A Political History of Spanish: The Making of a Language

Description

Spanish is spoken as a first language by almost 400 million people in approximately 60 countries, and has been the subject of numerous political processes and debates since it began to spread globally from Iberia in the thirteenth century. A Political History of Spanish brings together a team of experts to analyze the metalinguistic origins of Spanish and evaluate it as a discursively constructed artefact; that is to say, as a language which contains traces of the society in which it is produced, and of the discursive traditions that are often involved and invoked in its creation. This is a comprehensive and provocative new work which takes a fresh look at Spanish from specific political and historical perspectives, combining the traditional chronological organization of linguistic history and spatial categories such as Iberia, Latin America and the US, whilst simultaneously identifying the limits of these organizational principles.

Jose del Valle is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of El trueque s/x en espanol antiguo: Aproximaciones teoricas (1996) and co-editor and co-author of The Battle Over Spanish Between 1800 and 2000: Language Ideologies and Hispanic Intellectuals (2002) and La lengua, ?patria comun? (2007). In 2010 he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for his outstanding research record.

'With more than 400 million speakers spread over every continent, the Spanish language represents a powerful social and political force in the modern world. A political history of Spanish traces the development of Spanish from a rustic regional vernacular to a multi-center world powerhouse, including the rise of Castilian as the variety of choice and the institutional control of the Royal Academy. The coverage includes Spain, Spanish America, the United States, Africa, and Asia. This skilfully configured anthology provides a valuable complement to linguistic histories of Spanish, by documenting the socio-political currents that shaped one of the world's most prominent languages. Historians, linguists, political scientists, and students of language and culture will find relevant and thought-provoking material in these essays.' John Lipski, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, Pennsylvania State University