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Origins of American Spanish is lecture topic

March 10, 2008

KALAMAZOO--The language, culture and history of marginalized Spanish-speaking communities in Latin America and their effects on the evolution of American Spanish are topics of a free public lecture Monday, March 17, at Western Michigan University.

Dr. Armin Schwegler, director of global cultures at the University of California-Irvine, will speak on "Marginalized Spanish-speaking Communities (Latin America)" at 3 p.m. on the 10th floor of Sprau Tower. A reception will follow.

An author and professor of Spanish and Portuguese, Schwegler is an expert on the evolution of American Spanish and has done research on Spanish creoles and marginal speech communities of African descent in Colombia, Cuba, and Ecuador.

Schwegler earned his doctoral degree from the University of California-Berkeley and his bachelor's degree from California State University. He was the 2006 Outstanding Professor of the Humanities for UCI and won a Fulbright Award to study African influences in Columbian Spanish in 1991. He also was named and the President's Fellow in the Humanities at the University of California-Berkley in 1988.

His speech is sponsored by WMU's departments of Anthropology, Foreign Languages and Spanish and its Africana Studies Program. For more information, contact Kristina Wirtz at kristina.wirtz@wmich.edu or (269) 387-0408.

Media contact: Mark Schwerin, (269) 387-8400, mark.schwerin@wmich.edu

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