Chad Howe

Professor

Director of LACSI

My primary area of research is language variation and change, focusing on structural phenomena in the Romance Languages. More generally, I investigate the forces that shape language use and the subsequent effect that these forces have on how language evolves. The most recent extension of this research involves analyzed data from social media for evidence of language change. I am also involved in work related to Spanish/Quechua contact. For a full list of research-related goings on, please see my current CV. Additional information regarding my research and teaching can be found on my personal website. [ORCiD]

I advise graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Romance Languages and the Department of Linguistics. Current students are encouraged to consult my website. This (non)exhaustive list provides an overview of different resources that will help in your research, teaching, and non-UGA life. Prospective students might have a look at the list of students whose work I've directed.

Imaynalla kashanki? Students interested in the UGA Quechua Language program should contact me for more information. In addition to beginning (QUEC 1001 and 1002) and intermediate (QUEC 2001 and 2002) level language courses, we also offer more advanced courses (QUEC 3001, "Cultural Dialogues in Quechua") that lead to our new Quechua Minor.

Research

Research Areas:

Hispanic & Romance Linguistics

Latin American, Iberian & Latinx Studies

Brazilian & Lusophone Studies

Research Interests:

Some Current Projects:

Grammaticalization and language change in Romance Languages
Language variation and change in social media
Incipient Language Shift in a Southern Latino Community
Indigenous Languages in Latin America: Contact, Shift, and Maintenance

Other Relevant Information

Of note:

[March 2025] I was selected for the Excellence Initiative-Research University programme at Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, as part of their "Mobility" initiative. In collaboration with Dr. Michał Głuszkowski, I will be visiting Nicolaus Copernicus University to provide several public lectures, conduct an introductory workshop on Python, and work on building research collaborations.

In Spring 2021, Dr. Chad Howe and Dr. John Hale were selected to participate in the collaborative project titled New Languages for NLP: Building Linguistic Diversity in the Digital Humanities, hosted by the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), and the US Library of Congress Labs, and Haverford College. Their projects seeks to digitize documents written in Quechua and to use NLP tools to understand questions of authorship and indigenous representation in colonial documents.

Education

Education:

Georgia Southern University, BA (1999)

The Ohio State University, MA (2001)

The Ohio State University, PhD (2006)