News – Page 6 – Sociolinguistics Lab

PhD Research Assistantship with MI Diaries

September 6, 2022

Thinking about PhD studies in language variation and change?

Want to work on a big linguistic data collection project from your very first semester?

Interested in five years of funding?

Apply to Michigan State University’s Linguistics PhD program!

Come to the Sociolinguistics Lab at Michigan State University! The MSU Linguistics PhD provides a generous 5 years of funding including a stipend, health insurance, and tuition. First year PhD students work part-time as Research Assistants (RAs). The MI Diaries project would love to recruit a strong RA with a research interest in language variation and change to help with our longitudinal study of self-recorded “audio diaries” from hundreds of people across the state. Become involved with everything from project management, community outreach, data analysis, recruitment, mentoring undergraduates and youth interns, to developing best practices for eliciting speech from a broad range of participants. Work closely with our faculty, Prof. Betsy Sneller and Prof. Suzanne Wagner, and with our team of students and other collaborators. Get started on your own related project, so that you’ll have a great foundation for building the research skills you’ll need for your PhD career and beyond.

Apply here by November 30, 2022 for full consideration for Fall 2023 admission.

Download the flyer

Grad student testimonials

MSU Linguistics graduate students have had great experiences with MI Diaries.

Being involved with the MI Diaries project has enhanced my graduate school experience because it has given me the chance to work on a large-scale collaborative research project. Thanks to this project, I’ve been able to gain knowledge and experiences that can be applied to my own research that I would not have been able to acquire on my own. Working with the MI Diaries has also been incredibly enriching because it has provided me with so many opportunities to deepen my connections with other students and faculty in the department in a professional, but enjoyable setting. It’s also been a great opportunity to mentor undergraduate students and high school students on participating in an academic project and performing linguistic research which has been a personally fulfilling experience.”
Jack Rechsteiner

“I am able to get hands-on experience of nearly every aspect of a research project — collaboration with faculties and students, mentoring, public outreach, writing, turning research ideas into conference presentations and papers, etc. I am grateful for the professional development opportunities this project offers, as well as all the wonderful personal connections I made working with people in this project. “
Yongqing Ye

“If you are a student interested in sociolinguistics who thrives in a supportive, tight-knit departmental community, continuing your education at MSU is a wonderful choice. In my time here so far, I have not only enjoyed the instruction and guidance of a host of brilliant scholars – including two world-class sociolinguists doing research on the cutting edge – I have also been embedded in one of the most innovative and largest-scale sociolinguistics projects being conducted today. Even after just a year of working in MI Diaries, my knowledge of sociolinguistics, and my ability to both approach research in an ethical, community-conscious manner as well as to operate within a big team of faculty and fellow students, have increased drastically. “
Adam Barnhardt

Events

Talk on language choice in Ukraine

April 19, 2022

The lab’s Visiting Research Scholar, Dr. Irina Zaykoskaya, gave a talk at MSU on April 18, 2022 titled When native language is a matter of choice: The linguistic situation in Ukraine before and during the War. Irina provided some background on multilingualism in Ukraine, historical and 21st century attitudes to the Ukrainian language, and closed by discussing the phenomenon of language rejection. Anecdotal evidence suggests that since Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine, some Ukrainians have symbolically given up speaking Russian through resistance or disgust. Irina compared this with German-speaking Holocaust refugees in the early 20th century who similarly gave up their language and in some cases lost it altogether. Irina touched on the ethics of gathering data from traumatized individuals, and cautioned that we cannot know the true linguistic situation in Ukraine at this time.

