About Us Francisco Moreno-Fernández

Research in Progress

• El español en Europa analyzes the demographics of the Spanish-speaking community in Europe, taking into consideration the native speakers, the speakers with non-native competence in Spanish, and those learning the language. The project focuses on the social, cultural, and educational spaces that Spanish speakers inhabit and create across Europe.

• International network PRESEEA:Proyecto para el Estudio Sociolingüístico del Español de España y de América. International research project on the sociolinguistics of the Spanish language in Spain and Ibero-America, aiming at creating a corpus of spoken Spanish with particular consideration given to geographic and social aspects. The overarching aim of the international network is to link research in this field and to promote the exchange of knowledge.

• Research project CORPEEU: Corpus del español en los Estados Unidos. This project aims at building a corpus of the spoken and written Spanish language that has been documented in the US since 1960. This linguistics corpus will allow for studies to be carried out in different fields of research on the basis of linguistic data. These samples are classified according to the geographical and social origin of the speakers, the date the samples were produced, as well as based on the styles, genres, and contexts of the Spanish speaking community in the US.

• INMIGRA. Integration of Migrants in Spain. The main goal of the project is to analyze and facilitate the integration of the immigrant population in Spanish society. The project is funded by the Autonomous Community of Madrid and the European Union. Moreno-Fernández was founder and principal researcher of the project and currently acts as an academic advisor and researcher.

• VARILEX-R. Lexical Variation of worldwide Spanish. This project, created by Hiroto Ueda (Tokyo University), has an enormous amount of linguistic information at its disposal, which has been collected in 61 Spanish-speaking cities on several continents. The linguistic data were collected through questionnaires that included questions regarding 981 lexical, phraseological, and syntactic aspects of contemporary Spanish that is spoken daily in urban environments. Varilex-R, developed by Ueda and Moreno-Fernández, is a database in which linguistic data is classified by country of origin.

Completed Research Projects

• Public discourse on the pandemic in Latin America. Awareness, understanding, and social attitudes – A case study on Argentina: The goal of this cooperative project is to analyze the socio-communicative dynamics of discourse on the COVID-19 pandemic in educational contexts in Argentina. In order to understand the discursive construction of social representations, both, the discourses on education produced by the media as well as the discourses of the educational institutions themselves and their political representatives are being studied. This project is being funded by the DAAD.

Completed Doctoral Dissertation Projects at Heidelberg University

• Dr. Alba Segura Lores: “Absence and presence of the pronominal subject in Spanish spoken in the PRESEEA-Málaga corpora”. Heidelberg University, HCIAS doctoral research group “Communication and Society in Ibero-America”. Cotutelle de thèse, further supervision: Prof. Dr. Matilde Vida Castro (Universidad de Málaga, Spain) and Prof. Dr. Francisco Díaz Montesinos (Universidad de Málaga, Spain).