Lab member Jess Shepherd (Linguistics PhD) recently had a paper published in the Journal of English Linguistics. The paper is titled “LTH Affrication: A sociolinguistic indicator in the American West” and is authored by Joey Stanley (Brigham Young University) and Jess Shepherd.
Congratulations, Jess!
Students and faculty working on our major research project, MI Diaries, were at the MSU Science Festival again this year. We talked with community members of all ages at the STEAM Expo Day on April 5, 2025.
Read more about it at the MI Diaries website.
We’re hiring! Come and work in the Sociolinguistics Lab under the direction of Dr. Betsy Sneller.
The successful applicant will join the MI Diaries project, which is collecting sociolinguistic data from Michiganders across the state. The position primarily will be in helping the MI Diaries project develop partnerships with middle and high school classrooms across the state, developing lesson plans for grades 5-10 based on MI Diaries data (in partnership with WGVU PBS Station), supporting project maintenance, and developing reports or manuscripts about community outreach in collaboration with the principal investigator (Betsy Sneller). We especially invite applicants with a record of success in both sociolinguistics and K-12 Education, as working with schools is a critical component of this position. There are no required teaching responsibilities for the position.
Applications accepted from April 25, 2025 onwards. Review of applications will begin June 1, 2025. The position will remain open until filled.
Undergraduate members of the Sociolinguistics Lab and/or the MI Diaries project team demonstrated their research skills at MSU’s 2025 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) on April 11, 2025. Presenters included:
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!
