The well-documented benefits of community engagement experiences have resulted in its incorporation across a wide variety of disciplines, from health care (Alexander et al., 2020) to aviation science (Belt & Sweetman, 2021) to statistics (Schanz & Giles, 2021). The field of sociolinguistics is no exception with plentiful examples of community-engaged scholarship (CES) or “research of mutual benefit to community and academic interests” (Delugan et al., 2014, p. 155). One way that linguistics and language courses have integrated CES is through the development of community-based sociolinguistic corpora or collections of informal interviews with community members. In these courses, students are trained in sociolinguistic methods as research assistants to conduct, transcribe, and analyze sociolinguistic interviews. Although personal experience and practitioner reports attest to the benefits of students participating in building sociolinguistic corpora, there has been little research documenting student perceptions. Additionally, there is a dearth of research on CES experiences involving underrepresented college students, including students of color, first-generation students, and low-income students. The present study examines the perceptions of underrepresented college students on CES courses where they participate in developing a community-based sociolinguistic corpus
