Prof. Erker is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Boston University. He earned an MA in linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a PhD in linguistics at New York University. He is currently the director of the Spanish in Boston Project, a federally-funded research initiative that investigates the sociolinguistic behavior of Spanish-speaking Bostonians. Prof. Erker has published research in several leading linguistic journals (including Language, Lingua, Language Variation and Change, and Language in Society), and his work has been featured in The Boston Globe and on NPR. He teaches courses on language variation and change, Spanish in the United States, the biological evolution of language, the linguistic structure of Spanish, language and music, and language and identity.