Mexico's 'Commission for the Defense of the Spanish Language' (1981-82)
This paper focuses on one of the most intriguing and short-lived corpus language planning efforts in the history of Mexican Spanish—the Comision Para La Defensa del Idioma Espanol (Commission for the Defense of the Spanish Language). Formed in 1981 and disbanded the next year, the Commission’s concentration during its short tenure was the cleansing of Mexican Spanish grammar of so-called errors as well as the Mexican Spanish lexicon of English borrowings. Those linguists who worked on the Commission were both prescriptive as well as descriptive in perspective, and hence some very valuable linguistic work resulted. This paper compares some of the Commission’s findings with the state of English borrowing in Mexican Spanish today.
Clasificacion y analisis de prestamos del ingles en la prensa de España y Mexico
This volume investigates the influence of modern English on the lexicon of the press of Mexico and Spain. A classification and comparative study of all the English loan words found in the written Spanish of the Mexican and Peninsular press has been carried out, as well as an analysis of the morpho-orthographic adaptation of the same loan words in both linguistic varieties. The newspapers used were "El Pais", Madrid, and "El Universal", Mexico Federal District.
Reading Shop Windows in Globalized Neighborhoods: Multilingual Literacy Practices and Indexicality
Shop and café signs in multiple languages are familiar features of polyglot immigrant neighborhoods. This paper examines such signs, presenting photographic, observational, and interview data from a multisited ethnographic study of language contact in Ghent, an urban Belgian city. Drawing upon diverse ethnographic sources, especially the comparative readings of foreign, immigrant, and native adults, we analyze signs and notices in several immigrant neighborhoods as (a) literacy practices, attending to their contexts of use as well as to their interpretations, and as (b) examples of indexical orders and orders of discourse, asking what hierarchical frames of interpretation and evaluation are brought to bear on the reading of such signs. Our findings show that shop signs and notices are complex indexes of source, addressee, and community, which are manifest in different readers' interpretations. The overall argument addresses several general points: that the study of indexicality helps conceptualize and analyze the rich and unexpectedly broad frames of interpretation readers bring to situated multilingual texts; that concepts of indexical or discursive order contribute to our understanding of multilingual literacy practices in situations of globalized locality; and that, conversely, the study of literacy practices reveals unexpected dimensions of Late Modern discursive orders.