Socio Lab meetings in Spring 2022

Once again the lab is meeting on a reduced schedule, to accommodate all of the work members are doing on the MI Diaries project. But we still have some important sessions, so we invite everyone to join us! Meetings will be held virtually via Zoom unless otherwise advertised. Please contact Dr. Suzanne Wagner (wagnersu@msu.edu) if you would like to have the Zoom details, and/or join the lab’s e-mail list, sociolab@list.msu.edu.

Here’s our line-up so far. The meetings are 3:00-4:00pm, Eastern time.

Monday, February 14th, 2022

Yongqing Ye and Adam Barnhardt. Practice talk for Illinois Language & Linguistics Society.

Monday, February 28th, 2022

Suzanne Wagner. Practice talk for CLARe 5.

Monday, March 18th, 2022

Jack Rechsteiner. Practice talk for Penn Linguistics Colloquium.

Monday, March 28th, 2022

Arlo Kaczor. MA thesis project.

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Lab meetings in Spring 2021

Once again our lab meetings will be on Monday afternoons, at the later and longer time of 4:30-6:00pm. General lab meetings, for student presentations, idea workshopping, guest speakers etc will alternate bi-weekly with a new reading group. The group’s topic will be language and age. We’ll read about the acquisition, calibration and incrementation of ongoing language changes from childhood to adolescence. We’ll also tackle post-adolescent lifespan change and age grading.

Meetings will be held on Zoom and/or Microsoft Teams. To hear further announcements, join the Socio Lab’s mailing list here. If for any reason you think you’re not getting messages, contact Dr. Suzanne Wagner, wagnersu@msu.edu.

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ELAN basics workshop, Sep 11

Screenshot provided by ELAN website.

We’re running a workshop to introduce people to the basics of using ELAN transcription and annotation software. It’s a free, flexible and widely-used tool for creating time-aligned transcriptions of audio and video recordings. You can also add multiple tiers of annotation, which is very helpful for various kinds of linguistic coding. It’s become a standard tool in sociolinguistics. 

If you are affiliated with MSU and you’d like to join us, please use this link to indicate your interest. The workshop will be held on Wednesday, September 11th, 2:15 – 3:45pm in B-125 Wells Hall. The room has Windows computers for your use, or you can bring your own laptop. 

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Socio Lab meetings this semester

Thanks to everyone who came to our organizational meeting this morning! We’ve tentatively settled on Wednesdays, 2:10pm – 3:45pm as our regular fall semester 2019 weekly meeting time. Friday afternoons will be our backup time in weeks when we need an additional meeting, or can’t meet on Wednesday.

To keep up to date with our meeting schedule and topics, you can subscribe to our mailing list, and check our calendar.

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First fall Socio Lab meeting, 8/28

Interested in what we do in the Sociolinguistics Lab?

Come along to our first meeting of the 2019-2020 year on Wednesday, August 28th, 9am – 10am in B-411 Wells Hall. We’re open to faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in language and society, language variation and language change. If you can’t come this time, make sure you’re on our Socio Lab mailing list so that you get announcements about future meetings.

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Summer accountability

Summer goals: Our kanban board.

It’s that time of year again. The Socio Lab is hosting a weekly summer accountability meeting for any students or faculty in Linguistics or in programs related to Linguistics. Summer can be a tough time: You think you’ve got tons of time to get things done, but it goes by very quickly, and can feel very isolating. Our group aims to build continuity, community and accountability in a low-pressure way. We lay out our goals for the summer on sticky notes, and watch them move across our kanban board from week to week. It’s fun to hear what other people are working on (we have so many amazingly productive students!) and what non-work goals they have. Last year’s non-work goals included “Catch all the Pokemon” and “Learn to make a really good latte”. This year’s include “KonMari my whole apartment” and “Finally finish making my sister’s Christmas present.” If you’d like to join us, you can find us in B-411 Wells every Thursday, 10am – 11am.

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GLEAMS and NWAV Workshop Summaries

There will be no Sociolinguistics Lab meeting this week, due to GLEAMS (Graduate Linguistics Expo At Michigan State), although all are welcome to attend any and all GLEAMS sessions! A special congratulations goes to Alex Mason and Matt Savage for their talk Style and Attitude: The Social Evaluation of the BET Vowel, which they presented at NWAV earlier this month. If you missed their talk in New York, your chance to see their encore performance is Saturday, November 3, 2018 at 3:55pm in Wells Hall, B-342.

GLEAMS is open to the public, and begins Friday, November 2, 2018 at 1:00pm (Wells Hall B-342)

The next sociolinguistics lab meeting will be on November 9, 2018 at our regular time (2:00pm), where attendees of NWAV 47 Workshops will present synopses of the sessions they attended. Presentations are scheduled to run as follows: 

  • 2:00 – 2:20    Computational sociolinguistics and eye-tracking for sociolinguistics
  • 2:20 – 2:40    Automated, non-invasive phonetic measurements  [demo ISCAN]
  • 2:40 – 3:00    Best Practices in Sociophonetics   [demo Clox]
  • 3:00 – 3:20    Integrating undergrads into corpus studies/data collection
  • 3:20 – 3:30    Plan any future in-house workshops on the above, depending on need/interest

If you didn’t get a chance to attend NWAV, or you attended NWAV, but not any of the workshops, this is your chance to catch up on what you missed!

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NWAV 47 Debrief Meeting this Friday!

MSU Sociolinguists had a fun and productive time at NWAV 47 this past weekend at New York University! If you missed out on the party and want to hear about the best talks, posters, and events, or just want to congratulate our presenters, please feel free to attend our annual NWAV Debriefing Meeting this Friday, October 26, 2018 at 2pm in B-411 Wells Hall. All are welcome!


MSU Sociolinguists with Professor Aaron Dinkin of San Diego State University and Professor Chun-Yi Peng of CUNY at NWAV 47 in New York City.


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Sociolinguistics in Fall 2018

The semester is in full swing and so are the Sociolinguistics students at Michigan State! There’s no shortage of research going on, including senior theses, research papers, conference preparation and more! If you’re interested in sociolinguistics, would like to get involved in research, or just want to see what it’s like, please feel free to join us for our meetings. We’d be happy to have you!

Our schedule can be found here

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