Issues of Spanish language maintenance among the Equatorial Guinean community in Houston

Abstract

This chapter discusses the place of Guinean Spanish in the Spanish linguistic canon, in light of the late Hispanicization of the territory under Spanish rule and the conflicting language policies after independence. The imposition of the Spanish language was renewed in the early 1980s, spreading into the interior provinces and creating new generations of Spanish speakers with varying degrees of bilingualism and second-language acquisition features. Sociolinguistic interviews were administered to 6 members of the Equatorial Guinean community in Houston, Texas. The participants were between the ages of 23 to 47 and all of them hailed from the interior provinces of Wele-Nzas and Kié-Ntem. Partly due to economic opportunities in the oil industry, Houston attracts Equatorial Guineans for work and study, ultimately creating the largest Equatoguinean community in the United States. The research questions investigated 1) the use of Spanish with non-Guineans, 2) current linguistic domains of Spanish among the Equatorial Guinean community in Houston, and 3) attitudes towards the use of Spanish. Results revealed that all participants had used Spanish upon arriving in Houston, benefiting from the networks already established by the Latin American immigrant population. Most had integrated into Latin American social networks, having friends, classmates, and even spouses from Latin America. All participants noted that the differences in lexicon sometimes created communication issues, but some participants had also adopted some of those lexical items themselves. In addition, participants decried losing their ability to speak Fang, an autochthonous language of the interior, and that they had to resort to codeswitching to Spanish to fill lexical gaps. An important factor shaping current attitudes towards Spanish is pressure in the home country to adapt to Peninsular varieties as models of prestige. This endangers the disappearance of Guinean Spanish phonological and lexical features due to imitation, adoption, and dialect convergence with the Peninsular variety. This chapter concludes with several strategies to empower speakers of marginalized varieties to resist pressure to shift towards other varieties, especially when facing linguistic bias and discrimination.