Bilingualism In The Spanish Speaking World

An introduction to bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking world, looking at topics including language contact, bilingual societies, code-switching and language choice.

Suitable for linguists, sociolinguists, language acquisitionists, as well as teachers who deal with topics relating to bilingualism as it relates to Spanish speakers around the world, this title focuses on bilingual theories, issues on the teaching of bilinguals, bilingual policies abroad, and research on bilinguals.

Sociolinguists have been pursuing connections between language and identity for several decades. But how are language and identity related in bilingualism and multilingualism? Mobilizing the most current methodology, this collection presents new research on language identity and bilingualism in three regions where Spanish coexists with other languages. The cases are Spanish-English contact in the United States, Spanish-indigenous language contact in Latin America, and Spanish-regional language contact in Spain. This is the first comparativist book to examine language and identity construction among bi- or multilingual speakers while keeping one of the languages constant. The sociolinguistic standing of Spanish varies among the three regions depending whether or not it is a language of prestige. Comparisons therefore afford a strong constructivist perspective on how linguistic ideologies affect bi/multilingual identity formation.

This book traces how and why Spanish has arrived at its current position, examining its role in the diverse societies where it is spoken from Europe to the Americas.

Combining text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers, this textbook covers a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the Spanish Language and its role in societies around the world.

This volume offers a multidisciplinary view of cutting-edge research on bilingualism in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions, with the aim of building a bridge between sub-fields and approaches that often find themselves isolated from one another. The thirteen contributions in this volume offer a glimpse of the diversity of bilingualism present in the Hispanic and Lusophone world, shedding light on the sheer variety of speaker communities, language pairings (e.g., Spanish-English, Spanish-Basque, Spanish-Dutch, Portuguese-Spanish-English, Portuguese-English, Spanish-K’ichee Maya, and Spanish-Ixcatec) and speaker types (e.g., simultaneous bilinguals, and early and late sequential bilinguals). The diversity present in this collection of papers, both in empirical coverage and methodological and theoretical approaches, will be of interest to a wide range of students and researchers in bilingualism and Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics.

This book is a collection of original studies analyzing how different internal and external factors affect Spanish language variation and evolution across a number of (socio)linguistic scenarios. Its primary goal is to expand our understanding of how native and non-native varieties of Spanish co-exist with other languages and dialects under the influence of several linguistic and extra-linguistic forces. While some papers analyze the linguistic dynamics affecting Spanish grammars from a cross-dialectal perspective, others focus more closely on the relations established between Spanish and other languages with which it is in contact. In particular, some of these studies show how power and prestige may support (or not) the use of Spanish in different social contexts and educational realities, given that the attitudes toward this language vary greatly across the Spanish-speaking world. On the one hand, in some regions, Spanish represents the variety spoken by the majority of the population, typically related to prestige and power (Spain and Latin America). On the other hand, in other contexts, the same language is conceived as a minority variety, which may or may not be associated with stigmatized immigrant groups (i.e., in the US).

This collection is the first to examine the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on the development of dialectal varieties of Spanish in Africa, America, Asia and Europe. Nineteen essays investigate a variety of complex situations of contact between Spanish and typologically different languages, including Basque, Bantu languages, English, and Quechua. The overall picture that evolves clearly indicates that although influence from the contact languages may lead to different dialects, the core grammar of Spanish remains intact. Silva-Corvalán's volume makes an important contribution both to sociolinguistics in general, and to Spanish linguistics in particular. The contributors address theoretical and empirical issues that advance our knowledge of what is a possible linguistic change, how languages change, and how changes spread in society in situations of intensive bilingualism and language contact, a situation that appears to be the norm rather than the exception in the world.