THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

SPANISH AS A HERITAGE LANGUAGE

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language brings together contributions from
leading linguists, educators and Latino Studies scholars involved in teaching and working with
Spanish heritage language speakers.
This state-of-the-art overview covers a range of topics within five broad areas: Spanish in
U.S. public life, Spanish heritage language use and systems, educational contexts, Latino studies
perspectives and Spanish outside the U.S.

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The Routledge Handbook of Spanish as a Heritage Language addresses for the first time the
linguistic, educational and social aspects of heritage Spanish speakers in one volume making it

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an indispensable reference for anyone working with Spanish as a heritage language.

Kim Potowski is Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Director of the Spanish Heritage
Language Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
 ROUTLEDGE LANGUAGE HANDBOOKS

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF SPANISH AS A HERITAGE
LANGUAGE

Edited by Kim Potowski

Spanish List Advisor: Javier Muñoz-Basols

Taylor and Francis

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First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2018 selection and editorial matter, Kim Potowski; individual
chapters, the contributors
The right of Kim Potowski to be identified as the author of the
editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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ISBN: 978-1-138-83388-3 (hbk)
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 CONTENTS

List of contributors ix

1 Spanish as a heritage/minority language: a multifaceted

look at ten nations 1
Kim Potowski

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PART I
Social issues 15

2 A historical view of US latinidad and Spanish as a heritage language 17

Andrew Lynch

3 Spanish in U.S. language policy and politics 36

Phillip M. Carter

4 Spanish language use, maintenance, and shift in the United States 53

Devin Jenkins

5 Spanish in linguistic landscapes of the U.S. 66

José M. Franco Rodríguez

6 Linguistics and Latino studies: intersections for the advancement

of linguistic and social justice 78
Lourdes Torres

7 Spanish and identity among Latin@s in the U.S. 92

Rachel Showstack

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8 Spanish as a heritage language and the negotiation of race

and intra-Latina/o hierarchies in the U.S. 107
Rosalyn Negrón

9 Queering Spanish as a heritage language 124

Holly Cashman and Juan Trujillo

PART II
Linguistic studies 143

10 Morphology, syntax, and semantics in Spanish as a

heritage language 145
Silvina Montrul

11 Heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology 164

Rebecca Ronquest and Rajiv Rao

12 The lexicon of Spanish heritage language speakers 178

Marta Fairclough and Anel Garza

13 Heritage Spanish pragmatics 190

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Derrin Pinto

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14 Neurolinguistic approaches to Spanish as a heritage language
Harriet Wood Bowden and Bernard Issa
203

15 Psycholinguistic perspectives on heritage Spanish 221

Jill Jegerski

16 Child heritage speakers’ morphosyntax: rate of acquisition

and crosslinguistic influence 235
Naomi Shin

17 Sociolinguistic variation in U.S. Spanish 254

Rena Torres Cacoullos and Grant M. Berry

18 Spanish dialectal contact in the United States 269

Daniel Erker

19 Understanding and leveraging Spanish heritage speakers’

bilingual practices 284
Leah Durán and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio

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 Contents

PART III
Educational issues 299

20 Towards the development of an analytical framework for

examining goals and pedagogical approaches in teaching
language to heritage speakers 301
Guadalupe Valdés and María Luisa Parra

21 Outcomes of classroom Spanish heritage language

instruction 331
Melissa A. Bowles

22 Critical language awareness and Spanish as a heritage language:

challenging the linguistic subordination of US Latinxs 345
Jennifer Leeman

23 Differentiated teaching: a primer for heritage and

mixed classes 359
Maria Carreira and Claire Hitchins Chik

24 Key issues in Spanish heritage language program design and

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administration
Sara Beaudrie
375

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25 Spanish for the professions and community service learning:
applications with heritage learners 389
Ann Abbott and Glenn Martínez

26 Spanish heritage speakers studying abroad 403

Rachel Shively

27 Expanding the multilingual repertoire: teaching cognate

languages to heritage Spanish speakers 420
Ana Carvalho and Michael Child

28 Developing Spanish in dual language programs: preschool

through twelfth grade 433
Kathryn Lindholm-Leary

29 What do we know about U.S. Latino bilingual children’s

Spanish literacy development? 445
Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez

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 Contents

PART IV
Spanish as a minority/heritage language outside of the U.S. 461

30 Spanish in the Antipodes: diversity and hybridity of Latino/a

Spanish speakers in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand 463
Criss Jones Díaz and Ute Walker

31 Spanish as a heritage language in Italy 479

Milin Bonomi and Laura Sanfelici

32 Spanish as a heritage language in Germany 492

Carmen Ramos Méndez-Sahlender

33 Spanish as a heritage language in Switzerland 504

Verónica Sánchez Abchi

34 Chilean Spanish speakers in Sweden: transnationalism,

trilingualism, and linguistic systems 517
Maryann Neilson Parada

35 Spanish as a minority/heritage language in Canada

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and the UK
Martin Guardado
537

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36 Language issues for US-raised ‘returnees’ in Mexico
Clare Mar-Molinero
555

Index 568

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 CONTRIBUTORS

Ann Abbott is Associate Professor/Academic Professional at the University of Illinois, Urbana-

Champaign, USA and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and
Portuguese. Her research and publications focus on community service learning, social entre-
preneurship, business Spanish, and a growing attention to advocacy and civic engagement.

