New Web Portal Highlights UNM's Hispanic Linguistics Program

September 4, 2015

The UNM Department of Spanish & Portuguese announces a new web portal to highlight Hispanic linguistics at the university. The premier Hispanic Linguistics program features cutting-edge research in cognitive, functional, and typological linguistics, and brings together five core faculty members plus numerous affiliations with faculty from other departments, including Linguistics, Anthropology, Speech & Hearing Sciences, and Foreign Languages & Literature.

Faculty affiliated with the program have active research agendas in both historical and contemporary language variation and change, language contact, first and second language acquisition, and sociolinguistics.

The program's historical framework extends to the beginning of the previous century with important documentation of New Mexican Spanish collected by UNM's own Aurelio Espinoza - an endeavor that has been continued most notably in the work of Professors Bills and Vigil with the New Mexico Colorado Spanish survey. In contemporary terms, the program emphasizes usage-based approaches to linguistics and oversees several endeavors to build corpora in language contact situations in the United States and the Amazon, as well as monolingual varieties of Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Demonstrating the breadth and vigor of the program, faculty and students frequently present on their research initiatives through local venues such as the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, the Latin American & Iberian Institute, and the High Desert Linguistics Society. Their analyses have resulted in publications in peer-reviewed journals such as Spanish in Context, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, Revista Interacción, and the International Journal of Bilingualism, among others.

To learn more, visit the Hispanic Linguistics program website.