This academic year saw remarkable growth for the Sociolinguistics Lab. In addition to a new cohort of students, we welcomed a new affiliate professor, Dr. Rose Fisher, who studies (socio)linguistics and language attitudes in Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking communities, as well as two new postdoctoral scholars, Dr. Leah Nodar and Dr. Joel Berends, who work with the lab’s MI Diaries project.
We heard a total of 18 sociolinguistics presentations from grad students and faculty at lab meetings this year, on topics ranging from morphological variation in Swahili to the changing usage of English intensifiers, and seemingly everything in between. Lab members shared their findings with broader communities of linguists at the NWAV, ISLE, LSA, and SECOL conferences.
Sociolinguistically-inclined undergraduates had a rewarding year, too — after conducting original research based on data from the MI Diaries, six students presented their findings at the University Undergraduate Research and Arts Fair (UURAF), with freshman Connor Mason winning a first-place award in the fair’s Linguistics, Languages, and Speech category!
This time of year also comes with the bittersweet necessity that some lab members will be moving on from MSU. Hamlin Teng, who successfully defended his Master’s thesis investigating the phonetics of Mandarin tones in whispered speech across differing communicative contexts, will be starting his linguistics PhD next year at Stony Brook University! We’re also preparing to work up the strength to say farewell to longtime lab member Adam Barnhardt, who’s currently finishing his dissertation on how the meanings of linguistic variants interact with the development of idiolects and the propagation of sound changes.
Thank you to all who contributed to the lab this year. Here’s to the continuation of great work on all facets of language variation!