Volume 2024, Issue 286 - Special Issue: Languages in Modern Day Puerto Rico; Issue Editors: Katherine Morales Lugo, Kevin S. Carroll and Simón D. Campos

This introduction to our special issue surveys some of the current work undertaken by scholars on the island of Puerto Rico and abroad that document the language forms, uses, and ideologies of language in the U.S. territory. We provide the “total linguistic fact” (Silverstein 1985) of what it means to speak English and Spanish in Puerto Rico, Census projections of language use, self-reported data and actual documented work on the form and social uses of languages. We provide the sociohistorical context of the history of both Spanish and English on the Island, language policies across time, and how these have played out and been contested in real time. Setting the scene for our special issue, we ask our readers to think critically on the status of contact languages in globalized times, ideological shifts of language practices, and the intimate ties between language and identity.

This study evaluates the effects of gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and school of origin on students’ language performance. We used data from the test Measurement and Evaluation for Educational Transformation (META, for its acronym in Spanish). We analyzed the results of 21,425 eleventh-grade students from 194 public schools in Puerto Rico. The results suggest that there is a significant relationship between students’ gender and their English skills. Female students achieved higher levels of language performance than male students. There was also a significant relationship between SES and language performance. Students with a more advantaged socioeconomic status showed better language outcomes than students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. The socioeconomic composition of the school was found to play an important factor in the linguistic performance of students: a diverse socioeconomic composition is related to better school performance and the narrowing of language disparities. We propose that the composition of schools’ student bodies is a factor that educational linguistic policy makers in Puerto Rico should give more consideration to, as it could have a key role in ameliorating English language attainment and education in general in Puerto Rico’s public schools.

This article examines the language mixing practices of Puerto Rican adolescents in various social media platforms through a framework of code-mixing and socioindexicality. Over a twelve-week period, I collected samples of online text messages from six island bilinguals of an elite community of practice (CofP) and studied the way their unique socializations in private schools and bilingual universities contributed to the ways they made sense of languages, their social meaning potentials, and uses across online interactions. Against the meaningful backdrop of colonial-dynamics of Spanish and English in Puerto Rico, the paper examines how ideologies of “nationalism” and “race” get reproduced or challenged through bilingual practice, and English takes up an equally important role for the construction of social identities in the interactions of youth. Additionally, the study discusses bilingual styles that have been enregistered as social styles specific to technological mediums of communication and youth registers, Puerto Rican netspeak , as well as emerging social styles that indicate queer gender identity, or non-binary practices . In this sense, I offer a description of the island bilingual that is dynamic, strategic, and metapragmatically conscious of the purist ideologies of Spanish in Puerto Rico, as well as the indexical potentials of appropriating variable gender forms in Spanish, bilingual language practices, and netspeak registers towards the negotiation of identities in technological interaction. The way bilinguals relate to the languages at their disposal can provide a window to impending questions on the perceived coloniality of English, potential changes in language ideologies and uses, and whether and how language policies may shift to meet current demographic attitudes and language uses of contemporary Puerto Ricans.

Transnational movement to and from the United States is a social phenomenon that impacts all aspects of life in Puerto Rico. This includes language and education for minors who move back and forth between both locations. The present investigation focuses on the educational experiences of first-generation Puerto Rican transnational students in the public education system in Puerto Rico. The data presented are part of a larger ethnographic study conducted in two public schools in western Puerto Rico with transnational students and the analysis encompasses the language policies established for this student population and resources available to them as they adjusted to a new educational setting. Although translingual practices were the most effective source of support observed for participants in the study this option was not always available. Due to the lack of an efficient support system for transnational students in schools this responsibility was relayed to teachers and their decisions were primarily informed by their own language ideologies and their life experiences.

Resumen Este estudio combina conocimientos sociohistóricos y lingüísticos para arrojar luz sobre la naturaleza y el origen del español de Loíza (EL), una variedad afrohispánica hablada en Loíza, Puerto Rico, por los descendientes de los africanos traídos a esta región para trabajar como esclavos durante el período colonial. El presente trabajo analiza la evolución de esta variedad y sus implicaciones para los estudios criollos. Al hacerlo, desafía la postura que presentaría ciertas características contemporáneas del EL y otras variedades afrohispánicas como las huellas de una etapa criolla anterior. Por lo tanto, este artículo contribuye al prolongado “Spanish Creole Debate” ( Debate de los Criollos del Español ) al proporcionar nueva información sobre una variedad afropuertorriqueña hasta ahora poco estudiada.

The present study examines the use of the Spanish imperfect progressive in Puerto Rican Spanish to determine if this construction is influenced by English, or if it is responding to internal grammaticalization processes as defined as the process in which a lexical item acquires a grammatical function. 33 Puerto Ricans that lived in Puerto Rico completed a sociolinguistic interview and two retell tasks. The English influence hypothesis is discarded since the results indicate that the imperfect progressive is slowly grammaticalizing as a past imperfective, which explains why it can be used with all verbs classes and to express habitual events. Pre-existing work in the field proposes that progressive constructions can develop as imperfective markers. This finding supports the present progressive hypothesis which states that it grammaticalizes from a locative to a progressive expression, and later develops a habitual meaning. Finally, it is possible that some cases of language variation and change are due to grammaticalization processes, language contact, or language contact induced grammaticalization.

Both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts are routinely used for writing in Serbian. In existing ideological discourses, using Cyrillic is associated by some with Serbian ethnic authenticity and loyalty to nationhood, but by others with conservatism, Russian-leaning politics and dangerous ethnonationalism. For some, using Latin is associated with cosmopolitanism and a western-leaning internationalisation, but for others with an assault on Serbian heritage, values and tradition. In this context, with which script do Serbians today most closely affiliate and does established ideological discourse actually inform script choices? By seeing this affiliation as linguistic citizenship, the paper analyses survey data and metalinguistic explanations about which script Serbians choose to represent their own names as the most personal of identities. The data show that while some simply write their name in either script depending on habit, younger Serbians, and Serbians outside metropolitan areas, seemingly bias Cyrillic for ethnonationalist reasons as discourse predicts. However, especially revealing is that linguistic citizenship among older Serbians is sooner mediated by lingering notions of Yugoslavia and Serbo-Croatian as country and language that no longer exist but once indexed ideals of equality and harmony in the region.

The inquisitorial feature of Chinese criminal trials requires active participation from defendants in courtroom interaction. To fully participate in the trial proceedings, defendants who cannot speak the language of the court have to rely on the language support offered by interpreters. Court interpreters are expected to facilitate language minorities’ participation and communication in the proceedings, but their mediation changes the dynamics of courtroom interaction. This paper aims to explore how the use of interpreting impacts the participation status of English-speaking defendants in Chinese criminal trials. Adopting participation framework as the primary analytical tool, drawing upon discourse analysis of seven authentic recordings of bilingual trials and fieldwork observations, this study empirically shows that as a result of zero renditions and non-renditions in the triadic communication, the participation role of the defendant changes from being a direct addressee to the position of a non-participant, which results in them a marginalised status. The role alteration, which is associated with the court interpreting practice, including the sole use of consecutive interpreting, puts the defendant at a disadvantage, undermining their participation rights in the trial proceedings. In a way, the defendant becomes a de facto stand-by participant in the interpreter-mediated courtroom interaction.