Multilingual Realities, Monolingual Ideologies: Social Media Representations of Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States

Abstract

Little is known about how monolingual ideologies and their effects manifest in online contexts as compared to offline contexts. We conducted a corpus-assisted discourse study to investigate this, with a focus on Twitter representations of Spanish as a heritage language in the USA. We analysed two corpora (one English and one Spanish—over 30 million words), examining frequencies, collocations, concordance lines, and larger text segments. The results revealed evidence of the same ideologies found in offline contexts: normative monolingualism (drawing on the one-nation-one-language ideology and language purity ideologies) as well as raciolinguistic ideologies. We show how the semiotic processes of iconization and erasure lead to the (evidently erroneous) essentialization of Spanish heritage language speakers as a homogeneous group of un-American, racialized immigrants with broken language. This discursive creation of difference constitutes the basis for the systematic discrimination of Spanish heritage language speakers, thus reflecting and reproducing social inequality. Our findings therefore indicate the necessity of extending planning measures to protect heritage language speakers (and other minority groups) from offline contexts to online contexts.

The attitudes at the heart of multilingual family language policies

“…Using the corpus-linguistic software AntConc (Anthony, 2022), we conducted a study that broadly falls under the remit of corpus-assisted discourse studies -an approach that has, in recent years, proved to be highly insightful in research regarding language-related beliefs (e.g. Vessey, 2016;Jaworska & Themistocleous, 2018;Kircher & Kutlu, 2023). It combines corpuslinguistic procedures that effectively reveal discursive patterns in large amounts of data (Baker, 2010) with qualitative analyses that allow for nuanced meaning to be established in context (Vessey, 2017).…”

The Evolving Landscape of Spanish Language Representation in U.S. Media: From Overt to Covert Discrimination

“…Of course, we are not the first ones to point out that, at its core, U.S. entertainment media is culturally and racially centered in whiteness and white-dominant practices (e.g., Bernardi 2007;Nygaard and Lagerwey 2020;Vera and Gordon 2003). We are also not the first ones to suggest that media representation is shaped by and intertwined with linguistic ideologies that align with the interests of the dominant social group while simultaneously to the detriment of minoritized groups (e.g., Kircher and Kutlu 2023;Rosa 2016;Sánchez-Muñoz and Retis 2022). While overt discrimination and anti-Latinx biases that were common to U.S. sitcoms in the 1990s have diminished in contemporary media, we will argue that well-disguised attitudes, beliefs, and practices that function to devalue Latinxs and the Spanish language still persist.…”

Heritage Language Sebagai Identitas Etnis Anak Imigran Indonesia Di Malaysia: Studi Sosiolinguistik Dalam Pewarisan Bahasa

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