Sara Beaudrie is an associate professor of Spanish Linguistics in SILC at Arizona State

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University, USA and director of the Spanish Heritage Program. She is the co-editor of two
books on heritage language research and pedagogy published by Georgetown University Press,

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and co-author of Heritage Language Pedagogy: Research and Practice (McGraw-Hill, 2014).

Grant M. Berry is a PhD Candidate in Spanish and Language Science at Penn State University,
USA. His research interests include language variation and change, sociolinguistics, bilingual-
ism, language processing, and laboratory phonology.

Milin Bonomi is a postdoctoral fellow in Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Milan, Italy.
Her research focuses on Latino communities in Italy from a sociolinguistic and an educational
perspective.

Melissa A. Bowles is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and
Director of the Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) PhD concen-
tration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her main research interest
is in classroom second and heritage language acquisition, and the ways in which instruction
differentially affects the two learner groups.

Maria Carreira is a Professor of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach and the
Co-director of the National Heritage Language Resource Center at UCLA, USA. She is a
co-author of six Spanish-language textbooks and of Voces: Latino Students on Life in the United
States (Praeger, 2014).

Phillip M. Carter is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and English at Florida International

University, USA. He has authored numerous articles in sociolinguistics and linguistic

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 Contributors

anthropology, and is co-author of Languages in the World: How History, Culture, and Politics
Shape Language (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

Ana Carvalho is a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese linguistics at the University of Arizona,
USA, where she also directs the Portuguese Language Program. Her research interests include
language variation and change in contact situations, including contexts of bilingualism and
language acquisition.

Holly Cashman is Associate Professor of Spanish and chair of Languages, Literatures, and
Cultures, core faculty in the Women’s Studies Program, and coordinator of Queer Studies at
the University of New Hampshire, USA. Her current research focuses on language practices of
LGBTQ+ Latinxs.

Michael Child is an Assistant Professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Brigham
Young University, USA. From 2014 to 2016 he was an Assistant Professor (Universitair
Docent) of Portuguese and Linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His interests
include second/third language acquisition, bilingualism, Portuguese and Hispanic sociolin-
guistics, Spanish as a heritage language, and second language pedagogy.

Leah Durán is an Assistant Professor of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies in the
College of Education at the University of Arizona, USA. Her research focuses on bilingualism
and biliteracy in young children, and the development of pedagogical approaches which sup-
port them. The findings appear in journals such as the Journal of Literacy Research, Journal

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of Early Childhood Literacy, International Multilingual Research Journal, and the Bilingual
Research Journal.

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Daniel Erker is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Boston University, USA,
where he is the director of the Spanish in Boston Project. Erker earned his MA in linguistics
at CUNY Graduate Center, USA, and his PhD in linguistics at New York University. His
research focuses on language variation, contact, and change, especially in Spanish spoken
in the USA.

Marta Fairclough is Professor of Spanish Linguistics and Director of the Spanish Heritage
Language Program at the University of Houston, USA. Her research focuses on Heritage
Language Education and US Spanish. She has published a book, two co-edited volumes, and
numerous book chapters and articles.

José M. Franco Rodríguez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication,

Languages and Cultures at Fayetteville State University, USA. His research on Spanish in lin-
guistic landscapes of the USA started in Los Angeles County in 2002 while he was a bilingual
teacher in the county. This investigation was followed by a study on Miami-Dade County’s lin-
guistic landscape. Later he applied his methodology to analyse and contrast the linguistic land-
scape of Almería (Spain). He uses his research findings to teach about Spanish and Hispanics
in both Spanish and Education courses.

Anel Garza is a faculty member at San Jacinto College, USA. Her areas of teaching include
Modern Languages, English to Speakers of Other Languages, and Developmental Studies. Her
research interests focus on Heritage and Language Education and US Spanish.

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 Contributors

Martin Guardado is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and the Academic Director
of the English Language School at the University of Alberta, Canada. His research interests
include heritage language development and English for academic purposes.

Claire Hitchins Chik is an Associate Director of the Title VI National Heritage Language
Resource Center at UCLA, USA. Her most recent project is the development of an online
certificate, “Teacher Training for the 21st Century: Teaching Heritage Languages.” With her
colleagues Olga Kagan and Maria Carreira, she is a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of
Heritage Language Education: From Innovation to Program Building (Routledge, 2017). Earlier
in her career, Hitchins Chik worked with a Chinese EFL teacher from Yunnan Province on
his autobiography, coauthoring, and getting the book, Mr. China’s Son (1993, 2nd ed. 2002,
Westview Press), to publication.

Bernard Issa (PhD, University of Illinois at Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA. His research examines how individual difference var-
iables (e.g. motivation, attention, working memory) relate to the processing and development
of second language grammar.

Jill Jegerski is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and SLATE (Second Language Acquisition
and Teacher Education) in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Her primary research interests include bilingual
and non-native sentence processing, psycholinguistic research methods, and Spanish as a
heritage language.

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Devin Jenkins (PhD, University of New Mexico) is Associate Professor of Spanish and

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Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Colorado Denver, USA.
His research focuses on Spanish in the southwest USA, bilingualism, language contact, and
population trends.

