Dr Santiago Sanchez Moreano

Professional biography

I am interested in language as a social practice in the construction of the social world. I aim to understand how social actors use their linguistic resources and repertoires within interaction, negotiating and creating social meaning through interactional stances and positionings. I am also interested in understanding how transnational mobility impacts the speakers' multilingual repertoires, enhancing language variation and contact phenomena. 

I follow an interdisciplinary approach, including ethnographic approaches to fieldwork and social approaches to language.  I draw on methods from interactional sociolinguistics, sociocultural pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, contact linguistics, and multilingual corpus linguistics. Recently, I have been exploring critical dialogues between multilingualism and sustainability sciences. 

I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in multilingual settings in Colombia, the Amazon Trapezium (Brazil, Colombia, Peru), and French Guiana.

• Portales. Beginners Spanish (L194 Presentation, Chair)
• Introduction to Spanish studies (L106 Production, Module Team Member)
• Spanish Studies 2: language and culture of the Spanish-speaking world. (L226 Presentation, Module Team Member)
• L226 Residential School & Online School Coordinator

I currently collaborate with the research program Limits of variability in Spanish relative complementation (PI: Prof. Dr. Melanie Uth, University of Potsdam). The project seeks to explore the limits of variability of relative complementation in Spanish using cross-linguistic comparisons of production data and acceptability judgements. The collaboration focuses on the comparison of syntactic constructions with bare que and donde in three areas: (a) the Yucatecan linguistic area (Quintana Roo, Mexico) where Spanish is in contact with Mayan varieties; b) varieties of European Spanish; and c) varieties of Latin-American Spanish. My contribution consists in analysing and comparing first-hand data from Cali (Colombia) following the same protocol used in Mexico and Spain. More information here.

In 2020-2022, I collaborated with the project Aproximación a la diversidad lingüística y sociocultural de Cartagena: diagnóstico sociolingüístico de poblaciones minoritarias, pensando en una ciudad-región sostenible (PI: Prof. Dr. Doris Patricia Fagua Rincón, University of Cartagena, Colombia). The project aimed to map the sociocultural and linguistic diversity of Cartagena focusing on minority populations. In relation with this project I currently co-supervise 4 BA thesis in the field of Sociolinguistics.

I am a research associate within the French Research Unit Structure et Dynamique des Langues in Paris. I currently collaborate with the   Multi-L - From contact linguistics to societal issues of multilingualism program of this unit.