This course fulfills the Sociocultural dimensions of L2 learning requirement in the Core Courses section of the SLAT Map, or can be used towards the Sociocultural Dimensions major or minor requirements. The course can only be used towards one of the requirements (Core, Major, or Minor).
This course presents an overview of sociolinguistic issues pertaining to the contact between languages in general and the contact between Spanish with other languages in particular. The course will discuss basic concepts that emerge in this field of inquiry, such as diglossia, language maintenance, attrition, shift, convergence, code-switching, and borrowing, and apply these concepts to our discussion of contexts that involve Spanish. The course will have readings about speech communities where Spanish is the majority language (in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America) and the minority language (in the United States). We will compare these situations and discuss how linguistic and extra-linguistic factors influence the output of contact, from both qualitative and quantitative viewpoints.