Hispanics in the United States : more than Spanglish

Abstract

CECILIA MONTES-ALCALÁAccording to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 35.3 millions of people who identified themselves Spanish, Hispanic or Latino in 2000 12.5% of the U.S. population.This reflects an increase in the Hispanic population by almost 58% since 1990, compared with an increase of 13.2% for the total U.S. population.The projections released by the Census in 2004 reveal an exponential increase for the Hispanic population in the next 45 years: an estimated 47.7 million by 2010, 73 million by 2030, and by 2050 Hispanics are expected to represent 24.4% of the total U.S. population with 102.5 million.1 The statistics speak for themselves.The Hispanic presence in the U.S. is obvious and so is the Spanish language.The Census 2000 reports that Spanish is the language spoken at home for 28.1 million people over 5 years old, making clear that Spanish is, unofficially, the second language in the country.The inevitable consequence is a language contact situation where both Spanish and English coexist in the lives of millions.While there should be nothing exceptional about this -a very common scenario in a world where bilingualism is the norm, rather than the exception-for some reason, the alliance of Spanish and English in the U.S. has typically created much controversy and uproar among scholars, educators, and the general public alike.From strong supporters to fatalists foreseeing the end of Spanish (and/or English), everybody has an opinion about it, and few remain indifferent.I am here referring to the so-called Spanglish, or the language allegedly spoken by millions of Hispanics in the U.S. 2 Interestingly enough, few other languages in contact appear to have caused so much debate as Spanish and English in the U.S. have done all over the world.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 12 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.