Volume 9, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Heritage languages and socialization: the case of Spanish; Guest Editors: Francisco Moreno-Fernández and Óscar Loureda Lamas

The core goal of this article consists of raising new questions about the status of Spanish in bilingual contexts. The starting point is that we observe tremendous variance in the repertoire, competence, and use of Spanish by bilinguals across the globe: from very fluent bilinguals to subtractive bilinguals (also known as heritage speakers) to overhearers, who heard Spanish in the background growing up but did not actively speak it. Setting the overhearer type aside, I contend that the other types of bilinguals meet the criteria for native speakerhood, which is nowadays understood in a more flexible and nuanced way than in more traditional variants of sociolinguistics. The discussion centers around the issues of the baseline (the language that serves as input to the bilingual upbringing), minimal exposure required for the acquisition of a language as a native one, and sociolinguistic models that allow for discontinuity in a given language community.

This paper offers an estimation of the number of Spanish speakers in Europe in order to analyze the demographic dynamics according to their migratory backgrounds. This demolinguistic approach allows us to quantify this group of Spanish heritage speakers and outline their demographic and linguistic profiles. Through analyzing specific family, social, educational, and geographic settings, this paper identifies a heterogeneous group of 1.7 million Spanish heritage speakers. Moreover, we discuss the social dynamics involved in the intergenerational transmission of the Spanish language in different contexts: spaces in which Spanish is an official language and in which different geographic varieties coexist, and spaces beyond the national borders of predominantly Spanish-speaking countries. In the latter, the demolinguistic analysis suggests that barely a third have been linguistically socialized in environments favorable to the intergenerational transmission of the Spanish language.

Family and educational institutions are the main centers of socialization in heritage language. Beyond the communicative and learning dynamics that take place in both environments, linguistic socialization also depends to a large extent on the relationship of families with educational spaces. The aim of this paper is to discuss families’ expectations regarding the intergenerational transmission of Spanish and to explore their attitudes towards heritage language and educational programs in Germany. For this purpose, the results of an exploratory study based on surveys will be presented to compare the main arguments justifying Spanish-speaking families’ decision to include heritage language courses or bilingual education spaces in their family language management in the German context. The analysis of the perception of families and their attitudes shows that the positive valuation of the family and instrumental dimension of heritage language influence families to include bilingual programs or heritage language classes in their family language management.

Spanish has a considerable presence in the socio-cultural mosaic of Israel, a country made up of ethnolinguistic communities from different parts of the world. However, language policy has not always integrated the study of languages as a source of interculturality. This paper summarizes the results of the first stage of a broader investigation into the linguistic practices and strategies developed by Spanish-speaking families to acquire and preserve the migrant language, as a way of transmitting the heritage, identity and culture of the country of origin in the face of the influence of the majority language, Hebrew. To this end, individual interviews were conducted to record specific data on the Spanish-speaking community and, particularly, the presence of Spanish as a vehicular language through the identification of sociocultural references among families who arrived under the Law of Return and include members who are 15 years of age or younger. The surveys reflect that the interest and affective need to preserve the language are main motivators in these Spanish-speaking families. These conclusions served as a basis for in the afore-mentioned group were considered relevant conclusions within the broad objectives of the larger project, which seeks to create a program of intergenerational activities to develop respectful bilingualism and strengthen the community of practice as a space to build the mutant puzzle between the inherited and acquired identity of children and youth.

This paper aims to contribute to research and policy that supports Latino children in early education regarding their transition into the school system and their bilingual development. It presents the results of a one-year longitudinal ethnographic study of four Latino children starting school at a transitional bilingual kindergarten in the Boston area. The analysis identifies dynamics and trends at the micro and meso levels that show that Spanish use and development in Latino children cannot be fully understood and supported if we consider it an individual ability instead of an organic and intrinsic component of broader dynamic socialization, emotional, and academic processes (such as the transition to school) of which English is also a part and in which parents and teachers participate. Recommendations for designing and implementing comprehensive programs to engage Latino families and educators to support transitions, bilingual development, and academic performance in young Latino children are presented.

In recent decades, the increasingly blurred boundaries between work, home, and various other spheres of social life have brought greater complexity to the notion of the workplace. In many contemporary workplace environments in the U.S., the demand for Spanish is unequivocal and uncontested; in some areas, Spanish is a de facto requirement. Because U.S. Latinx bilinguals show a broad social preference for English and lack formal education in Spanish, they may feel challenged to meet workplace language demands in Spanish, particularly where specialized vocabulary or formal registers are concerned. Carried out in the highly dynamic bilingual context of Miami, this study posed the following questions: Do adult heritage speakers of Spanish in Miami – where a broad majority of the population speaks Spanish – appear to draw linguistic benefits from participation in the local labor market? Does this participation have the potential to curtail language loss? To answer these questions, semi-structured interviews were carried out with heritage speakers of Spanish in Miami. Their personal accounts of adult heritage language socialization suggest that Spanish use in the U.S. workplace is a highly situated, localized discourse practice that depends largely on the individuals involved. Despite the uncontested value of Spanish in Miami and the demand to speak it in most workplace settings, conscious choice to do so remains with the individual. The participants’ related experiences reveal the importance of speaker agency and manifest the potential of workplace environments to engender more positive orientations toward Spanish as well as active use of the language during adulthood.

This paper explores from a qualitative and quantitative approach, the complex interactions between second dialect accommodation or acquisition, language socialization, ideologies, family language policies, and identity, among Argentinean immigrants living in Malaga, Spain ( n  = 72). We found that family language policies – and more specifically mothers’ language policies and their stances towards both varieties in contact – shape their children’s development, connect with their formal school success, determine D1 maintenance, and even affect identity projection. We also found discrepancies between conservative family language policies and linguistic production: what families try to do with language does not always match their own linguistic performance. Through the analysis of different language components – phonological, morpho-syntactic, and lexical – we conclude that linguistic accommodation or second dialect acquisition does not always follow a linear path to assimilation, but it is related to early stages of exposure and formal education in the D2 community (optimal age acquisition period), takes place to improve mutual intelligibility, derives from both unconscious and conscious decisions to change D1, and allows speakers to showcase different identities through accommodation or divergence.