Research

I am a sociolinguist who specializes in language contact situations involving minority languages. The central issue of my research is minority language resilience. Why do some languages survive in ideologically hostile environments while others do not? What do resilient languages teach us about how to address language death in an increasingly globalized world? How do extreme sociolinguistic environments affect grammars? Much of my recent work has addressed these and related questions. 

The central focus of my work is Argentine Guarani, a historically and linguistically unique variety of Guarani which has been largely overshadowed by Paraguayan Guarani. Comparison of these two closely related varieties spoken in drastically different sociolinguistic environments allows us to probe at how ideologies and institutions affect language transmission, language use, and the grammars of the languages themselves. I'm additionally interested in these issues as they pertain to Mayan languages spoken by migrant populations in the state of Mississippi, in particular Chuj and Mam.

I predominantly utilize qualitative approaches, and fieldwork is methodologically central to my research. My recent projects are the product of fieldwork trips in 2017, 2018, and 2020, which were made by possible by funding from the U.S. Department of Education, the Tinker Foundation, and The Ohio State University (specifically the Council of Graduate Students, the Board of Trustees, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese).

My research has been presented in the United States, England, France, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, and Cuba, including at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), the Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology (ALT), the Manchester Phonology Meeting (mfm), the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS), the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA), the Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina (ALFAL), and the Congreso Internacional Transdisciplinario Desafíos en la Diversidad, among various others.