Bio

Keita Kuramitsu is a PhD student at the University of Osaka. He conducts his research in the areas of the phonology, phonetics and morphology of the Catalan and Spanish languages. The main areas include linguistic interferences from Spanish into Catalan, the linguistic analysis of Castilianisms and phonological and phonetic phenomena in Romance languages.

His doctoral thesis addresses the realisation of vowel reduction in unstressed syllables of Eastern Catalan and ‘code-mixing’ features with Spanish. To write his thesis, he reached out to native speakers of Eastern Catalan, whom he ran a test with and interviewed about Castilianisms.

Project

At the Faberllull Residence, Keita will delve into various types of research on the Catalan language and culture which he cannot find in Japan. By talking about and discussing it, he hopes to gain interdisciplinary perspectives with which he can explore, analyse and consider the data addressed in his doctoral thesis more deeply.

“It would be wonderful if other professionals could give me their opinions or experiences about bilingualism and its reality. I would also like to know both the situation on the ground and problems, or what they enjoy about teaching Catalan in the country or community that Faberllull's colleagues belong to,” he said.