MI Diaries
The MI Diaries project has been documenting life and language in Michigan since April 2020. Participants record regular “audio diaries” on their mobile devices using our custom app, in response to weekly prompts. Collectively, the recordings constitute a novel genre for analysis, and they form a longitudinal database of Michigan (English) speech from participants across a range of ages and walks of life. Faculty and students in the Sociolinguistics Lab are using the data for a variety of phonetic, lexical, discourse-pragmatic and other studies.
Supported by National Science Foundation BCS 2119975 (PI:Sneller, co-PI: Wagner), National Endowment for the Humanities HAA-284835-22 (PI: Sneller), MSU Humanities Arts Research Program (Sneller).
Sample publications
- 2022. Sneller, Betsy, Suzanne Evans Wagner and Yongqing Ye. MI Diaries: Ethical and practical challenges. Linguistics Vanguard 8(s3).
- 2023. Sneller, Betsy and Adam Barnhardt. Sociolinguistic prompts in the 21st century: Uniting past approaches and current directions. Language and Linguistics Compass 17(3) e12484.
Great Lakes Speech and Society
This is our umbrella name for the lab’s ongoing efforts to examines variation and change in the language of people in the Great Lakes region. Our focus thus far has been on English, and especially sound change.
The vowel system in this geographic area emerged from a series of sound changes known as the Northern Cities Shift. Today, the system is undergoing further change. We have been compiling recordings of longtime residents from public oral histories and sociolinguistic interiews. More recently we’ve been able to look at recordings from the MI Diaries project. We’ve also conducted some preliminary research on listeners’ evaluation of Great Lakes speech.
Sample publications
Wagner, Suzanne Evans, Alexander Mason, Monica Nesbitt, Erin Pevan & Matt Savage. 2016. Reversal and re-organization of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 44. 22(2). 171–179.
Zheng, Mingzhe. 2018. You Have to Learn to Adapt: A Sociolinguistic Study of Chinese Americans in the “Asian City” of Southeast Michigan. Doctoral dissertation in Linguistics.
Nesbitt, Monica, Suzanne Evans Wagner & Alexander Mason. 2019. A tale of two shifts: Movement toward the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Lansing, Michigan. Publications of the American Dialect Society 104(1). 144–165.