MSU sociolinguists study the impact of the coronavirus on daily life

THURSDAY, July 23 — Before March, you’d probably never heard the phrase “social distancing.” It’s one of the many things that people across the globe have been forced to learn about since the coronavirus outbreak began.

Professors Suzanne Evans Wagner and Betsy Sneller of the Michigan State University Sociolinguistics Lab are studying how speech is changing over the course of the pandemic. Their research aims to show how major societal change can affect people on a personal level.

Wagner and Sneller's project is called MI COVID Diaries, and it is cataloging responses to the pandemic. Each week, they present prompts to participants focused on current events. Then, participants upload audio recordings of their responses, which Wagner and Sneller compile for their research.

“Our goal as humans and researchers is to get a range of perspectives on the website to represent what we’re hearing and help people feel not so alone in this self-isolation weird time,” Sneller said.

Participants in the study can as consistently or as sporadically as they please. Sneller and Wagner said they're looking to increase the amount of diversity in the project. Sneller and Wagner asked their students to reach out to people through their personal social media pages. One Saudi student reached out to Saudi and Yemeni communities around the state, and one student from Detroit has been in touch with Michigan’s Black communities.

“We had to scramble to get this together,” said Wagner. “So we’ve been working very closely with our students in the Sociolinguistics Lab.” Sneller and Wagner have been brainstorming with students about what to do with the information they’re gathering. Students have been helping design prompts and combing through the audio for interesting clips.

Sneller and Wagner said their work with MI COVID Diaries could be used as the basis for research papers, a senior thesis, or even an entire graduate degree. They’re getting around 10 interviews a week, but they want to collect a vast amount of interviews in order to create an accurate snapshot of this weird point in history.

Sneller and Wagner’s research has led them to some strange discoveries. One of Sneller’s friends on Facebook noticed she was saying “I mean” a lot more during the quarantine. “Hey, that’s a great project for someone to analyze over time,” Sneller said. “Is this person saying, ‘I mean’ more often? But as a researcher, I couldn’t tell her that, because then she would become aware of it.”

Some of their prompts are basic: “Do you remember the last meal you had in a restaurant? How often do you leave the house? Do you wear a mask?” But some of them are more timely. For example, when people were protesting against the lockdown Sneller and Wagner asked participants for their opinions on the protests.

Sneller and Wagner said they’re careful about the language used in their prompts. Phrases like “before the crisis” or “before the lockdown” have different meanings to different people.

“It’s different in every place. Are we in lockdown in Michigan? We’re not Spain. We can leave the house. How people respond to our language will feed into how we phrase things going forward,” Wagner said.

Sneller emphasized that the media plays a role in how language changes across society. Phrases like “social distancing” have entered our lexicon out of necessity. If you had never heard the phrase before, you almost certainly have now. Sneller and Wagner’s indicates that when the world undergoes rapid changes, so does the way we speak. With MI COVID Diaries, they hope to get a better understanding of how and why these changes occur.

Sneller and Wagner said don’t plan to stop working on the project — even if a vaccine comes around — because they want to see if there are any long-lasting effects on people’s language or behavior.

“As you go back into normal life, how has it changed?” Sneller asked. “Maybe it’ll be less common to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a restaurant because everyone will be social distancing.”

You can learn more about MI COVID Diaries by visiting betsysneller.github.io/MI-COVID-diaries.