This book explores the current state of Spanish sociolinguistics and its contribution to theories of language variation and change, from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It offers original analyses on a variety of topics across a wide spectrum of linguistic subfields from different formal, experimental, and corpus-based standpoints. The volume is organized around six thematic sections: (i) Cutting-edge Methodologies in Sociolinguistics; (ii) Bilingualism; (iii) Language Acquisition; (iv) Phonological Variation; (v) Morpho-Syntactic Variation; and (vi) Lexical Variation. As a whole, this collection reflects an array of approaches and analyses that show how in its variation across speakers, speech communities, linguistic contexts, communicative situations, dialects, and time, the Spanish language provides an immense wealth of data to challenge accepted linguistic views and shape new theoretical proposals in the field of language variation and change. Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis represents a significant contribution to the growing field of Spanish sociolinguistics.

Located near Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, Palenque is a former Afro-Hispanic maroon community that has recently attracted much national and international attention. The authors of this collection examine Palenque’s linguistic, geographic, and cultural origins from interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse perspectives. Extensive in situ fieldwork and long-term familiarity with the Palenquero community form the basis of the seven essays, all of which are enriched by data from archival and other scholarly works. In this book, linguists, literary scholars, historians, and specialists in cultural and visual studies thereby enter into mutually enriching dialogues about the origins and nature of Palenque’s unique Lengua (local creole) and culture. This rich tapestry of ideas is decidedly international, as its authors are members of academic institutions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Orality, Identity, and Resistance in Palenque (Colombia) is an updated translation of Palenque, Colombia: Oralidad, identidad y resistencia, 2012.

Language standardization is an ongoing process based on the notions of linguistic correctness and models. This manual contains thirty-six chapters that deal with the theories of linguistic norms and give a comprehensive up-to-date description and analysis of the standardization processes in the Romance languages. The first section presents the essential approaches to the concept of linguistic norm ranging from antiquity to the present, and includes individual chapters on the notion of linguistic norms and correctness in classical grammar and rhetoric, in the Prague School, in the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, in sociolinguistics as well as in pragmatics, cognitive and discourse linguistics. The second section focuses on the application of these notions with respect to the Romance languages. It examines in detail the normative grammar and the normative dictionary as the reference tools for language codification and modernization of those languages that have a long and well-established written tradition, i.e. Romanian, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. Furthermore, the volume offers a discussion of the key issues regarding the standardization of the ‘minor’ Romance languages as well as Creoles.

Setting out the historical national and religious characteristics of the Italians as they impact on the integration within the European Union, this study makes note of the two characteristics that have an adverse effect on Italian national identity: cleavages between north and south and the dominant role of family. It discusses how for Italians family loyalty is stronger than any other allegiance, including feelings towards their country, their nation, or the EU. Due to such subnational allegiances and values, this book notes that Italian civic society is weaker and engagement at the grass roots is less robust than one finds in other democracies, leaving politics in Italy largely in the hands of political parties. The work concludes by noting that EU membership, however, provides no magic bullet for Italy: it cannot change internal cleavages, the Italian worldview, and family values or the country’s mafia-dominated power matrix, and as a result, the underlying absence of fidelity to a shared polity—Italian or European—leave the country as ungovernable as ever.

Creolistics, an important branch of language contact theory and sociolinguistics, is one of the most socially engaged areas of language study today. Pidgin and Creole Linguistics in the Twenty-First Century explores where the field is headed in the new century, in the judgment of eleven leading scholars. At the same time, the authors look backward toward the migrations starting five hundred years ago of Old World people to the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere, and the strange turns the European colonial languages underwent here. Their analyses underscore our belief that language change can only be understood in its social context, even though those changes often took place under horrifying conditions that were illegal even under the laws of the time.