Research

Faculty and students in the Department of Linguistics conduct research on a wide range of topics, using both traditional and cutting-edge methods.

For a description of different research areas and faculty who are engaged in this work, click on the button below.

Research Areas of Interest

Current Research Highlights

Dr. Jon Forrest, Dr. Margaret Renwick, Dept. of Linguistics alumnus Dr. Joseph Stanley (now at Brigham Young University), and Dr. Lelia Glass (Georgia Tech) are collaborating on a research project on changing speech patterns in Georgia. Their article "Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English" appeared in the journal Language Variation and Change in Fall 2023 and attracted widespread media attention, including NPR, Late Night with Stephen Colbert, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Other publications are in press.

Dr. Keith Langston, Dr. John Hale, Dr. Margaret Renwick, and Dr. Zvjezdana Vrzić (New York University) are developing an online spoken corpus for the documentation and study of endangered language varieties spoken in northwestern Croatia (see https://elic-corpus.uga.edu). Graduate Research Assistants Austin Jones and recent Ph.D. graduate Dr. Shulin Zhang were the lead authors on two conference papers, one presented at LREC-COLING 2024 in Turin, Italy in May 2024 (see Zhang et al. 2024) and another at the Field Matters Workshop at the ACL Annual Meeting in Bangkok in August 2024 (Jones et al., to appear). Senior project personnel also presented a paper at the 54th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages at Brigham Young University in May 2024, and  held two workshops for research collaborators in Croatia, at the University of Rijeka and the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula in July 2024.