Overview
Our Hispanic linguistics program offers many benefits to prospective and current students. Our unique placement within the Department of Linguistics enables us to offer the best of both worlds: we provide specialized training in Hispanic linguistics while also taking advantage of the wonderful resources in Second Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistics within our very own Department. Additionally, we specifically cap our incoming classes in Hispanic Linguistics; these small classes enable us to provide a great deal of individualized attention and feedback to all of our graduate students. We also offer the benefit of strong links within the larger university and other universities in Pittsburgh, as we work closely with Pitt’s Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures and with Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Modern Languages. We are also fortunate to be located in a vibrant city that now regularly lands on lists of the most desirable places to live.
Financial support
All students we admit into our Hispanic Lingustics graduate program are offered a TAship for five years which includes full tuition remission, a stipend, and health insurance. The department also has funds for research and conference travel. Additionally, funds are available through the Center for Latin American Studies and the European Studies Center, which provide a wide range of support for graduate students, including fellowships, conference travel grants, and grants for field research.
Research
Our active research topics in Hispanic Linguistics include:
Prosody and intonation
Spanish, Catalan, English
Description of less-studied varieties
L1/L2 acquisition of:
Sound
Prosody
Morphosyntactic variation
Acquisition in the study abroad context
Native-speaker morphosyntactic variation
Intersection of second language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation
Cross-language speech perception
Our students and faculty in Hispanic linguistics regularly present at top conferences in our field, including the Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (HLS), the Second Language Research Forum (SLRF), the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), the International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics (WSS), etc.
Students earning their degree in the University of Pittsburgh Hispanic linguistics program will have an MA or PhD in linguistics, with a specialization in Hispanic linguistics. For those entering the academic job market, the degree will give them the option of joining either Spanish departments or general linguistics departments.
Our department also offers a popular colloquium series every other week, in which current students, faculty, and invited guest lecturers present original empirical research and field questions and comments from our audience.
Outstanding library resources are available in the Hillman Library, which has an especially strong collection in the Latin American area. Students should visit the Eduardo Lozano Latin American collection.