Faculty – Sociolinguistics Lab

Michigan State Presenting at LSA 2026

December 2, 2025

Five MSU linguists (including Sociolinguistics Lab members Mofart Ayiega & Leah Nodar) will be presenting their work at the Linguistics Society of America’s annual conference, taking place this year in New Orleans from January 8th – 11th!

Please find their talk titles below:

Mofart Ayiega (co-authored with Dr. Suzanne Wagner) – Morphological Leveling of Noun Class Agreement in Urban Swahili
Dr. Leah Nodar – Twelve Variables of Africatown English in 1927 and 1979
Jingying Xu (co-authored with Dr. Cristina Schmitt):
- Beyond Truth Conditions: Context Modulates Telicity Interpretation
- Learning Telicity in Context: Developmental Evidence from Mandarin Children
Ellie Xia (co-authored with Dr. Alan Hezao Ke) – Tonal Marking of Telicity in Hakka: An Agree-Based Analysis
John Ryan (co-authored with Yaxuan Wang) – Reference, Aspect, and Event Completion in Mandarin Sentence Judgments

Click ‘Continue Reading’ for abstracts.

Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / Research

MSU Linguists Presenting at NWAV 53

September 23, 2025

This November, Adam Barnhardt, Mofart Ayiega, Rose Fisher, Jess Shepherd, Connor Bechler, Annan Kirk, 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“
Annan Kirk will be presenting “Really is really frequent: intensifiers and change in Michigan English“
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!