CASTAÑETS AND CONJUGATIONS: SPANISH LINGUISTICS AS CULTURAL CONCEPTS

Abstract

Spanish is the most popular foreign language studied at American secondary schools and institutions of higher learning. While French departments throughout the educational landscape in the United States are dwindling, Spanish programs have been growing exponentially Since Spanish lacks the nasalization of vowels, it is treated as a linguistic relative to English by English-speaking students. Indeed, the omission of personal pronouns in contextualized statements, the phonetic spelling and pronunciation, as well as sufficient cognates within other Romance and even Germanic languages, make Spanish a popular language destination for American students. Although students at the novice level advance rapidly, most students do not move beyond the intermediate level and deprive themselves of the true soul of the Spanish language, the intricacy of Spanish verb tenses, and the Spanish subjunctive. While basic grammar, structure, vocabulary, and etymology are Latin based, Spanish displays unique linguistic phenomena. I will argue that Spanish is not listener focused but speaker based; in other words, it is less important what is said, but how it is said. The impact on Spanish culture of this linguistic hypothesis is the focus of this study.