The Department of Spanish and Portuguese would like to congratulate Graduate Teaching Associate Luana Lamberti for winning an International Research and Scholarship grant from the Offices of International Affairs and its Gateways, the Office of Research, and the Graduate School, to support her project titled “Afro-Cuban Spanish: A Language Variety of the African Diaspora in the America."

Luana plans to investigate Afro-Cuban Spanish as spoken in Santiago de Cuba as a product of the "historical contact between Spanish, several Niger-Congo languages (mainly Kikongo and Yoruba), and Haitian Creole."  Her project will tackle the following questions:  "1. What are the unique linguistic features of Santiago Afro-Cuban Spanish? 2. How has the sociohistorical development of the community determined these linguistic features? and, 3. How can the unique linguistic features of Santiago Afro-Cuban Spanish inform our understanding of language change in contexts of multilingualism?"  She will conduct fieldwork in Santiago and develop her corpus by carrying out sociolinguistic interviews and naturalist interactions, linguistic questionnaires, and community observations.

The International Research and Scholarship grant supports projects that promote “active international research collaborations,” address “global issues in a regional context,” connect “discipline-specific research to the implementation of projects and programs in diverse geopolitical and cultural settings,” and explore “the languages, cultures, arts, social sciences and area studies,” among other things.  You can find out more about the scholarship on the OIA website. 

Congratulations, Luana!