San Antonio College Library

"Lingo takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of sixty European languages and dialects, sharing quirky moments from their histories and exploring their commonalities and differences ... Lingo takes us into the remote mountain villages of Switzerland, where Romansh is still the favored tongue; to formerly Soviet Belarus, a country whose language was Russified by the Bolsheviks; to Sweden, where up until the 1960s polite speaking conventions required...

"To what extent do our accents determine the way we are perceived by others? Is foreign accent inevitably associated with social stigma? Accent is a matter of great public interest given the impact of migration on national and global affairs, but until now, applied linguistics research has treated accent largely as a theoretical puzzle. In this fascinating account, Alene Moyer examines the social, psychological, educational and legal ramifications...

"Naturally controversial, Spanglish outrages English-language-only proponents, who seek to ban all languages other than English north of the Rio Grande. Equal in their outrage are Spanish-language purists and the supporters of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid, as they deem Spanglish a cancer to their precious and centuries-old tongue. With elegance and erudition, Ilan Stavans reflects on the verbal rift that has given birth to Spanglish....

This is a study of the interweaving of life and languages in a group of bilingual Spanish, Spanish-American and Latino writers. Unravelling the "tongue ties" of such diverse figures as the American philosopher George Santayana, the emigré Spanish poet Pedro Salinas, Spanish American novelists Guillermo Cabrera Infante and María Luisa Bombal, and Latino memoirists Richard Rodriguez and Sandra Cisneros, the book argues that their careers are shaped...