Ryan M. Bessett

Ryan Bessett holds a PhD in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Arizona. He coordinates the Spanish as a Heritage Language Program and the Intermediate Spanish as a Second Language series within the department. His research interests center around language variation and change, Spanish in contact, bilingualism, Spanish as a heritage language, language acquisition, and Spanish phonology. He is especially interested in the Spanish spoken around the US-Mexican border and through variationist methodology differentiating contact-induced change from language-internal variation by comparing the Spanish of monolingual speakers in Sonora, Mexico to the Southern Arizona bilingual Spanish of speakers who come from families from Sonora.

Languages: Spanish, English

Articles & Book Chapters

• Bessett, Ryan M., Katherine Christoffersen, Ana M. Carvalho, Isabella Calafate, and Mayte Vega Rudy. 2024. "Developing Community-Based Sociolinguistic Corpora to Promote Social Justice". In Covadonga Lamar Prieto and Álvaro González Alba (Eds.), Digital Flux, Linguistic Justice and Minoritized Languages, 195-214. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
• Bessett, Ryan M. 2023. “A cross-dialectal comparison of first-person singular subject pronoun expression in Southern Arizona and Southeast Texas” In Pekka Possio and Peter Herbeck (Eds.), Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages, 25-39.
• Christoffersen, Katherine, Aubrey Villanueva, and Ryan M Bessett. 2023. “Student Perceptions of Community Engaged Scholarship Courses: Developing a Sociolinguistic Corpus on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” International Journal of Research on Serive-Learning and Community Engagement, 11(1), Article 9.
• Bessett, Ryan M. 2022. “A comparative analysis of first-person singular subject pronoun expression in Facebook and sociolinguistic interviews: Studying variation via social media.” Semas: Revista de Lingüística Teórica y Aplicada, 3(6), 57-74.
• Bessett, Ryan M. and Ana M. Carvalho. 2021. “The structure of US Spanish.” In Sergio Loza and Sara Beaudrie (Eds.), Heritage language teaching: Critical language awareness for research and pedagogy, 44-62. New York: Routledge.
• Bessett, Ryan M. 2018. “Testing English influence on first person singular ‘yo’ subject pronoun expression in Sonoran Spanish.” Issues in Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald, 355-372. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Bessett, Ryan M. 2017. “Exploring the phonological integration of lone other-language nouns in the Spanish of Southern Arizona.” U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 23(2).
• Bessett, Ryan M., Joseph V. Casillas, and Marta Ramírez Martínez. 2017. “Language Choice and Accommodation: Casual Encounters in San Ysidro and Nogales.” Spanish in Context 14(1), 78-98.
• Bessett, Ryan M. and Sonia Colina. 2017. “Depalatalization in the synchronic and diachronic phonology of Spanish”. Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics (6)1, 223-241.
• Bessett, Ryan M. 2015. “The extension of estar across the Mexico-US border: Evidence against contact induced acceleration.” Sociolinguistic Studies 9(4), 421-443.
• Carvalho, Ana M. and Ryan M. Bessett. 2015. “Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish in Contact with Portuguese.” In Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco, and Naomi Lapidus Shin (Eds.), Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal perspective, 143-165. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Digital Humanities

• Christoffersen, Katherine and Ryan M. Bessett. 2019-2022. Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) LINK
• Assistant Investigator for the Corpus del español en el sur de Arizona (CESA) LINK

• Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics, University of Arizona, 2017
• M.A. in Hispanic Linguistics, University of Arizona, 2012
• B.A. in Spanish and Language Studies, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, 2010