Multimodal Corpus of Heritage Spanish

FAIN: HAA-280770-21

University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
Elisa Gironzetti (Project Director: January 2021 to present)

Protocol development, data collection, and preliminary analysis of a multimodal corpus representing the written and oral discourse of regional Spanish heritage speakers in the United States. 

We are applying to the Level I DHAG in order to support the initial stages of a large innovative project with the end goal of creating the first annotated, bilingual, multimodal corpus of written and oral discourse produced by heritage speakers of Spanish in the U. S. in English and Spanish. The corpus will include speakers from different sociolinguistic generations of the understudied and underrepresented varieties spoken in the DMV (the DC-Maryland-Virginia area). The project will engage scholars, educators, and students in the field of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) as well as members of the Latinx community to create an open-access online resource that will facilitate the study of SHL discourse and support research in languages in contact, bilingualism, and heritage language discourse, and serve as a digital repository representing the voices and experiences of the diverse population of Latinx Spanish heritage speakers from the DMV area.

Media Coverage

The State of Spanish in the DMV (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Jessica Weiss
Publication: MarylandToday
Date: 11/18/2021
Abstract: UMD Researchers to Record and Document the Unique Linguistic Features of the Region’s Spanish Speakers
URL: http://https://today.umd.edu/the-state-of-spanish-in-the-dmv