DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Wílmar López-Barrios specializes in prosody—the music of language. His research lies at the intersection of Second Language Acquisition and Language Contact, as the latter complements and nurtures the former. In the same vein, Wílmar has studied the prosody of Palenquero/Spanish bilinguals disentangling the melodies of African origin from those induced by contact with the majority language. In the classroom, he recreates communicative contexts that emulate diverse language contact situations, aiming to raise awareness of the challenges and opportunities involved in learning and maintaining minority languages, such as Spanish in the United States or Palenquero in Colombia. His publications include “Language-specific Prosody in Statements of Palenquero/Spanish Bilinguals” (Languages, 2024); “Decline and Substitution of Spanish Future Subjunctive in Northwest and Southwest Colombia from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries” (Journal of Linguistic Geography, 2022); and he is currently writing the paper “Language Differentiation and Generational Effects on Yes/No Question Intonation in Palenquero/Spanish Bilinguals”.