Events – Page 4 – Sociolinguistics Lab

Talk on language choice in Ukraine

April 19, 2022

The lab’s Visiting Research Scholar, Dr. Irina Zaykoskaya, gave a talk at MSU on April 18, 2022 titled When native language is a matter of choice: The linguistic situation in Ukraine before and during the War. Irina provided some background on multilingualism in Ukraine, historical and 21st century attitudes to the Ukrainian language, and closed by discussing the phenomenon of language rejection. Anecdotal evidence suggests that since Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, some Ukrainians have symbolically given up speaking Russian through resistance or disgust. Irina compared this with German-speaking Holocaust refugees in the early 20th century who similarly gave up their language and in some cases lost it altogether. Irina touched on the ethics of gathering data from traumatized individuals, and cautioned that we cannot know the true linguistic situation in Ukraine at this time.

The talk was co-hosted by the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab and the MSU Language Policy and Practice Lab. It was delivered in a hybrid format. We were delighted that so many people could join via Zoom, in addition to the audience in Wells Hall. The talk abstract is below, and the slides can be found here.

abstract

Ukraine is a large and multilingual country, with Ukrainian and Russian especially dominating its linguistic landscape for decades. However, not only are the statuses of these languages different (i.e., Ukrainian being the official state language and Russian currently not having any formal status), but the attitudes towards them among the Ukrainian people differ as well. Even before the Russian attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukrainians, including those from the Eastern, historically considered Russian-speaking parts of the country, would demonstrate symbolic preference for Ukrainian over Russian: for example, in a 2020 poll, only 21.8% of Eastern Ukrainians admitted speaking Ukrainian at home but 44.3% of the same respondents named it as their native language, which implies the view of one’s native language as a matter of choice rather than a matter of chance. Now, Russian-speaking Twitter is getting flooded by tweets like “I want lightning to strike me so that I forget the Russian language”. This talk will present an overview of historical events and policies that led to the current linguistic situation in Ukraine as compared to a few other post-Soviet countries, such as Belarus and Latvia. It will also attempt to capture the ongoing shift in attitudes among Ukrainians, from recognizing Russian as the language the enemies speak to perceiving it as the essence of the enemy.

Events / Meetings

Socio Lab meetings in Spring 2022

January 25, 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.

Events / Faculty / People / Research

The interdisciplinary water cooler

October 30, 2021

Flyer for Yares and Sneller 2021 University Interdisciplinary Colloquium talk

Sociolinguistics Lab co-director Dr. Betsy Sneller will give a high-profile, university-wide talk on November 5th that is open to the public. Her co-presenter, Dr. Laura Yares, met Dr. Sneller at an informal College of Arts and Letters workshop in October 2020 about pivoting research to remote methods in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Yares and her collaborators were looking for a way to capture participants’ reactions to a popular Netflix show, Shtisel. Upon learning about the MI Diaries project’s mobile app for self-recorded audio entries, Dr. Yares met with Dr. Sneller and co-investigator Dr. Suzanne Wagner to talk about adapting it for her project. Come and hear about this serendipitous cross-disciplinary conversation, and its broader implications, courtesy of the MSU Center for Interdisciplinarity.

Abstract

Can common research technologies serve diverse disciplinary needs? Even disciplines that seem on the surface to have little in common can benefit from casual conversations about the challenges and methods that they might share. In this talk, we show how a simple smartphone app developed for a project analyzing language during the pandemic (MI Diaries) was successfully adapted for a Religious Studies project examining learning about Judaism through the cultural arts (Shtisel Diary). By reflecting on these two case-studies we highlight how the tools that we use to conduct research can be just as interdisciplinary as research projects themselves.

Details

Friday, November 5, 2021
12PM-1PM EDT via Zoom

Zoom Link: https://msu.zoom.us/j/96411904159
Passcode: msuc4i

Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / People / Research

MSU represented at NWAV 49

October 18, 2021

For the first time, the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference is being held online. Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin, NWAV 49 talks are available as pre-recorded videos to registered participants, and live Q&A sessions are happening this week, October 19 – 24, 2021.

MSU will, as always, be pretty well represented! Here’s the list of current and former MSU faculty and students who will be presenting this year:

Adam Barnhardt. I didn’t go to college with anyone that country: Age-stratified indexicality of Southern-shifted vowels.
Jack Rechsteiner and Betsy Sneller. Non-binary speakers’ use of (ING) across gender-related topics.
Denise Troutman. Throwing shade: Signifyin(g) and synchronic change among Ebonics speakers.
Mingzhe Zheng. One-ge person or One-wei person: Exploring the use of Mandarin classifier across time.
Dennis Preston. Women are hens: A taxonomic exercise in historical gender-based metaphor.
Rebecca Roeder. PALM and the low-back merger shift: Evidence from Victoria, BC.
Marisa Brook. Language shift in a microcosm: Finnish-English bilingualism, contact, and substrate effects in Sointula, British Columbia.

Events / Meetings

Lab meetings in Spring 2021

December 7, 2020

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.