This course presents an overview of sociolinguistic issues pertaining to the contact between languages in general and the contact between Spanish with other languages in particular. We will discuss basic concepts that emerge in this field of inquiry, such as diglossia, language maintenance, attrition, shift, convergence, code-switching, and borrowing, and apply these concepts to our discussion of contexts that involve Spanish. We will read about speech communities where Spanish is the majority language (in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America) and the minority language (in the United States). We will compare these situations and discuss how linguistic and extra-linguistic factors influence the output of contact, from both qualitative and quantitative viewpoints.
Units
3
Grade Basis
Regular Grades