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About UsFrancisco Moreno-Fernández

Professor of “Ibero-American Linguistic, Cultural, and Social Studies”

Alexander von Humboldt-Professor
HCIAS Director 

Affiliation: Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies - HCIAS
Cooperation: Faculty of Modern Languages

Tel.: +49 (0)6221 54-19331
Email: francisco.moreno(at)uni-heidelberg.de 

Dr. Francisco Moreno-Fernández is a Spanish dialectologist and sociolinguist. He has studied Linguistics, Sociology, and Political Science and holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics. He has been a Professor of Spanish Language at the University of Alcalá (Spain) since 1996 and he has been a Professor of Ibero-American Linguistic, Cultural, and Social Studies at Heidelberg University since September 2019. Francisco Moreno-Fernández holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, which was awarded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and endowed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

Complete CV Francisco Moreno-Fernández

Prof. Dr. Francisco Moreno-Fernández

Research

Francisco Moreno-Fernández’s research interests lie at the intersection between language and society. During his academic career, he has initiated and developed multiple international research projects with interdisciplinary perspectives. At Heidelberg University, he is currently directing the development of a transversal research program in Ibero-American Studies under the guiding theme of “Spaces and Dynamics”. Aside from this, his ongoing projects focus primarily on the analysis of socio- and geolinguistic phenomena of the Spanish language in Europe and the Americas.

Research in Progress

  • 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.
  • 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.

Recent Publications

Table

  • Moreno-Fernández, F. (2024): “Cognitive attributes of preclassical phonology”, in M. Vida-Castro and A. M. Ávila-Muñoz (eds.), The Continuity of Linguistic Change. Selected papers in honor of Juan Andrés Villena-Ponsoda. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 15-36. ISBN: 978-90-272-1448-5.
  • Moreno-Fernández, F. (2023): “Discursos sobre medioambiente en lengua española. Análisis del corpus HCIAS-UMWELT”. Botelín de la Academia Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española, cuarta época, 9, 319-353.
  • Moreno-Fernández, F. (2023): “Auf der Suche nach einer Universalsprache”, in Humboldt-Gesellschaft für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Bildung e.V. (ed.), Innovation und Tradition: 60 Jahre Humboldt-Gesellschaft, Roßdorf: TZ-Verlag, 2023, pp. 65-76. ISBN: 978-3-96031-012-9.
  • Moreno-Fernández, F. (2023): “Las variedades del español en el cine y la televisión: de Hollywood a Netflix”, in Instituto de Cervantes (ed.), El impacto audiovisual en la difusión internacional de la lengua y de la cultura en español. Madrid: Palgraphic, 2023, pp. 351-383. ISBN: 978-84-18210-26-6.

Recent Presentations and Media Contributions

Dentro y fuera de la norma en la enseñanza de la lengua

Presentation at the Encuentro de Jóvenes Investigadores del Hispanismo Suizo Ginebra 2023: Dentro y fuera del canon. Retos de los estudios hispánicos actuales. University of Geneva. Geneva, Switzerland.
October 13, 2023.

Por mi raza hablará el espíritu

Presentation at the Ciclo Internacional de Conferencias de Lingüística 2023-2. National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Colegio de Letras Hispánicas. Online.
September 27, 2023.

Teaching

Winter Semester 2023/2024

  • Comunicación y Sociedad en Ibero-América
  • Ámbitos de la comunicación pública en Iberoamérica
  • Language and Society (Course offer for BA students)

HCIAS Course Catalog Winter Semester 2023/2024

CONTACT

Prof. Dr. Francisco Moreno-Fernández

Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies | HCIAS
Brunnengasse 1 69117, Heidelberg

Tel.: +49 (0)6221 54-19331
Email: francisco.moreno(at)uni-heidelberg.de

Visiting address:
Brunnengasse 1, 69115 Heidelberg 
Room 003 (3012.00.003)

Office Hours

Only with prior registration at courses.moreno-fernandez(at)uni-heidelberg.de