Latin American Spanish

Front Cover
Longman, 1994 - Foreign Language Study - 426 pages
The diversity of Latin American Spanish has attracted attention and interest for more than a century, and in this book John Lipski describes the immense richness of the varieties of a language which is spoken from the US-Canadian border of Antarctica. The first part of the book presents a linguistic analysis of Latin American Spanish and places it in a broad historical context. The author examines the phonology and morphology of the language, its syntactic and lexical variation and social differentiation, its past and present contacts with other languages and also explores the sociohistorical factors which have shaped the various Latin American Spanish dialects. He provides the reader with a detailed account of the influence of African and Native American languages and populations, and assesses the contribution made by Peninsular Spanish. This includes the geographical and social origins of the original Spanish settlers, the effects of dialect levelling and nautical language and subsequent migratory patterns. There are also in-depth evaluations of dialect classification schemes. The second section of the book gives a detailed country-by-country account of Latin American Spanish, with key historical facts for each country as well as details on pronunciation, morphosyntax and the lexicon. Latin American Spanish provides a comprehensive and accessible analysis of Hispanic dialectology and will be essential reading for all undergraduate students of Spanish language and literature. It will also be of interest to graduate students and teachers of Spanish dialectology and comparative Romance philology, and to the general reader interested in specific details of varieties of Latin American Spanish.

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Contents

Before and after Spain the Native American
3
4
44
The African connection
93
Copyright

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