Isla Flores-Bayer

Isla Flores-Bayer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Linguistics. She began her linguistic research on Latino communities as a McNair Scholar and an Intellectual Entrepreneurship Scholar at UT Austin. She earned her B.A. in Hispanic Linguistics from the UT Department of Spanish & Portuguese, with the honor of Dean’s Distinguished Graduate. She continues to work on Spanish and Chicano English at Stanford as a National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation and Stanford Vice-Provost of Graduate Education DARE Fellow. She enjoys mentoring underrepresented minority, low-income, first-generation, and LGBTQ undergraduate and graduate students. Isla's exceptional academic achievement and service to the university community earned her the 2016 VPGE Academic Achievement Award.

Dissertation: Sociolinguistic Variation in Practice: An Ethnographic Study of the Social Significance and Strategic Use of Chicano Language in 'El Barrio'

Isla’s research focuses on Chicano English and Spanish in the U.S. Her research examines the social significance of linguistic variation. Her dissertation, titled: “Sociolinguistic Variation in Practice: An Ethnographic Study of the Social Significance and Strategic Use of Chicano Language in 'El Barrio'”, illuminates how speakers make use of critical Chicano linguistic features to construct identity and connect with other speakers in complex and socially meaningful ways.