Name: Interdisciplinary Studies of Bilingualism and Linguistic Diversity in Mexico
Start: 2026-02-02T14:00:00-06:00
Location: 2300 Red River St, Austin, TX, United States, Texas 78705

Tinker Visiting Professor Talk: Interdisciplinary Studies of Bilingualism and Linguistic Diversity in Mexico
Date: Monday February 2, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Location: SRH 1.313, LLILAS Hackett Room
Join LLILAS for a talk by Tinker Visiting Professor Elia Haydée Carrasco Ortiz.
Linguistic diversity in Mexico reflects the country’s history as well as its social and cultural dynamics. This talk adopts an interdisciplinary perspective to examine bilingualism and language diversity, integrating insights from psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. Particular attention is given to how bilingual trajectories among speakers of minoritized languages—especially Yucatec Maya and Otomi—are shaped by migration, educational practices, and language contact. Drawing on empirical findings, the talk also discusses recent research on Afro-Mexican varieties of Spanish, highlighting their linguistic, cognitive, and historical dimensions as vernacular speech forms. Overall, this interdisciplinary approach seeks to deepen our understanding of the factors that have enabled linguistic diversity to endure for centuries within Mexican society and culture.
Elia Haydée Carrasco Ortíz, Spring 2026 Tinker Visiting Professor, is a Mexican psycholinguist who studies the cognitive and neural bases of language processing in Mexican Indigenous languages and Spanish vernaculars. She is associate professor of linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro in Mexico, and a member of Mexico’s National Council of Science. She is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on neurolinguistics and bilingualism in different contexts of language contact in Mexico. Her current research projects include the cognitive and neural bases of language processing of Mexican Indigenous languages and Spanish vernaculars.
Free and open to the public. For more information, contact Paloma Díaz.