This book provides a clear and comprehensive overview of sociolinguistics and the pragmatics of oral communication in Spanish. Drawing on the research of foremost scholars in the field, Carmen Silva-Corvalan covers central concerns of variational sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language change, and language contact, with special reference to Spanish in the United States. A thoroughly revised and expanded version of Silva-Corvalan's 1989 study, Sociolinguistica: teoria y analisis, this book includes rigorous quantitative and qualitative analyses, and it documents such ongoing issues as language change in monolingual and bilingual communities, the nature of phonetic and syntactic variation, and modes of data collection and analysis. New topics include pragmatics and discourse analysis, discourse markers, and sociolinguistics and education. Written in Spanish, Sociolinguistica y pragmatica del espanol will be welcomed by students and sociolinguistic researchers, who will find in it the ideal overview of the social aspects of language as well as a wealth of empirical data on Spanish linguistics. Complete with exercises at the end of each chapter and a convenient subject index, this book is appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of Spanish throughout the world.