Wyatt Barnes

Hi! My name is Wyatt and I'm a PhD student at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor in the linguistics department.

My research interests are primarily focused on sociophonetic and prosodic variation, the commodification of language, rurality versus urbanism, and the intersections of language, gender, class, and sexuality. I am also interested linguistic fieldwork and language contact, primarily on languages of the Afroasiatic language family. I am currently working with speakers of Tarifit and Darija.

I graduated from Pitzer College in May of 2018 as a double major in linguistics & Middle East / North African studies. In April 2018 I was selected by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board as a finalist for a Fulbright Fellowship to Morocco. The fellowship period began on September 2018 with 6 months of intensive study of Darija, followed by a 9 month grant period. During the grant period I conducted sociolinguistic research on a number of topics including: English/Arabic code-switching, Spanish/Arabic code-switching, and language ideologies of Moroccan youth.

I started my PhD *virtually* at U-M in Fall 2020