Brendan Regan , Ph.D. Associate Professor of Spanish & Linguistics

Dr. Brendan Regan is an Associate Professor of Spanish & Linguistics at Texas Tech University and the Director of the Texas Tech Sociolinguistics & Bilingualism Research Lab. He also serves as the Coordinator of Hispanic Linguistics (undergraduate and graduate programs). His research and teaching interests include sociolinguistics, sociophonetics, phonetics & phonology, language attitudes & language ideologies, bilingualism, SLA & study abroad, dialects/languages in contact, and variational pragmatics. He utilizes a range of quantitative experimental methods for production and perception data (sociolinguistic interviews, laboratory approaches, corpora data, matched-guise experiments, forced-choice experiments, etc.) and statistical analyses. He also employs mixed-methods utilizing qualitative discourse analysis to complement quantitative analyses. 

Education

• Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin, 2017
• M.A., Temple University
• B.A., University of Richmond

Research

• Sociolinguistics
• Sociophonetics
• Phonetics & Phonology
• Language Attitudes & Language Ideologies
• Bilingualism
• SLA & Study Abroad
• Dialects/Languages in Contact
• Variational Pragmatics​

Courses commonly taught

Graduate

• SPAN 5388: Spanish Phonetics & Phonology
• SPAN 5389: Spanish Quantitative Sociolinguistics
• SPAN 5390: Language Ideologies
• SPAN 5391: Spanish Sociophonetics
• PORT 5342: Intensive Portuguese II for Spanish Speakers

Undergraduate

• SPAN 3306: The Culture, History, and Language of Andalucía (Sevilla study abroad program)
• SPAN 3308: How the Spanish Language Works: A Course in Hispanic Linguistics
• SPAN 3318: The Sounds of Spanish
• SPAN 4318: Spanish in the United States
• SPAN 4343: Advanced Language Skills (Sevilla study abroad program)
• SPAN 4346: Spanish Life and Culture (Sevilla study abroad program) 

Peer-Reviewed Publications

• Regan, B., & Toribio, A.J. (2026). “Como está hablando con su mamá, está bien que haga el code-switching”: The social evaluation of situationally-based code-switching in West Texas.International Journal of Multicultural and Multilingual Development. OnlineFirst.
• Baird, B., & Regan, B. (2025). The status of /f/ in Mayan-accented Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 18(1): 1-35.
• Mastrantuono, A., & Regan, B. (2024). Present Perfect and Preterit Variation in the Spanish of Lima and Mexico City: Findings from a corpus analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20(2): 375-405.
• Regan, B., & Martinez, J. (2023). The indeterminacy of social meaning linked to ‘Mexico’ and ‘Texas’ Spanish: Examining monoglossic language ideologies among heritage and L2 Spanish listeners. Languages 8(4): 266.
• Tieperman, R., & Regan, B. (2023). A variationist corpus analysis of the definite article with personal names across three varieties of Spanish (Chilean, Mexican, Andalusian). Isogloss. Open Journal of Romance Linguistics 9(1)/10: 1-27. 
• Regan, B. (2023). Individual differences in the acquisition of language-specific and dialect-specific allophones of intervocalic /d/ by L2 and heritage Spanish speakers studying abroad in Sevilla. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 45(1), 65-92. 
• Regan, B. (2022). Guadaloop or Guadalupe?: Place-name variation and place identity in Austin, Texas. American Speech, 97(4), 441-482. 
• Archer, C., & Regan, B. (2022). An analysis of the yeísmo merger in Córdoba, Argentina: A synchronic coexistence of all diachronic processes of lleísmo to yeísmo sound change.University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 28(2), Article 2. 
• Regan, B. (2022). La percepción social del seseo sevillano y sus implicaciones para la norma sevillana. Lingüística en la Red, Núm. XIX, 1-27. 
• Regan, B. (2022). The social meaning of a merger: The evaluation of an Andalusian Spanish consonant merger (ceceo). Language in Society, 51(3), 481-510.   
• Regan, B. (2021). Analyzing Andalusian coronal fricative norms (ceceo, seseo, and distinción) using a sociophonetic Demerger Index. In M. Díaz-Campos (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish, 137-158. Routledge.  
• Regan, B. (2021). Differing effects of speaker and listener characteristics on the perception of two traditional Andalusian features undergoing dialect leveling. In Luis A. Ortiz-López & Eva-María Suárez-Büdenbender (Eds.), Topics in Spanish Linguistic Perceptions, pp. 95-116. Routledge.
• Regan, B. (2020). Intra-regional differences in the social perception of allophonic variation: The evaluation of [tʃ] and [ʃ] in Huelva and Lepe (Western Andalucía). Journal of Linguistic Geography 8(2) 82-101.  
• Regan, B. (2020). Extending Pillai scores to fricative mergers: Advancing a gradient analysis of a split-in-progress in Andalusian Spanish. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 26(2): Article 13.  
• Regan, B. (2020). El [ʃ]oquero: /tʃ/ variation in Huelva capital and surrounding towns. Estudios de Fonética Experimental XXIX: 55-90. 
• Regan, B. (2020). The split of a fricative merger due to dialect contact and societal changes: A sociophonetic study on Andalusian Spanish read-speech. Language Variation and Change32(2): 159-190. 
• Regan, B. (2019). Dialectology meets Sociophonetics: The social evaluation of ceceo and distinción in Lepe, Spain. In Whitney Chappell (Ed.), Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception [IHLL 21], pp. 85-121. John Benjamins.
• Regan, B. (2017). A linguistic analysis of Quechua borrowings in Matto de Turner's Aves sin nido: National ideology seen through linguistic incorporation. Hispanic Studies Review 2(2): 224-253.
• Regan, B. (2017). A study of ceceo variation in Western Andalucía (Huelva). Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 10(1): 19-60.
• Regan, B. (2016). Prosody-pragmatics interface in the pragmaticalization of ¡Hombre! as a discourse marker. In Inquiries in Hispanic Linguistics: From theory to empirical evidence [IHLL 12], Cuza, Alejandro, Lori Czerwionka, and Daniel Olson (Eds.), pp. 211-239. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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