Rate My Professor Catherine Fountain

Catherine Fountain serves as Professor of Spanish and TESL/Applied Linguistics and Spanish Language Program Director in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Appalachian State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles (2006), where her dissertation examined Colonial Linguistics in New Spain: The Nahuatl Tradition. She also earned an M.A. in Spanish from UCLA (2000) and a B.A. with a double major in Linguistics and Spanish from Cornell University (1997), graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Fountain began her career at Appalachian State as Assistant Professor in 2006, promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. She has held positions such as Assistant Chair (2011–2013), Supervisor of the Spanish Education Program (2008–present), Spanish Section Coordinator (2008–2012), and Resident Director of the UNC-Charlotte Semester in Spain Program (2007–2008, 2014). She coordinates the World Language Education program and advises student organizations including El Círculo Hispánico and the Native American Council.

Her academic interests encompass linguistic historiography, language variation and change, indigenous languages of the Americas, language policy in the Spanish-speaking world, Spanish in the United States, and phonetics and phonology. Current research projects include analyses of early Spanish descriptions in the U.S., documentation of indigenous languages in California from missionary accounts, and colonial Nahuatl descriptions in Mexico. Fountain received the UNC Board of Governors Excellence in Teaching Award (2015) and UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award (2005), with multiple nominations for outstanding advising. Notable publications feature "Missionary Linguistics in the Americas" in the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2025), "Missionary linguistics in Mesoamerica" in The Languages and Linguistics of Mexico and Northern Central America (2024), "Fray Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta’s Work on California’s Native Languages" in Historiographia Linguistica (2013), "Worthy the Name of a Grammar" comparing verb morphology in colonial grammars (Historiographia Linguistica, 2009), and "Challenging the Monolingual Status Quo: Heritage Speakers and the Future of Spanish in the U.S." in Hispania (2017). She serves as a reviewer for Foreign Language Annals and Hispania, and is active in organizations like the Linguistic Society of America and North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences.