"This is the most comprehensive book I’ve ever read about the use of Spanish in the U.S. Incredible research. Read it to understand our country. Spanish is, indeed, an American language."—Jorge Ramos An American Language is a tour de force that revolutionizes our understanding of U.S. history. It reveals the origins of Spanish as a language binding residents of the Southwest to the politics and culture of an expanding nation in the 1840s. As the West increasingly integrated into the United States over the following century, struggles over power, identity, and citizenship transformed the place of the Spanish language in the nation. An American Language is a history that reimagines what it means to be an American—with profound implications for our own time.
There is growing interest in heritage language learners—individuals who have a personal or familial connection to a nonmajority language. Spanish learners represent the largest segment of this population in the United States. In this comprehensive volume, experts offer an interdisciplinary overview of research on Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. They also address the central role of education within the field. Contributors offer a wealth of resources for teachers while proposing future directions for scholarship.
Research on Spanish in the United States is intended for use in courses, as well as by scholars and researchers interested in the area. The 29 original articles are organized into sections on interpreting; historical perspectives; borrowings of words and phrases; codeswitching, narratives, and discourse; sociolinguistics and pragmatics; phonology, morphology, and syntax; and language attitudes and planning. Many of the chapters focus on regional aspects of Spanish in the US, ranging from sociolinguistic issues among Dominicans in New York and Cubans in Miami to the adoption and adaptation of forms from Nahuatl and English in the southwestern US. Other chapters discuss the outlook for the growing population of Spanish speakers in many areas of the United States, particularly in bilingual education and other public policy questions. The book includes an introduction to the volume by Ana Roca and a history of US Spanish research by John M. Lipski.
This collection of original papers presents current research on linguistic aspects of the Spanish used in the United States. The authors examine such topics as language maintenance and language shift, language choice, the bilingual's discourse patterns, varieties of Spanish used in the United States, and oral proficiency testing of bilingual speakers. In view of the fact that Hispanics constitute the largest linguistic minority in the United States, the pioneering work in the area of sociolinguistic issues in the U.S. Spanish presented here is of great importance.
U.S. leadership will be a strong factor in the persistence of Spanish in its midst as a living language will be a powerful factor in the strengthening of the language on the international stage. In this volume, a number of specialists, all professors of Latino origins currently working in U.S. universities, analyze a variety of factors, from different perspectives, that play a role in the present and future vitality of Spanish as a second language in the U.S. The result is a rich and complex work surrounding a crucial issue that will influence the future of Spanish as an international language.
Thirty-three million people in the United States speak some variety of Spanish, making it the second most used language in the country. Some of these people are recent immigrants from many different countries who have brought with them the linguistic traits of their homelands, while others come from families who have lived in this country for hundreds of years. John M. Lipski traces the importance of the Spanish language in the United States and presents an overview of the major varieties of Spanish that are spoken there. Varieties of Spanish in the United States provides—in a single volume—useful descriptions of the distinguishing characteristics of the major varieties, from Cuban and Puerto Rican, through Mexican and various Central American strains, to the traditional varieties dating back to the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries found in New Mexico and Louisiana. Each profile includes a concise sketch of the historical background of each Spanish-speaking group; current demographic information; its sociolinguistic configurations; and information about the phonetics, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and each group's interactions with English and other varieties of Spanish. Lipski also outlines the scholarship that documents the variation and richness of these varieties, and he probes the phenomenon popularly known as "Spanglish." The distillation of an entire academic career spent investigating and promoting the Spanish language in the United States, this valuable reference for teachers, scholars, students, and interested bystanders serves as a testimony to the vitality and legitimacy of the Spanish language in the United States. It is recommended for courses on Spanish in the United States, Spanish dialectology and sociolinguistics, and teaching Spanish to heritage speakers.
The study examines the effects of formal instruction on the acquisition of standard Spanish, looks at the expression of conditionality and suggests pedagogical implications based on the findings.
