ABSTRACT

This book is organized around the three broad topics related to Spanish in the United States that are not mutually exclusive: language attitudes, language variation, and heritage speakers of Spanish. It explores these topics by examining distinct populations (including bilingual advanced second-language learners), representative of the many Spanish-speaking groups in the United States. These populations range from New Yorkers of Caribbean origin to Salvadorans in Texas; from Mexican-origin speakers to advanced learners of Spanish as a second language; and diverse groups of speakers of Spanish as a heritage language. The book stimulates new areas of inquiry and motivates new ways of analyzing the social, linguistic, and educational aspects of what it means to speak Spanish in the United States. In addition, the extensive use of both Spanish and English across the United States has led to dialectal and structural changes that are common as languages are shared by multiple (native, heritage, and second-language) speakers.