Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact: Sociolinguistic Case Studies. New York: Routledge, 2018. xvii + 300. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
This chapter presents the notion of linguistic policies and rights to a language from a sociopolitical and multicultural perspective. Spain becomes a sociolinguistic prototype due to its extensive history of language planning policies and bilingual education. The case of Spain is studied as representative of a legitimate multilingualism with illustrative examples in terms of officiality, vitality, governmental response, social identity, and educational programs. The chapter is divided into five sections, which explain the linguistic landscape of the Peninsula in terms of language contact approaches and introduce recent research in variationist sociolinguistics. It includes diachronic accounts to explain the contemporary panorama where Spanish is in contact with four other languages, including both the origin and trajectory of its contact with non-Indo-European Basque, and its eventual contact with three other Romance varieties: Portuguese, Galician and Catalan. It concludes with an overview of the repercussions of this contact to map modern Spanish and its role in both society and the educational system. All the sections are inter-linked and encompass topics like language choice, variation according to style and identity. The chapter also contains a range of features such as key terms, glossary, further readings, and topics for discussion. The main scope consists of offering an insight into the sociolinguistic reality of languages in contact, urging the reader to reflect upon this situation. Secondly, it covers social aspects of language planning, and the relations between minority and official languages, and how they are represented in legal policies with Spain as an illustrative example. At the same time, it intends to open a dialogue with the reader to underline how the right to a language becomes a socio-cultural need as an extension of human rights.
This study investigates the influence of social and linguistic constraints on language contact through the analysis of linguistic borrowing from Spanish in three indigenous languages of the Americas (Ecuadorian Quechua, Paraguayan Guaraní and Mexican Otomí). An extensive corpus for each language was collected and processed in search of loanwords and function words from Spanish. The analysis of the corpora was developed in the framework of the parts-of-speech theory and linguistic typology. In this way the study meets the requirements of a solid empirical foundation and a theory-driven approach. After an evaluation of the fundamental concepts of language contact, the author proposes a multi-level model of causation to explain contact-induced language change, in which linguistic and nonlinguistic factors interact with each other. The model serves as a point of departure to explain the interplay of social and linguistic constraints on borrowing. To support the language specific analysis, an extensive description of the recipient languages is provided in terms of their historical development, sociolinguistic situation, dialectal variation and typological profile. The study confirms the dynamic nature of the causation model of contact-induced language change and the need to include specific typological, sociolinguistic and historical criteria in any evaluation of scales of borrowing and hierarchies of borrowability. Still, the major finding of the study is that not everything goes in linguistic borrowing: the outcomes are determined by the structural limits of the recipient languages and the resistance of basic typological parameters to change in contact situations. The study provides a new insight into the relation between linguistic borrowing, language typology and bilingualism, and therefore is of interest to typologists, sociolinguists, psycholinguists and those students of language contact and Amerindian languages.
This study investigates the influence of social and linguistic constraints on language contact through the analysis of linguistic borrowing from Spanish in three indigenous languages of the Americas (Ecuadorian Quechua, Paraguayan Guaraní and Mexican Otomí). An extensive corpus for each language was collected and processed in search of loanwords and function words from Spanish. The analysis of the corpora was developed in the framework of the parts-of-speech theory and linguistic typology. In this way the study meets the requirements of a solid empirical foundation and a theory-driven approach. After an evaluation of the fundamental concepts of language contact, the author proposes a multi-level model of causation to explain contact-induced language change, in which linguistic and nonlinguistic factors interact with each other. The model serves as a point of departure to explain the interplay of social and linguistic constraints on borrowing. To support the language specific analysis, an extensive description of the recipient languages is provided in terms of their historical development, sociolinguistic situation, dialectal variation and typological profile. The study confirms the dynamic nature of the causation model of contact-induced language change and the need to include specific typological, sociolinguistic and historical criteria in any evaluation of scales of borrowing and hierarchies of borrowability. Still, the major finding of the study is that not everything goes in linguistic borrowing: the outcomes are determined by the structural limits of the recipient languages and the resistance of basic typological parameters to change in contact situations. The study provides a new insight into the relation between linguistic borrowing, language typology and bilingualism, and therefore is of interest to typologists, sociolinguists, psycholinguists and those students of language contact and Amerindian languages.
Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas, 2023
This collection will focus on the structural results of contact between Spanish and Maya, Quechua, Guarani, Portuguese, and English as spoken in the Americas. It will not only explore the various ways in which these languages affect the linguistic structure of Spanish in situations of language contact, but also how Spanish impacts their linguistic structure. The collection will address potential mutual linguistic influences on the lexicon, morphosyntax, phonology, semantics, and pragmatics of Spanish contact pairs (Spanish-Maya, Spanish-Quechua, Spanish-Guarani, Spanish-Portuguese, and Spanish-English). Studies of each language pair reveal that languages in contact affect one another structurally and, though outcomes are different depending on the pair in question, there is an undeniable mutual influence that occurs in bilingual language varieties. Given these results, we propose that this dual mutual influence be examined more closely for a wide variety of language contact pairs worldwide.
Lingua. Vol. 62, No. 2-3. Pp. 247-254., 1984
This anthology contains 18 studies that seek to: (1) show the range of Spanish in the United States, which, though originally associated with the Southwest, is now beyond the limits of that area, (2) include both established and younger scholars, and (3) illustrate the principal trends and methods in sociolinguistic investigation. This book contains three sections, which address the following themes: (1) Varieties and variations of Spanish in the United States (Mexican-American, Cuban, and Puerto Rican Spanish, 6 chapters); (2) Aspects of language contact and language change (7 chapters); and (3) ethnographic aspects of language use in bilingual communities (5 chapters).
Spanish in Contact With English in the United States
Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2023
In the United States, Spanish is spoken by more than 50 million people, making it one of the largest Spanishspeaking populations in the world. What differentiates Spanish in the United States from most other national contexts is the ubiquitous presence of English, which engenders two important and related effects. First, at the level of the individual, the overwhelming majority of Spanish speakers are bilingual. Second, at the level of the speech community, Spanish is involved in a situation of language shift, in which Spanish is continuously abandoned generation by generation. Linguists studying Spanish in the United States want to know if these factors, which research on this topic seem to indicate that, with the exception of lexical-level phenomena, the degree to which English represents both a direct force on and a driving factor of change in Spanish in the United States may be less changes due to English is still a matter of empirical investigation. The influence of English, it is clear, interacts in variegated and nuanced ways not only with the internal linguistic mechanisms of the Spanish grammatical system but also with respect to the influence of Spanish dialects in contact with each other in particular local ecologies.