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.
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.
Congratulations to Monica Nesbitt, who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation Changing their minds: The impact of internal social change on local phonology on August 24th.
Monica has been a wonderful contributor to the Sociolinguistics Lab, as a student, lab manager, mentor and collaborator. We’ll all miss her very much. Monica is starting a prestigious three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Dartmouth College, where she’ll be working with Dr. Jim Stanford, who is also a 2007 alumnus of the MSU Linguistics PhD program!
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.
On April 5th, undergraduate sociolinguists Jared Kaczor and Travis Coppernoll presented their poster Football, Church and Free Breakfast: Doing Sociolinguistic Research in Rural Communities Around Lansing at the 2019 Michigan State University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF). The project, which has been running since August, focuses on two small communities in a rural part of mid-Michigan. Jared and Travis have been developing an ethnography via trips to football games, church coffee mornings and local cafés. They have just begun to record sociolinguistic interviews with residents. The goal of the project is to compare rural speech with the Sociolinguistics Lab’s existing corpus of urban speech.