This collection is the first to examine the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on the development of dialectal varieties of Spanish in Africa, America, Asia and Europe. Nineteen essays investigate a variety of complex situations of contact between Spanish and typologically different languages, including Basque, Bantu languages, English, and Quechua. The overall picture that evolves clearly indicates that although influence from the contact languages may lead to different dialects, the core grammar of Spanish remains intact. Silva-Corvalan's volume makes an important contribution both to sociolinguistics in general, and to Spanish linguistics in particular. The contributors address theoretical and empirical issues that advance our knowledge of what is a possible linguistic change, how languages change, and how changes spread in society in situations of intensive bilingualism and language contact, a situation that appears to be the norm rather than the exception in the world.

This thoroughly updated second edition provides a clear and comprehensiveoverview of sociolinguistics and the pragmatics of oral communication in Spanish. While maintaining the same structure as the first edition, it includes revised "Ejercicios de Reflexion" along with new comprehension checks at the end of each chapter, enhancing its use as a classroom text. Among the significant revisions are more attention to the relation of pragmatics to sociolinguistics, a new section on applied sociolinguistics and the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language, updated information on statistical modeling programs for studying linguistic variables, expanded coverage of the overt versus null pronominal subject variable, a new emphasis on pragmatics in chapter 5, and a new section on Spanglish.

This thoroughly updated second edition provides a clear and comprehensive overview of sociolinguistics and the pragmatics of oral communication in Spanish. While maintaining the same structure as the first edition, it includes revised "Ejercicios de reflexion" and new comprehension checks at the end of each chapter, along with numerous bibliographic references throughout, enhancing its use as a classroom text. Among the significant revisions are new sections on corpus linguistics and on statistical modeling programs for studying linguistic variables, an expanded chapter on the study of linguistic attitudes with special attention to Spanish in the United States, greater attention to the relation of pragmatics to sociolinguistics, including coverage of verbal politeness and forms of address, and updated information on Spanglish and on the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language.