Maintenance of Spanish as a Heritage Language in a Global World

Abstract

This research focuses on the idea that a mixture of human interaction involving diverse cultural, social, and linguistic backgrounds in an era of globalization generates change in two stages. First, previous ideologies supporting assimilation require replacement with those that encourage multilingualism. Second, multilingualism creates an environment for a reconstruction of identity by second-generation bilingual, Spanish/ English speakers. The newly constructed identity emphasizes greater cosmopolitanism with adherence to a strong ethnic and linguistic identity base. This study will examine a generation that transformed the use of Spanish in the United States. This generation included the mixed Spanish-speaking population in New York’s urban areas and its surroundings. Data were collected from two groups: immigrants (i.e., first-generation Spanish speakers) and their children born in the United States, who were brought up bilingual and who, as young adults, exhibited proficiency in both languages. A point of departure in the current study was to differentiate between the two processes lived by the two groups of participants. The first group was made up of parents who came into a new country as immigrants. They needed to pursue cultural and linguistic assimilation in order to help their children integrate into the dominant local society. The second group consisted of the immigrant parents’ children who were attending college in New York State. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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