KEYNOTE: The Significance of Spanish Heritage Varieties: Charting Contributions to Heritage Language Studies and Future Avenues for Centering Speakers in Linguistics Scholarship

Investigations of Spanish as a heritage language have yielded rich and extensive insights, incorporating diverse conceptual and analytical frameworks from structural linguistics, contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the sociology of language, among other sub-disciplinary orientations. Research findings unveil robust patterns of both continuity and variation, underscoring the importance of Spanish heritage speakers’ knowledge and practices to broader understandings of language of representation and dissemination. This plenary offers an overview of my contributions to the field of Spanish Heritage Language Studies and outlines potential directions for future endeavors, aiming to center heritage varieties and their speakers not only in Linguistics scholarship but also in allied fields such as Ethnic Studies and Speech Sciences