“Madrileña at large in the world!” you could say… I was born in the Spanish capital, where I lived with my family until I was 18. My adventures in learning and studying languages began at a young age: I grew up speaking three languages, German, Spanish and English. After completing the Abitur (German university entrance exam) at the Colegio A
lemán in Madrid, I moved to Heidelberg (Germany), where I began a degree in translation and interpreting in the same languages that have accompanied me since childhood. Once I finished my basic studies, and now being in love with the student city where I lived, I decided to stay there and do a Master’s degree in Ibero-American studies, through which I really came into contact with the Portuguese language. Fiquei apaixonada of the Brazilian variety, and I suppose that this was the beginning of the path on which I find myself today. I studied several subjects that dealt with the question of contact between languages and, as a speaker of Spanish as a mother tongue immersed in the process of learning a typologically similar and structurally related language such as Portuguese, I soon discovered both the wonders and the curses that linguistic interference entails… I became interested in the Portuguese-Spanish “raya”, in the contact zones between Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil, in the learning of Portuguese as a foreign language by Spanish speakers (and vice versa), in literature and music written in “Portuñol” and, thus, one day I ended up presenting my idea for a doctoral thesis on linguistic contact on the border between Uruguay and Brazil.
After a six-month stay at the University of Bielefeld (Germany), I am now writing my thesis at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) under the supervision of Professor Johannes Kabatek and Professor Carlota de Benito Moreno. For more information about my career, please visit the following website.
What else? Beyond fieldwork in Uruguay, research and teaching at the University of Zurich, I love sports. I mainly swim and run, and, from time to time I like to participate in (half) marathons and triathlons. Also, I’ve been riding horses since I was eight years old and this is definitely my passion. Since the beginning of 2022 I have been practising capoeira, which I love because it brings together a good combination of movement, rhythm and music (in Portuguese!).