Miguel Ángel Quesada Pacheco

Miguel Ángel Quesada Pacheco (San José, 6 May 1955) is a Costa Rican linguist and professor. His areas of research include the dialectology of Central American Spanish, the history of the Spanish language in Costa Rica and the documentation of Central America's indigenous languages, with a special focus on the Chibchan languages.

Education and career In 1971 he began to study at the University of Costa Rica (UCR), where he studied under the linguist Gastón Gaínza. where he graduated with a thesis about the colonial Spanish of Costa Rica.

In the UCR he held a professorship in Spanish philology in the School of Philology, Linguistics and Literature and was a researcher at the Institute of Linguistic Research.

As a member of the ACL, he has participated regularly in the Permanent Commission of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE) (2000, 2010 y 2016), as well as in various editions of the Congress of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (2001, 2007, 2010, 2013) and of the International Conference of the Spanish Language, organized by the Instituto Cervantes, the Real Academia Española and the ASALE. Between the years 1992-2010 he worked on the Atlas lingüístico-etnográfico de Costa Rica (ALECORI) project, the first of its kind for Costa Rican Spanish.

He later applied his experience with the ALECORI to the Atlas lingüítico-etnográfico de América Central, which aimed at systematically studying the Spanish of Central America by way of dialect surveys.

As for his work with Amerindian languages, Quesada Pacheco has worked extensively on the description of Boruca, Guaymí, Cabécar, Huetar, Chibcha and Pech. His ethnolinguistic studies on the Huetar people and language earned Quesada Pacheco the Premio Nacional Aquileo J. Echeverría en 1997.

Awards and recognitions Quesada Pacheco has received the Premio Nacional Aquileo J. Echeverría on two occasions (1997, 2009), the Premio Magón (2015) and the Norwegian Association of Researchers' Research Award (2015).