New webinar in the “9 Months, 9 Universities” series: Intercomprehension, language contact, and plurilingualism in Romance-speaking Europe

Intercomprehension, language contact, and plurilingualism in Romance-speaking Europe

30 May 2025 at 13:30 CEST on YouTube

This webinar focuses on the parallelism and inter-comprehension among Romance languages from a historical linguistics perspective.

The Romance languages are not only closely related genetically (having a common ancestor in spoken Latin), but they have also been in constant contact with each other during different periods of their history. The latter explains, for example, the large number of inter-Romance loanwords: from Italian during the Renaissance, from French during the Enlightenment, while Spanish is a bridge for many Arabic words as well as indigenous words from the Americas to enter Europe.

The webinar will be presented by David Porcel Bueno, Stefan Koch, and Katharina Gerhalter, the board members of the Arqus International Forum on Romance Studies. Within this network, they have organised several joint research and teaching activities with a strong pan-Romance perspective. In addition to the main Romance languages, these activities also focus on Romance regional and minority languages.

The speakers

David Porcel Bueno is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Romance, Italian, Galician-Portuguese and Catalan Philology, at the University of Granada. His research focuses on the Ibero-Romance languages and literatures (Spanish, Portuguese, Galician), especially in their medieval and classical phases, and on their relationship with other languages which are or have been present on the Iberian Peninsula (Arabic, Hebrew and Medieval Latin) and with other Romance (Italian, Occitan and French) languages and literatures.

Stefan Koch is a postdoctoral researcher and project co-director at the University of Graz. His research focuses on the history of Spanish and other Ibero-Romance languages (especially Leonese) and on Italo-Romance languages (especially southern Italian varieties, e.g. Neapolitan). His work draws on field research, be it in historical documents (scriptae) in archives or in the locations where these languages are spoken.

Katharina Gerhalter is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Graz. Her research focuses on Spanish, Portuguese and French, with an emphasis on theoretical models of language change, as well as on discourse and pragmatics, with a strong background in corpus linguistics.

9 Months, 9 Universities is a series of guest lectures that focus on specific topics related to language and culture and target mainly graduate and postgraduate students as well as Early-Stage Researchers and lecturers interested in these topics. The lectures are intended to generate awareness and appreciation for the topic of multilingualism as well as an understanding of the many areas of our lives that are influenced by language.