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Passion and Commitment for The Speech of Monterrey

Date: (17/4/2009)

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

We interviewed Dra. Lidia Rodriguez Alfano, who is a School of Philosophy and Language Arts professor, with a Doctoral Degree in Applied Linguistics and a well-known member of our language's researchers community.

Doctor Lidia Rodriguez Alfano during the presentation of her book: "¿Que opinas con verbos y pronombres? Analisis del discurso de dos grupos sociales de Monterrey," in School of Philosophy and Language Arts, 2004.

By Mayra Silva

Since 1982, she is a professor, since 2005, she is School of Philosophy and Language Arts researcher, and lately, she was acknowledged with the Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon’s (UANL) “Flama, Vida y Mujer” award. Doctor Lidia Rodriguez Alfano is a university pride.

She was born in Linares, Nuevo Leon, she started to study university in 1976, and with her husband’s support and her two children, she continued with her doctoral degree studies in UANL. In 1999, she got her Doctoral Degree in Applied Linguistics with honors in Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM).

She started one of her great projects in 1985; this project is still working: The Speech of Monterrey. “At the beginning, I was not a researcher, but a professor. In 1984, I went to Spain and I took Hispanic Philology higher course. I was inspired by professors who were the speakers in the course, and were talking about Spanish projects which pretended to know Spanish language use’s regional variations, so I was determined to make a research,” said Dra. Lidia Rodriguez.

Eugenio Coseriu, Manuel Alvar, Humberto Lopez Morales, Maria Vaquero y Antonio Quilis, they are well-known professors, and Lidia Rodriguez listened all of them in that course. When she returned, she started to make The Speech of Monterrey, a vast sociolinguistic research focused in language study use, and Monterrey citizens’ speech.

“People always wonder why we study a way of speaking from more than 20 years. People think that language has changed a lot and there is no reason for studying it. But just imagine, if we could have recordings about the way in which Spanish was spoken in XVII century, the way Sor Juana used to spoke (…). We are lucky of having recorded 600 conversations of people who lived in Monterrey in 1985, and this is a treasure for language and Spanish use in Monterrey.”

Doctor Rodriguez, level II in National System of Researchers (SNI, Spanish abbreviation) and a great team of collaborators got The Speech of Monterrey in 2001, and currently, its second stage, 2007-2010 were supported by National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT, Spanish acronym). Furthermore, she said: “Now, in order to make an incorporation of The Speech of Monterrey to a project directed in Spain (PRESSEA) in which the Monterrey speech is contrasted with more than forty cities speech, we were asked to provide new recordings and we thought about requiring the same people who worked with us 20 years ago, they are more than 100 people.”

So, The Speech of Monterrey will be lucky of comparing the way same person used to speak since 20 years ago and the way that person speaks now, on the other hand, researcher considers it a project justification. “We have not studied yet morphology, phonetics, intonation, and several constructions, there is missing a lot of linguistic study and it is waiting to be made with richness of this corpus. It is so good the use of a language is described in a specific moment and this is a unique opportunity.”

Sociolinguistics is in constant evolution and has been focused in speech studies. Doctor Lidia Rodriguez does not continue in research just because passion, she says: “the duty of finishing what is not done motivates me, so I am inspired by finishing the research, by covering the areas that were not covered at the beginning and complement it.”

Lidia Rodriguez has more than 90 publications, such as her own books or books which she collaborated in, chapters, articles and compilations. But her career has not made her to leave her personal life, and she knows work and family in a woman, cannot be irreconcilable things: working market must be balanced, it is necessary that men and women could have the opportunity of share some time with family and the possibility of focusing in science, technical work and home, and finally, it must be a gender equity.”

Because of her long career, Doctor Rodriguez Alfano, has been teaching or giving consultancy to several generations. So, she does not have two children: “I also have adopted children, my students, whom I wish I could give them all I know, share with them and sow them many seeds of language interest.”

So, Lidia Rodriguez Alfano, professor, researcher, mother, woman, has combined all aspects in her life and has gotten the balance in order to be known and loved by all community and above all, by those ones who she calls her “linguistic family.”