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.
Doctoral projects associated with the OSE
Variation and change in Castilla-La Mancha’s urban lexic
Jana Weckesser’s doctoral thesis aims to analyze and compare the urban lexical variation of Castilla-La Mancha at the end of the 20th Century and today from a dialectometric and sociolinguistic perspective. The research is part of the project Varilex XXV. By researching lexical variation in one of Spain’s autonomous communities in its spatial, social, and temporal dimensions, this work contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of Spanish in European contexts where it is an official language.
Variation in spoken-Spanish expression of the pronominal subject on the PRESEEA-Málaga corpora
Alba Segura Lores’s doctoral thesis is framed within the Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español en España y América (PRESEEA). This project allows the study of different linguistic phenomena through a common methodology, making the spatial, temporal, and social comparison of the different Spanish-speaking communities in Europe easier. Concretely, the research studies the syntatic variation of Spanish caused by the absence or presence of the subject personal pronoun. It aims to observe the evolution of this linguistic phenomenon throughout 20 years in a concrete Spanish-speaking area, the city of Málaga (Spain), and to establish comparisons with other Spanish-speaking communities to trace a sociolinguistic pattern that explains this phenomenon.
