In-Person- Introduction to Asturian - Fridays 6pm-8:30pm

This course will allow students to become familiar with Asturian, a Romance language spoken in the northwestern part of Spain (Asturias), to approach its history and to get to know some of the particularities of Asturian culture. Through literature, music and a variety of audiovisual documents, students will be exposed to the basic principles of the syntactic, lexical and phonetic structure of Asturian and, by the end of the course, will be able to read short pieces in this language, participate in basic conversations in Asturian and learn more about this mountainous community in northern Spain.

Paquita Suárez Coalla is a fiction writer, translator, literary critic and Spanish Professor at the Modern Languages Department of the Borough of Manhattan Community College (CUNY). She completed her PhD in Spanish Philology at the University of Oviedo, and moved to New York in 1994 after teaching one year at the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México. She is the author of several books in Asturian and Spanish and has been very commited to the visibility of the Asturian language for the last two decades. She has also been involved in the cultural and literary community of Latino artists and writers in New York City and is the co-founder of the cultural organization LART (Latino Artists Round Table).