Mofart Ayiega is a Linguistics PhD student. Mofart’s primary interests are morphosyntax, morphosemantics, and language change and variation in Bantu, with a focus on Swahili and other African languages. He is currently working on morphological non-agreement with animate nouns in Swahili, a study that investigates variable subject–verb agreement with the goal of identifying its semantic and morphological characteristics. He is also conducting research on tense and suffix ordering in Ekegusii (Guz, ISO 639-3).
Adam Barnhardt is a Linguistics PhD student. Adam’s research primarily focused on phonetic/phonological variation and Adam is interested in examining how the implementation of this variation as a means to position oneself within culture and society might intersect with language change broadly.
Annan Kirk is a PhD student specializing in sociolinguistics, with particular interests in discourse-pragmatic variation, sociosyntax, grammaticalization, and queer linguistics. She’s interested in the ways in which linguistic variation operates below the level of conscious awareness within a community, and how this variation can spread and acquire social meaning over time. She is also engaged with the broader theoretical challenge of investigating variables which don’t qualify for semantic equivalence but still pattern together. Currently, Annan is working on examining the distribution of intensifiers in Michigan English.
Connor Bechler is a Linguistics PhD student. Connor’s primary theoretical interests are in socially motivated language change, language attitudes/ideologies, and the phonetics/phonology interface. His research focuses on investigating these areas through quantitative analysis of speech corpora, particularly those resulting from language documentation projects or participant-driven research projects, and building computational tools to facilitate such investigations.
Hamlin Teng is a Linguistics MA student. He is interested in variationist sociolinguistics and language ecology. He is also learning statistical and other quantitative methods used in linguistics. He is currently searching for his specific research focus.
Jessica Shepherd is a Linguistics PhD student. Jessica’s primary interests are sociolinguistics, phonetics, and phonology. She’s particularly interested in how people use language to communicate meaning, what drives language change, and the phonetic and phonological variations that exist between different speech communities. She is currently working on post-tonic pronunciation variation in Michigan English.
Millie Hacker is a Linguistics PhD student. Millie is mainly interested in the relationship between sociolinguistic variation and the phonology-phonetics interface. They currently work with the MI Diaries project and are gradually developing a specific research plan.
Other students
- Drake Howard is a Linguistics major and a former Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller (2022-2024).
- Julia Bolash is an Experience Architecture major and a Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller (2024-2026).
- Connor Mason is a Linguistics major and a Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller (2025-2026).
- Keira Wesley is a Linguistics major and a Professorial Assistant to Dr. Suzanne Wagner (2025-2026).
- To see all the students working for the MI Diaries project, check out the project’s Meet the Team page