Lecture by Óscar Loureda (Universität Heidelberg)
Óscar Loureda Lamas is Professor of Linguistics and Romance Linguistics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. He holds a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela and has been a faculty member at Heidelberg since 2008. His research focuses on Spanish linguistics, particularly communication and discourse, experimental pragmatics, semantics, phraseology, textual grammar, and the social dimensions of Spanish as a migration language, heritage language, and foreign language. He has served as Vice-Rector of Heidelberg University, President of the German Association of Hispanists, Director of the Center for Galician Studies, and member of the selection committee for the Princess of Asturias Awards. He also acts as an expert for university accreditation and quality assurance agencies in Spain (ANECA), Chile (CNA), and several Latin American universities.
His research encompasses the semantics and pragmatics of Spanish, contrastive and experimental linguistics, language demography, and the study of Spanish variation in contexts of migration and contact, with particular emphasis on Europe. He is the author and editor of more than one hundred scholarly publications, including key monographs and edited volumes on discourse markers, cognitive linguistics, and contemporary Spanish. He has led and participated in projects funded by the DFG and DAAD. He is currently developing several research lines on the demolinguistics of Spanish and on the processes of maintenance, shift, and intergenerational transmission in Spanish-speaking communities settled in Europe, one of which he co-directs with Francisco Moreno Fernández (U. Heidelberg) and Johannes Kabatek (U. Zurich).
🔹 Conference abstract
This lecture examines the current position of Spanish in Europe from a demolinguistic perspective, considering its recent evolution, internal dynamics, and future projection in a continent shaped by intense processes of mobility, migration and multilingualism. It explores the status of Spanish as a heritage language within a multilingual environment, its patterns of distribution and growth, and the settlement of Spanish-speaking communities across major European countries, together with the resulting internal diversity stemming from different national origins and migratory trajectories.
The presentation offers an overview of the place of Spanish within the current European linguistic ecology and outlines research and policy directions to understand and support its development as one of the continent’s major languages of communication and heritage.
