Esteban Eduardo Benalcázar Cepeda
Contact Information
Graduate Teaching Associate
he/him/his
Office Hours
Fall 2025
By Appointment
Areas of Expertise
- Spanish as Heritage Language
- Dialects & Languages in Contact
- Linguistic Anthropology
Education
- PhD, Hispanic Linguistics, The Ohio State University, USA, (in progress)
- MA, Hispanic Linguistics, The Ohio State University, USA, 2025
- MA, Teaching Spanish as Foreign Language, Universidad Internacional de la Rioja, Spain, 2021
- BA, Applied Linguistics in Translation, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, 2013
When he lived in Germany as an adolescent and visited Spain, he realized how migration affects both speakers and language. This realization inspired his undergraduate research, where he analyzed the dialectal accommodation of Ecuadorian migrants who had returned from Madrid to Quito. He focused on changes in intonational patterns, measured with Sp_ToBI.
After graduating from university and completing an internship in Padang, Indonesia, where he taught English at a local technical college, he developed a strong interest in teaching. This experience motivated him to pursue an MA in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language. His MA project focused on teaching B1 students about mood selection (indicative/subjunctive) and how meaning changes within relative clauses.
While working in aviation and with people, he paid close attention to how individuals spoke various dialects of Spanish, and particularly the language use and dynamics of Ecuadorian migrants in New York and Madrid. He quit his aviation job and pursued a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics, where he wanted to keep working on language and migration.
His MA paper at OSU was about the symbolic use of Spanish, the phonological use of a group of heritage speakers in a fraternity. During the summer of 2025, and using quantitative and qualitative tools, he went to Madrid to start his research with Ecuadorian speakers, and their dialect contact situation, who had lived there for 26 years or more. The speakers show a convergence, assimilation behavior towards the Spanish variety. He is currently analyzing what linguistic features can be assimilated first, how they are using Spanish, and the social, cultural, and economic factors that influence the process.
Translating and Tutoring Services:
- Spanish Advanced Tutoring & Translating