Our team talked with community members of all ages at the STEAM Expo Day on April 5th, 2025, as part of the MSU Science Festival. We invited visitors to participate in two dialect games and consider the ways sociolinguistics connects to their lives! It was a long day for us, but "the amount of people that enjoyed hearing about linguistics is more than worth it," says team member Lin Cabada. Do you call soft drinks pop or soda? We used this question as an attention grabber. Julia Bolash, another team member, says many people "had stories to tell about pop versus soda debates from their own lives!" We asked visitors to record the word they use with a color-coded sticker on our chart. Annan Kirk, an MI Diaries team member, showing our Pop/Soda chart to attendees. Team member Hamlin Teng helping a visitor add a sticker to the chart later in the day. Red sticker: pop Blue sticker: soda Yellow/green sticker: other (such as Coke, sodapop, fizzy drink) Each participant placed their sticker above the year they were born, so we could compare the words across generations. As the day went on, our chart filled up and we could show Science Festival visitors a clear pattern: soda is becoming more common in younger generations! What do you call the body part at the end of your arm? What do you call something you can wear on your head? In our second dialect game, we prompted participants to say the words hand and hat and listened closely to their pronunciation of the vowel sounds in the two words. Team member Xhanna Travina with our Hand/Hat chart towards the start of the day. Team member Jess Shepherd talking to visitors about the Hand/Hat game. Yellow sticker: the two vowel sounds were pronounced the same way Green sticker: the vowels were pronounced differently. Red sticker: the vowels sounded different, but not in a typical Michigan way! Science Festival attendees helped us reveal a trend: younger Michiganders are much more likely to pronounce hand and hat differently than people from older generations! "People were often genuinely amazed to learn that there were two pronunciations of the same vowel. By the afternoon, the trend in apparent time was really clear," says MI Diaries co-lead Dr. Suzanne Wagner, "so visitors got a great sense of how sociolinguistic inquiry magically uncovers phenomena that they hadn’t noticed before."…