Episode seven of season three of the Liberal Arts Endeavor podcast is out! In this episode, Dean Christopher P. Long discusses why language changes over time with Suzanne Wagner, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Linguistics program in the Department of Linguistics & Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages. She is also Core Faculty member at the Center for Gender in Global Context and an Affiliate Faculty member in the Second Language Studies program.

Dr. Wagner is a sociolinguist who studies the social meaning attached to linguistic variation. Her goal is to understand what motivates changes in languages. Her research includes studying young adult speech in Philadelphia and generational accent changes in mid-Michigan. She is also a co-editor of the Routledge series Studies in Language Change and co-editor with Erez Levon of the sociolinguistics section of the Mouton online journal Linguistics Vanguard. 

You can follow more of Suzanne’s work, teaching, and research on his website wagnersu.msu.domains and on twitter @redbirdred.