"Spanish is the fourth most widely spoken language in the world, and while it is the official language of twenty countries, it is also spoken as an unofficial language in many other countries as well. In the United States, it is the most common second-language. Influenced by historical colonial forces and, in the contemporary world, by an increasingly mobile and interconnected global population, Spanish has taken on distinct sociological, phonetic, and grammatical features in global Spanish-speaking populations. La Enciclopedia Concisa de Variedades de Español (The Concise Encyclopedia of Varieties of Spanish) is the first work to offer a complete overview of the varieties of spoken and written Spanish all across the world, written in Spanish to ensure accessibility to a worldwide community of Spanish-speaking scholars. Organized into two parts -- Phonological Variation and Grammatical and Lexical Variation -- this work will be prepared by an international team of editors and contributors, each writing on a specific regional variety of Spanish. Truly global in scope, the chapters consider Spanish throughout the Americas, in Europe, in Asia and Africa, and as a contact language. This text will reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on global Spanish and will thus offer the first entry-length considerations of some forms of regional Spanish, including Ladino Spanish and Spanish as a contact language of Asia"-- Provided by publisher.