Nadezhda Bravo Cladera


Elsa Nadezhda Bravo Cladera is a Bolivian linguist, researcher and writer. She is a Doctor of Philosophy in Romance Languages from the University of Uppsala, Sweden. She is Académica de número of the Academia Boliviana de la Lengua.

Early life and education

Nadezhda Bravo Cladera was born in Oruro, Bolivia. It was her father that named her Nadezhda which means hope in Russian and has the diminutive "Nadya". Her father Fernando Bravo James was a Bolivian politician, senior lecturer at the Universidad Técnica de Oruro and at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz. Her mother Elsa Cladera de Bravo was a Bolivian union leader and educator, leader of the teachers organisation in Bolivia, delegate at the Asamblea del Pueblo in 1971, engaged in the work for women's emancipation. Nadezhda has two younger sisters Emma Bolshia and María Alexandra.
She attended the Anglo American School in Oruro and when the family moved to La Paz Hugo Dávila Senior High School where she graduated as Bachelor in Humanities. At the "Instituto Normal Superior Simón Bolivar" in La Paz she became a teacher of English and French languages for the Senior High School.
After Hugo Banzer's coup d'état in Bolivia she was imprisoned. Thanks to a scholarship of the French Government, she studied at the University of Franche-Comté in Besançon where she obtained her licence ès lettres de linguistique.
Nadezhda met her husband, Anders Nilsson, at the university of Besançon. "It was love that took her to Sweden". They have two sons: Andrés Fernando and Ernesto Ricardo. In Sweden, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Arts degree, with a major in Spanish, at the Stockholm University and her Doctor of Philosophy degree in Romance Languages with a major in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Uppsala. "She defended her thesis in Spanish with French guidance".

Work and research

Bravo Cladera's main areas of research are dialogue studies, spontaneous conversations and discourse markers. She has directed the linguistic projects entitled "Spanish of Bilingual Youth of Stockholm". Now she directs the projects: "Spanish
of Youth of the City of El Alto" and "Spanish of Children and Youth of the City of La Paz". She is currently a founder member of the project Dialogue Studies at the "Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de América Latina", Delegate of ALFAL for Belgium, England, Finland, the Netherlands, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, a supervisor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, Bolivia.
In Bolivia, her pedagogical experience, has to do with young people who had Aimara language or Quechua language as their mother tongue and had learned Spanish at school. She taught them modern languages as English and French. This experience contributed to her interest in problems concerning bilingualism. Later in Sweden, the experience with her sons, who grew up with two languages at home increased her interest in research on bilingualism, languages and cultures in contact. For example, the corpus of her doctoral thesis is based on spontaneous conversations of bilingual youth in Stockholm.
Bravo Cladera has been senior lecturer in Hispanic linguistics at Linköping University and Gävle University College and lecturer in Hispanic linguistics at the University of Uppsala, where she has supervised more than 40 essays on language themes and even some in literature and economics. At the Stockholm Institute of Education and at Högskolan i Eskilstuna Västerås she has been lecturer in Early bilingualism and Children's literatur. She has also taught Spanish as modern language and as mother tongue at Huddinge Senior High School and Ingemundskola at Karolinska Institutet. At Huddinge Senior High School she was responsible editor of the school newspaper in Spanish "Periódico Latino". In Bolivia she taught English and French in Senior High Schools and was lecturer in General Linguistics at the "Instituto Nacional de Estudios Lingûísticos".
She is the author of several monographs and articles on discourse markers, dialogue studies, bilingualism, languages in contact as well as other linguistic and pedagogical themes. She has been publishing manuals for her teaching in Spanish Phonetics, Linguistics and Pragmatics. In 2013 she publishes a biography about Elsa Cladera de Bravo, The purpose of this biography was make known a part of Bolivian history that is worth remembering.

Awards and honors

In the 21 October 2022, Elsa Nadezhda Bravo Cladera became Académica de número of Academia Boliviana de la Lengua with the discourse: "Castellano de niños y jóvenes de Bolivia: escritura y oralidad". Hugo César Boero Kavlin was in charge of the response.
In 2017, Bravo Cladera was declared Miembro correspondiente of the Academia Boliviana de la Lengua as a recognition for her linguistic knowledge and literary merits, by his Director José G. Mendoza and by the Plenary meeting of the Bolivian Academy.
In 2009, Bravo Cladera was declared Honorary Member of the "Instituto Boliviano de Lexicografía y otros Estudios Lingüísticos" as a recognition of her valuable contribution in the field of linguistic research, by his Director Carlos Coello Vila.

Selected writings

  • Fernando Bravo James. Infatigable luchador por la causa del proletariado y la juventud
  • Una revisión de los rasgos fonéticos y fonológicos del español de Bolivia.
  • Análisis del discurso, diálogo y marcadores discursivos. En ″Actas del XVIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Lingüística y Filología de la América Latina, 2017a ″. Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
  • ¿Puedo aprovechar? Interacciones en el transporte diario de la ciudad de La Paz.
  • Construcciones colaborativas en los diálogos de jóvenes hispanohablantes en Estocolmo.Elsa Cladera de Bravo. Maestra de profesión y revolución
  • Diálogos. su desarrollo en diferentes grupos de jóvenes hispanohablantes.
  • Diálogos espontáneos: incidencia de los marcadores del discurso
  • Backchannels as a realization of interaction: Some uses of mm and mhm in Spanish.Y, pero, así que y es que. Un estudio de su uso en las interacciones del español de jóvenes bilingües y unilingües.
  • Un estudio de los marcadores del discurso y su distribución en interacciones diádicas de jóvenes bilingües.
  • Study of Discourse Markers and their Distribution in Dyadic Interactions of Bilingual Youth.
  • Contrastes y similitudes en el uso de los marcadores del discurso en interacciones de jóvenes bilingües y unilingües.
  • Bilingüismo y educación. Experiencias comparadas.
  • Conectores semánticos y pragmáticos.
  • Responsible editor of Periódico Latino.