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The spread of Spanish as a foreign language in North America during the 19th century prompted the publishing house Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt to edit in 1868 an anonymous handbook of pronunciation, lexicon, phrases, verbs and dialogues to teach Spanish in a short, easy and practical way. ¿Habla Vm. español? or Do you Speak English? collects the rudiments to perform in Spanish, especially through oral language, for those who wished to make a stay in Spain or in Latin America. Although the text is unoriginal in its content and formal presentation, it is part of linguistic historiography and the corpus of Spanish as a Foreign Language materials. This paper focuses on the analysis of ¿Habla Vm. español? or Do you Speak English?, the context in which it was written and the methodology used by Holt and Leypoldt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on American Spanish pays little attention to word formation and less still to compounding. To bridge this gap, using as corpus the Diccionario de americanismos published in 2010 by Real Academia Española, this paper analyses the formation of nominal compounds in American Spanish from formal, semantic, diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic point of view. In short, this study not only shows the difference between American dialect areas and its comparison with European Spanish but also the richness of compounding from a language variation perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately over the past ten years, the RAE and its associated Academies have published several works committed explicitly to a pluricentric vision of Hispanic language culture. This paper aims at examining the impact of pluricentrism -- a key concept in terms of current language policy -- on the conceptualization of linguistic variation and, consequently, the treatment of empirical data. In doing so, the focus will be on the Nueva gramática de la lengua española (from here "NGLE"), where this problematic interrelation is reflected in an especially complex way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]