A.C. Maas - Latin American Spanish (Page 3)

The Spanish Your Textbook Didn't Teach You

Open a popular Spanish textbook. What you read is a language — but not, quite, the language that is actually spoken by four hundred and eighty million people. It is a close cousin. It is a useful approximation. And almost no one tells you where the approximation ends.

Reviews Books History

Review: The Story of Spanish

Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow's The Story of Spanish attempts a comprehensive biography of the Spanish language — from its prehistoric origins on the Iberian Peninsula to its current global presence. A review of what the book delivers, what it misses, and who should read it.

Articles Cultural Insight Regional Varieties Foundational

Latin American Spanish Is Not One Language

There is a convenient fiction at the center of most Spanish instruction: that Latin American Spanish is one language, learnable from one book, understood the same way everywhere. It is a beautiful idea. It is also not quite true.