Spanish of the U.S. Southwest

A Language in Transition

Susana Rivera-Mills, Daniel Villa (eds.)

Spanish in the Southwest of the United States predates the appearance of English in this country. The language has had an uninterrupted presence in the Río Grande corridor since 1598, and has spread geographically and demographically over the last four centuries. Despite that growth, it is being lost among younger generations that trend toward English monolingualism; thus, Spanish exists in a tremendous state of flux in the U.S. Southwest. The present volumeʹs principal goal is to provide a window into this dynamic through a collection of essays focused on linguistic and sociolinguistic topics on Southwest Spanish.
It includes studies of its history, its maintenance and the shift to English, descriptive studies of current varieties of the language, issues in attitudes and identities of its speakers, and language politics and policies in Spanish Heritage Speaker pedagogy. In doing so, this book seeks to capture a historic moment in the constantly unfolding linguistic and political realities that both encourage and threaten the existence of Southwest Spanish.

Susana V. Rivera-Mills is Associate Professor of Spanish and Diversity Advancement at Oregon State University. Her research interests include Spanish in the U.S., sociolinguistics, second language acquisition, and Spanish for heritage speakers.

Daniel J. Villa is Professor of Spanish at New Mexico State University. His research interests include language maintenance and shift, the sociolinguistic study of Southwest Spanish, and Spanish for heritage speakers.

New Perspectives on Hispanic Contact Linguistics in the Americas / Sandro Sessarego, Melvin González-Rivera (editores).

Español en Estados Unidos y otros contextos de contacto : Sociolingüística, ideología y pedagogía = Spanish in the United States and Other Contact Environments Sociolinguistics, Ideology and Pedagogy / Manel Lacorte, Jennifer Leeman (eds.)

Spanish and Heritage Language Education in the United States : Struggling with hypotheticals / Marta Fairclough.

El español en América : Aspectos teóricos, particularidades, contactos / Volker Noll, Klaus Zimmermann, Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh (eds.)