Through this course, students will develop practical and theoretical familiarity with the essential “toolkit” of sociophonetic methods and analytical techniques, including but not limited to: principles of experimental design, ethical field practice, acoustic analysis, and statistical techniques in language research.  Students will refine and advance these skills via their application to naturalistic language data gathered through the work of the Bennington Sociolinguistics Laboratory, as well as to available archival and legacy data relevant to contextualizing and understanding this corpus.