Speaking Spanish in the US

The Sociopolitics of Language

Janet M. Fuller,Jennifer Leeman

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788928304
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistique

This book introduces readers to basic concepts of sociolinguistics with a focus on Spanish in the US. The coverage goes beyond linguistics to examine the history and politics of Spanish in the US, the relationship of language to Latinx identities, and how language ideologies and policies reflect and shape societal views of Spanish and its speakers. Accessible to those with no linguistic background, this book provides students with a foundation in the study of language and society, and the opportunity to relate theoretical concepts to Spanish in the US in a range of contexts, including everyday speech, contemporary culture, media, education and policy. The book is a substantially revised and expanded 2nd edition of Spanish Speakers in the USA, including new chapters on the history of Spanish in the US, the demographics of Spanish in the US, and language policy; and expanded chapters on language ideologies, race, identity, media, and education.

A Spanish-language edition of this book is also available: https://www.multilingual-matters.com/page/detail/?K=9781800413931.

Chapter 1

An Introduction to Speaking Spanish in the US

Objectives

To present and explain the focus and approach of our book, provide a general background on the sociopolitics of language and provide a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.

Introduction

In the decades leading up to and following the turn of the 21st century, the presence of Spanish in the United States has become more salient. The most obvious reason is that the number (and percentage) of people who speak Spanish has increased significantly over the past few decades. According to the US Census Bureau, in 1990 roughly 17 million people aged five or older spoke Spanish at home, which was 7.5% of all persons over the age of five. That number increased to 28 million people (10.7%) in 2000 and 41 million (13.4%) in 2017 (American Community Survey 2017 one-year estimates). Spanish is by far the most common non-English language spoken in the US (the next most common language is Chinese, spoken at home by approximately 3.5 million people). These statistics, together with the long history of Spanish in what is now the US, make Spanish the de facto second language and part of the national fabric.

Even people who do not speak Spanish themselves and who do not regularly come into contact with Spanish-speakers are likely also to have become more aware of the presence of Spanish in recent decades. In other words, hand in hand with an increased number of speakers has come increased visibility of Spanish in the public sphere. Think, for example, of the expansion of Spanish language media and entertainment – including television channels, music, radio and internet programming – and the ubiquity of automated menus offering users the option of using Spanish at ATMs and on telephone customer service lines. In addition to both increased growth and increased recognition of Spanish-speaking populations in the US, these trends are also attributable to the proliferation of media outlets, audience segmentation, transnational programming, targeted and niche marketing and technological advances. In addition, outcry and activism surrounding the lack of ethnoracial diversity in television programming, Hollywood films and broader mainstream popular culture has brought increased attention to the underrepresentation of Latinxs1 and Spanish-speakers in English language media (such as the #OscarsSoWhite campaign). So too, political dialogue and campaigns invariably discuss the growth and the potential impact of the Latinx electorate. Because Latinxs are linked to Spanish in the minds of many people in the US, public discourse about Latinxs often involves attention to Spanish, even when language is not discussed explicitly. Thus, politicians routinely use Spanish in efforts to attract Latinx voters, sometimes even in primarily English language contexts such as presidential candidate debates.

While the presence, visibility and attention to Spanish have been on the upswing in recent years, people have been speaking Spanish in what is now the US for hundreds of years. In fact, two-thirds of the present-day US was previously under the control of a country where Spanish was the official language (i.e. Spain or Mexico), and Spanish has been spoken continuously by a significant segment of the population ever since (Macías, 2014). Indeed, Spanish has long been and still is ‘an American language’ (Lozano, 2018).2 In short, Spanish plays an important role in US society, whether you speak it or not, and this means that understanding what it means to speak Spanish in the US is critical to understanding the workings of US society. Further, understanding the case of Spanish in the US helps us to understand larger issues of multilingualism, so the concepts, themes and theories discussed in this book are also relevant for students who are interested in linguistic diversity more broadly.

Our primary emphasis is on social and political issues related to Spanish in the US. As such, we focus on the use and representation of Spanish rather than on its linguistic characteristics. Similarly, we are interested in language as social action, particularly the ways in which people use language to convey social and political meanings. For this extensively revised second edition of the book, we changed the title to better reflect this focus. The first part of the title is meant to emphasize speaking Spanish as an action and something that people do, rather than the language itself. The second part of the title similarly reflects our approach, and is also intended to make clear that we offer a broad introduction to the study of the sociopolitics of language, for which Spanish in the US can be considered an extended case study. In the next sections we will outline our theoretical orientation and then provide a brief overview of the chapters to come.

An Interdisciplinary Sociopolitical Approach

A key tenet of our approach is that language is inseparable from the people who speak it and the context in which it is situated; the sociopolitical context shapes the formal features of language, its use and its symbolic meaning. For this reason, our examination of speaking Spanish in the US covers a broad range of issues in language and society. Some of the questions we address are: Who speaks Spanish in the US and why? How is Spanish related to Latinx identity? How do people use language to express their identities? How are Spanish and Spanish-speakers treated in education? What public policies govern the use of Spanish and other minority languages? How is Spanish represented and utilized in the media? In order to answer these and other questions, we incorporate theory and research from a broad range of academic disciplines. Of course one of these is sociolinguistics, or the study of language in relation to society. However, the book is informed by social theory more broadly, and we also draw from anthropology, education, critical race theory, demography, history, law, media studies, political science and sociology, among other disciplines. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect or perspective, thus giving readers the opportunity to examine Spanish in the US from many different angles, even as we stress the interrelatedness of the topics we cover. In our view, it is only through this prism of perspectives that we can gain a full appreciation of what it means to speak Spanish in the US.

