Speaker: Rafael Orozco, Louisiana State University

Professor of Linguistics and Spanish; Director of Louisiana State University’s Interdepartmental Linguistics Program. Scholarly interests include sociolinguistics with emphases on language variation and change in Latin American Spanish, and Spanish in the United States. His research studies the factors that condition language variation including the effects of language contact —mainly with English— and dialectal contact on Latin American Spanish. Recent work explores lexical effects on language variation and change. Has delivered presentations in the United States, Canada, Europe, New Zealand, and South America. Author of Spanish in Colombia & New York City: Language Contact Meets Dialectal Convergence (John Benjamins, 2018); editor of New Directions in Hispanic Linguistics (Cambridge Scholars, 2014); coeditor of SubjectPronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-Dialectal Perspective (Georgetown, 2015). His work has appeared in several edited collections and in journals such as Hispania, Languages, Lingüística, Spanish in Context, and Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics.