Spanish & Latin American Language & Literature

Rafael Lapesa’s book is a standard in the field. He begins with the language before the Roman conquest, and includes later borrowings and influences from other tongues; however, there is only a small section on Latin America. The color fold-out maps are a nice feature, as is the index.

This source is divided into two parts: a general “Evolution of Latin American Spanish” succeeded by chapters on “individual Latin American dialects.” Each chapter has a “historical overview,” “Extra-Hispanic linguistic influences,” “Phonetics and phonology,” “Morphological characteristics,” “Syntactic characteristics” and “Lexical characteristics.” Extensive notes and a literature review are also part of each chapter. There is a comprehensive bibliography and a helpful index.

The author provides a brief historical grammar of Spanish. He begins with an introduction to classical and vulgar Latin, stressing the ways in which they influenced Spanish. He avoids dialect and influences on Spanish from languages other than Latin.