A Political History of Spanish: The Making of a Language

Spanish is spoken as a first language by almost 400 million people in approximately 60 countries, and has been the subject of numerous political processes and debates since it began to spread globally from Iberia in the thirteenth century. A Political History of Spanish brings together a team of experts to analyze the metalinguistic origins of Spanish and evaluate it as a discursively constructed artefact; that is to say, as a language which contains traces of the society in which it is produced, and of the discursive traditions that are often involved and invoked in its creation. This is a comprehensive and provocative new work which takes a fresh look at Spanish from specific political and historical perspectives, combining the traditional chronological organization of linguistic history and spatial categories such as Iberia, Latin America and the US, whilst simultaneously identifying the limits of these organizational principles.

About the Author

José del Valle is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of El trueque s/x en español antiguo: Aproximaciones teóricas (1996) and co-editor and co-author of The Battle Over Spanish Between 1800 and 2000: Language Ideologies and Hispanic Intellectuals (2002) and La lengua, ¿patria común? (2007). In 2010 he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for his outstanding research record.