Dr. Sergio Francisco Romero – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Sergio Francisco Romero

University of Texas at Austin
Linguistic Anthropology

External Junior Fellow
January 2025 – August 2025

Last Update: 08.11.2024

Curriculum Vitae

Born and raised in Guatemala City, Sergio Romero is associate professor at the University of Texas in Austin with appointments in the Lozano-Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) and the Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese. Currently, he serves as LLILAS’s Associate Director for Indigenous Programs, and is also a Numerary Member of the Guatemalan Academy of Geography and History. He is a former Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Fellow (2018-2021) and a former Fulbright US Scholar (2022). Trained in linguistics and anthropology, his research on language change and indigenous languages is cross-linguistic, multi-sited and interdisciplinary. His interests include language variation and change, ethnicity and colonialism, semiotics and ritual, the emergence of Mesoamerican Christianity, and, more recently, Maya migration to the United States. He has written extensively on K’iche’, Kaqchikel, Q’eqchi’, Ixil and Nahuatl communities. His publications include “Language and Ethnicity among the K’iche’ Maya” published by Utah University Press and numerous journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. His next book, an annotated Spanish translation of the Memorial de Sololá (Kaqchikel), will be published in Guatemala City this year.

Selected Publications

Language and ethnicity among the K’ichee’ Maya. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City, 176 pp, (2015).
Ethnicity and Regional Stereotypes in Standard Ixhil (Ixil) Mayan. Language & Communication 61, 102-112 (2018).
Los manuscritos en náhuatl centroamericano y la historia cultural de Guatemala. Anales de la Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala XCII, 75-104 (2017)
‘Brujos’, mitos y modernidad en la historia oral k’iche’. Estudios de cultura maya 50, 249-270 (2017).
‘Bill Gates speaks K’iche’: The corporatization of linguistic revitalization in Guatemala. Language & Communication 47, 154-166 (2016).

FRIAS Project

On God, idols, and language: Latin, Spanish, Arabic, and the Christianization of the highland Maya

This project is an interdisciplinary study of the role language and translation played in the Christianization of the Highland Maya in the 16^th century. Using linguistic, philological and ethnohistorical methods, I seek to understand the complex ways in which Mayan and European languages interacted, influenced each other, and shaped the emergence of Maya Christianity, and Christian ritual and theologies in the mid decades of the 16^th century. From a comparative, cross-linguistic perspective I consider Maya and Spanish language ideologies, discourse genres, scholarly traditions, and the structural convergences and divergences between Mayan languages (Kaqchikel, K’iche’ and Q’eqchi’), Spanish, Latin and Arabic, the languages involved in this story.