There is growing interest in heritage language learners—individuals who have a personal or familial connection to a nonmajority language. Spanish learners represent the largest segment of this population in the United States.

In this comprehensive volume, experts offer an interdisciplinary overview of research on Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. They also address the central role of education within the field. Contributors offer a wealth of resources for teachers while proposing future directions for scholarship.

Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings together leading experts on the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression.

The book consists of three sections. The first studies the distributional patterns and conditioning forces on subject pronoun expression in four monolingual varieties—Dominican, Colombian, Mexican, and Peninsular—and makes cross-dialectal comparisons. In the second section, experts explore Spanish in contact with English, Maya, Catalan, and Portuguese to determine the extent to which each language influences this syntactic variable. The final section examines the acquisition of variable subject pronoun expression among monolingual and bilingual children as well as adult second language learners.

"[A] superb collection of studies that substantially increases our understanding, not only of variation in subject personal pronouns, but also of variable morphosyntactic processes generally.... clearly relevant to all students and scholars who wish to understand the complexities of linguistic variation and dialect contact." -- Robert Bayley, professor of linguistics, University of California, Davis

"Students and scholars will find that this volume is an essential reference in the field of Spanish language variation. If the study of final /s/ has led Spanish sociophonetics, the study of subject pronouns stars in sociogrammar. This volume presents a 3D analysis of how subject pronouns are used and acquired in Spanish. This comprehensive volume is not only of interest to those concerned with Spanish grammar, but also to anyone interested in pro-drop languages. The vision of Carvalho, Orozco and Shin has harmonized an excellent collective volume." -- Francisco Moreno-Fernández, professor of Hispanic linguistics. University of Alcala (Spain) and Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University.

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"If you seek innovative, theoretically and empirically driven research into syntactic variation, open this book and read on. Here a variationist focus on alternating sound and silence, something and nothing, or subject pronouns and nulls generates striking insights into the nature of Spanish and those who speak and learn it." -- Richard Cameron,, University of Illinois at Chicago