Covadonga Lamar Prieto leads the team at the Spanish of California Lab (SOCALab) in the University of California Riverside.
She specializes in Sociolinguistics of the Spanish in the US. Her corpus-based research deals with Historical Spanish in California, with a focus on language change, dialectology and bilingualism. Her book “El español en la California del XIX” is under contract with Iberoamericana/Vervuert. The “Marianopedia”, an Omeka project that constitutes the first corpus of Californio documents online, will be available soon.

She is also interested in the contemporary consequences of historical language contact, particularly related to Spanish language in California and Digital Linguistics. “Siri and Hispanounidenses” is a Digital Humanities project that seeks to understand how voice-recognition applications respond to different dialects of Spanish (Spain, Mexico, US). She analyzes the impact of Siri’s interpretations on our understanding of US Spanish and its speakers.

Besides being a Linguist, Covadonga is also a Colonialist. She specializes in Colonial Mexico and the cultural production of the first Criollos: how these Criollos defined their new transatlantic identity, and the way they used to examine their society through literature.