Dr. Armin Schwegler, University of California, Irvine

“Latin American Spanish: Spanish Linguistics and its Interface with Creole Linguistics”

The lecture was given by Professor Armin Schwegler at UW-Milwaukee on April 7, 2014. Professor Schwegler provided a brief overview of the principal theoretical issues and major themes related to the origins of Latin American Spanish, and then demonstrated how and why the subfield of Spanish creolistics has profoundly influenced how we currently view the “true” and complex origins of Latin American Spanish. Professor Schwegler has worked closely with marginal speech communities that are of great historical importance to understanding the evolution of American Spanish. Included among these communities is the maroon village of El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia), where a Spanish Creole is still spoken today, and his latest work on Palenque combines population genetic (DNA) research and linguistic field studies.

Dr. Armin Schwegler is the Director of Global Cultures Interdisciplinary B.A. Program and Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Irvine. He teaches courses on “History of the Spanish Language”, “Spanish Phonetics and Phonology”, “Spanish in Latin America”, “Spanish in the USA”, “Pidgin and Creole Languages”, and “Origins of languages: Evolution, genetics, and the brain”.

Porf. Schwegler’s research interests include the History of Spanish, dialectology, historical linguistics, typology, Creoles, Language and Globalization. He is a founding co-editor of la Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, and an associate editor of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. He has published over 60 papers, and authored and edited numerous books.

For more information on Prof. Schwegler, see his faculty profile page.