Linguists Betsy Sneller and Suzanne Wagner of Michigan State University will present their project "MI Diaries: Tracking language change during a pandemic."

ABSTRACT
Face-to-face interaction has long been hypothesized to be a central component of both sociolinguistic development for individuals as well as of language change across an entire community. The social distancing conditions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic introduced a deep and long term disruption to typical face-to-face interaction for Michiganders, which in turn enables researchers to test precisely how these widescale disruptions to face-to-face interactions impact sociolinguistic development for children and participation in lifespan change for adults. In this talk, we introduce the MI-Diaries project, which has been tracking audio diaries from participants since the beginning of the pandemic. We highlight some of the major theoretical goals of the project, as well as discuss some of the methodological innovations necessary for conducting sociolinguistic fieldwork during a pandemic.