Criss Jones Díaz is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the Western Sydney
University, Australia. Her research and publication interests are primarily in critical and cul-
tural studies with an emphasis on bi/multilingualism, languages and literacies education, and
identity negotiation in contexts of diversity and difference.

Jennifer Leeman is Professor of Spanish at George Mason University (Fairfax, Virginia, USA)
and Research Sociolinguist at the US Census Bureau. Her current research focuses on language
and race in the US Census, linguistic anthropological perspectives on Spanish in the USA, and
the sociopolitics of heritage language education.

Kathryn Lindholm-Leary is Professor Emerita of Child and Adolescent Development at San

Jose State University, USA, where she taught for 28 years. Kathryn has worked with over 75
two-way and developmental bilingual programs from PreK through 12 over the past 30 years
and has written books, chapters, and journal articles, and has given presentations to research-
ers, educators, and parents on the topics of dual language education and child bilingualism.
More recently, she worked with the National Academy of Sciences in their report on the devel-
opment of English/dual language learners. Kathryn has served on advisory boards or as con-
sultant to federal and state departments of education, various professional organizations, and
other agencies, school districts, and schools.

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 Contributors

Andrew Lynch, University of Miami, USA, researches language variation, social and struc-
tural consequences of Spanish in contact with other languages, ideological and sociolinguistic
dimensions of Spanish in the USA, and heritage language acquisition and pedagogy. He is
Editor in Chief of Heritage Language Journal.

Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez is Associate Professor of Literacy at Vanderbilt University’s

Peabody College of Education and Human Development. Her program of research is focused
on advancing students’ language and literacy outcomes, with her work spanning the toddler-
hood years through adolescence.

Clare Mar-Molinero is Professor of Spanish Sociolinguistics and Director of the Centre for
Mexico-Southampton Collaboration (MeXsu) at the University of Southampton, UK. She has
published widely on Spanish as a global language, language policies, urban multilingualism,
and linguistic superdiversity.

Glenn Martínez is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Adjunct Professor of Nursing at The
Ohio State University, USA. His research and publications focus on language and healthcare,
Spanish as a heritage language in the USA, and language policy and planning.

Carmen Ramos Méndez-Sahlender is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Centre for
Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the University of Applied Languages, Munich,
Germany. Her research focuses on language teaching at university, learner and teacher beliefs,
and heritage languages.

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Silvina Montrul is currently Professor of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and

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Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, where she
is also Director of the University Language Academy for Children and Director of the Second
Language Acquisition and Bilingualism Lab.

Rosalyn Negrón is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts,

Boston, USA, specializing in urban social anthropology. Rosalyn studies the interpersonal
dimensions of race and ethnicity in diverse cities, with a special focus on Latina/os, ethnic
flexibility, and social networks.

Maryann Neilson Parada is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at California State

University Bakersfield, USA. She recently earned her PhD from the University of Illinois at
Chicago, USA, where her dissertation examined the lexical profiles and language maintenance
of trilingual Spanish heritage speakers in Stockholm. Her research interests include Spanish as
a minority language, language attitudes and ideologies, names and identity, family language
policy, and heritage language pedagogy.

María Luisa Parra is Spanish Senior Preceptor at the Department of Romance Languages and
Literatures at Harvard University, USA. Her main research interests are pedagogy for Spanish
as a heritage and foreign language, and the impact of immigration in Latino children’s bilingual
development and process of school adaptation.

Derrin Pinto (PhD, University of California at Davis, USA) is currently Professor of Spanish
Linguistics and Chair of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University

xii
 Contributors

of Saint Thomas in Minnesota, USA. He has published studies involving different areas of
pragmatics, discourse analysis, and second language acquisition.

Kim Potowski is Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Hispanic & Italian
Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA, where she holds appointments in Latin
American and Latino Studies, Curriculum and Instruction, and an affiliation with the Social
Justice Initiative. She has directed the Spanish for Heritage Speakers program since 2002 and
is the founding director of its summer study abroad program in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her research
focuses on Spanish in the USA, including factors that influence intergenerational language
transmission and change as well as connections between language and ethnic identity. She has
authored, co-authored, and edited over 12 books including Intra-Latino language and iden-
tity: MexiRican Spanish (John Benjamins, 2016), El español de los Estados Unidos (Cambridge
University Press, 2015), Heritage Language Teaching: Research and Practice (McGraw-Hill,
2014), Language Diversity in the USA (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Language and
Identity in a Dual Immersion School (Multilingual Matters, 2007). Her advocacy for dual lan-
guage education in promoting bilingualism and academic achievement was the focus of her
2013 TEDx talk “No child left monolingual.”

Rajiv Rao is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,

USA. He employs laboratory approaches to address the phonology of heritage speakers, Afro-
Hispanic intonation, the prosody-pragmatics interface, prosodic phrasing, and intonational
phonological theory.

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Rebecca Ronquest is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at North Carolina State University,
USA. Her research focuses on the phonetic/phonological systems of heritage speakers of

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Spanish, the Spanish vowel system, laboratory approaches to phonology, and Spanish in the
southeastern USA.

