Hello! I'm Gabi/Gabby (both spellings work) and my pronouns are she/her/hers in English, ella in Spanish, and ea/ei in Romanian.
I grew up in Bucharest, Romania, lived in Bremen, Germany, and have been residing in the United States for the past seven years. Therefore, in the last decade I have been an immigrant to two different nations which has painted my understanding of belonging. While recognizing the immigrant-specific struggles I have experienced, I also acknowledge my privilege of having faced them as a white cis-woman with no visible disabilities.
I am multilingual; I speak Romanian, Spanish, and English fluently, and can also get by in German and French. Importantly, I am a multilingual speaker whose language competency in Romanian, Spanish, and English affords me the ability to ‘pass off’ as a ‘native’ speaker. The possibility of ‘opting out’ and not being othered as a ‘non-native’ speaker has been guiding my research in language attitudes, stereotyping, and discrimination for the past years.
​
I am currently working on my dissertation and researching the ways in which listeners use language cues, such as a speaker’s 'native' or 'non-native' accent, to make assumptions about race and/or ethnicity and, consequently, form language attitudes. Furthermore, I examine how this type of language stereotyping can lead to language-based discrimination in the workplace and influence employment criteria, thus, disadvantaging multilingual individuals.
My research aims to emphasize that, while overt discrimination based on a person’s race, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, etc. is generally disapproved, language oftentimes serves as a proxy for inferring an individual’s identity and can be used to perform covert discrimination.
​