Within linguistics, sociolinguistics is one of the areas I'm most interested in. It was a heavy reading class with a lot of research papers, but the research was so interesting. I felt like I really understood the class and I was just excited to learn about all of these social and linguistic variations. Sociolinguistics is an aspect of linguistics that has real world implications because of the linguistic biases that exist. I think it's really important to be aware of.
The final project was so much fun. It was an analysis paper based on research I collected myself. I first did tests on myself: drawing a dialect map of the United States (pictured above), explaining the features of each dialect, and then completing a listening test to try and place a person's dialect, age, race, and education level based on their speech. I then did the same tests with five other people and compared all of our results. It was such a cool way to look at dialect perception and already see how differently I think about linguistics than other people even after only having taken two classes.