Meets: Mondays, 4:30 – 6:00 PM, via Teams in Spring semester 2021. Contact: Dr. Suzanne Wagner. Conveners: Dr. Suzanne Wagner and Dr. Betsy Sneller.

Goals of the group:

  • Serve the needs of current faculty and students whose research, qualifying paper or dissertation topics touch on sociolinguistic development.
  • Provide the theoretical background to the MI Diaries project for those interested, including project team members.
  • Get a broad overview of how age has been operationalized in variationist sociolinguistics (age, age group, generation, cohort etc).
  • Be familiar with some landmark studies of age and language change in variationist sociolinguistics.
  • Gain some exposure to the most recent sociolinguistic research on sociolinguistic development.
  • Understand how variationist studies of sociolinguistic development at points in the lifespan connect to broader questions about the nature and mechanisms of language change.
  • Appreciate the intersectional nature of age as a concept i.e. how it is complicated by gender, style, social class etc.
  • Get a sense of how the papers link to each other, as well as to other scholarship that you know.

Who: The group is open to graduate students, staff, alumni and faculty at MSU and beyond.

What we’re reading:

Readings were selected by the group conveners for presentation by individual members each week. Members are very welcome to suggest additional or alternative readings!