The primary objective of the course is to expose students to
issues related to language diversity and its role in the daily
lives of Spanish speakers in the United States. This class 
will offer students the opportunity to learn about both the 
social and linguistic dimensions of Spanish in the United 
States, covering topics such as language and migration, 
bilingualism, language attrition, heritage speakers, language 
mixing, and “Spanglish."

The course will provide students with the opportunity to apply
current approaches and techniques to the study of language
variation, including interviews with native speakers and
language surveys. Moreover, students will observe speakers'
attitudes about language use, focusing on populations of 
Spanish speakers in the United States and the perceived status 
of Spanish in American society. The final topic of the course 
will involve a discussion of the varieties of Spanish spoken in 
the Southeastern United States, with a focus on Spanish 
speakers in the state of Georgia. The centerpiece of the course 
will be a linguistic "fieldwork" project in which students 
conduct interviews with Spanish speakers in the local community 
and then use these interviews as data for an analysis of 
patterns of language use.

The following is a sample topical outline of the course:
1. The linguistic "facts of life": What is language and how do 
we use it?
2. Language use and language variation in the United States
3. Hispanics/Latinos and Spanish in the United States: A social 
and demographic profile
4. Bilingualism and language contact
5. Code switching and code mixing
6. Spanish speakers by country of origin: Mexican, Cuban, 
Puerto Rican, Dominican, Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Guatemalan,
Honduran
7. Spanish in New Mexico and Louisiana
8. Spanish in the Southeast: New voices in the Old South
9. Language subordination and linguistic profiling
10. Language diversity in the modern classroom