Course Description: Intro to Spanish Linguistics: Presents the principal branches of linguistic study, as it pertains to Spanish: the sound system (phonetics and phonology), the structure of words (morphology), and the structure of sentences (syntax). Additionally, attention is paid to bilingualism, especially Spanish in the US, and how Spanish is spoken/written differently by various social groups (sociolinguistics) and in various Spanish-speaking countries
Course Narrative: This course was very intriguing to me and showed me a more systematic side of observing a language. The course targeted multiple topics in linguistics starting at the simplest unit of sounds and this helped me with my pronunciation in Spanish. The course was taught in Spanish and was focused on the Spanish language. The professor compared the differences between sounds, morphemes and structures found in the English and Spanish language. From this class, I learned the typical phonemes in the Spanish language and how to scribe the different variations of the pronunciations of the words in various dialects. The concept of phonemes was tied into the anatomy of the mouth and throat and the components that make the sound production possible. It was interesting to see how the anatomy of the tongue alters work formations as each sound is produced in different regions of the mouth. Also, the class went into syntax and the order of words and how to label each part of a sentence in Spanish. This improved my metacognition of both of my languages and substantial assisted in the crystallization of my Spanish language skills. The class also went into the morphology of words and how nouns change with by simply adding suffixes or can be completely changed by changing the part of speech. Morphology goes deeper and we went into compound words and acronyms. The big group project of the class was about dialects and the dialects and my project described the phonemes, morphology, lexicons of the Rioplatense dialect. The project can be found here. MLO 1 & MLO 2 were met during this course.