Multilingualism and indigenous peoples in the Americas

This course introduces students to the multilingual nature of the Spanish-speaking world and related global issues, such as migration and diffusion of language variability, language attitudes, and educational politics. The main focus is on diverse outcomes of language contact with Amerindian languages in its historical and contemporary context. Students will investigate how multilingualism, in its social and geographic dimensions, affects lexical and syntactic differences in Spanish as spoken in Latin America and in Europe by extension. Based on in-depth case studies and individual research projects, students will be introduced to methodologies in studying dialectal variability and will gain first-hand experience at empirical linguistic analysis.