Reviewed by Isabel Álvarez, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

This volume includes twenty-one papers on the topic of Spanish in contact with other languages. These papers were presented at the XX Conference on Spanish and Portuguese in Contact with Other Languages, which took place in Chicago in March of 2005.

Part 1, which focuses on ‘Heritage Spanish in the United States’, includes three papers. Carmen Silva-Corvalán and Noelia Sánchez-Walker show the development of autonomous syntactic systems in bilingual first language acquisition. Silvina A. Montrul discusses mood distinctions and concludes that second generation speakers may not have the ability to discriminate semantically between the subjunctive and the indicative. Francisco Moreno Fernández studies the lexicon of Hispanic teenagers in Chicago.

Part 2 is devoted to ‘Education and policy issues’. Maria M. Carreira offers different strategies to support instruction in mixed-ability classes. Lourdes Torres discusses ways of enhancing bilingualism in both island and stateside Puerto Ricans. The last two papers are devoted to policy issues in Spain: Manuel Triano-López studies the de-Castilianization of Valencian, and Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez examines the nature of the standardized form of Galician and its role in Galician society.

The papers in Part 3 deal with ‘Pragmatics and contact’. Janet M. Fuller, Minta Elsman, and  Kevan Self shed light on the conversational structure of bilingual discourse. Ana Sánchez-Muñoz examines the style and register of college heritage speakers of Spanish. Linda Ohlson uses the Spanish-English lyrics of bachata songs to show that codeswitching may be used as a stylistic tool. Marilyn S. Manley discusses the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic markers in Quechua and the influence these markers have on Andean Spanish. Luis A. Ortiz López investigates double negation along the Dominican Republic/Haitian border and concludes that the presence of double negation in Dominican Spanish is not the result of contact with Haitian Creole.

Part 4, the largest in this volume, is devoted to ‘Variation and contact’. Anna María Escobar shows that colonial bilingual documents cannot be used as evidence of early stages in the formation of the Andean Spanish dialect. Kimberly L. Geeslin and Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes examine copula use in Galician Spanish. They conclude that copula use across the Spanish-speaking world is constrained by similar linguistic features. The next three articles focus on the Spanish spoken in New York City: Ricardo Otheguy and Ana Celia Zentella discuss possible reasons for the increasing use of overt subject pronouns in second generation speakers, Nydia Flores-Ferrán shows how tense and aspect are conditioned by the segment of the narrative being recounted, and Rafael Orozco studies the factors that constrain the expression of futurity in the Spanish of New York Colombians. The last two chapters look at two contact situations in the south: Jessi Elena Aaron and José Esteban Hernández show how contact between Salvadoran and Mexican Spanish in Houston has affected the /s/ reduction distribution in Salvadorans, and Michelle L. Salazar shows that the northern New Mexico/southern Colorado variety of Spanish exhibits the same innovative uses of estar ‘to be’ found in other Spanish dialects.

Part 5, which includes the last two chapters of this volume, is devoted to ‘Bozal Spanish’, a pidginized language used by African slaves. John M. Lipski reviews four sources of authentic data that allow a more realistic reconstruction of bozal Spanish. William M. Megenney analyzes the language used in some Cuban and Brazilian neo-African literature and demonstrates how bozal was incorporated into these writings.