This paper documents attitudes toward English, Spanish, and Spanish-English Code-switching in Juarez, Mexico, the oldest and largest city along the Mexican–U.S. border. It refutes the finding of related work which has shown two distinct orientations – integrative and instrumental – toward English as a foreign and as a second language, but supports various assumptions regarding the relationship between attitudes and use and the impact of the local milieu on language attitudes. It also explores attitudes toward correctness and sentiments of language loyalty, and highlights the influence of language loyalty on perceptions of Spanish-English Code-switching. Eighty-five Juarez residents were interviewed. (Language attitudes, so-ciolinguistics, Hispanic linguistics, border studies, ethnic studies, Latin American studies)
The model of historical evolution proposed in the introduction is tested using the case of New Spain as the quintessential region where all the sociolinguistic phenomena occurred. Sociolinguistic strati®cation Ð an undeniable reality stemming from social strati®cation Ð is conceived both as a substage of a more encompassing phase that extends throughout the colony, and as a major predictor of language policy, bilingualism, diglossia, and language shift. It is proposed that an initial period of koineization took place in the ®rst few decades after the arrival of Europeans in Mesoamerica, where speakers of diverse peninsular dialects interacted with one another and with speakers of Amerindian languages, Nahuatl being the most important of all. Nahuatl/Spanish language contact also took place during the same initial period, but reciprocal transfers are not reported until the more intense phase of diversi®cation. During this intermediate stage, members of the Nahuatl-speaking elite were exposed to Spanish and learned to read and write. At the level of pronunciation, the system of one language is interspersed in the other, whereas lexical borrowing is likewise bilateral. Although Spanish was politically dominant in New Spain, Nahuatl remained the most widely spoken language of the New Spanish capital, where a few thousand Spaniards took control over the``center'' of the Great Tenochtitlan. A minority of Spanish speakers promptly built institutions that rationalized their priviliges and the prestige of the transplanted language. While there is no data demonstrating that bilingualism was massive or widespread, sucient information is extrapolated from dierent sources indicating that in the mid-eighteenth century there were a good number of Nahuatl/Spanish bilinguals who experienced a shift to Spanish. Sociolinguistic strati®cation in New Spain was polarized early in the colony due to the cultivation of various literary genres starting in the mid-sixteenth century.
This paper is concerned with the theoretical and pedagogical issues emanating from the practice of teaching Spanish to Hispanic bilingual college students. First, it addresses the distinction between standard and dialect and the educational implications of this dichotomy. Second, it addresses the major structural dissimilarities between standard Spanish and the two most important varieties of U.S. Spanish (i.e., Chicano and Puerto Rican). Finally, using current sociolinguistic theory, it makes suggestions to teach the standard language to speakers of Chicano and Puerto Rican Spanish. It presents examples of dialect drawn from students enrolled in Spanish for Native Speakers courses.
The circumstances that intervened in the formation of the standard variety of Spanish in the American continent included the essentially urban character of the Conquest, the social and educational background of early immigrants from Spain, the prestige of Spanish in the sixteenth century, and the strong positive attitudes of the conquistadores toward their mother tongue. This paper outlines the most relevant phonological features of Castilian Spanish for the history of Spanish-American dialects, the traditional dichotomy of cultured and popular speech modes, and the impact of the Spanish written norm on researchers' perceptions of Spanish-American dialects. Addressing the linguistic and sociopsychological gaps between the standard variety of Spanish and its respective marginal dialects in the American subcontinent, and highlighting the historically perceived hiatus between mainstream and popular Spanish, it assumes: (1) the existence of a relatively homogeneous dialect used in the most formal spheres of public interaction in modern urban communities, and (2) the progressive emergence of a "rurban" dialect with features of both educated and noneducated Spanish. Finally, given the rapid structural changes of Latin American society in general, it proposes new directions for the study of social and geographic dialects in the major urban centers of the continent.Over the past two decades in Latin America, there has been an increasing interest in issues concerned with the language variety spoken in the most important capital cities of the continent. One of the commitments to research since the mid1960s has thus been the study of the norma culta (standard), spoken by middle-class, college-educated adults inhabiting capital cities (Lavandera 1974b). The international project entitled Programa Coordinado de la Norma Lingüística de las Principales Ciudades de Iberoamérica y España has been a fruitful one, and several volumes have appeared in different parts of the Spanish-speaking world. 1 The impact on the de lineation of research in Spanish-speaking communities throughout the world is, however, not commensurate with this prolific bibliography. This is not to imply that the commendable results of first-rate scholars have been totally neglected by the community of researchers interested in Latin American (LA) varieties of Spanish; on the contrary, the project has inspired many similar regional and national studies. However, in spite of such acceptance, one finds that the orien tation of research in LA urban varieties has been uneven and diffuse and that a number of equally renowned scholars have taken an opposing stance. 2 For his encouragement and support during the writing of this paper, I am indebted to Dr. Ernesto Barrera, former chair of Spanish and Portuguese, SDSU. For valuable suggestions in form and content, I am grateful to my colleagues Thomas Case,
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