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The article discusses the book "Language and Utopia: The Esperanto Movement in Spain, 1890-1936" by Roberto Garvía, which explores the history of the Esperanto movement in Spain before the start of the Civil War. The book provides a comprehensive account of the creation of Esperanto associations and federations in Spain, as well as the diverse social actors involved in the movement. It examines the ideological reasons behind the adoption of Esperanto, including its role in facilitating international communication and its association with different political and social groups. The book also delves into the internal diversity of Esperantism in Spain and the various forms of sociability displayed by the movement. While the book offers valuable insights into the history of Esperanto in Spain, some interpretations, such as the idea of Esperantism as a space of respectful coexistence, may be controversial and open to further discussion. [Extracted from the article]

Through an interpersonal global writing exchange between middle school students in Spain and the United States, students develop skills in world languages, cultural awareness, sensitivity, and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Oceánide is the property of Spanish Society for the Study of Popular Culture (SELICUP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Languages around the world differ in terms of the number of adnominal and pronominal demonstratives they require, as well as the factors that impact on their felicitous use. Given this cross-linguistic variation in deictic demonstrative terms, and the features that determine their felicitous use, an open question is how this is accommodated within bilingual cognition and language. In particular, we were interested in the extent to which bilingual language exposure and practice might alter the way in which a bilingual is using deictic demonstratives in their first language. Recent research on language attrition suggests that L2 learning selectively affects aspects of the native language, with some domains of language competence being more vulnerable than others. If demonstratives are basic, and acquired relatively early, they should be less susceptible to change and attrition. This was the hypothesis we went on to test in the current study. We tested two groups of native Spanish speakers, a control group living in Spain and an experimental group living in Norway using the (Spatial) Memory game paradigm. Contra to our expectations, the results indicate a significant difference between the two groups in use of deictic terms, indicative of a change in the preferred number of terms used. This suggests that deictic referential systems may change over time under pressure from bilingual language exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its early studies, linguistic landscape has been approached from an increasing number of perspectives, which include the relative weight of languages in the signage of international holiday resorts. However, the coexistence of varieties of a given language in a single destination remains to be addressed. The research adopts a corpus-based approach to study English texts on display in the tourist resorts of S'Arenal and Magalluf in the Bay of Palma. Data analysis applies the framework of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) to bring to the forefront the lexical features that delineate the presence of two varieties of English and the implications of their choice. Our findings reveal that English is not homogeneous in the Bay. Notwithstanding their common tourist activity, the existence of lexical peculiarities in each resort suggests the coexistence of two varieties that appear to be associated to the native or non-native background of holidaymakers and local sign initiators, with social class possibly intervening as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology is the property of Editorial of the University of Almeria (Spain) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of photographers produced boldly geometrical images of urban spaces, engineering and buildings, drawing attention to the abstract shapes discerned in what was depicted. Among those were Juan (Jean) Laurent and his collaborators and successors. The images sold by Laurent y Cia (Laurent & Co.) provide a significant example of how such geometrical obsessions could be connected to cultural translation, as we would now term it. Lee Fontanella has argued that Laurent 'sensed it was his mission to record photographically and to register in an orderly fashion all minutiae, as well as monuments, in the peninsula'. By providing such renderings in a reproducible form, Laurent made a version of those things available to people abroad, in other parts of Spain, and, of course, to those in the locality that was depicted. The geometrical shapes in which the images are cast are a key means through which those things are communicated. The present study argues that geometry is presented as a kind of universal language through which photography can 'speak' and attempts a reconstruction of how such a geometrical photographic language might have been thought to operate. In these respects it contributes to the renewed critical interest in the historical notion of photography as a universal language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last three decades, regional minority languages in Europe have regained increased recognition and support. Their revitalisation is partly due to their being taught in schools. Multilingualism has special characteristics for speakers of minority languages and it poses unique challenges for learning minority languages. This article looks at the cases of Basque and Frisian, comparing and contrasting their similarities and differences. The educational system in the Basque Autonomous Community underwent an important transformation, starting in 1979 from a situation where less than 5 per cent of all teachers were capable of teaching through Basque. Today this figure has changed to more than 80 per cent. An innovative approach was chosen for teaching the minority language, Basque, alongside the dominant language, Spanish, and the international language, English. The outcome is a substantial increase in the proficiency in the minority language among the younger age groups. The decline of the minority language has thus been successfully reversed and one of the major challenges now is to uphold a sustainable educational system. By contrast, the Frisian language has fared less well in the Netherlands, where developments over the last 30 years have been much slower and the results more modest. Here policy-making for education and for language is caught in a continuous debate between a weak provincial level and a powerful central state level. Overall, multilingualism as a resource for individuals is valued for 'bigger' languages such as English, French and German, but not for a 'small' language such as Frisian. Nevertheless, a few trilingual experiments have been carried out in some schools in Friesland in teaching Frisian, Dutch and English. These experiments may also be instructive for other cases of minority languages of a 'moderate strength'. In the cases of both Basque and Frisian multilingualism is generally perceived as an important resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas (RLLA) is the property of Universidat Politecnica de Valencia, Department of Applied Linguistics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the policies designed and implemented since the early nineties by Spanish government agencies in order to promote Spanish as a valuable international language. In particular, we focus on its promotion in Brazil and on the strategies used to legitimize not only the presence of the language in various domains (e.g. the educational system) but also the active participation of Spanish institutions in its spread. Through a detailed analysis of a corpus of relevant texts, (a) we critically examine the cultural, economic, and political roots of these policies, as well as the rhetoric used to provide them with legitimacy; (b) we explore their connection to national language and global language ideologies; and (c), on the basis of our findings and related work done by other scholars, we argue for the need to develop a comparative strand in the analysis of the international promotion of languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]