Prof. Dr. Miguel Gutiérrez Maté

The chair’s research lines include both the sociolinguistic characterization and the structural description of Romance varieties spoken in monolingual or, more frequently, multilingual ecologies that emerged from processes of decolonization.
Thus, diverse realities of the so-called Global South are examined, taking into account their specific features from a comparative perspective, with particular emphasis on Latin America (especially the Caribbean and Brazil), Central Africa (Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea), and Southeast Asia (particularly Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia).
The spirit of the chair is comprehensive and inclusive, not only because of the thematic breadth outlined above, but also due to its intrinsically interdisciplinary nature (since “linguistic ecology” involves studying language in relation to sociological, demographic, attitudinal, and other factors) and the inherently relational and comparative nature of the “postcolonial” (which requires, on the one hand, a deep linguistic understanding of colonial history and, on the other, of current relations between Europe —the former colonial “metropolises”— and the countries of the Global South).
The chair’s more recent publications focus primarily on the continuities and discontinuities in the development of Creole languages and other restructured varieties in these regions, as well as on the management of multilingual repertoires in the context of South–South migration processes.