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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.
Suzanne Wagner and Jack Rechsteiner in front of Wagner, Sneller & Rechsteiner’s poster “Sociolinguistic research projects as brands” at NWAV 51.
Betsy Sneller stands behind a podium, pointing to a slide titled "MI English vowel changes" with a diagram of the Northern Cities Shift.
Betsy Sneller points to a diagram of the Northern Cities shift.
Head and shoulders group photo of Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Wagner, Betsy Sneller, Yongqing Ye, Adam Barnhardt, and Shannon Harasta.
Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Wagner, Betsy Sneller, Yongqing Ye, Adam Barnhardt, and Shannon Harasta at NWAV 51.

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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Events / Research

Talk by Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor

September 27, 2023

On October 9th, Dr. Sarah Bunin Benor (Vice Provost and Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (LA) and Adjunct Professor in the University of Southern California Linguistics Department) will present a talk titled Beyond bagels and burekas: American Jewish language and identity. The talk will be from 5:30-7:00pm in B-342 Wells Hall. Dr. Benor is hosted by the Michigan State University Jewish Studies program, and her visit is co-sponsored by us, the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab. An abstract of Dr. Benor’s talk is below.

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Publications

Paper in Journal of Language and Aging Research

August 7, 2023

Suzanne Evans Wagner has published a brief invited paper in the brand new Journal of Language and Aging Research, for which she serves on the inaugural advisory board. The paper, titled Including older adults in variationist sociolinguistics via mobile self-recording, talks about the success that the lab’s MI Diaries project has had with collecting self-recorded ‘audio diaries’ (see Sneller, Wagner, and Ye 2022). Wagner suggests that similar mobile apps could be appealingly low-friction routes for older speakers to contribute to sociolinguistic research.

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