Anna Babel

Anna Babel is a sociolinguist and a linguistic anthropologist. Her interests also include contact linguistics and Andean Spanish. Her research draws on quantitative and qualitative data from a Quechua-Spanish contact region in central Bolivia.

Dr. Babel investigates how linguistic features are linked to social representations, and the way that complex social factors are integrated into language structure. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her current research projects focus on applying social theory to structural and cognitive approaches to linguistics.

Selected publications:

• To appear, Summer 2018. Language at the border of the Andes and the Amazon (working title). Monograph to be published by University of Arizona Press. 
• 2016a. Editor, Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research. Cambridge University Press, New York/Cambridge.
• 2016b. Affective motivations for borrowing: Performing local identity through loan phonology. Language and Communication 49:70-83. 
• 2014a. Stereotypes versus experience: Indexing regional identity in Bolivian Valley Spanish. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(5):604-633.
• 2014b. Time and reminiscence in contact: Dynamism and stasis in contact-induced change. Spanish in Context 11(3):311-334.
• 2013. Doing copying: Why typology doesn’t matter to language speakers. First author with Stefan Pfänder. In Family Effects in Language Contact: Modeling congruence as a factor in contact-induced language change (De Gruyter).
• 2011. Why don’t all contact features act alike?  Contact features and enregistered features. Journal of Language Contact 4(2011):56-91.
• 2009. Dizque, evidentiality, and stance in Valley Spanish. Language in Society 38(4):487-511.