Household Perspectives on Minority Language Maintenance and Loss

Investigates everyday minority language interactions within households and families in the US

This book examines minority language maintenance and loss in Spanish-speaking families in communities in the US with a low ethnolinguistic vitality for Spanish. It offers an account of the gendered nature of linguistic transmission and compares the self-perceptions, motivations and attitudes of members of two generations in the same household.

Isabel Velázquez is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her research interests include bilingualism, sociolinguistics and heritage languages, with a particular focus on Spanish in the United States.

Isabel Velázquez is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA. Her research interests include bilingualism, sociolinguistics and heritage languages, with a particular focus on Spanish in the United States.

Quite simply, without intergenerational transmission of a language within families, there is no maintenance and thus very little for linguists to study. This carefully nuanced study explores everyday linguistic choices navigated by working class Mexican immigrant mothers in the Midwest. A must-read for families raising kids bilingually and for scholars interested in the vitality of Spanish in the US.

This book is a fascinating portrayal of the struggle, resilience and triumph of Spanish language maintenance from an up-close-and-personal perspective in the US Midwest. Isabel Velázquez has gifted us with an innovative example of a storytelling sociology of language that will be emulated by researchers in years to come and that shines a bright light on the personal and lived consequences of language policy.

Masterfully written and highly compelling, this book not only foregrounds the voices of Latina mothers in Nebraska’s New Latino Diaspora, it helps us understand the important role they play in language maintenance and transmission, as well as the great cost to society when these processes are interrupted.