Elisa Fernández Rei

Elisa Fernández Rei is a Professor in the Department of Galician Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela. She has been affiliated with the Instituto da Lingua Galega (ILG) since 1991 and currently serves on the ILG Standing Committee. Her academic career spans over three decades with continuous contributions to Galician linguistics research and language documentation.

Her educational background includes:

• Bachelor's degree in Galician Philology (1992)
• Doctorate/PhD in Galician Philology (2002)

Professor Fernández Rei's research primarily focuses on Galician intonation and prosody, linguistic change, and language contact phenomena. She has made significant methodological contributions to dialectometric analysis of prosodic variation and has pioneered research on Galician-Portuguese prosodic boundaries. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics with practical applications for language preservation.

Her recent publication trajectory reveals a strategic expansion from traditional phonetic research toward computational applications for the Galician language. While maintaining her core expertise in prosody and intonation, she has increasingly focused on developing language resources and technologies, particularly through the Nós project which addresses speech synthesis and recognition for Galician. This evolution demonstrates her commitment to applying linguistic theory to practical language technology development for minority languages.

Professor Fernández Rei has served as principal investigator on multiple research projects including the Perceptual Study of Dialectal Prosodic Variation in Galician and the Prosodic Multimedia Atlas of the Romanesque Space (AMPER-Gal). She has been instrumental in developing the Computerized Oral Corpus of the Galician Language (CORILGA), creating valuable resources for linguistic analysis.

She coordinates the Galician committee for the international AMPER project since 2003 and has been a member of the Editorial Board of Estudos de Lingüística Galega since its foundation in 2008, serving as secretary since 2018. Her leadership extends to the Nós project, which develops speech technologies specifically for the Galician language, addressing the digital gap for minority languages.