Research – Page 4 – Sociolinguistics Lab

Mohammed Ruthan defends dissertation on Saudi Arabic

March 24, 2020

Top left: Yen-Hwei Lin. Top right: Karthik Durvasula, Suzanne Wagner, Mohammed Ruthan, Modi Ruthan, Kaylin Smith. Bottom left: Brahim Chakrani. Bottom right: Yongqing Ye.

Mohammed Ruthan became the Linguistics program’s first PhD student to defend his doctoral dissertation in the new age of social distancing. His defense took place on Friday, March 13th, with just his wife, two friends and two committee members present in person, plus two committee members and various others via Zoom. It might not have been how Mohammed imagined his defense would be, but he handled it all (including various technical issues) with tremendous grace and patience. His dissertation, Aspects of Jazani Arabic, examines the phonology and phonetics of his own southwestern dialect of Saudi Arabic, as well as attitudes to the dialect. It was co-advised by Yen-Hwei Lin and Suzanne Evans Wagner, with much support from Karthik Durvasula and Brahim Chakrani. Once travel restrictions are lifted, Mohammed will return to Saudi Arabia to take up a university teaching position. Congratulations!

Conferences / Events / People / Research

MSU Socio people at NWAV 48

October 22, 2019

Current and former Michigan State sociolinguists were recently at the NWAV 48 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) conference, October 10-12. The Eugene, Oregon location meant that not everyone could make the long trip, but presenters included:

Former MSU Sociolinguistics students Monica Nesbitt (now a post-doc at Dartmouth College) and James Stanford were also there, along with former faculty Dennis Preston and Marisa Brook. We enjoyed a great MSU+affiliates dinner on the Friday night.

Thanks to the members of the lab who gave us valuable feedback on our practice presentations!

Alumni / Conferences / Research

SLA meets LVC: Second language acquisition of sociolinguistic variation at SLRF conference

September 20, 2019

Irina Zaykovskaya (PhD 2019) and Suzanne Evans Wagner are co-convening a colloquium at this week’s Second Language Research Forum (SLRF) conference, hosted by Michigan State University’s Second Language Studies program. The colloquium, held on Friday, September 20th, is titled: Catching interlanguage in action: When SLA meets language variation and change. The goal is to bring together researchers who study second language acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, using quantitative (and often also qualitative) methods.

Irina’s PhD studies were in the Second Language Studies program, but she took a graduate course in sociolinguistics with Suzanne in 2014, and subsequently decided to take a variationist sociolinguistic approach to her work. Suzanne became her co-advisor, and Irina defended her dissertation (on L2 acquisition of US English vernacular like) in 2019. Researchers like Irina, who work at the interface of SLA and LVC, are still quite rare. SLRF seemed to be a good opportunity to inform other SLA scholars about the insights afforded by LVC approaches. To further support this initiative, Irina has created an online resource hub for people interested in SLA+LVC.

The other panelists include Xiaoshi Li (MSU), Kimberley Geeslin (Indiana University-Bloomington) and Matthew Kanwit (University of Pittsburgh).

Conferences / Events / People / Research / Undergraduates

Rural fieldwork on display at MSU undergraduate conference UURAF

April 11, 2019

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.

Alumni / Events / People / Research

Welcoming back Rebecca Roeder

December 10, 2018

The Linguistics program‘s latest Colloquium speaker was Rebecca Roeder (UNC Charlotte). Roeder graduated with a PhD in Linguistics from MSU in 2006, under the direction of Dennis Preston. Her colloquium talk was titled “The role of PALM in the low back merger: Theory and evidence”. We were lucky to also get some time with Becky in the Sociolinguistics Lab, where we talked about the phonology and sociolinguistics of the Canadian Shift/Third Dialect Shift/Elsewhere Shift/etc, which Becky has been studying in the Canadian context, while we’ve been tracking it here in Michigan.

It was great to have Becky back at Michigan State!