Rhoel is a first-year PhD student, researching the role of language contact in the morphosyntactic development of Zamboangueño Chavacano, a Spanish-based creole language spoken in the Philippines. He received his BA in Modern and Medieval Languages from the University of Cambridge (2020), specialising in Spanish, Portuguese, and Ibero-Romance linguistics. There, he also completed his MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (2022) with a dissertation examining subject and object expression in Zamboangueño Chavacano.
His academic interests lie in the syntax of non-standard (Ibero-)Romance varieties, creoles and Philippine dialectology.
His past and present research projects were completed under the supervision of Prof Ioanna Sitaridou, and his PhD project is funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership and Walker Studentship in Queens’ College.
Rhoel’s doctoral research explores morphosyntactic variation and change in Zamboangueño Chavacano and examines how external factors such as colonisation, social mixing/isolation, and a dynamic multilingual landscape composed of native and migrant ethnolinguistic groups have shaped modern varieties of the creole. By integrating ethnographic methods with underpinnings within current generative theory, the study utilises novel data to inform our understanding of morphosyntactic variation in Chavacano and provide insights into preserving minority language varieties more generally.
Rhoel’s doctoral research is fully funded by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP and Walker Studentship in Queens’ College (2024-2027).
Other scholarships and prizes:
- Lusophone Prize (awarded by Section for Spanish and Portuguese, MMLL Faculty, 2020)
- David Thompson Prize (awarded by Homerton College, 2020)
- David Thompson Scholarship (awarded by Homerton College, 2018)
