Erin O’Rourke

Erin O’Rourke is an Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the Department of Modern Languages & Classics, University of Alabama. She specializes in intonation, sociolinguistics, and language contact phenomena, particularly focusing on Spanish dialects in the Andean and Amazonian regions.

• PhD in Spanish from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• MA in Spanish Linguistics from Pennsylvania State University
• BA in Spanish and BS in Chemistry from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Her research explores:

• Intonation and prosodic variation in Spanish and Quechua
• Acoustic and articulatory phonetics in bilingual contexts
• Sociophonetic patterns and statistical methods in linguistics
• Language contact in the Amazon and Andean regions

Recent publications analyze phonetic shifts in Amazonian Spanish-Quichua interaction and socioprosodic frameworks. She is affiliated with the PRESEEA project (Quito) and leads the LengUA Lab at the University of Alabama.