Dr. Ryan Bessett

Biography

Ryan Bessett holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Arizona. He coordinates the Spanish Heritage Language Program and the Intermediate Spanish Language series at his institution. His research interests center on language variation and change, Spanish contact, bilingualism, Spanish heritage language acquisition, and Spanish phonology. Bessett is particularly interested in the variationist methodology pertaining to Spanish spoken along the U.S.-Mexican border, focusing on how language-internal variation compares with contact-induced change. He conducts comparative studies between Spanish monolingual speakers from Sonora, Mexico, and Southern Arizona bilingual speakers who come from families in Sonora. Bessett has published several articles and book chapters on topics including socio-linguistic corpora and pronoun expression in different dialects. He has also worked as an assistant investigator on digital humanities projects related to bilingual linguistic research. Bessett is fluent in both Spanish and English, which facilitates his research in bilingual contexts.

Research Interests