Osmer Balam
Assistant Professor of Spanish
Spanish
Biography
Areas of Interest
- Hispanic Linguistics
- TESOL
- Spanish Sociolinguistics
- Bi/Multilingualism in the Spanish-speaking World
- Fundamentals of Language Contact
- Spanish and Spanglish in the U.S.
- Theory and Practice in Second Language Acquisition
- Spanish Phonology
- Spanish Pragmatics
- Central American Spanish
- Spanglish in U.S. Latino Literature
- Metaphors in English free verse poetry
Courses Taught
- Beginning Spanish
- Intermediate Spanish
- Spanish Phonology
- Structure of Modern Spanish
- Spanish and Spanglish in U.S. Media (FYS)
Selected Publications & Presentations
- Balam, O., (2025). Spanglish in the US, Belize and Gibraltar: On the Importance of Comparative Research. Languages, 10(11), 283.
- Balam, O., & Carroll, K. (2025). Pedagogical code-switching and translanguaging in multilingual education settings. In Romanowski, P. (Ed.), Cambridge Handbook of Multilingual Education (pp. 809-827). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Balam, O., Ross, D., & Bravo, A. (2024). The use of agarrar ‘grab, take’ verb constructions in Belizean Spanish: An intergenerational analysis. Isogloss: Open Journal of Romance Linguistics, 10(1), 14, 1-27.
- Baird, B., Balam, O., & Parafita Couto, M. C. (2023). Linguistic Advances in Central American Spanish. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill.
- Balam, O., Parafita Couto, M. C., & Stadthagen-González, H. (2020). Bilingual verbs in three Spanish/English code-switching communities. International Journal of Bilingualism, 24(5-6), 952–967.
For further details on scholarly work:
Osmer Balam on Google Scholar // Osmer Balam on ResearchGate
Independent Study Advising
- “Trade, aid, and dependency: The impact of U.S. bilateral food aid on trade and welfare in Mexico,” by Rayan Dos Passos. 2025. (Double major in Global & International Studies in Economics and Spanish)
- “Bilingual compound verbs: A comparison of Orange Walk, Belize and the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico,” by Lidia Pérez Leutza. 2023. (Latin American Studies major at Leiden University, the Netherlands) *External supervisor
- “Un análisis léxico y sociolingüístico del shesheo en la canción “La Mushasha Shula” de Espinoza Paz,” by Penelophe Pintor. 2023. (Spanish major)
- “El lenguaje es la hoja de ruta de la diversidad: La brecha digital en la comunidad latina inmigrante antes y durante la pandemia,” by Berenice Hernández. 2023. (Spanish major)
- “La percepción de la variación sociolingüística en los dialectos de español en los Estados Unidos,” by Catherine Baker. 2022. (Spanish major)
- “A gag tied too tight becomes liberty’s noose: A linguistic analysis of vagueness in Spain’s Ley Mordaza,” by Jacob Shelton. 2022. (Double major in Spanish and History)
- “Las emociones y el cambio de código: Un estudio sobre cómo las emociones provocan el cambio de código en bilingües español-inglés,” by Camryn Bragg. 2021. (Spanish major)
- “Multilingual literature of the New World: A literary and semantic study of Spanglish in Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas,” by Justin Garibotti. 2021. (Double major in Spanish and English)
- “El español en contacto con el maya: Un análisis de las actitudes e identidades lingüísticas de los kaqchikeles en San Jorge la Laguna, Sololá, Guatemala,” by Tristan Donohoe. 2020. (Spanish major)
Want to learn more?
Interested in Spanish or have questions about courses? Feel free to reach out!
Contact Osmer