My team of student-researchers and I have developed a large-scale corpus of spoken Spanish, \u00a0collected in my sociolinguistics laboratory at Boston University. We are studying speech data, reading passages, and questionnaire results from the perspective of variationist sociolinguistics. These data will help answer questions about language maintenance and attitudes — who speaks Spanish with whom, when, and why? — as well as questions about language change and stability —\u00a0how is Spanish spoken in Boston and how does it compare to that of other communities?<\/p>\n
This research, which is funded by the\u00a0<\/span>National Science Foundation (BCS-1423840)<\/a>, \u00a0examines 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 approximately 200 Bostonians, making our corpus among the largest \u00a0of its kind.<\/p>\n Our work has produced several\u00a0academic publications<\/a>\u00a0(including several co-written with students). It has also been the focus of media meant for\u00a0a general audience:<\/p>\n I am currently working on a book related to the project. Below are links to recorded lectures I have given that relate to Spanish in Boston.<\/p>\n TEDx Middlebury College<\/strong><\/p>\n\n