Gironzetti awarded NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant

This competitive award seeks to engage scholars, educators, and students in the field of Spanish as a heritage language.

Elisa Gironzetti has been awarded one of the competitive NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grants for the 2-year project "Multimodal Corpus of Heritage Spanish."

She will collaborate with colleagues Manel Lacorte and Evelyn Canabal-Torres, as well as researchers from UT Austin, Texas A&M, and Aix Marseille Université.

The grant will support the creation of the first annotated, bilingual, multimodal corpus of written and oral discourse produced by heritage speakers of Spanish in the U. S. in English and Spanish. The corpus will purposefully include speakers from different sociolinguistic generations of the understudied and underrepresented varieties spoken in the DMV (the DC-Maryland-Virginia area). The project will engage scholars, educators, and students in the field of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL) as well as members of the Latinx community to create an open-access online resource that will facilitate the study of SHL discourse and support research in languages in contact, bilingualism, and heritage language discourse, which will not only serve to enhance current research areas in the SHL field but also impact SHL teaching at all levels, from teacher preparation programs to curriculum design and SHL assessment. The corpus will also serve as a digital repository representing the voices and experiences of the diverse population of Latinx Spanish heritage speakers from the DMV area.