Nessie School of Languages

The literature produced by Latinos who
live in the United States is especially interesting in terms of the ways in
which it tries to reflect the complex modes of speech behaviour among members
of this community. Hispanics are different from other ethnic groups in the US,
because they have maintained the use of the minority language to a large
extent. Bilingualism and code switching are widespread among them. This creates
special problems for the cultural products dealing with the Latino community.
Some linguists say that the ways in which creative writers choose to represent
the linguistic behaviour of the Chicano characters have not been studied
properly.

– The Language of the Chicanos

In the United States, Spanish is the largest minority
language. According to the 1980 census there were nearly 9 million Spanish speakers.
There are now 25 million Chicanos (Mexican-Americans) in the US. These live
mainly in the southwestern states: Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico
and Texas. The presence of Spanish-speaking population in these states dates
back to the period of Spain’s colonial expansion in this area,  to the 16th century. After Mexico gained
independence from the metropolis, Spanish continued to be spoken by large parts
of the population. The sparsely inhabited northern states of Mexico began to be
settled by expanding Anglos, who eventually outnumbered the Hispanophones. In
the process, involving armed conflicts and selling of land, by the mid 19th
century Mexico had lost two thirds of its territory, which from then on has
formed part of the US. The Spanish-speaking community in the southern states
has been continually revitalized by the arrival of emigrants from Mexico. Most
of this community is bilingual, and competent to varying degrees in both
Spanish and English. The terms Spanish and English cover here a group of
different varieties. Anzaldúa mentions the following: 1) Standard English 2)
Working class and slang English 3) Standard Spanish 4) Standard Mexican Spanish
5) North Mexican Spanish dialect 6) Chicano Spanish 7) Tex-Mex 8) Pachuco
(caló). Most of these varieties lack clear definition and overlap with others.
This terminological confusion reflects the linguistic diversity observable.

Chicano bilingualism in some variety of
Spanish and some variety of English is not uniform across the generations:
"The recently arrived monolingual Spanish speaker from Mexico may live
next to a fourth generation family in which the youngest children neither speak
no understand Spanish". The typical situation is that the first generation
immigrants acquire comprehension competence in English but use only Spanish at
home. Their first child then acquires Spanish as the first language and usually
maintains a high level of competence in this language in her/his life. The
younger children acquire both Spanish and English at home: they are more or
less balanced bilinguals, possibly with some degree of interference in their
both languages. The third generation speakers, whose parents were born in the
US, are typically dominant in English and although their comprehension of
Spanish may be total, their productive competence is usually restricted. This
scenario is especially valid for urban centres such as Los Angeles, where
contact with the dominant Anglo language and culture is particularly intensive.

In situations of intensive language
contact such as those observed in the southwestern US, certain sociolinguistic
phenomena typically occur. The superordinate language (English) excludes the
subordinate one (Spanish) from some domains. This situation, described as diglossia
(Gonzalez-Berry and Gynan 1989: 302), results in the reduction of registers
available in the L.A. variety: it becomes used mainly in the private sphere in
the informal register. Both the dominant and the subordinate languages undergo
interference from each other. These influences are most easily observable on
the phonetic and lexical levels. The phonetics are mainly ignored in literary
written texts such as those we dealwith in this study: at best they may attempt
to approximately signal non-standard pronunciation by non-standard spelling.

Among the lexical items borrowed from English into
Spanish the most often cited are:

1) loans (transferring form with its meaning): bil
(bill), sinque (sink), suiche (switch), troca/troque (truck), breca (brake), craque (cracker), mapear (to mop), puchar
(to push), cuquiar (to cook), parquiar (to park), loquiar (to lock), so (= así
que) (Silva-Corvalán 1994: 170; Armas 1995; García 1998)

2)
single word calques (transfer of meaning into an existing word form): parientes
(= padres), aplicación (= solicitud), grados (= notas), papel (= periódico),
moverse (= mudarse de casa), carpeta (= alfombra) (Silva-Corvalán 1994: 170-1)

English loans from Spanish usually describe Hispanic
realities and tend not to replace native English words. The most
frequent include: amigo/a, barrio,
compadre, muchacho/a, novio/a and
hasta la vista.

Spanish in the US is virtually excluded from the
public domain, so it undergoes no strong normative pressure the way English
does. Further, many Latinos are not literate in Spanish. These factors,
together with the contact situation, precipitate language change: phonetic
reductions abound and the tense/aspect/mood system becomes simplified. The
variety status of Spanish in the US also explains why it is more susceptible to
transfer than English. Among the
terms applied to the way Chicanos speak are Tex-Mex and Spanglish. They are
impressionistically defined as "a hybrid dialect . . . 60 percent English,
40 percent Spanish format". They apparently refer to the code switching or
the use of two or more languages/varieties in the same communication situation.
The complexity of the language use observable among Mexican-Americans in the US
– and especially the language distribution across the generations and the
omnipresent code switching – offer a particular challenge for authors proposing
to write about the Hispanics.

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