The MI Diaries team set up at the STEAM Expo for MSU’s 2024 science festival, spending a day giving Spartans and their loved ones a taste of sociolinguistic research, handing out treats, and recruiting new participants for the MI Diaries project!
The team helped visitors run two little sociolinguistic experiments on themselves: 1) Do you call it Pop or Soda? in which visitors used stickers to plot their preferred term for fizzy drinks based on their birth year, allowing us to observe the gradual invasion of “soda” into Michigan; and 2) Do Cot and Caught rhyme for you? where we elicited the CAUGHT and COT vowels from visitors and similarly used stickers to plot by birth year, revealing the development of the CAUGHT/COT merger through apparent time.
