Projects
One of the goals of the Observatory is to produce knowledge that may be useful both for other researchers and for civil society, in line with Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS). You can access the projects the OSE has collaborated with here.
Spanish in Europe: Demography of the speakers of a language
The interdisciplinary research project Spanish in Europe analyses the Spanish language in the old continent. It aims to provide a quantitative and qualitative description of the linguistic and cultural geography of Spanish and its speakers with a specific focus on the dynamics of migration, demography, and education. The demolinguistic methods developed for this purpose enable us to understand the process of internationalisation of the Spanish language and is simultaneously useful as an empirical basis for language and culture planning.
The published volumes of the project can be downloaded from Centro Virtual Cervantes.
Lexical Variation of Spanish in the World: VARILEX XXV
The project Varilex-XXV, developed by Hiroto Ueda (Tokyo University) and Francisco Moreno-Fernández (OSE, Heidelberg University), aims to gain knowledge about the status of Spanish lexic and its dialectal variation. To this end, the project has created a database that contains more than 10,000 linguistic data from 61 Spanish-speaking cities on several continents and classified by country of origin. The data were collected through questionnaires regarding 981 lexical, phraseological, and syntactic aspects of contemporary Spanish that is spoken daily in urban environments. In its newest edition, Varilex XXV includes information on Spanish-speakers located in countries in which Spanish is not an official language, including European countries. Thus, it can reflect the usage of Spanish in the context of migrations.
