ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on Spanish as a way of speaking deployed in multilingual social contexts by multilingual speakers (including bilingual contexts and bilingual speakers). Bilingual ways of speaking have always been common in both Spain and Latin America, placing Spanish speakers at all points in history in multilingualism with Catalan, English, Euskara, Galician, Nahuatl, Quechua, Yoruba, and many other European, African, and Indigenous American languages. As Spanish ways of speaking continue to spread at the present time, a concomitant expansion in the number of bilinguals seems assured. These spreads and expansions create the urgent need to develop a theoretically coherent understanding of Hispanic bilingualism.