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.

This text presents an interdisciplinary perspective on Spanish speakers in the US, looking at how language and culture are intertwined. It explores attitudes about Spanish and its speakers; how Spanish and English are used in a variety of US contexts; how Spanish has changed through its contact with English and the education of Latin@s in the U.S. school system.

This book introduces readers to basic concepts of sociolinguistics with a focus on Spanish in the US. The coverage goes beyond linguistics to examine the history and politics of Spanish in the US, the relationship of language to Latinx identities, and how language ideologies and policies reflect and shape societal views of Spanish and its speakers. Accessible to those with no linguistic background, this book provides students with a foundation in the study of language and society, and the opportunity to relate theoretical concepts to Spanish in the US in a range of contexts, including everyday speech, contemporary culture, media, education and policy. The book is a substantially revised and expanded 2nd edition of Spanish Speakers in the USA, including new chapters on the history of Spanish in the US, the demographics of Spanish in the US, and language policy; and expanded chapters on language ideologies, race, identity, media, and education. A Spanish-language edition of this book is also available: https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781800413931.

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.

This edited volume focuses on Spanish use in education, public spaces, and social media in five macro-regions of the United States: the Southwest, the West, the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Southeast.

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.

When this book was first published in 1982, there were approximately eleven million Spanish-speaking people in the United States. This volume constitutes a comprehensive and accessible set of readings on the Spanish spoken in the United States. The authors examine various aspects of language structure and language use by the American Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban populations. Chapters include descriptions of language variation, reports of language contact and language change and analyses of the ethnography of language use in bilingual communities with particular emphasis on code-switching. Several chapters explore the educational implications of language structure and language use. This collection will be of interest to a wide range of linguists, anthropologists and sociologists. Bilingual educators and language planners in bilingual communities will find it of particular value and students of sociolinguistics will discover in it the main trends of sociolinguistic analysis usefully exemplified.