Connor Mason, an undergraduate Linguistics major, has been working for the past 18 months on adverbial lowkey as in e.g. Lowkey Shakespeare’s kinda great; I’m lowkey bored right now and I was lowkey fighting with my teacher. Data for Connor’s investigation came from his work with the MI Diaries project and was published on the project website. That’s where Dr. Mark Shea found it.
Dr. Shea is a senior lecturer at Mount Holyoke College. This fall, he’s been teaching a class called FYS 110LG Slang: Community, Language, and Power. His students had mentioned the rise of lowkey and wanted to know more about it. Connor was an expert. And as a bonus, his research mentor, Dr. Suzanne Evans Wagner, had been Dr. Shea’s instructor for an advanced sociolinguistics course, way back when Dr. Shea was a Second Language Studies PhD student at Michigan State University.
On November 3, 2026, Connor gave a guest talk on Zoom titled “Lowkey, what’s up with low-key?”. Connor explained that the MI Diaries corpus of audio self-recordings is a great place to find current slang words. He also described lowkey‘s historical trajectory from adjective meaning “unintense” to adverb meaning “secretly”, “kinda”, and “to be honest”, before hypothesizing that lowkey is grammaticalizing to a discourse marker. In the Q&A, Mount Holyoke students offered their own observations. They also raised questions like, “How do non-native speakers of a language learn its discourse markers?”. It was a great opportunity for Connor, and a reminder that when it comes to linguistic innovations, undergraduate students can be at the forefront of research!
