* This course is taught in Buenos Aires, Argentina. *

In this course we will deal with various aspects related to the Spanish in the world: the Spanish varieties in the Spanish speaking world – for example Spanish in the USA – but also the expansion of Spanish through the media and the cinema will be an important part of the course. The situation of Spanish together with the other official languages on the Iberian Peninsula but also the language politics in Latin America will be treated in this course. According to the number of its speakers, Spanish is considered the third most spoken language in the world. Although it’s spoken in very distant regions, it provides until now certain uniformity in the standard higher level which allows the speakers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean to communicate easily. The most important differences are found in the supresegmental level, which means in the different intonation, a product of the diverse linguistic subtracts in the Spanish speaking countries. Another difference is also observed in the lexical diversity which derives from the different evolution of the Spanish language in every region but also from the influence of other languages in the corresponding regions. The orthography and the linguistic norm guarantee the unity of the language; also the necessity of collaboration between the different Language Academies of the Spanish language in order to preserve the unity contributes to the expansion of the literary, scientific, pedagogical, cinematographic, television, communicative, and informatic products. (1 unit)
Required text: Electronic material provided at Middlebury.