Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire

Truth in Many Tongues examines how the Spanish monarchy managed an empire of unprecedented linguistic diversity. Considering policies and strategies exerted within the Iberian Peninsula and the New World during the sixteenth century, this book challenges the assumption that the pervasiveness of the Spanish language resulted from deliberate linguistic colonization.

Daniel I. Wasserman-Soler investigates the subtle and surprising ways that Spanish monarchs and churchmen thought about language....