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Research on the Cutting Edge

Linguistics research at NC State involves numerous ongoing multi-year projects involving both faculty and students. See below to learn more!

The Phonetics Lab

Through our state-of-the-art Phonetics Lab we engage in advanced research using ultrasound, airflow and other laboratory methods to investigate how we produce and perceive speech. 

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Raleigh Research Projects

Based on hundreds of interviews over the last decade, our ongoing research of speech communities in Raleigh investigates the changing English and Spanish dialects of the urban south. 

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SLAAP

Through the first-of-its-kind project, the Socio-Linguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP), maintains the largest digital archive of sociolinguistic interviews from all across North Carolina as well as North America.

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Student Research

Under mentorship of faculty, our Linguistics students conduct and present on their own research, often as part of ongoing faculty-led research. Further, students frequently present their research at regional or national conferences throughout the country!

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Linguistic Research In the News

So Long, Drawl

So Long, Drawl

For more than half a century, the familiar Southern accent has been fading in Raleigh. Its disappearance has been so slow and so subtle that locals may not even have noticed. But for Robin Dodsworth, an associate professor in sociolinguistics at NC State, the decline tells the story of rapid social change across the urban South.

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Gender Differences in Speech

Gender Differences in Speech

Doctoral student Caroline Myrick stopped by Wilmington, NC’s HQR 91.3 to talk about gender identity and language. Listen to the full interview!

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Preserving Yucatec Maya

Preserving Yucatec Maya in Yucatan, Mexico

Jim Michnowicz is one of the few scholars that study the Spanish of Yucatan, Mexico, which is in contact with an indigenous language, Yucatec Maya, one of the last remaining major language contact zones in Latin America.

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The Phonetics Lab

The North Carolina State University Phonetics Lab houses state-of-the-art equipment for studying the articulation, acoustics, and perception of speech, to address research questions in phonetics, phonology, language variation, and language change. The Phonetics Lab is directed by Dr. Jeff Mielke and affiliated with the Linguistics Program in the Department of English.


Raleigh Research

Our ongoing research of speech communities in Raleigh investigates the changing dialects of the urban south. This has involved extensive interviews with life-long Raleigh-ites of varying ages and backgrounds, of both English and Spanish.

SLAAP and the Linguistics Lab

The Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (SLAAP) is an interactive web-based archive of sociolinguistic recordings, with integrated media playing and annotation features, as well as phonetic analysis and corpus analysis tools designed for enabling and improving empirical linguistic inquiry. SLAAP was built by Tyler Kendall and is maintained by linguistics students and faculty in the Linguistics Lab in Tompkins Hall Room 204.

Student Research

As a linguistics student at NC State, you have the opportunity to travel the country to present your own research. Faculty closely mentor students to be productive researchers, and students graduate with multiple conference and journal publications.