Rate My Professor Joelle Bonamy

Dr. Joelle Bonamy serves as Department Chair and Assistant Professor in the Department of Society, Culture, and Languages within the College of Letters and Sciences at Columbus State University. She leads this newly formed department, which resulted from the reorganization of the former Department of Modern and Classical Languages, where she previously served as chair. Dr. Bonamy joined Columbus State University in August 2010 as Assistant Professor of Spanish and received tenure in 2017. She has recently been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, effective August 2026. Dr. Bonamy earned her Ph.D. from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the Romance Languages program with the Linguistics track. Her dissertation is titled Yanito Codeswitching and Language Shift in Gibraltar. Her academic interests include applied Spanish linguistics, societal language evolution, second language acquisition, and pedagogy. She manages the Konan Language Learning Center and participates in the university Chairs Assembly.

Dr. Bonamy's research examines language contact phenomena in Gibraltar, where English is the official language and Spanish is traditionally spoken in homes, resulting in bilingualism. In her 2015 publication, Switching by the Numbers: A Quantitative Case Study of Tag and Lexical Item Switching in Gibraltar, she analyzes intrasentential and intersentential switching among twenty-seven Gibraltarians using methods from Myers-Scotton and Poplack. The study quantifies turns, switches for fourteen tag words, and other lexical singletons. Results show that approximately 60% of participants switched into English, with higher frequency of Spanish tags without switching, and overall about 59% used more English than Spanish. These findings indicate increased English use in informal domains such as home and among friends, diverging slightly from prior research by Lipski and Moyer on diglossia in Gibraltar.