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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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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!

Continue ReadingPaper on nonbinary speech accepted to ICPHs