UNE Professor Steven Byrd's book on Calunga language released in paperback

Steven Byrd, Ph.D., professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the School of Arts and Humanities within the College of Arts and Sciences at UNE, recently had his book, "Calunga and the legacy of an African language in Brazil" (University of New Mexico Press, 2020), released in paperback.

Byrd's study provides a comprehensive linguistic description of the Calunga language based on two years of interviews with its speakers in Patrocínio, Minas Gerais, Brazil. In the book, he examines the language’s history, historical and linguistic contexts, its sociolinguistic profile, and its lexical and grammatical aspects.

The Luso-Brazilian Review, a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes interdisciplinary scholarship on the Portuguese, Brazilian, and Lusophone African cultures, noted that Byrd’s study is "a great contribution to the field of creole linguistics.” The Journal of Anthropological Research remarked that “Byrd presents an insightful resource for the study of Calunga and other forms of Afro-Brazilian speech.”