Felicidades are in order for Professor Justin Davidson, who was awarded a UC Multicampus Research Initiative Grant! The project, entitled "An interdisciplinary approach to the study of Spanish-English bilingualism in California," lasts for at least two years and expands Professor Davidson's Corpus of Bay Area Spanish to now include Spanish-English bilinguals in the Los Angeles and Santa Cruz areas of California.
The grant provides funding for the paid employment of several undergraduate and graduate research assistants at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Santa Cruz, so stay tuned for calls for participation in the project this Spring 2023!
By documenting and linguistically analyzing Spanish-English bilingualism in California, this project serves to legitimize the speech practices of diverse types of Spanish speakers in the United States, whose linguistic norms are unjustly scrutinized by prescriptive academies and often ignored in Hispanic Linguistics.
The sociolinguistic products of this research will be made available as a publicly accessible repository of Spanish-English bilingual speech, positioning the University of California as a leader in bilingualism research and attracting future scholars at all levels to carry out Spanish-English bilingualism research at UC-Berkeley. Moreover, a portion of grant funds will be used to host the inaugural conference on Multilingual Hispanic Speech in California (MuHSiC) in Fall 2024.