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."…

The MI Diaries team hosted a special session at MSU's Grandparents University event this year, helping kids and their grandparents get involved with linguistics through the themes "Harry Potter and the Secrets of British English" and "Diary of a Michigan Kid." "Harry Potter and the Secrets of British English" included classes in Potions (ad libbing), Charms (International Phonetic Alphabet), Defense Against the Dark Arts (British accent features), and History of Magic (historical linguistics). Meanwhile, "Diary of a Michigan Kid" got folks to reflect on their experiences and start recording audio diaries, as well as thinking critically about the different types of language they use to express themselves. Kids' dance Grandparents' dance Sam Scroggins explaining dialect regions Betsy Sneller drawing Michigan Harry Kasper and Sam Scroggins in wizard swag Visitor receiving the sorting hat Circle activity Sabrina Ruiz laughing in front of the grandparents

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. Lin Cabada helping visitors add their data to the Pop/Soda chart Betsy Sneller laughing with visitors Emily Duggan walking visitors through the COT/CAUGHT merger chart Betsy Sneller showing children how to record their stories on the MI Diaries app Caroline Zackerman showing a family some MI Diaries themed gifts they can take home Drake Howard talking to a visitor about the project Annan Kirk talking to visitors about the project Partial team photo: (from left to right) Jess Shepherd, Suzanne Wagner, Betsy Sneller, Lin Cabada, and Caroline Zackerman

Project lead Dr. Sneller sat down with Michigan State University's Alumni Office to talk about MI Diaries and how we are tracking real-time language change with our data. The event was live-streamed and included some really excellent questions from the audience. Click here to watch on Vimeo, or watch the video below to hear about the especially exciting findings from our Baby Boomer participants! https://vimeo.com/930699489

MI Diaries partnered with Inquiry Arts as part of the STEAM Expo Day at the MSU Science Festival on April 1st and 2nd, 2023. We invited Michigan residents and visitors to reflect on their lives, curiosities, and hopes for the future while learning about sociolinguistic research. In addition to providing information about MI Diaries, we shared some of our featured participant stories with with Science Festival attendees and welcomed them to record their own stories! You can see some photos from the event below: MI Diaries team member, Yongqing Ye, shares one of our featured stories with a Science Festival visitor. Annabelle McClanahan, MI Diaries team member, talking with attendees about her Citizen Scholars project with the MI Diaries. Two MI Diaries team members talking with a visitor about the goals of the MI Diaries project. Yongqing Ye, MI Diaries team member, helping a new diarist sign up to tell their story. We brought a lot of freebies, like pins and stickers, for people to take with them. See us at our next event if you want some! Some of the MI Diaries team that took part in the Science Festival this year! A few more of the MI Diaries team members that were at the Science Festival this year!

MI Diaries partnered with the East Lansing Public Library to hold a "Diary of a Michigan Kid" event on November 14th, 2022. The focus of the event was helping kids from ages 7 to 12 learn about diaries: fictional, real, written, and audio! Playing off of popular children's book series like “Diary of a Wimpy Kid”, the MI Diaries team worked with participants to make their very own Diary of a Michigan Kid that will stand the test of time. You can see some photos from the event below! MI Diaries team members and event participants collaborating on a group activity. The MI Diaries team and some participants getting ready for the Diary of a Michigan Kid event. Drake Howard, MI Diaries team member, talks with participants about different examples of diaries. MI Diaries team member, Jack Rechsteiner, talking with event participants about audio diaries. Some participants working on event activity worksheets. The MI Diaries team assisting participants with their activity sheets.

On June 24, 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned the ruling made in the 1973 Roe v. Wade case for the fundamental “right to privacy” that protects a pregnant person’s choice of whether to have an abortion. Some of our diarists shared their experiences and opinions about this ruling which can be found together in our collection of stories related to this event. Click here to listen