Introduction

Abstract

Languages have always fascinated me, as a young child growing up in rural Vermont I used to ask my neighbor, Edwin Nelson, to tell me stories just to hear the sound of his gurgly, almost unintelligible manner of speech. As I have grown older, my interests in speech have grown as well, and I have become intrigued by the efforts of a number of writers who work to capture the beauty and magic of rural dialects within ~'_" the framework of contemporary wr i tten language. Perhaps nowhere in the world have artists, musicians, and writers turned to popular culture as a medium of expression as they have in nineteenth and twentieth century Spain; two concrete examples being Segovia's introduction of the guitar, a folk instrument, into the realm of classical music, and Garcia Lorca's renaissance of the Romance, with his collection, El Romancero Gitano.