ISSN: 1750-8649 (print)
ISSN: 1750-8657 (online)
Sociolinguistic
Studies
Review
Español en Estados Unidos y otros contextos de contacto.
Sociolingüística, ideología y pedagogía. Manel Lacorte and
Jennifer Leeman (eds) (2009)
Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert. pp. 406.
ISBN 978-84-8489-424-7
Reviewed by Kim Potowski
This 400-page volume is the outcome of the 21st conference on Spanish in the
U.S. and in contact with other languages held at George Mason University in
2007. It is also the 11th conference volume to appear from this event (see http://
spanishintheus.org/ for a complete history) and was edited by its co-organizers,
Manel Lacorte from the University of Maryland and Jennifer Leeman from
George Mason University. It consists of 17 chapters, divided into three sections: Contacto lingüístico (6 chapters), Ideologías lingüísticas (6 chapters) and
Pedagogía y política educativa (5 chapters). Of the 17 chapters, 12 focus on
Spanish in the U.S.
In the section on outcomes of language contact, both Claudia Parodi and
Carol Klee examine Spanish phonology in contact with indigenous American
languages. While Parodi shows historical processes of contact with several
varieties of Spanish, Klee shows that, in the past 30 years, young people in the
Andes, the Yucatan and in Paraguay where contact varieties are spoken have
been adopting non-contact variants, particularly due to internal migration
and globalized communication. In the final phonological study of this section,
Jim Michnowicz argues that intervocalic voiced stops (the most noticeable
phonological feature of the Yucatan) may be not be due to direct influence
Affiliation
The University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
email: [email protected]
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©2009, equinox publishing
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from Mayan, but rather to shifting second language speakers of Spanish. The
evidence supporting this conclusion includes the fact that a similar pattern
obtains in some varieties of Andean and Central American Spanish. Similarly
to Klee’s conclusions about contact varieties, Michnowicz notes that younger
speakers are ‘adapt[ing] to pan-Hispanic standardized norms’ and strongly
prefer fricatives, and that as a result this feature of Yucatan Spanish may disappear within a few generations. Both chapters, then, point to some form of
globalization as the motivator for linguistic change.
The remaining three chapters in this section look at syntax; the first two
specifically at object pronouns. Analyzing Spanish in contact with Haitian
Creole, Luis Ortiz-López finds that bilinguals on the border use subject pronouns more than Dominican monolinguals, perhaps due to the fact that Haitan
Creole is not a pro-drop language. Similarly, Naomi Lapidus Shin and Ricardo
Otheguy find that second generation Spanish speakers in New York City use
more pronouns, even when the subject does not change from verb to verb;
however, in third person singular verbs, these speakers look more like newly
arrived Spanish speakers, likely because establishing clear referents is more
complicated in the third person where competing subjects are possible. Finally,
MaryEllen García analyzed two interviews with Chicano Spanish speakers and
found that codeswitching increased as the interview proceeded, positing that
this is due to increased familiarity leading naturally to the informal community
norm of codeswitching. This is an interesting conclusion that would be greatly
strengthened with an analysis of a larger corpus of interviews conducted only
by fluent heritage Spanish-speaking codeswitchers.
I would like to focus the remainder of this review on sections 2 and 3, which
include chapters on ideologies and pedagogy/education. Such topics are only
recently appearing with such strong presence in conference volumes resulting
from this biannual event, which is a positive trend for the field. The first of
these two sections, Ideologías lingüísticas, proceeds thematically from chapters about Spain’s international linguistic efforts (Paffe and Mar-Molinero) to
examinations of the role of printed Spanish grammars and discourse (Villa;
Train; Fernández-Gibert; Colombi). Martínez’ chapter on ideologies related to
healthcare services fits fine here, although its underlying assertion that local
practices are at odds with federal legislation makes it closely related to Morán
(more on this later) and also thematically affiliated with section 3.
To start section 2, I find Darren Paffey and Clare Mar-Molinero’s arguments
about Spain’s supposed linguistic imperialism and its detrimental effects to be
unconvincing attempts to find mountains in molehills. The authors begin by
insisting that, through the 72 different locations of the Instituto Cervantes (IC),
the Real Academia of Spain imposes its variety on the rest of the world. While
most full time IC instructors are Spaniards, it is not a requirement, and only
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30% of all IC instructors are full time. Of the remaining IC instructors, about
25% are from the Americas, meaning that in total almost 20% of IC instructors
are not Spaniards. More importantly, although instructors from Spain will
certainly speak their native variety while teaching and thus expose students
to it, we cannot assume that, for example, IC students in Brazil will sound like
madrileños when they likely have much greater contact with Argentines and
other neighbors in Latin America. The authors also complain that the IC has
begun seeking to accredit Spanish language institutions in other parts of the
world, but fail to show that these institutions are forced to adopt a curriculum
or instructors from Spain. Overall the complaint is that the IC ‘packages and
sells the Spanish language on behalf of the Spanish government, ‘ensuring its
global spread and status as a language of international communication’ (p. 169).
