I’m an Assistant Professor in Department of Linguistics at Brigham Young University specializing in sociophonetics and quantitative methods. In May 2020, I received my Ph.D in linguistics from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Georgia.
My primary area of research is on English in the western United States. My dissertation focused on English in Cowlitz County, Washington with an emphasis on uncovering variation in vowel formant trajectories. I am involved in several research projects on Utah English (vowels, consonants and intonation), including a long-term project analyzing a collection of 750 interviews with residents of Heber, Utah born before WWII.
Another strand of my research is focused on sociophonetic data analysis methods. Recently, I’ve run simulations on real and artificial sociophonetic data, uncovering some overlooked aspects of methods that may in fact be rather important, like order of operations and Pillai scores.
I publish under the more grown-up-sounding version of my name, Joseph A. Stanley, but anyone who has ever met me knows I go by Joey. I live in Spanish Fork with my wife (Kelly) and kids (Lena, Walter, and Douglas). I enjoy road running, breadmaking, succulent-raising, organ-playing, and object incorporation. I also have a blog on frequency statistics of hymns used in my church. A description of my idiolect can be found here and the languages I speak here.
What am I up to right now?
As of June 9, 2025, I am…
- 👨🏻🏫 Teaching African American English as a linguistics capstone course.
📊 Putting together presentations for NWAV53
🗒 Working on what I guess I’d call a “desk R&R” that I got from a journal.
🗒 Awaiting reviewer comments for three other submitted manuscripts.
📼 Using new-fave to extract acoustic measurements from my Kohler Tapes collection. Like, literally, FAVE is running as I type this. I got them all force-aligned last week and FAVE has been running for about four days. Another day or so and I’ll have them all done!
👨🏻🏫 Ruminating about my tenure portfolio due in the fall.
📖 Reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Hero of Ages and listening to Hugh Howey’s Wool.
🎹 Prepping some organ music to play in church.
🧶 Thinking about my next scarf to knit, now that I’ve just finished a second one. Do I do a cool cabling design, thick ribbing, a texture, or some more intricate kind of stitch?
