Throughout his career, Alvar oversaw and influenced the creation of many Spanish linguistic atlases; maps which recorded speech variations in a given geographical area.
He served as Director of the Real Academia Española for four years and was a member of language academies throughout Europe and Latin America.
[2] Alvar transferred to the Universidad de Salamanca and graduated from there in 1945 with the highest honors, with a degree in Philosophy and Spanish Literature.
Alvar's research provides sociohistorical context of Spanish dialect diversification, outlined in his Manual de dialectología hispánica (1996).
Alvar's study of Spanish in the Aragón region includes an in-depth historical background, development of orthography over time, personal names, and variation in syntax, morphology, and phonology,[4] published in his 1953 work El Dialecto Aragonés.
[1] He used a similar method to elicit data from people living in the Canary Islands and published a linguistic atlas of this dialect in 1975.
[5] Alvar has also been criticized for using overly traditional field methods in his dialectology studies, for example focusing on forms in isolation rather than in context, or leaving out morphosyntactic variables.
[9] Alvar was also a member of several historical and cultural academies, including the Real Academia de la Historia, appointed to serve as director in 1999 (replacing Luis Díez del Corral).
"[10] Beginning in 1963, Alvar also served as director of the CSIC Department of Linguistic Geography and Dialectology,[2] Spain's largest public institution dedicated to Spanish language research.
[2] The Fundación José Manuel Lara (in Seville) grants an award for excellence in the humanities each year in Alvar's name, beginning in 1993.