What, exactly, is the problem with this? Many scholars working on Spanish
in the U.S. are thrilled to see attempts to raise the status of Spanish – and the
authors haven’t shown that this has harmed anyone’s linguistic behavior or
self-esteem. They instruct the reader to consult Mar-Molinero (2006a) on the
purportedly ominous goals of the teaching materials of the Cervantes, but the
onus of proof here should rest with the authors, not the reader.
As for the IC’s publication of the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, the
authors complain that corporate executives in transnational companies use it as
a style guide. In the subsequent paragraph on collaborations between businesses
and the Spanish government, the authors argue that large energy, aviation,
insurance, and banking industries have a commercial interest in the spread
of Spanish and are ‘invest[ing] in opening doors for linguistic spread.’ What
plausible role does the Diccionario… de dudas play in this goal? The authors
appear to believe that big businesses from Spain throwing money around will
lead to significant changes in international linguistic behaviors (Mexico City
or Quito communities shifting to Madrid phonology and lexicon, perhaps?);
scholarship on language maintenance and revival tells us that the issue is far
more complex. A much more interesting analysis would be to show what,
exactly, the Diccionario considers ‘incorrect’ Spanish. There is a great deal of
overlap in the Spanishes of the world; even if the IC’s publication (or instructors) misguidedly promoted ‘torta’ where Mexico uses ‘pastel,’ this is about as
trivial as the authors’ use of amongst and whilst where I use among and while.
Another insufficiently supported complaint includes that the Enciclopedia
del español en el mundo has changed its name from ‘report’ to ‘encyclopedia’,
‘suggest[ing] an exhaustive authority on knowledge about global Spanish.’ Do
the authors find shortcomings in this work? Is there good reason why it is not,
in fact, encyclopedic in nature? If an institution in Argentina or Mexico were to
publish such an enciclopedia, would the authors have the same reaction? To be
sure, there is room for pointed criticism that the IC’s Enciclopedia del español
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en los Estados Unidos, for example, fails to include any entry by a U.S. Latino
author. But on the use of the term enciclopedia, the authors do not substantiate
their complaint. Nor do they prove that the Congreso Internacional de la Lengua
Española, organized every three years to discuss the status of the Spanish language worldwide, never invited more than one member of the North American
Spanish language academy in 2007, only that its Director was the only member
in attendance. 1 In other words, in the absence of any proof of exclusion, the
authors assume exclusion. Not everyone invited to an international event will
show up; U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, for example, was invited to
the 2010 meeting but had to decline. As a side note, since the goal of all language
academies is to apply the brakes to linguistic change, the authors should treat
the Spanish Academies in the Americas with the same suspicious caution as
that of Spain. In summary, Paffey and Mar-Molinero’s shouts of foul play ring
hollow. Yes, it is probably true that Spain seeks to maintain a role of primus inter
pares even though numerically it constitutes just 10% of the Spanish-speaking
world. But blaming a Spanish language style guide for potentially undermining
indigenous languages in Latin America, as the authors do in their conclusions,
is attacking a straw man.
Daniel Villa’s chapter proposes the term ‘General Spanish’ (GS) instead of
‘Standard Spanish,’ an idea that I support enthusiastically. He repeatedly refers
to studies of U.S. Spanish that ‘often’ use the term ‘non-standard,’ including an
author who quotes a 1923 textbook. Yet my sense is that the use of this term has
decreased considerably in recent scholarship, so citations of recent uses of this
derogatory term would have been useful. It is, however, a valid criticism that
many Spanish textbooks reveal a Eurocentric ideology in listing ‘vosotros’ as
if it were in general use; debates still crop up quite regularly on online teacher
forums such as FL Teach about ‘whether to teach ‘vosotros’.’ The goal of producing a grammar of GS, according to Villa, is to identify the linguistic elements
that allow Argentineans to communicate with Nicaraguans, Chileans with
New Mexicans, etc., in an effort to separate regional variants from those found
throughout the Spanish-speaking world. I wondered how this grammar would
classify uses like ‘comistes’, ‘La persona que estaba supuesto de hablar con’ or
the examples Villa cites in the Appendix such as ‘Mi papá fue nacido aquí’ or
‘todo mi vida’. Villa’s chapter is related to that of Train, who acknowledges that
‘any account of Spanish for the purposes of teaching, learning, or research risks
entailing some form of symbolic violence as a basis for pedagogic action and
authority’ (p. 204). However, this is true not just for Spanish but for all languages taught in school: oral and written language are different, and the variety
of prestige is usually that spoken by the socioeconomic classes of prestige. If a
main purpose of formal schooling is to equip people to function in wider society, I have a hard time accepting arguments like Ducar’s (later in the volume)
review: potowski 491
that U.S. varieties of Spanish are ‘marginalize[d]… by defining appropriate and
inappropriate contexts for their use.’ Do these authors – all of whom, by the way,
are in the relatively comfortable position of possessing highly prestigious forms
of academic discourse in both English and Spanish – argue that teachers should
simply tell Juanita that her community uses the perfectly valid form [fill in the
blank with a stigmatized variant] and that it’s perfectly fine for academic essays
and job interviews? Or maybe they should not point it out at all? This might
spare Juanita the discomfort of feeling socioeconomic inequalities playing out
through language and having to learn alternate forms of expression, but at least
holds the promise of Juanita one day publishing something in Spanish alongside
these authors. We do students a disservice when not signaling which variants
will mark them negatively as speakers of a stigmatized variety. Instead we
should invest them with the knowledge and agency required to make informed
decisions about how they wish to communicate. 2 In any case, both Villa and
Ducar make the very reasonable argument that grammars and textbooks should
make greater use of corpus analysis, although no references are provided for
the ‘plethora’ (p. 361) that are available.
