Spanish in Context - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2009

In a census-related study on language maintenance among the Hispanic/Latino population in the southwest United States, Hudson, Hernández-Chávez and Bills (1995) stated that, given negative correlations between language maintenance and years of education and per capita income, “educational and economic success in the Spanish origin population are purchased at the expense of Spanish language maintenance in the home” (1995: 179). While census figures from 1980 make this statement undeniable for the Southwest, the recent growth of the Spanish-language population in the United States, which has grown by a factor of ~2.5 over the last twenty years, begs a reexamination of these correlations. A recent study on the state of Colorado (McCullough & Jenkins 2005) found a correlational weakening, especially with regard to the relationship between language maintenance and median income.
 The current study follows the model set forth by Hudson et al. (1995) in examining the interrelationship between the measures of count, density, language loyalty and retention based on 2000 census data, as well as the relationship between these metrics and socioeconomic and demographic variables, including income and education. While some relationships existed in 2000 much in the same way that they did in the 1980 data, especially with regard to count and density, the measures of loyalty and retention saw marked reductions in their correlations with social variables.

Many researchers investigating the maintenance and loss of non-English languages in the U.S. base their work on fairly homogeneous language groups, those who have immigrated here during a relatively restricted period of time. The European-origin migrations during the early decades of the twentieth century represent these types of language communities. However, Spanish is not strictly an immigrant language when compared to other non-English, non-indigenous languages. It shares in common with indigenous languages the fact that it was spoken in what is now the U.S. before the arrival of English speakers. However, it is unlike indigenous languages in that it continues to be reinforced by the arrival of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Given the complexities of this bilingual population, the purpose of the present article is to examine the variables that set apart the Spanish-speaking populations of the U.S., and particularly of the Southwest, in order to provide a revised model for language maintenance and shift that goes beyond the limitations of classic intergenerational models.

Within the discussion of the dynamics of Spanish language maintenance and shift to English in the southwestern U.S., this article takes a magnifying glass to one Southwest state in particular, Arizona, and the societal pressures that impact language maintenance and shift. Rather than focus on speakers’ language use across domains or attitudes about Spanish and English, this article examines the wider sociopolitical context of language use through the lens of ethnolinguistic vitality and subjective ethnolinguistic vitality, and from the perspective of the competing forces of language panic and language pride.

This study examines the beliefs held by a group of adult Spanish-English bilinguals from El Paso, Texas regarding the vitality of Spanish in their community and the ways in which their own experience of being bilingual on the US-Mexico border has influenced their perceptions of the benefits and costs of fostering Spanish development in their children. Results show that parents’ positive attitudes toward Spanish did not translate into the investment of time and resources to foster Spanish development in their children nor, ultimately, into the use of Spanish by their children. Households where the mother perceived herself as having an active role in her children’s linguistic development and where she perceived both Spanish and a bilingual/biethnic identity as desirable for her children’s future were also households where children were expected to speak Spanish at home and where more opportunities for linguistic development were present. The author argues that these beliefs must be understood as a consequence of the underlying tensions present in the community, where intense linguistic and interethnic contact takes place every day.

The growing amount of research in heritage languages (HL) consistently suggests that HL learners are a diverse population with language abilities that span across the whole spectrum of the bilingual range (Valdés 2001). Receptive bilinguals, sometimes called passive bilinguals, are at one end of this bilingual range, almost at the verge of culminating the language shift towards English monolingualism. This population of HL students has received scant attention from HL programs and researchers alike. The present study fills this gap in the literature by focusing specifically on receptive bilinguals of different generations enrolled in Spanish classes at a large university in the southwestern United States. It seeks to provide insights into their cultural and linguistic profile so as to begin to understand the factors that have influenced their current Spanish use and linguistic abilities in the language.

Several studies have looked into the different uses of indicative and subjunctive in the Spanish of heritage speakers. Generally speaking, research seems to show that mood simplification is taking place in heritage speakers’ Spanish. Mood and modal alternation is of particular interest to research on language change and contact due to the wide variation in the ability of heritage speakers to produce and apply it. (This is, in part, no doubt, due to their embodiment of a complex relationship between syntactic form, semantics and pragmatic meaning.) The present study examines the use of the indicative/subjunctive in the written and oral Spanish production of one group of heritage language speakers to find out which similarities/differences can be found when compared to monolingual speakers and what this says about how their linguistic systems are configurated.