James Ramsburg (PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota), awarded with the Doctoral Scholarship in Catalan Studies (2022-2023) from the Institut Ramon Llull and the North American Catalan Society (NACS). Ramsburg is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota.

In addition, he has also worked with the Center for Advanced Research in Language Acquisition at the same institution and the Sociolinguistic Research Group of the Balearic Islands at the University of the Balearic Islands. His research focuses on identifying and explaining dialectal variation, especially in the lexicon and morphosyntax.

His dissertation project, Negotiating language change at the periphery: Language contact and the maintenance of the Majorcan Catalan lexicon, seeks to provide a comprehensive, contemporary account of the state of the Majorcan Catalan lexicon, with an emphasis on the lexical choices of the island’s youth. The ultimate goal is to determine the degree of lexical maintenance and/or shift among Majorca’s Catalan-speaking youth, identify the principal linguistic and social factors that govern these processes, and provide linguistic authorities with relevant, data-driven policy recommendations for the protection of the dialect.

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