Verónica Sánchez Abchi has a PhD in Linguistics. She is a researcher at the Institute of
Pedagogical Research and Documentation (Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and teaches Spanish
didactics at the Higher School of Education in Valais, Switzerland. Her research interests
include writing competences in L1, L2, and in heritage languages, and language acquisition in
multilingual contexts.

Laura Sanfelici is a Researcher in Spanish Language and Translation at the University of

Genoa, Italy. Her research interests focus on the maintenance of the language of origin by
Hispano-American immigrants attending Italian Middle School, and the relationship between
languages and immigration.

Noami Shin is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Spanish at the University of New
Mexico, USA. Her primary interests include child language acquisition, bilingualism, lan-
guage contact, and sociolinguistics. Her research focuses on patterns of morphosyntactic vari-
ation, examining how these patterns are acquired during childhood and how they change in
situations of language contact. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Journal of Child
Language, Language Variation and Change, Language in Society, International Journal of the
Sociology of Language, Language Acquisition, and Spanish in Context.

Rachel Shively (PhD, University of Minnesota, USA) is an Associate Professor of Spanish and
Applied Linguistics at Illinois State University, USA. Her widely published research focuses

xiii
 Contributors

on second language pragmatics and study abroad. In 2011 she was awarded the ACTFL-MLJ
Pimsleur Award for Research in Foreign Language Education.

Rachel Showstack is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Wichita State

University, USA. She has published articles in Spanish in Context, Language and Intercultural
Communication, The Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, and The Journal of Language,
Identity, and Education.

Almeida Jacqueline Toribio is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and

Portuguese at The University of Texas, USA. Her dossier reflects scholarship in the areas of
language contact and variation, and a trajectory from theoretical to more empirically based
approaches. Her research endeavours have been supported by the National Endowment for
the Humanities, The Russel Sage Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others,
and the findings appear in handbooks, compendia, and journals, including The International
Journal of the Sociology of Language, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Social Science
Quarterly, International Journal of Bilingualism, Lingua, and Linguistic Inquiry.

Lourdes Torres is a Professor and Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul
University, USA. She is editor of the journal, Latino Studies. She is the author of Puerto Rican
Discourse (Routledge, 2013) and co-editor of Tortilleras: Hispanic & Latina Lesbian Expression
(Temple, 2003) and Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indiana University
Press, 1991). Her recent essays on language and culture have appeared in Meridians, MELUS,
Centro Journal, and International Journal of Bilingualism.

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Rena Torres Cacoullos is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Penn State University,

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USA. Her work aims to discover grammatical structure through quantitative analysis of
natural production data in its social context.

Juan Trujillo is coordinator of World Languages and Cultures in the School of Language,
Culture, and Society at Oregon State University, USA. His work explores intersections of
Mormonism, queer identity, and latinidad from an autoethnographic perspective.

Guadalupe Valdés is the Bonnie Katz Tenenbaum Professor of Education at Stanford

University, USA. Her work has focused on the English-Spanish bilingualism of Latinos in
the USA, and on discovering and describing how two languages are developed, used, and
maintained in Latino immigrant communities.

Ute Walker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at Massey University, New Zealand
(Manawatu campus) with research interests in the areas of language and identity, bilingualism,
and digitally facilitated language learning.

Harriet Wood Bowden (PhD, Georgetown University, USA) is Associate Professor of Spanish
at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA. Her research investigates first, second, and
heritage language acquisition and neurocognition, and the interaction of multiple learner-
internal and external factors influencing these processes.

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 1
SPANISH AS A HERITAGE/
MINORITY LANGUAGE
A multifaceted look at ten nations

Kim Potowski
the university of illinois at chicago, usa

Introduction
It is estimated that the combined total number of “native” Spanish speakers1 around the world is
between 437 million (Ethnologue 2016, www.ethnologue.com/statistics/size) and 472 million
people (Instituto Cervantes 2016), making it the second most commonly spoken language in

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the world. It is spoken by sizeable populations over 20 countries; the top ten countries with the
largest numbers of Spanish-speaking inhabitants are displayed in Table 1.1.

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This table assumes that all residents in each country (except the U.S.) are Spanish-speaking,
although this is not totally accurate. For example, although it is estimated that over 95% of
the population in Mexico speaks Spanish, the number in Paraguay is closer to 69% (Moreno
Fernández & Otero Roth 2006). The presence of the U.S. on this list surprises some people,
particularly its position as home to the third largest Spanish-speaking population among the
world’s nations.2
Before continuing, I should make clear the problematic nature of two principal concepts dis-
cussed in this chapter and the volume overall. The most basic is the idea of “Spanish.” As noted
by Otheguy, García, and Reid (2015, p. 286), named languages such as “Spanish,” “English,”

Table 1.1 Estimated Spanish-speaking populations by country

Country Estimated number of Spanish-speaking habitants Source

1 Mexico 120,000,000 2015, www.inegi.org.mx

2 Colombia 49,100,000 2017, www.dane.gov.co
3 United States 46,500,000 2015, www.census.gov
4 Spain 46,400,000 2015,www.ine.es
5 Argentina 43,500,000 2016, www.indec.gov.ar
6 Peru 31,800,000 2017, www.inei.gob.pe
7 Venezuela 31,000,000 2016, www.ine.gov.ve
8 Chile 18,300,000 2017, www.ine.cl
9 Guatemala 16,900,000 2017, http://fadep.org
10 Ecuador 16,200,000 2015, www.inec.gob.ec

