Faculty – Sociolinguistics Lab

MSU Linguists Accepted at NWAV

September 23, 2025

This November, Adam Barnhardt, Mofart Ayiega, Rose Fisher, Jess Shepherd, Connor Bechler, and Karthik Durvasula will be presenting at NWAV 53 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor!

Adam will be presenting “Creaky voice: A women-led sub/exurban-centric sound change in white Michigan English“
Mofart will be presenting “Morphological Non-agreement on Animate Nouns in Swahili“
Rose will be presenting “Language Loyalty and Maintenance: The Case of Pennsylvania Dutch“
Jess will be presenting “Paths of sound change in the [mɪɾən]: /tən/ in two varieties of Michigan English”
Connor will be presenting “Modeling and Documenting Variation across Pumi Varieties“
Karthik will be presenting “Near mergers are compatible with categorical representations”

NWAV 53 will run from Nov. 5th – 7th. Register here.

Click ‘Continue Reading’ for abstracts.

Faculty / Research

New Post-Doctoral Researchers

September 1, 2025

MSU Linguistics recently hired two new post-docs, Leah Nodar and Joel Berends, to work with the MI Diaries project.

Welcome, Leah & Joel!

Leah Nodar is a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures. She is a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics on the MI Diaries project. Her research interests include dialect development, network analysis of discourse, and the role of personal investment in a social identity on language continuity and change.

Joel Berends works with the MI Diaries project and as an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at MSU. His work involves youth who are interested in pursuing careers in education as part of MSU’s Community Teachers Program. His scholarship includes work with African and Asian immigrant youth, museum and cultural studies, diasporic literacies, discourse analysis, sports, poetry, and arts-based research and methodologies. His teaching, research, and community-engagement directly include youth in determining and deliberating curriculum, career pathways, and futures for learning communities.

Faculty / Graduate Students / Publications

Sneller & Greeson Published in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics

September 1, 2025

Prof. Betsy Sneller (MSU) and PhD candidate Daniel Greeson (Stony Brook University)’s paper “Distinct Phonological Reanalysis Patterns in Michigan English TRAP” was recently published in Proceedings of the 48th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference. The article is available on UPenn’s repository.

Congratulations, Betsy and Daniel!

Faculty / People

MSU German Studies hires Rose Fisher

December 4, 2024

A photo of Rose Fisher smiling and standing in front of a table and a microphone. — Rose Fisher

We congratulate to the MSU German Studies program on their recent hire of Rose Fisher to a tenure track position starting August 2025. Rose Fisher is completing a PhD in Germanic Linguistics and Language Science at Pennsylvania State University under the direction of Michael T. Putnam. The focus of Rose’s doctoral work is morphophonological variation and change in Pennsylvania Dutch. As an L1 speaker of this minoritized German variety and a former member (until age 11) of an Old Order Amish community, Rose brings important sociocultural insights to her data collection and analysis. In addition to her work on inflectional morphology, she has published a general paper on Amish linguistic identity and was interviewed by the BBC about the Pennsylvania Dutch linguistic and cultural origins of Groundhog Day. She also has experience with dialect geography, having been a Visiting Junior Researcher at the Forschungszentrum Deutscher Sprachatlas (Research Center of the German Language Atlas) at the University of Marburg, Germany. The Sociolinguistics Lab looks forward to forging connections to Rose and her work in the years ahead!

Read more about the article MSU German Studies hires Rose Fisher

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

MSU students, faculty, and alumni presenting at NWAV 52

October 15, 2024

The following people from the Sociolinguistics Lab will be presenting at NWAV 52 this year:

Adam Barnhardt is seeking expert input on the next stage of his ongoing project via a Project Launch poster titled: Patterns of social meanings indexed to Low-Back-Merger Shifted vowels in Michigan.
Connor Bechler will present prior work that he undertook at the University of Kentucky: Evaluating wav2vec2 speech recognition and forced alignment on a multi-varietal language documentation collection.
Jessica Shepherd, Drake Howard, and Betsy Sneller will present interim results from Jess’s first PhD qualifying paper research: Pronunciation in the [mɪɾən]: Post-tonic /t/ flapping in Michigan: a non-white male-led change.

Adam’s work and the study by Jess, Betsy, and Drake all use speech data from the MI Diaries project.

We’ll also be looking out for presentations by the former MSU people shown in bold below:

James Stanford, George Stain, Monica Nesbitt: Phonological foundations of ethnic divergence: The Low-Back Merger Shift and the African American Vowel Shift as opposite movements.
Kaitlyn Owens and Monica Nesbitt: Changing boundaries: Evidence from Northern Cities Shift categorical perception in Michigan.
Amalia Robinson, Monica Nesbitt and Xiao Dong: The phonology of Black women in Boston (across age, ethnicity, and style).
Xiao Dong, Fengming Liu, Monica Nesbitt, and Chien-Jer Charles Lin: Social perception of neutral tone and rhotacization in Mandarin Chinese: How do Beijing and Taiwan speakers differ and does place orientation matter?
Rebecca Roeder: /ay/ glide weakening in North Carolina and the origins of the Southern Vowel Shift.
Dennis Preston and Terumi Imai-Brandle: Reconstructing American English inputs in a globally available mass media product: Intensifiers in the television series Gilmore Girls.

See you in Miami!