Mercedes Niño-Murcia, PhD

Professor Emerita, Department of Spanish & Portuguese

Thursday, April 17, 2025
4:00 pm
Kollros Auditorium
101 Biology Building East

Video

My country of origin, Colombia, puts the normative Spanish language high among symbols of prestige and patriotism. Then in grad school days I studied how Spanish interacted with Quechua, the Inka language, which endures as the low-status language of Andean and west-Amazonian native peoples. This made me hyperconscious of how power differentials saturate big and small language differences. My life as an immigrant in the USA made me ever more aware of related frictions along the English-Spanish interface. I turned to studying the big and small ways in which language politics generate and perpetuate North American inequalities. From tiny details of pronunciation up to major policy positions, how we hear, and judge language has everything to do with what kind of country we are in.

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319-356-0330 or carol-scott-conner@uiowa.edu.

~ Sponsored by the Emeritus Faculty Council and the Office of the Provost ~