1
 Kim Potowski

and “Quechua” are not actually independent linguistic objects, but rather constructs that exist
only socially according to the definitions and affiliations of its speakers. Similarly, the concept
of “countries” is problematic. The emergence of most modern nation-states in the 19th century
resulted from wars and annexations, and as a result, many populations of individuals with sim-
ilar ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic affiliations were arbitrarily split by lines drawn on a
map. Thus, when contemplating ideas about “Spanish” and about “countries/nations,” readers
should keep present the fact that these constitute a kind of conceptual shorthand that do not
always correspond to realities as individuals experience them. Despite these important limita-
tions, I believe that much can be learned about what we generally understand to be the Spanish
language via a study of those who claim to speak it in different parts of the world.
In most of the 21 nations where Spanish is an official or national language (either de facto
or de jure), it exists in contact with at least one other language. For example, it is estimated
that 43% of the population of Guatemala, 37% of that of Bolivia, 35% of Peru, and 5.4% of
the population of Mexico speaks an indigenous language. Yet in these contexts, Spanish is the
dominant language of society – the one typically taught in schools, used in the media, and
necessary for economic stability. In other places, Spanish is in contact with another language,
but it has equal official status with that language. Such is the case in three autonomous regions
of Spain (the Basque Country, Catalonia, and Galicia) where children are frequently educated
through varying proportions of Basque, Catalan, and Galician respectively. However, despite its
co-official status, in these autonomous regions Spanish is typically seen as having greater social
value. For example, there are few if any adults who are monolingual in Basque (Cenoz 2008)
or Catalan (Boix-Fuster & Sanz 2008),3 and all Spaniards are obliged to know Spanish but not
any other language (del Valle 2000). In any case, in places like these around the world where

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Spanish is the majority and high status language – both where Spanish exists largely by itself as
well as where it is in contact with but has equal legal status with another language – there has

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been a great deal of linguistic research documenting micro- and macro-level linguistic features.
However, in locations where Spanish is a minority language, and especially where it is a
minoritized language, the sociolinguistic reality is very different. The term minority is easy enough
to define: it refers to a quantity less than 50%. The Cervantes Institute (Instituto Cervantes 2016)
calculated a total of 45.8 million native Spanish speakers residing in non-Spanish-speaking coun-
tries (i.e. where Spanish is a minority language) including Australia, Russia, and Switzerland.
However, this source likely undercounted the Spanish-speaking population in the U.S., listing
it at 42.7 million, which is 3.8 million short of the 46.5 million listed in Table 1.1. If we add
these 3.8 million U.S. Spanish speakers to the 45.8 million estimated by the Cervantes Institute,
we get a possibly more accurate total of 49.6 million Spanish speakers around the world resid-
ing in non-Spanish-speaking countries. It is likely that no language besides English has as many
“native” speakers living in places where it is not the common tongue.
Clearly the largest number of Spanish speakers in this situation (46.5 million out of 49.6
million, or 94%) live in the U.S., constituting approximately 15% of its national population.
Figure 1.1 shows the proportion of U.S. Spanish-speaking residents by county. The areas
marked with the darkest shade have a proportion of Spanish speakers greater than 68%, and
some areas demarcated with the next darkest shade have over 50%. We notice that in counties
in the Southwest, southern Florida, and rural Washington, Idaho, and Kansas, Spanish speakers
form the majority of the local population.
Despite these local majority concentrations, on the national level Spanish remains a minority
and minoritized language in the U.S. Minoritized means that in addition to being in the minority
and having no legal status or support, Spanish is marginalized and sometimes outwardly discrimi-
nated against. Both local and national discourses frequently frame it as inferior, problematic, and a

2
 Spanish as a heritage/minority language

Figure 1.1 Percent Spanish-speaking, by county (Source: Modern Language Association language maps,
2010 American Community Survey)

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threat to national unity and to children’s advancement in school. These negative forces lead many

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individuals to abandon Spanish and not pass it down to future generations (see Potowski 2010
for evidence that this is in fact the outcome for almost all non-English languages in the U.S.).
Around the world, it is common for minority and minoritized languages, which I will abbrevi-
ate as minority/ized, to be replaced by the locally dominant language. Lambert (1977) described
this phenomenon as subtractive bilingualism, in which lower status, negative attitudes, and lack of
educational opportunities in the language lead to its weakening or total replacement. Thus, unlike
studying Spanish in contact with Guaraní in Paraguay or with Galician in Spain, for example,
where Spanish is not minority/ized, it is reasonable to hypothesize that there will be different
linguistic and social features of Spanish where it is a minority/ized language – not least of which
is the fact that under these conditions, the language is very frequently on a path towards loss.
In the U.S., non-English languages are commonly referred to as heritage languages. The first
part of the 21st century saw the creation of the National Heritage Language Resource Center in
addition to numerous Spanish for heritage speakers educational programs (see chapters by Beaudrie
and by Valdés & Parra, this volume). However, some scholars reject this term, embracing
the position of García (2005) that the word heritage “connotes something that one holds onto
vaguely as one’s remembrances but certainly not something that is used in the present or that
can be projected into the future” (2005, p. 601) and that:

