La hispanofobia del movimiento "Inglés oficial" en los Estados Unidos por la oficialización del inglés

The greatest efforts ever made to restrict language in the US since the post W.W.I period have been taking place since 1980. Language policy in three areas¿the language of government, the language of employment and the language of the schools¿ affect the human rights of 32 million members of language minority families, but they are targeted most specifically at the group that represents the majority: Spanish speakers. In response, defense of Spanish has served to unite diverse groups of Latinos despite differences in migration history, socio-economic profiles, and political affiliations. Of particular interest is the relationship between the positions that a group takes on the issue of making English the official language of the US and on the issue of eliminating the services that might be affected by English-only legislation. This paper reports on the views of more than 300 Latinos in New York City, and compares them with those of Euro-American, African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and others

HABLAMOS LOS DOS. WE SPEAK BOTH : GROWING UP BILINGUAL IN EL BARRIO

This study describes and analyzes the role of Spanish and English in the lives of bilingual children in a community setting. Its specific focus is the functions and linguistic characteristics of code switching in children of different ages and language proficiency levels. Participants in the study included thirty-four children of nineteen families (Corpus A); five of these children between the ages of six to twelve were studied in depth (Corpus B). The research was undertaken over a period of eighteen months on a Puerto Rican block in East Harlem. The principal methodology, ethnography, revealed that the community values and uses both Spanish and English in all aspects of community life in networks that alternately reinforce Spanish or English or code switching. Four major family patterns emerge, depending on the language(s) spoken at home by caretakers, and by children to each other. Despite major differences in exposure to and/or practice in Spanish at home, English is the prevalent language among children, and they show frequent intersentential switching. These code switches often defy expected links with topic and/or domain: switching for switching\u27s sake corroborates speakers\u27 dual identity as Puerto Ricans and New Yorkers. The ethnographic data are supported by a quantitative analysis of 2,139 intra-turn code switches. Fourteen variables were considered: speaker, addressee, language of the switch, syntactic constituency of the switch and of the constituents immediately preceding and following the switch, speaker\u27s knowledge of the switched word(s), setting, style, language of the previous statement, function, conversational strategy, editing phenomena and grammaticality/equivalence. Results show that, contrary to the community belief that intra-turn code switching occurs only when the speaker does not know the word(s), i.e., for the purpose of crutching, 78 percent of the children\u27s switches were for words they knew in both languages. The majority of the switches are intra-sentential and demonstrate the ability to juxtapose constituents from both languages in accordance with the grammatical rules of both. Older English-dominant children tend to switch intra-sententially and at infrequent switch points more often than the youngest Spanish dominant speaker. The children employ code switching for twenty-four conversational strategies grouped under Crutching, Footing, and Appeal and Control. Individual differences in the use of these strategies, of English and Spanish, and of grammatical constituents, reflect the roles played by language dominance and social role of the speaker. Implications of the research for bilingual educational programs and language policies are discussed

HABLAMOS LOS DOS. WE SPEAK BOTH : GROWING UP BILINGUAL IN EL BARRIO

This study describes and analyzes the role of Spanish and English in the lives of bilingual children in a community setting. Its specific focus is the functions and linguistic characteristics of code switching in children of different ages and language proficiency levels. Participants in the study included thirty-four children of nineteen families (Corpus A); five of these children between the ages of six to twelve were studied in depth (Corpus B). The research was undertaken over a period of eighteen months on a Puerto Rican block in East Harlem. The principal methodology, ethnography, revealed that the community values and uses both Spanish and English in all aspects of community life in networks that alternately reinforce Spanish or English or code switching. Four major family patterns emerge, depending on the language(s) spoken at home by caretakers, and by children to each other. Despite major differences in exposure to and/or practice in Spanish at home, English is the prevalent language among children, and they show frequent intersentential switching. These code switches often defy expected links with topic and/or domain: switching for switching\u27s sake corroborates speakers\u27 dual identity as Puerto Ricans and New Yorkers. The ethnographic data are supported by a quantitative analysis of 2,139 intra-turn code switches. Fourteen variables were considered: speaker, addressee, language of the switch, syntactic constituency of the switch and of the constituents immediately preceding and following the switch, speaker\u27s knowledge of the switched word(s), setting, style, language of the previous statement, function, conversational strategy, editing phenomena and grammaticality/equivalence. Results show that, contrary to the community belief that intra-turn code switching occurs only when the speaker does not know the word(s), i.e., for the purpose of crutching, 78 percent of the children\u27s switches were for words they knew in both languages. The majority of the switches are intra-sentential and demonstrate the ability to juxtapose constituents from both languages in accordance with the grammatical rules of both. Older English-dominant children tend to switch intra-sententially and at infrequent switch points more often than the youngest Spanish dominant speaker. The children employ code switching for twenty-four conversational strategies grouped under Crutching, Footing, and Appeal and Control. Individual differences in the use of these strategies, of English and Spanish, and of grammatical constituents, reflect the roles played by language dominance and social role of the speaker. Implications of the research for bilingual educational programs and language policies are discussed