News – Page 6 – Sociolinguistics Lab

MSU represented at NWAV 49

October 18, 2021

For the first time, the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference is being held online. Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin, NWAV 49 talks are available as pre-recorded videos to registered participants, and live Q&A sessions are happening this week, October 19 – 24, 2021.

MSU will, as always, be pretty well represented! Here’s the list of current and former MSU faculty and students who will be presenting this year:

Adam Barnhardt. I didn’t go to college with anyone that country: Age-stratified indexicality of Southern-shifted vowels.
Jack Rechsteiner and Betsy Sneller. Non-binary speakers’ use of (ING) across gender-related topics.
Denise Troutman. Throwing shade: Signifyin(g) and synchronic change among Ebonics speakers.
Mingzhe Zheng. One-ge person or One-wei person: Exploring the use of Mandarin classifier across time.
Dennis Preston. Women are hens: A taxonomic exercise in historical gender-based metaphor.
Rebecca Roeder. PALM and the low-back merger shift: Evidence from Victoria, BC.
Marisa Brook. Language shift in a microcosm: Finnish-English bilingualism, contact, and substrate effects in Sointula, British Columbia.

Events / Meetings

Lab meetings in Spring 2021

December 7, 2020

Once again our lab meetings will be on Monday afternoons, at the later and longer time of 4:30-6:00pm. General lab meetings, for student presentations, idea workshopping, guest speakers etc will alternate bi-weekly with a new reading group. The group’s topic will be language and age. We’ll read about the acquisition, calibration and incrementation of ongoing language changes from childhood to adolescence. We’ll also tackle post-adolescent lifespan change and age grading.

Meetings will be held on Zoom and/or Microsoft Teams. To hear further announcements, join the Socio Lab’s mailing list here. If for any reason you think you’re not getting messages, contact Dr. Suzanne Wagner, wagnersu@msu.edu.

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Lab meetings in Fall 2020

August 31, 2020

Welcome ‘back’ to the Socio Lab! Our lab meetings this semester will be on Zoom, 2-3pm Mondays, every other week. Check the calendar to see what’s coming up when. Everyone is welcome to our lab meetings. We invite you to come and try them out. There is no expectation that you’ll commit to coming regularly, although we hope you will.

At lab meetings, you’ll hear people give practice talks for conferences and academic defenses, update on their research projects, share skills they’ve learned, and workshop ideas for new projects (e.g. senior thesis/Honors Option, MA thesis, doctoral qualifying papers etc). Sometimes we read a study together and discuss it. Contact Dr. Suzanne Wagner if you’d like the Zoom link and password.

Members of the MI-COVID Diaries team at a meeting this summer.

This semester we’re also running weekly meetings for the MI-COVID Diaries project team. This group meets Thursdays 5-6pm on Microsoft Teams. The project launched just after Michigan went into coronavirus lockdown. It’s collecting audio diaries from Michigan residents about their pandemic experiences. Contact Dr. Betsy Sneller to join a meeting and see if you’d like to get involved.

Finally, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, members of the lab came together to discuss a seminal paper by John R. Rickford and Sharese King. We’re now running a bi-weekly Anti-Racism Accountability Group for anyone who would like to learn more about anti-racism, and most importantly, who is looking for a community to nudge them to do anti-racist work in academia. The group meets bi-weekly on Mondays, 2-3pm on Microsoft Teams. Contact Jared Kaczor to find out more.

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In the news: Researchers study how COVID pandemic is affecting language change

August 6, 2020

Check out this August 5, 2020 story from the College of Arts and Letters on the MI COVID Diaries project, run by MSU’s Sociolinguistics Lab. We’ve been collecting recorded speech from Michigan residents since the beginning of April to track changes to language during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Social distancing and distance learning are affecting how people behave in the world. Part of this project is to document how people’s lives are changing. But from the linguistics side, what we are interested in is how these social changes impact language use, both on a short-term scale and potentially on the long-term scale as well.”
Dr. Betsy Sneller

Faculty / People

MSU Today features Suzanne Wagner

June 10, 2020

Sociolinguistics Lab co-director Suzanne Evans Wagner was featured in Michigan State University’s main news publication, MSU Today, at the end of May.

The story, “Understanding the language of change through linguistics” is an introductory overview of what sociolinguistics is, how Dr. Wagner came to join the field, and a little bit about some of the work we’ve done in the lab on sound change in Michigan. The short video captures only a tiny part of the bigger picture, but the main takeaway is that sociolinguists seek to understand how speakers use language to reflect and construct their identities, and that these actions contribute to language change over time.

The story is also on the College of Arts and Letters website, but this time with some great photos of members of the Sociolinguistics Lab! Below, you can see Dr. Irina Zaykovskaya with Suzanne.

Irina Zaykovskaya and Suzanne Wagner in the Sociolinguistics Lab. Photo: MSU College of Arts & Letters.