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.

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

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.

Linguistic Landscape in the Spanish-speaking World is the first book dedicated to languages in the urban space of the Spanish-speaking world filling a gap in the extensive research that highlights the richness and complexity of Spanish Linguistic Landscapes. This book provides scholars with an instrument to access a variety of studies in the field within a monolingual or multilingual setting from a theoretical, sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective. The works contained in this volume aim to answer questions such as, how the linguistic landscape of certain territories includes new discourses that, ultimately, contribute to a fairer society; how the linguistic landscape of minority or low-income communities can enforce changes on language policy and who determines advertising planning; how these decisions are made and how these decisions affect vendors, customers, and the general public alike. All in all, this collective volume uncovers the voices of minority groups within the communities under study.

Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century. A royal marriage united Castile and Aragon, its two largest kingdoms. The last Muslim emirate on the Iberian Peninsula fell to Spanish Catholic armies. And conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few in this period of flourishing Spanish power could define “Spain” concretely, or say with any confidence who were Spaniards and who were not. Speaking of Spain offers an analysis of the cultural and political forces that transformed Spain’s diverse peoples and polities into a unified nation. Antonio Feros traces evolving ideas of Spanish nationhood and Spanishness in the discourses of educated elites, who debated whether the union of Spain’s kingdoms created a single fatherland (patria) or whether Spain remained a dynastic monarchy comprised of separate nations. If a unified Spain was emerging, was it a pluralistic nation, or did “Spain” represent the imposition of the dominant Castilian culture over the rest? The presence of large communities of individuals with Muslim and Jewish ancestors and the colonization of the New World brought issues of race to the fore as well. A nascent civic concept of Spanish identity clashed with a racialist understanding that Spaniards were necessarily of pure blood and “white,” unlike converted Jews and Muslims, Amerindians, and Africans. Gradually Spaniards settled the most intractable of these disputes. By the time the liberal Constitution of Cádiz (1812) was ratified, consensus held that almost all people born in Spain’s territories, whatever their ethnicity, were Spanish.

One of the main contributions of this important book is that it offers a thorough survey of the theoretical and empirical developments that have occurred in the area of (im)politeness in the different regions of the Spanish-speaking world, gathering together overviews by distinguished scholars. Additionally, the book advances the field with new empirical research on linguistic (im)politeness, and silence and (im)politeness, in a range of (non)institutional contexts, as well as new perspectives for the study of (im)politeness. A closing chapter by the editors provides an assessment of salient trends in the area and directions for future research. Research on Politeness in the Spanish-Speaking World is essential reading for students in Spanish pragmatics and Spanish linguistics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. The volume is also very useful to English-speaking scholars in the general field of pragmatics who are not proficient in Spanish but require access to these empirical studies.

Stephenson worked in Chile for nine years for the Council on International Educational Exchange, and is now director of Latin American and Caribbean studies for the School of International Training in Vermont. She offers scholars, teachers, students, travelers, and business people insights into the Spanish political and religious history, and the cultural diversity, of the nine Spanish-speaking countries of South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela). Individual chapters on each of the nine countries cover geographical and historical influences, analysis of the mix of peoples, specific cultural features, communication styles, and life and work in each country. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).