Just as language use is inherently social and political, the social and political world is also shaped by language. Indeed, language is at the heart of many of the issues discussed in this book, including individual and group identities, education and civil rights, as well as historical and contemporary understandings of national belonging. For this reason, our goals are not only to show how an interdisciplinary sociolinguistic approach can provide a multifaceted understanding of Spanish-speakers and Spanish in the US, but also to show how a consideration of what it means to speak Spanish can shed new light on those issues. Thus, our aim in writing this book is to make information about language in its social context accessible to readers from all academic backgrounds and interests.

Linguistic Variation and Language Varieties

One of the most striking characteristics of human language is its incredible diversity, and variation is inherent to all languages. One type of variation that is particularly salient to linguists and laypeople alike is geographic variation; differences in the ways in which people speak a shared language in different places is a frequent focus of humor and an occasional source of misunderstandings. To give just one example, carro is the word typically used for ‘car’ in Mexico and Puerto Rico, máquina is used in Cuba and coche and auto are used in other places. In Spanish, there is also significant geographic variation in subject pronouns; in some places including Mexico and the Caribbean the informal singular second person pronoun (i.e. ‘you’) is tú, while in others, including large parts of Central and South America, vos is used, and in some regions people employ both forms. (We provide more examples of geographic variation in Chapter 10.)

Not only does language vary geographically; it also varies socially. That is to say, there is also variation across social groups within the same geographic location. To return to the example of vos, in some places members of all social classes use this pronoun, while in others it is more common among people of lower socio-economic status and/or educational attainment (Lipski, 1993). Further, individual speakers don’t speak the same way all the time. Instead, they vary their language according to where they are, who they are with, what they are doing and how they want to present themselves, among other factors. Thus, there are three main types of variation: geographic, social and contextual or stylistic. Some linguists also cite a fourth type of linguistic variation, temporal variation (e.g. Penny, 2000). Temporal variation refers to language change, which is a natural aspect of all human language.

When we talk about variation being an inherent aspect of language, this means all levels of language. For instance, there is lexical variation (as in the different words for ‘car’ mentioned above), phonetic variation (such as whether the s at the end of a syllable is pronounced as ‘s’ or aspirated as ‘h’; for example the word más, which means ‘more’, might be pronounced ‘mas’ or ‘mah’), and morphosyntactic variation (such as the different pronouns and their corresponding verb forms, discussed more in later chapters). There is also variation in the social norms regarding language use.

Although laypeople sometimes use the word dialect to refer to the ways of speaking associated with specific places, linguists generally prefer the term varieties for different ways of speaking, whether these are regional varieties or social varieties associated with particular genders, ethnic groups or other social categories. We generally prefer to avoid dialect because non-linguists sometimes use it disparagingly to refer to languages with less official recognition or social prestige, such as Mayan languages in Central America.

Social Constructionism

In contemporary social theory, social constructionism is the dominant theoretical approach to social structures, identities and behaviors. The underlying idea is that social categories (such as race, gender and social class), as well as the specific characteristics that we associate with them, are not naturally occurring or fixed. Instead, even though they may seem like objective facts, they are actually constructed through the social practices and beliefs of members of society. One important aspect of this theoretical perspective is that it recognizes that social constructions, such as the boundaries between categories or the characteristics associated with them, can change. To give an example, societal ideas about the category ‘woman’ have shifted over time (e.g. What age is the boundary between ‘girl’ and ‘woman’? Must one have two X chromosomes to be a ‘woman’?), as have societal assumptions about what women are like and how they should behave.

Another central aspect of social constructionism is that our identities are not the source of our social behavior but the outcome of it. This is not how we often use the word identity in our everyday lives, so it may take a while to get used to this idea. We will discuss these ideas in great detail in Chapters 5 and 6, but social constructionism is a thread that runs through the entire book. As we noted earlier, we see language as a type of social action, and in this book we explore how people use language in the construction of their own and other people’s identities. In particular, we look at how speaking Spanish can be used to present oneself to the world – as well as how speaking Spanish impacts how people are perceived by others.

There is a constant interaction between our social behavior (including linguistic behavior) and our ideas about the world; they influence each other. To give one example: if speaking Spanish is perceived negatively, Spanish-speakers might avoid speaking it, in order to escape public stigma. However, if people speak Spanish publicly and proudly, this could contribute to a shift in perceptions of the language. The construction of the social meanings of particular language practices and the interactions between language use and perceptions of social reality are a major theme in this book.

Critical Approaches

Our final overarching theoretical theme in the study of speaking Spanish in the US is linked to critical approaches to the study of language and society. There are m...