Headshot of Adam Barnhardt

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 Linguistics PhD student primarily interested in sociolinguistics. She is interested in language variation and change at the regional, community, and individual levels. She is interested in how identity and age influence how speakers adopt larger language change. 

Emily Duggan is an MA student in Linguistics starting in the Fall of 2023. She is primarily interested in sociolinguistic variation in relation to aspects of identity such as: geographical region, race/ethnicity, and gender/sexuality. Her main goals as a sociolinguist are to bring awareness to linguistic discrimination and focus her research on how language can be used as both a weapon of marginalization and a tool to empower minority groups.

Jessica Shepherd is a Linguistics PhD student. Jessica’s primary interests are sociolinguistics, phonetics, and phonology. She’s particularly interested in the phonetic and phonological variations that exist in language between different speech communities, how people use language to communicate meaning, how language changes over time. She is interested in documenting the phonological differences between different regions in the Western United States.

Kate Speak is a Linguistics Masters student, starting Fall 2023.

Headshot of Yongqing Ye

Yongqing/Anthea Ye is a PhD student in the linguistics program. Yongqing is primarily interested in phonetics, phonology and sound change. Her research focuses on using experimental techniques and corpus data to probe how phonological representations and processes change in a speech community. She is currently working on nasalization in Michigan English . In her free time, Yongqing likes hiking, journaling and going to Renaissance fairs.

Other students

  • Drake Howard is a Linguistics major and a Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller.
  • Caroline Zackerman is a Linguistics major and former Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller (2021-2022). She is currently the project manager for MI Diaries.
  • To see all the students working for the MI Diaries project, check out the project’s Meet the Team page.