Cecilia Colombi analyzes reports on Samuel Huntington’s book Who are we?:
The challenges to America’s national identity that appeared in Spanish-language
media in Latin America and Spain (and in a few English-language outlets in
the U.S.), a research approach that is highly relevant to the field of Spanish
in the U.S. She applies systemic functional linguistics to these texts, a model
that consists of three meaning-making systems: ideational, interpersonal and
textual. The author states that she will apply the rubric of appraisal, which forms
part of the interpersonal system, and which is presented on p. 238 but not
fully explained; nor is the coding system on p. 239. It is not clear, for example,
how every section of underlined text in the examples are ‘judgments’ (and
why the word ‘racista’ is underlined in Source #2 but bolded in Source #9),
what is meant by monoglossia or heteroglossia as types of ‘engagement,’ and
why ‘graduation’ is totally ignored. The chapter presents just one example of a
newspaper text that is coded using this rubric of appraisal before shifting to a
rather confusing presentation of ‘journalistic voices,’ examples from each news
source that contrast the ‘us vs. them’ language of Huntington, and examples
of journalists exhibiting either assimilationist or multicultural/multilingual
ideologies. The author’s conclusion – that Huntington’s discourse of ‘language
panic’ was resoundingly rejected by the sources studied – seems reasonable,
but it was not clear to me how it was reached through a consistent application
of the rubric of appraisal outlined in Figure 1. Glenn Martínez presents a deft examination of the language ideologies and
practices of health care providers in a Texas-Mexico border community. In his
surveys and interviews among 56 health organizations, he found a common
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belief that Spanish-speakers had a much more pressing moral obligation to
learn English than health care providers had to provide adequate services in
Spanish. Moreover, a belief that ‘everyone here is bilingual anyway’ led to the
routine practice of utilizing bilingual employees in the lowest ranks of the
organization, with no specialized training or extra pay, to translate complicated
medical terminology as best they could. The author contends that these practices are in violation of Executive Order 13166, signed by President Clinton in
2000 to improve healthcare access to people with limited English proficiency
under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Also related to Title VI is the
following chapter by Morán, which finds itself in the third and final section of
the book (Pedagogía y política educativa) but has in common with Martínez an
analysis of violations of federal law. Morán provides a fascinating account of the
legal and, compellingly, the personal play-by-play of the 1974 Supreme Court
case Lau v. Nichols as experienced by the litigators and by the Lau family. This
case determined that children who do not know English must receive some
type of assistance in school, otherwise they are being denied equal access to
education. Nowhere else have I seen these details about the development of
this landmark bilingual education case, which for the most part are presented
in understandable lay terms (undergraduates might need a glossary of terms
like de facto vs. de jure, amicus briefs, and a short description of Brown v. Board
of Education).
Kendall King’s chapter very competently explores the paradox that demand for
K-12 foreign language education programs are increasing across the U.S. while
heritage languages – due to the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind
and overall pressures on immigrant families to assimilate – are simultaneously
languishing and, in most cases, lost by the third generation. Her argument that
the general U.S. populace is growing more appreciative of multilingualism (supported by a few reports and polls she cites) left me a bit more optimistic than
usual. On the flip side, I did wonder why, exactly, globalization and economic
interdependency lead to greater value placed on cultural homogeneity, but
exploring this theme was likely not a goal of the chapter. Additionally in the
‘glass is half empty’ camp are the fact that national security interests are not only
fickle, they are morally unsavory to many language educators (see for example
Ricento 2005) and also the fact that the failure of anti-bilingual education in
Colorado was in some ways a Pyrrhic victory (see Crawford 2003). I couldn’t
agree more with the author’s following two calls: (1) for researchers to publish
more parent-accessible books about the complexities and rewards in raising
bilingual children, and (2) for the federal government to create programs
assisting states in developing heritage language programs for students, training
for their teachers, and incentives for relevant certification programs. These ideas
have been appearing for years without much discernible movement outside of
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academic publications; perhaps ACTFL and/or the National Heritage Language
Resource Center should be pressured to add this to their policy agenda.
