MI Diaries

Faculty / Research

New Post-Doctoral Researchers

September 1, 2025

MSU Linguistics recently hired two new post-docs, Leah Nodar and Joel Berends, to work with the MI Diaries project.

Welcome, Leah & Joel!

Leah Nodar is a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures. She is a postdoctoral researcher in linguistics on the MI Diaries project. Her research interests include dialect development, network analysis of discourse, and the role of personal investment in a social identity on language continuity and change.

Joel Berends works with the MI Diaries project and as an Assistant Professor of Teacher Education at MSU. His work involves youth who are interested in pursuing careers in education as part of MSU’s Community Teachers Program. His scholarship includes work with African and Asian immigrant youth, museum and cultural studies, diasporic literacies, discourse analysis, sports, poetry, and arts-based research and methodologies. His teaching, research, and community-engagement directly include youth in determining and deliberating curriculum, career pathways, and futures for learning communities.

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Conferences / Events / Faculty / Graduate Students / People / Research / Undergraduates

MSU students, faculty, and alumni presenting at NWAV 52

October 15, 2024

The following people from the Sociolinguistics Lab will be presenting at NWAV 52 this year:

  • Adam Barnhardt is seeking expert input on the next stage of his ongoing project via a Project Launch poster titled: Patterns of social meanings indexed to Low-Back-Merger Shifted vowels in Michigan.
  • Connor Bechler will present prior work that he undertook at the University of Kentucky: Evaluating wav2vec2 speech recognition and forced alignment on a multi-varietal language documentation collection.
  • Jessica Shepherd, Drake Howard, and Betsy Sneller will present interim results from Jess’s first PhD qualifying paper research: Pronunciation in the [mɪɾən]: Post-tonic /t/ flapping in Michigan: a non-white male-led change.

Adam’s work and the study by Jess, Betsy, and Drake all use speech data from the MI Diaries project.

We’ll also be looking out for presentations by the former MSU people shown in bold below:

  • James Stanford, George Stain, Monica Nesbitt: Phonological foundations of ethnic divergence: The Low-Back Merger Shift and the African American Vowel Shift as opposite movements.
  • Kaitlyn Owens and Monica Nesbitt: Changing boundaries: Evidence from Northern Cities Shift categorical perception in Michigan.
  • Amalia Robinson, Monica Nesbitt and Xiao Dong: The phonology of Black women in Boston (across age, ethnicity, and style).
  • Xiao Dong, Fengming Liu, Monica Nesbitt, and Chien-Jer Charles Lin: Social perception of neutral tone and rhotacization in Mandarin Chinese: How do Beijing and Taiwan speakers differ and does place orientation matter?
  • Rebecca Roeder: /ay/ glide weakening in North Carolina and the origins of the Southern Vowel Shift.
  • Dennis Preston and Terumi Imai-Brandle: Reconstructing American English inputs in a globally available mass media product: Intensifiers in the television series Gilmore Girls.

See you in Miami!

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Admin

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.

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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

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Events / Faculty / People / Research

The interdisciplinary water cooler

October 30, 2021
Flyer for Yares and Sneller 2021 University Interdisciplinary Colloquium talk

Sociolinguistics Lab co-director Dr. Betsy Sneller will give a high-profile, university-wide talk on November 5th that is open to the public. Her co-presenter, Dr. Laura Yares, met Dr. Sneller at an informal College of Arts and Letters workshop in October 2020 about pivoting research to remote methods in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Yares and her collaborators were looking for a way to capture participants’ reactions to a popular Netflix show, Shtisel. Upon learning about the MI Diaries project’s mobile app for self-recorded audio entries, Dr. Yares met with Dr. Sneller and co-investigator Dr. Suzanne Wagner to talk about adapting it for her project. Come and hear about this serendipitous cross-disciplinary conversation, and its broader implications, courtesy of the MSU Center for Interdisciplinarity.

Abstract

Can common research technologies serve diverse disciplinary needs? Even disciplines that seem on the surface to have little in common can benefit from casual conversations about the challenges and methods that they might share. In this talk, we show how a simple smartphone app developed for a project analyzing language during the pandemic (MI Diaries) was successfully adapted for a Religious Studies project examining learning about Judaism through the cultural arts (Shtisel Diary). By reflecting on these two case-studies we highlight how the tools that we use to conduct research can be just as interdisciplinary as research projects themselves. 

Details

Friday, November 5, 2021
12PM-1PM EDT via Zoom

Zoom Link: https://msu.zoom.us/j/96411904159
Passcode: msuc4i

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