Publications and Research
Document Type
Book Chapter or Section
Publication Date
2018
Abstract
This chapter offers an overview of the spread of Spanish as a global language, focusing on the politics and institutions that have worked toward its promotion in the last decades. The actions of the institutions, as well as those of corporate and cultural agencies involved in this sort of language policy, are to be understood as part of a wider movement of internationalization of financial activities and political influence. Our approach to globalization emphasizes agency and the dominance of a few nations and economic groups within the neo-imperialist order of the global village. In line with this framewrok, our analysis of langauge and (the discourse of) globalization focuses on the geostrategic dimension of the politics of Spanish in the world. First, we present a brief history of the internationalizarion of Spanish from colonization to American independence and then to the current conditions of globalization. Second, we examine how the contemporary internationalization of markets and political practices has led to linguistic commodification. Finally, we look at the metalinguistic discourses of the agencies in change of the international spread of Spanish and highlight their preferred fieds of action: Asisa, Brazil, Europe, the United States, and the World Wide Web.