[a]s the languages of the world transcend their traditional territories and English
spreads, languages other than English in the U.S. are being controlled through a shift
in discourse . . . perhaps best exemplified by the silencing of the word bilingual and
replacing it with heritage languages.
(2005, p. 605)

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 Kim Potowski

Despite these valid criticisms, the title of this volume and of the present chapter utilize the com-
pound term heritage, although chapter authors use the terms of their choice.
It is important to note here that not all minority languages are minoritized. For example,
English is spoken natively in Mexico by a relatively small number of people, many of whom
refer to themselves as expats (even though they fit most definitions of immigrant). While profi-
ciency in Spanish is necessary for most avenues of success in Mexico, many of these individuals
are able to secure employment in white-collar professions and are not shamed for speaking
English. Quite the opposite is true, in fact, with the worldwide prestige of English usually
granting them high status and earning potential. Even so, as Anderson and Solis (2014) and
Mar-Molinero (this volume) show, many Mexican-origin individuals who (in)voluntarily move
to Mexico after reaching adulthood in the U.S. do not necessarily enjoy all the benefits of native
English proficiency that one might expect, which is likely related to their lower socioeconomic
position as the children of economically motivated migrants to the U.S. This forces an exami-
nation of the role of socioeconomic status in language prestige. Middle class Chilean political
exiles in Sweden (Neilson Parada, this volume), for example, likely present a different sociolin-
guistic profile than poorer Ecuadorian immigrants in Italy (Bonomi and Sanfelici, this volume),
the former perhaps more likely to maintain Spanish intergenerationally and the latter to lose it.
The purpose of this volume is to explore Spanish as a minority/ized language in different
parts of the world, its authors examining macro and/or micro elements of Spanish as well as
issues that impact speakers’ use of the language. Most work to date on Spanish as a minority/ized
language has focused on adults and has been produced in the U.S. by two groups: linguists, and
high school and postsecondary language instructors in heritage Spanish programs. In addition to
these two important areas of scholarship, this collection presents the perspectives of researchers

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working in the fields of primary school education (grades preschool through eight) and Latina/o
Studies. The focus thus moves beyond Spanish as a minority/heritage language to include a

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variety of linguistically relevant considerations about the people who speak it, and includes work
focused on adults and with children.
I divide this introductory chapter into the same four Parts that structure the volume:
(1) social issues, (2) linguistic studies, (3) educational issues, and (4) countries outside of the
U.S. These divisions are somewhat arbitrary in that there are obvious intersections between
social issues, education, and linguistics both within and outside of the U.S. For example, Jones
Díaz and Walker’s chapter on Spanish-speakers in Australia and New Zealand combines social
and educational issues, while Bowles’ chapter detailing outcomes of adult classroom heritage
language instruction involve some linguistic descriptions of their Spanish systems. Despite these
thematic overlaps, the Parts are meant to help readers conceptualize broader themes. Countries
outside of the U.S. appear in their own Part because research on Spanish in these locations
is scant; except for the lexical availability analysis in Neilson Parada’s chapter about Chile,
and Mar-Molinero’s chapter about U.S.-raised Mexican-origin individuals in Mexico, these
chapters are limited to offering an introductory overview of how Spanish came to be spoken in
each country and considerations regarding its continued vitality.

Part I: Social issues

The nine chapters in this Part address a variety of social issues related to Spanish in the U.S.
The chapter by Lynch presents an analysis of the forces that brought the construct of latinidad,
and the Spanish language as an essential feature of it, into the U.S. cultural landscape during the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. He traces the early presence of “Hispanic-positive” novels
and Hollywood actors along with the incorporation of New Mexico into the U.S. and the

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 Spanish as a heritage/minority language

scholarship of Aurelio Espinosa, but shows that by the 1930s the country had shifted to more
Hispanophobic realities, the likes of which would prompt actress Margarita Carmen Cansino
to change her name to Rita Hayworth. Moving to more current times up through April 2017,
Carter outlines what he calls the “paradox of Spanish in the United States” via an examina-
tion of two phenomena: the use of Spanish in political discourse, and language policies toward
Spanish in the U.S. For example, he notes that “the act of speaking Spanish figures differently
depending on who is doing it” and that race is always present in questions of language and poli-
tics (also a theme in Negrón’s chapter). He concludes with an important consideration of the
role of Spanish Language Academies in supporting Spanish in such hostile environments, noting
that to date, they have generally shown disdain for the way Spanish is spoken in the U.S. Both
of these chapters offer timely insight into the current resurgence of nationalist, anti-immigration
discourse in the U.S. under the Trump administration.
After this consideration of the effects of the political and discursive landscape in the U.S. on
the use of Spanish, Jenkins’ chapter presents a demographic update of current Hispanophone
populations around the country. Interesting trends include that Mexicans are the fastest growing
Spanish-speaking group in the New York City area (heretofore dominated by Puerto Ricans
and Dominicans); Orlando has become a nouveau Puerto Rican enclave; and the Eastern sea-
board is the region that has seen the most significant numerical increase in Hispanic residents
between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses. He then moves into a deft analysis of several trajectories
that lead to predictions about the future of the language. Franco Rodríguez’ chapter follows
nicely with a summary of work on the presence of Spanish in the “linguistic landscape” of
the U.S., with many studies finding that the visibility of Spanish is disproportionately low in
relation to the size of the Hispanic population, in part due to an increasingly English-centered

