Faculty – Sociolinguistics Lab

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!

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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!

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

Socio Lab goes to New York City for NWAV 51

October 16, 2023

Adam Barnhardt stands behind a podium. A screen on the wall displays a slide titled "Primary research question." Below are two bullets. The first: "Do early adolescents vary pronunciation of an ongoing sound change when performing age-related stance (child vs teen)? Second: "Previously pursued using small number of speakers in CA looking at GOAT-fronting (Eckert 2011)" — Adam Barnhardt presents “Not all sound changes in progress are used in early-adolescent stance-taking”

Suzanne Wagner and Jack Rechsteiner stand in front of the Wagner, Sneller & Rechsteiner poster at NWAV 51. — Adam Barnhardt presents “Not all sound changes in progress are used in early-adolescent stance-taking”

The MSU Sociolinguistics Lab was well represented at the NWAV 51 conference at Queens College, New York, October 13-15, 2023. We had presentations on some of our first analyses of linguistic data from the MI Diaries project: Dr. Betsy Sneller presented as first author on a talk about Michigan English vowel change in apparent time, and Linguistics PhD students Adam Barnhardt and Yongqing Ye presented their doctoral qualifying paper research on adolescent stance-taking and vowel nasalization respectively. In addition, we had a poster that described our experience of building the MI Diaries ‘brand’ over the last three years. We were pleased to include new first year Second Language Studies student Shannon Harasta, who presented her MA thesis research (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) on queer individuals’ sense of (dis)comfort with various audiences. And it would not be NWAV without a gathering of MSU Socio Lab alumni and associates, such as Dr. Monica Nesbitt (U Indiana Bloomington), Jack Rechsteiner (U Pittsburgh), Chun-Yi Peng (Borough of Manhattan Community College) and Jayce Garner (Pomona College and MI Diaries NSF-REU 2022).

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Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Wagner, Betsy Sneller, Yongqing Ye, Adam Barnhardt, and Shannon Harasta at NWAV 51.

Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / Undergraduates

Grandparents University 2023

September 27, 2023

MSU Grandparents University is an opportunity for grandparents and grandchildren (ages 8-12) to come together for a three-day educational experience while spending time together on the MSU campus in the summer. This past summer, MSU Sociolinguistics led two courses.

As usual, we ran Harry Potter and the Secrets of British English, which has been a hit at Grandparents University since 2009! In this session, participants are whisked off to Hogwarts for classes in Potions (British/US English madlibs), Charms (IPA transcription), Defense Against the Dark Arts (British regional accents) and History of Magic (a brief lecture on language change).

And we had a new course: Diary of a Michigan Kid. In this class, we taught participants about keeping an audio diary, pronunciation differences, and generational differences in language. All of the activities and materials were co-designed by faculty and students on the lab’s MI Diaries project team. We think that the “Kids vs Grands” activity was the most fun. See below for some pictures from Diary of a Michigan Kid.

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Conferences / Faculty / Graduate Students

Paper on nonbinary speech accepted to ICPHs

May 5, 2023

Jack Rechsteiner (Linguistics M.A.) and Betsy Sneller recently had a paper accepted to ICPhS (International Congress of Phonetic Sciences) for a poster presentation. The paper is titled “The impact of social information on VOT shadowing by nonbinary speakers”. The conference will be hosted in Prague, Czech Republic on August 7-11, 2023.

Congratulations, Jack and Betsy!