The talk was co-hosted by the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab and the MSU Language Policy and Practice Lab. It was delivered in a hybrid format. We were delighted that so many people could join via Zoom, in addition to the audience in Wells Hall. The talk abstract is below, and the slides can be found here.

abstract

Ukraine is a large and multilingual country, with Ukrainian and Russian especially dominating its linguistic landscape for decades. However, not only are the statuses of these languages different (i.e., Ukrainian being the official state language and Russian currently not having any formal status), but the attitudes towards them among the Ukrainian people differ as well. Even before the Russian attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Ukrainians, including those from the Eastern, historically considered Russian-speaking parts of the country, would demonstrate symbolic preference for Ukrainian over Russian: for example, in a 2020 poll, only 21.8% of Eastern Ukrainians admitted speaking Ukrainian at home but 44.3% of the same respondents named it as their native language, which implies the view of one’s native language as a matter of choice rather than a matter of chance. Now, Russian-speaking Twitter is getting flooded by tweets like “I want lightning to strike me so that I forget the Russian language”. This talk will present an overview of historical events and policies that led to the current linguistic situation in Ukraine as compared to a few other post-Soviet countries, such as Belarus and Latvia. It will also attempt to capture the ongoing shift in attitudes among Ukrainians, from recognizing Russian as the language the enemies speak to perceiving it as the essence of the enemy.

MI Diaries app gets NEH grant to go open-source

February 17, 2022

NEH Grant to Develop Open-Source Code for Self-Recording Mobile App

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Betsy Sneller, Assistant Professor of Linguistics and co-Director of the Sociolinguistics Lab, was awarded a $99,908 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG) program. The new project, “Building and Disseminating an App for Ethnographic Remote Audio Recording”, is an innovative extension of the MI Diaries project. The goal is to provide other researchers with a convenient and accessible method of collecting speech data. In order to do that, Dr. Sneller’s team will develop an open-source code that anyone would be able to use to create a self-recording mobile app for their project.

The inspiration for the project came from the successful adaptation of the MI Diaries app for the study of Judaism through cultural arts led by Laura Yares, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at MSU, who will serve on the advisory council for the DHAG grant. Co-Director of the Sociolinguistics Lab, Dr. Suzanne Evans Wagner, is also a faculty advisor to the project.

Events / Meetings

Socio Lab meetings in Spring 2022

January 25, 2022

Once again the lab is meeting on a reduced schedule, to accommodate all of the work members are doing on the MI Diaries project. But we still have some important sessions, so we invite everyone to join us! Meetings will be held virtually via Zoom unless otherwise advertised. Please contact Dr. Suzanne Wagner (wagnersu@msu.edu) if you would like to have the Zoom details, and/or join the lab’s e-mail list, sociolab@list.msu.edu.

Here’s our line-up so far. The meetings are 3:00-4:00pm, Eastern time.

Monday, February 14th, 2022

Yongqing Ye and Adam Barnhardt. Practice talk for Illinois Language & Linguistics Society.

Monday, February 28th, 2022

Suzanne Wagner. Practice talk for CLARe 5.

Monday, March 18th, 2022

Jack Rechsteiner. Practice talk for Penn Linguistics Colloquium.

Monday, March 28th, 2022

Arlo Kaczor. MA thesis project.

Alumni / Faculty / People

Visiting Research Scholar: Irina Zaykovskaya

November 17, 2021

Head and shoulders of Irina Zaykovskaya, looking at camera and smiling — Dr. Irina Zaykovskaya

We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Irina Zaykovskaya back to the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab as a Visiting Research Scholar!

Irina holds a Ph.D. in Second Language Studies from Michigan State University. Because her research interests lie at the intersection of second language acquisition and sociolinguistics, she was an active SocioLab member during her time at MSU, stayed in touch with the Lab after graduation, and even participated in the MI Diaries project in its early days as a Facebook page manager.

Irina’s dissertation project revolved around the acquisition of variation: specifically, the acquisition of discourse pragmatics by non-native speakers of English. Using a combination of interviews/surveys and experimental methods, Irina investigated how speakers from various L1 backgrounds use remarkable (vernacular) like, what beliefs about and attitudes towards it they possess, and whether they pattern with native speakers in judging the naturalness of like in different syntactic positions. Her most recent paper is to appear in Multifunctionality in English: Corpora, Language and Academic Literacy Pedagogy.

During her upcoming SocioLab sojourn, Irina is planning to continue her work on variation in the second language, join the MI Diaries project team, and hold regular office hours (online and offline) to offer help and mentorship to all sociolinguistics students.

You can read more about Irina on her personal website.