Sara Beaudrie and Cynthia Ducar present the two data-driven studies of
this section. Beaudrie’s study comparing the experiences of receptively bilingual heritage speakers in heritage language (HL) vs. foreign language (FL)
courses makes an important contribution to our understanding of the types of
textbooks and curricula that are most beneficial for this understudied population. She found that both groups made language gains (including MLT, lexical
diversity, tense/aspect use, and various forms of grammatical agreement) but
there were advantages to the HL curriculum. 3 A few points deserve mention.
The author neglects to recognize that many Spanish programs simply do not
have a critical mass of receptive bilinguals to justify the creation of a course
section tailored to their proficiency level. In addition, the question of whether
receptive bilinguals should enroll in HL or FL courses depends greatly on the
local population of heritage speakers and what average proficiency level they
posses. Thus, the ‘line of separation’ will vary from one location to another; a
student who places into and does well in an HL course in Albuquerque, for
example, might not place into nor do well in an HL course in Chicago. In her
future work on this important topic, the author might make greater connections to existing research findings, including students in the FL course being
‘confused by the grammar explanations’ (p. 339) and feeling at a disadvantage
compared to the metalinguistic knowledge of their classmates (both found in
Potowski 2002), recent HL classroom research (Potowski, Jegerski and MorganShort 2009; Montrul and Bowles 2009, 2010) and the work of Montrul (2008)
which has already begun providing a ‘linguistic comparison of the similarities
and differences among elementary-level FL learners and receptive bilingual
HL learners’ (p. 343).
Finally, I made brief mention of Ducar’s arguments earlier in this review,
but it merits mention that two of the four textbooks she analyzes are known
for being traditional and thus are easy targets when seeking linguistic purism;
readers would surely like to know how newer texts fare under her analysis,
including Conozcámonos, Entre mundos, and Sí se puede. Not all instructors
would agree with the author’s proposal that introductory heritage Spanish
courses should provide ‘in-depth treatment of the complexity of [the vos]
pronominal form and its morphological repercussions,’ (p. 355) preferring
instead that such topics appear in more advanced coursework. She also states
that engaging students in converting informal/stigmatized variants into formal
expressions ‘serve to silence language variation’ (p. 360) but why is this necessarily true? Students can and will continue to speak their varieties both
inside and outside of class; they are only being asked to adjust their expres-
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sion for formal writing assignments. Everyone, including the author, edits
their language when they write. As for her criticisms of one-way contrastive
analysis-oriented translations, it would seem she is analogously arguing that
two-way translation exercises between African American Vernacular English
and Mainstream U.S. English (to use the term of Lippi-Green 1997) are needed
in U.S. English language arts textbooks, and that speakers of Mainstream
U.S. English should engage in such exercises as well (otherwise the ‘burden
of making one’s self understood consistently rests with’ (p. 352) the minority
variety speakers). Or perhaps AAVE should become the new formal variety
for written discourse? Or is it that there should be no normative system in
formal writing? It is unclear what the end result of these arguments look like
for educational systems.
The editors conclude the volume emphasizing the important role of parents,
teachers, activists, journalists, lawyers, politicians, interpreters, and other
professionals. This sentiment was enacted at the conference itself, where two
round tables were organized, one for media and one related to education. I
underscore the editors’ call that future conferences should include more of these
non-academic voices, particularly those of parents engaged in the monumental
task of minority language transmission. By understanding their challenges and
triumphs, those working in relevant fields can be sure our suggested remedies
are good fits. Overall, this volume would make an excellent text in a graduate
survey course about Spanish in contact, and particularly a course focusing on
Spanish in the U.S.
Notes
1 The full list of 2007 attendees is available at http://www.congresosdelalengua.
es/cartagena/default.htm.
2 I have addressed this briefly elsewhere (Potowski 2005). Students should be
engaged in understanding how certain variants come to hold prestige; the
fact that sometimes there is no definitive line between what does and does
not constitute a prestige variant; basic principles of language contact; and
how language change is almost always encountered by prescriptivist resistance. Such activities equip them to defend themselves against unwarranted
attacks on their ways of speaking. But formal writing is largely normative and
in Spanish is internationally very similar, and to participate in these discursive communities, one needs to master its conventions.
3 The author notes that the HL textbook was rarely used, so readers are unable
to directly compare the instructional materials.
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References
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Montrul, S. (2008) Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism. Re-examining the Age Factor.
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