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ideological environment.
Next, the chapter by Torres explores connections between Spanish-speakers and social jus-

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tice and the ways in which language functions in the life of Latino communities. Focusing on
how the fields of sociolinguistics and Latino studies have responded to prejudicial, status quo
notions of Latino ways of speaking, she argues for continued advocacy in advancing language
rights along the lines of work done by Shana Poplack, Ana Celia Zentella, Bonnie Urciuoli,
Guadalupe Valdés, and Ofelia García. Similarly, Showstack’s chapter explores connections
between Latino identity and language, unpacking essentialized assumptions that Spanish has a
uniform social meaning for all Latinos and instead demonstrating several ways in which indi-
viduals use Spanish to represent identities in interaction within specific social contexts such as
family, community, work, and classrooms – this last context a potent site for potentially (re)
constructing positive opinions about U.S. Spanish varieties.
Negrón further complicates relationships between Latinos and their Spanish varieties by
incorporating an analysis of “race” and the social hierarchy it generates both in the U.S. and in
Latin America. Through her literature review as well as examples from her own work in New
York City, she demonstrates that Latinos frequently negotiate racial categorization through
Spanish in both affiliative and differentiating ways, the latter often couched in racial terms.
Specifically, Latinos sometimes judge each other’s Spanish as inferior because they see certain
people as racially inferior. Finally, focusing on commercially produced textbooks for Spanish
heritage speaker courses, Cashman and Trujillo reveal the rampant heteronormativity that serves
to erase the experiences of and potentially alienate Latino LGBTQ+ students, simultaneously
doing nothing to address racialized violence, economic injustice, and racial privilege that impact
queer communities of color.
Since these chapters were completed, the Spanish version of the U.S. government website
was taken down for several months after Trump’s inauguration; draconian migratory regulations

5
 Kim Potowski

were threatened and some enacted; and general moves away from national and linguistic perme-
ability have increased. Many of the chapters in this Part offer recommendations for practice; it
is of crucial importance for readers to think about and act on concrete suggestions to combat
injustices against Spanish-speaking individuals and communities.

Part II: Linguistic studies

In places where Spanish is the only language spoken, it seems logical to posit that all children
learn it in more or less the same way, going through similar stages of phonological and mor-
phosyntactic development in the same order. However, linguistic forms and frequencies change
over time, indicating that the systems of children differ from those of their parents. There are
also obvious differences in the Spanish spoken in different geographic locations and by varying
social classes, genders, and ethno/racial groups, to name a few categories. This kind of socio-
linguistic variation continues to be amply documented around the Spanish-speaking world, for
example in the work compiled in Díaz-Campos (2011) as well as presentations at the biannual
Workshops on Spanish Sociolinguistics and other venues.
But when another language is present, the two linguistic systems interact and complicate
acquisition, use, and social meaning. Do monolingual and bilingual Spanish systems differ, and
if so how? And do bilingual Spanish systems differ in cases in which: (a) Spanish is the major-
ity prestige of the two languages, (b) Spanish has equal prestige with the other language, or
(c) Spanish is a minority language? The ten chapters in this Part address situation (c), presenting
cogent reviews of relevant work. They all focus on Spanish in the U.S. because this is where
the majority of work on the topic has been carried out; comparative studies are sorely needed

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in other countries as well. I begin this summary with an important quote from Pinto’s chapter
that all discussions of heritage languages should keep in mind:

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[c]omparing SHL [Spanish as a heritage language] to monolingual varieties of Spanish
should be considered an analytical exercise that does not necessarily imply any of the
following: 1) That heritage speakers of Spanish strive, or should strive, to speak like
monolingual speakers; 2) That the monolingual variety is superior; 3) That any differ-
ences reported for SHL represent deficiencies that need to be corrected; 4) That formal
registers are more valid than informal registers, although one or the other may be more
appropriate in a particular context.
(Pinto, this volume)

The Part begins with Montrul’s chapter on the grammatical aspects of U.S. Spanish heritage
language systems, carefully detailing aspects of the highly variable inflectional instances of mor-
phology; interfaces between morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics; and complex syntax that
these speakers evidence. It walks readers through clear explanations with helpful examples and
compares important points in summative tables, such that experts and more novice readers alike
can appreciate the complexity and also the frequent systematicity of these bilingual systems.
The Part then moves from acquisition/processing into production. Ronquest and Rao sum-
marize current research in heritage Spanish phonetics and phonology, including Voice Onset
Times of the consonants /ptk/ as well as very recent work on rhotics (‘r’ sounds). Regarding
Spanish vowels, they present interesting findings that even minimal contact with English can
affect them, as can whether a task is formal or informal. The penultimate section of the chapter
summarizes work in the most understudied area to date, heritage speaker prosody (intona-
tion, stress, and rhythm), while the final section presents a summary of where heritage speaker

