The Spanish language has a long and rich history, from its prehistoric roots to its position today as the mother tongue of nearly 400 million inhabitants of 21 countries. How the language originated, how it evolved, and how it is spoken today around the world makes for a fascinating story that greatly enhances the study of written and spoken Spanish.
This Spanish-language text covers the history of Spanish from its pre-Roman and Latin roots to its standardized form and its many regional variations. Along the way, discussion covers the spread of Latin on the Iberian Peninsula, the development of romance dialects due to a number of sociolinguistic influences, and the process of creating a standard variety of Spanish. It concludes with a discussion of the origin and the range of dialects that are spoken across the vast geographical area that forms the Spanish-speaking world.
Details of pronunciation, spelling, grammar, and vocabulary are explained in their historical context, giving the student of Spanish a deeper understanding of the language as a whole. The book is perfectly suitable for the students of Spanish as much as for other Spanish-speaking readers who wish to increase their knowledge of the language, and also includes a glossary of the elementary linguistic terms that are treated in the text.
Latino authors, like Chávez Silverman have constructed their own creative works, which illustrate their talent in a language that is most natural to them. Interestingly, as seen from the excerpt above, the author chooses to answer the interview questions in a mixed code, even though the questions were posed in monolingual English. Thus, Chávez Silverman’s language choice appears to make up part of her social and linguistic identity. Not only is her linguistic preference noted in interview format, it is also prevalent in her text, Killer Crónicas (KC2004).
This notion is further affirmed by Gumperz and Cook who comment, “social identity and ethnicity are in large part established and maintained through language” (7). Latino texts are written in English and include some Spanish words (usually in the form of simple insertions) to reference the Hispanic experience. However, more recently, authors like Chávez Silverman are beginning to use Spanish in their texts in a way that is less transparent and accessible to American monolingual readers who are assumed as their principal audience. This illustration shows the type of sustained code-switching prevalent in the text.
Beyond the language mixing strategies that these bilingual Hispanic authors utilize in their narratives, their contemporary autobiographical works increasingly move across geographical frontiers and socio-cultural spaces which reappear as uncertainties inspired by shifting borders, languages, discontinuities and progress. Thus, the Hispanic diasporic text is no longer only interested in two topographical latitudes, but rather a globetrotter experience, which can span continents.
Latino texts, nostalgia penetrates the discourse in variable degrees and progresses from bilateral geographies, cultural and historical experiences. In this regard, the current paper analyzes Chávez Silverman’s KC (2004) with an interest in the author’s bilingual nostalgic recall, which we believe is a response to globalization. As mentioned above, Chávez Silverman’s crónicas are written in a fused bilingual and multidialectal discourse. They illustrate the groundbreaking impact on the multilingual and multicultural Latino community that traverses distant frontiers, agglomerates and lives in the United States, while also taking into account the significant amount of longing progressing from those modalities.
Many of the crónicas showcase bitter-sweet reflections from the past and transition across socio-cultural spaces in different locales. The stories offer ample intertextual and cartographical references, which at times appear as streams of consciousness. KCis filled with personal confessions which emerge from the author’s journeys through Latin-American countries (Chile, Mexico and Argentina), Spain, South Africa and the United States. Chávez Silverman delivers a vivid testimony of the global and pan-Latina experience.
KC frames the author’s coming-of-age experiences in California and Spain, as well as her adulthood and experiences in Buenos Aires, South Africa, Mexico and the United States. The predominant feature of Chávez Silverman’s crónicas is code-switching and within, one encounters switches not only between English and Spanish, but also phonetic adaptations of Castilian, Argentine and Chicano variants of Spanish.
Latino memoirs and autobiographical novels are particularly noteworthy as they many times include some language mixing and globetrotter experiences. However, to date, analyses of bilingual literary representations considering nostalgia as a syndrome of the modern age have been relatively underexplored academically. For a person that has been dislocated geographically, culturally or linguistically, meditation with the past might enable them to generate unified narratives about their lives.
As a result, nostalgia as response to the experience of loss in contemporary times can be an essential tool to analyze the past from an individual standpoint and when considering ethnographic global experiences. Overall, nostalgia is triggered by sensory responses such as music, smells, and scents (Heeper et al. 2012). It also occurs in social interactions with friends, partners, family members and during monumental events like weddings and anniversaries (Sedekides et al. 2008). Heeper et al.
On one hand, globalization affects borders and national-cultural distinctions, causing dislocation and change in time and space, which result in the loss of an individual’s singular cultural identity, ethnicity and language usage. On the other hand, it causes stronger local attachments and fosters a sentimental desire for a community with a communal memory. From this perspective, Boym views nostalgia as “a social context that one could export into diaspora” (Boym 12). It is to say, nostalgia and diaspora are mutually inclusive phenomena; the later foreshadows dislocation while the other embraces it as a primal component.
In sum, nostalgia emerges as response to modernity; increased global movements, ethnic and cultural pressures, and national self-questioning. These create a widespread need to redefine the self in the face of ongoing change. In this paper, we take into consideration Boym’s (2001) typology of nostalgia to analyze Chávez Silverman’s KC. The use of Boym’s framework allows for a better understanding of displaced individuals and the ways they reconstruct homeland, culture, hybrid identity and linguistic preference in the context of global experiences through the implementation of scents and sounds, geographical and urban spaces, as well as evocation of languages and accents.
