COVID-19 has had a major impact on people around the world, but how is the pandemic changing our language and the way we communicate? That is the question being studied by a team of researchers at Michigan State University, led by Associate Professor Suzanne Wagner and Assistant Professor Betsy Sneller. The MI COVID Diaries project, run by MSU’s Sociolinguistics Lab, has been…
Suzanne Evans Wagner isn’t telling people how to talk. She’s here to say that people have options and reasons for talking the way they do. An Associate Professor of Linguistics in MSU’s Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, Wagner researches the social motivations for language variation and language change. It’s a subject she speaks freely about, providing examples,…
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…
All this week, a cross-college workshop, R Statistics Bootcamp, was offered at Michigan State University, giving graduate students and researchers the opportunity to learn more about the statistical methods using the programming language R. This five-day practical course provided participants with important transferable programming and statistical skills with a wide range of applications within and beyond academia. Participants learned how…
Attending Michigan State University was an easy choice for Linguistics major Scott Nelson, whose parents both graduated from MSU, but determining a major wasn’t as easy until he found a home in the College of Arts & Letters and Linguistics. “I randomly discovered Linguistics, found out more, and fell in love with it sort of superficially, but when I came…