Congratulations to Danny Erker!
Faculty member Danny Erker was featured in the article “How ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ are changing Bostonian Spanish” in the Boston Globe.
BOSTON HAS SEEN a dramatic increase in its Hispanic population since 2000, over 25 percent according to census records. That’s left an obvious and significant mark on the way locals speak English — but the city’s Spanish is also evolving, according to forthcoming research from Boston University linguist Daniel Erker.
Erker’s paper focuses on pause fillers, those tiny unconscious blips of sound, “um” or “uh” in English. What he’s found is that, as the city’s Spanish-speakers study English and come into contact with different varieties of their own language, filled pauses are evolving — part of what Erker thinks could be a new Bostonian Spanish, a way of speaking that’s consistent across nationalities but distinct from the Spanish spoken in Miami or New York or Chicago. Erker’s research, although still preliminary, suggests how much this phenomenon could resemble regional dialects in English — while making another argument for the power of the humble pause filler.