In particular, we employ the notion of “diasporic intimacy,” “reflective nostalgia” and an “off-modern” strain of critical thinking as vehicles to examine the literary representation of nostalgia in urban chronicles. We argue that the essence of Chávez Silverman’s crónicas is a product of her global experiences pertaining to diverse urban, geographical and linguistic encounters, sustained by a prevalent notion of longing and forms a predominant feature within the chronicles. Dislocated individuals often contemplate geographical, cultural, national or linguistic modalities in order to recollect the past and to generate unified narratives about their dispraised lives.
Nostalgia as a response to the experience of widespread loss in the contemporary age can be vital for an individual’s examination of the past as it attains an active cross-temporal presence. The overall objective is to increase speaking and listening skills in Spanish from a communicative approach. Learning takes place through geography, history and culture of Chile. Through various teaching techniques, students will be able to increase their speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills in Spanish.
This course focuses on the development of oral language skills to produce standard Spanish at every level. This course is divided in 2 parts: First part you will have basic Communicational Spanish and Chilean culture classes. Latin Americans seek their identity through art. This allows them to integrate a vision about themselves and their world. This course provides not only an historical, but also cultural and cinematographic approach to Latin America.
Since each Latin American country has its own distinctive culture, cross-cultural issues can be seen in their cinema. The cinematic approach, therefore, will be multicultural in nature: it will include films made by artists from Chile, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. This course aims to give its students a thorough overview of Latin American literature, both narrative and poetry. From the mid-20th century onwards, authors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Pablo Neruda reinvigorated the Spanish language by scoping its presence within the Latin American identity and bringing its otherness into the Spanish speaking worldview.
La enseñanza de español como lengua de herencia debe integrar en el aula las experiencias y la comunidad de sus estudiantes. Algunos trabajos anteriores sugieren que las investigaciones que llevan a cabo los estudiantes en su propia comunidad les permitan ver con orgullo su variedad (Correa, 2011), entender mejor el rol que juega en la sociedad (Martínez, 2003; Leeman, 2005), y desarrollar lazos fuertes en la comunidad (Leeman, Rabin & Ramón-Mendoza, 2011). El presente estudio examina dos contextos de cursos universitarios diseñados para hablantes de herencia del español.
A goal of language learning is for learners “to appropriately and effectively engage in global communities both during and after their formal language instruction” in support of ACTFL’s Global Engagement Initiative (ACTFL, 2017). One way in which this has been accomplished is through courses that contain a service-learning component. In such courses, students participate in an activity that attempts to address specific community needs; they gain academic credit, gain in their understanding of the discipline, and develop a sense of civic responsibility (Bringle & Hatcher, 1996).
However, due to curricular, financial, and logistical realities, not all heritage Spanish courses are able to include a service-learning component. Little research has been conducted on the benefits and community connections that Hispanic linguistics courses specifically can bring to students, even in areas that lack a significant Hispanic population. The current study examines the benefits that community engagement can provide HLLs who are enrolled in upper-level Spanish linguistics courses.
HLLs tend to receive their formal education and literacy training in English, having learned the heritage language (HL) (in this case, Spanish) in naturalistic settings, such as with their family, in their neighborhood, or in their community (e.g., Correa, 2011). As a result of having learned Spanish in informal settings, HLLs typically exhibit highly developed oral proficiency but have less experience with literary skills. Their oral abilities may exhibit stigmatized features, their vocabulary tends to be limited to the home and community, and borrowings from English are likely (e.g., Leeman, 2005; Kagan & Dillon, 2008; Correa, 2011).
Several studies have examined HLLs’ awareness of and attitudes toward their own variety and varieties spoken in other Spanish-speaking regions. European Spanish tends to be privileged over American varieties (e.g., Leeman, 2012), and, within the Americas, the norma culta of Latin American capitals is considered superior to the Spanish spoken by Hispanics in English-speaking regions (e.g., Bernal, Munévar & Barajas, 2014; Morett, 2014). Moreover, the presence of English in heritage Spanish is frequently disparaged.
Given the insecurity that HLLs may feel and the discrimination and social pressure that they may experience (e.g., Harklau, 2009), the classroom can be a powerful place to address these issues. Leeman (2005) presents two models of HLL instruction. The normative approach seeks to achieve Valdés’ (1997) goal of promoting Spanish maintenance. Students follow an additive model, acquiring the prestige variety of Spanish, while at the same time maintaining their own nonprestige dialect. They are taught that all varieties are legitimate, but that some are more appropriate than others in certain contexts.
Several studies have examined HLL involvement in Spanish-speaking communities through various types of service-learning projects. In addition to the list of benefits that such community involvement brings students, the following studies suggest that it also provides them with a greater knowledge of their own HL, the role that it serves in its community, and the greater sociocultural context in which the community and the HL exist.
Martínez and Schwartz (2012) argue that university HL programs must connect with HL communities, for the benefit of both the learners and the communities. However, community engagement is not always possible, due to curricular, financial, or logistical limitations. Despite these limitations, classroom-based courses can help HLLs grow in knowledge of their own variety and gain sociolinguistic competence.
Upper-division Spanish linguistics courses can provide a locus for student engagement in a multicultural world. Villa (2004) presents one such example at New Mexico State University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution in a majority Hispanic city. Approximately 90% of the students enrolled in Spanish linguistics classes at New Mexico State are HLLs, who come with the idea that their variety is ‘broken’ and not valued in society.
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