My research team and I have developed a large-scale  corpus of spoken Spanish,  collected in the greater Boston area. We are studying it from the perspective of  variationist sociolinguistics, exploring questions about language change and stability. This research, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS-1423840),  examines a range of variable linguistic phenomena in order to assess the possibility that language and dialect contact are promoting the emergence of a Boston Spanish speech community. At present, the research team has interviewed 192 Bostonians with origins in one of 21 Latin American nations.

This work has produced several academic publications. It has also been the focus of media meant for a general audience:

• An article in the Boston Globe.
• A TEDx talk that summarizes some of the study’s findings.
• An interview on WGBH’s Under The Radar.
•  A written piece in WBGH’s local news section.
• An article about the project in BU’s online daily newspaper BU Today.

I am currently working on a book related to the project.