"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.

Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.

The first part of the book presents a linguistic analysis of Latin American Spanish and places it in a broad historical context. The author examines the phonology and morphology of the language, its syntactic and lexical variation and social differentiation, its past and present contacts with other languages and also explores the sociohistorical factors which have shaped the various Latin American Spanish dialects. He provides the reader with a detailed account of the influence of African and Native American languages and populations, and assesses the contribution made by Peninsular Spanish. This includes the geographical and social origins of the original Spanish settlers, the effects of dialect levelling and nautical language and subsequent migratory patterns. There are also in-depth evaluations of dialect classification schemes.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • For anyone who wants to learn a foreign language, this is the method that will finally make the words stick. “A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide to learning new languages.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered. Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day. This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

This volume makes a vital and original contribution to a topic that lies at the intersection of the fields of history, anthropology, and linguistics. The book is the first to consider indigenous languages as vehicles of political orders in Latin America from the sixteenth century to the present, across regional and national contexts, including Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, and Paraguay. The chapters focus on languages that have been prominent in multiethnic colonial and national societies and are well represented in the written record: Guarani, Quechua, some of the Mayan languages, Nahuatl, and other Mesoamerican languages. The contributors put into dialogue the questions and methodologies that have animated anthropological and historical approaches to the topic, including ethnohistory, philology, language politics and ideologies, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and metapragmatics. Some of the historical chapters deal with how political concepts and discourses were expressed in indigenous languages, while others focus on multilingualism and language hierarchies, where some indigenous languages, or language varieties, acquired a special status as mediums of written communication and as elite languages. The ethnographic chapters show how the deployment of distinct linguistic varieties in social interaction lays bare the workings of social differentiation and social hierarchy. Contributors: Alan Durston, Bruce Mannheim, Sabine MacCormack, Bas van Doesburg, Camilla Townsend, Capucine Boidin, Angélica Otazú Melgarejo, Judith M. Maxwell, Margarita Huayhua.

Use the English you already know to quickly learn the basics of Spanish with this unique, accessible guide featuring original illustrations by Andy Warhol—from one of America’s most prominent language teachers. Read, write, and speak Spanish in only a few short weeks! Even the most reluctant learner will be astonished at the ease and effectiveness of Margarita Madrigal’s unique method of teaching a foreign language. Completely eliminating rote memorization and painfully boring drills, Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish is guaranteed to help you: • Learn to speak, read, and write Spanish quickly and easily • Convert English into Spanish in an instant • Start forming sentences after the very first lesson • Identify thousands of Spanish words within a few weeks of study • Travel to Spanish-speaking countries with confidence and comfort • Develop perfect pronunciation, thanks to a handy pronunciation key With original black-and-white illustration by Andy Warhol, Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish will provide readers with a solid foundation upon which to build their language skills.