6
 Spanish as a heritage/minority language

phonology is more like that of monolingual speakers and where it is not, leading to “two seem-
ingly contradictory observations about heritage Spanish pronunciation: ‘sounding’ like [native
Spanish speakers] on the one hand, but having a ‘heritage accent’ on the other.”
Moving to the lexicon, Fairclough and Garza first dispense with the mistaken notion that
vocabulary is “simply memorized lexical units . . . consisting of individual word forms” by
explaining the various types of lexical knowledge required to use a word productively. The
authors then describe the vast dialectal variation present in U.S. Spanish lexicon, the role of the
age of acquisition on the lexicon, and studies on both receptive and productive lexicon with
U.S. Spanish speakers. They argue that heritage language instruction should focus on building
students’ lexicon because it has been correlated with greater global language proficiency as well
as a reduction in students’ linguistic insecurity.
The chapter by Pinto explores the relatively scant published work on the pragmatic systems
of U.S.-raised Spanish speakers, including the discourse marker use of Chicano children in
southern California and of Puerto Rican adults in New York, Miami, and Chicago; the use of
non-canonical grammar structures (influenced by English) for requests and complaints; commu-
nicative strategies in longer oral narratives; and the use of tú and vos in Houston. He notes that
research on pragmatic phenomena – which exhibit unwieldy variety – would benefit greatly
from close comparisons with monolingual Spanish and monolingual English data, from a com-
bination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, and the incorporation of interpretation studies
instead of just production.
Wood Bowden and Issa discuss neurophysiological investigations of heritage language online
processing of Spanish (meaning that it takes place in real-time) during recognition and pro-
duction tasks. These studies use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional

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near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), and event-related potentials (ERP), all of which measure
changes in electrical activity or blood flow in the brain. Main findings include that heritage

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speakers’ two languages may be differentiated on a fine-grained neurological level, yet there is
a high degree of overlap in neural substrates that underlie their two languages. They also show
increased activation of particular regions of the brain related to executive function when switch-
ing between their two languages.
Also centered on real-time processing methodology such as timed lexical decision tasks and
eye tracking, Jegerski’s chapter elucidates the state of the art in psycholinguistic studies of her-
itage Spanish systems, including the intriguing finding that heritage speakers look more like
second language learners in off-line tasks but more like monolingually raised native speakers in
on-line tasks.
The chapter by Shin also looks at morphosyntax but focuses on children, finding that in
the U.S. context of reduced exposure to Spanish, bilingual children tend to acquire Spanish
morphosyntax at a slower rate than monolingual children, and that while English does influ-
ence children’s Spanish morphosyntax, as they get older they become increasingly adept at
suppressing features that do not correspond to communicative expectations. Such knowledge
can assist speech pathologists working with bilingual children, helping them understand what
to expect among typically developing bilinguals versus what requires intervention. In addi-
tion, the chapter outlines outstanding theoretical issues that are ripe for future research, such
as the need to better understand how bilingual children acquire variable grammatical patterns
as opposed to categorical ones, as well as when and how bilingual children generalize over
lexically restricted patterns.
Torres-Cacoullos and Berry examine the understudied area of sociolinguistic variation in
U.S. Spanish – that is, correlations between linguistic behavior and speakers’ sociodemographic
characteristics. They find patterns that generally replicate those found across the Spanish-speaking

7
 Kim Potowski

world, indicating that social factors are just as important in minority language situations as they
are in other sociodemographic contexts. They also argue for a data optimization method such as
principal component analysis as a way to group speakers on the basis of their linguistic behavior,
illustrating with a corpus of New Mexico Spanish. Another type of variation in U.S. Spanish
results from the fact that speakers hail from vastly different dialect regions of Latin America. Yet
Erker’s chapter on dialectal contact shows that speaker region of origin is only one among many
social factors contributing to their linguistic choices. The studies he reviews show both inter-
generational continuity and change, as well as the fact that it is typically highly salient linguistic
features (such as the pronoun vos and syllable final /s/) that are sensitive to change in the U.S.
Finally, Durán and Toribio explore research on macro bilingual practices including code-
switching and the ways in which children are socialized into these practices. They note that
many K-12 researchers and classrooms have begun legitimizing code-switching and translan-
guaging, but the university level has largely not, meaning that when they “[enter] the university
Spanish language classroom, heritage speakers are expected to leave their hybrid practices at
the door.” In this way, an important resource for developing linguistic and content knowledge
among college students is overlooked. The authors advocate for critical language awareness
approaches (see Leeman, this volume) that engage Latino students in discussions of bilingual
varieties and language mixing practices.
At least three areas for future research are suggested by the work in this Part. First, our
knowledge would benefit from comparisons of two groups of Spanish-speaking bilingual indi-
viduals, both children and adults: those in majority contexts vs. those in contexts where Spanish
is a minority language. For example, how does the Spanish spoken by indigenous bilingual
speakers in Ecuador compare with that spoken by second generation Colombians in Switzerland

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or third generation Puerto Ricans in New York? A second area in need of research is the
role of contextual factors including societal and familial attitudes. For example, King, Fogle,

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and Logan-Terry (2008) document that some indigenous Ecuadorian parents believe that early
second language exposure confuses children, which leads these parents to promote Spanish
only in the home and, concomitantly, to shift away from their indigenous language. Finally, we
sorely need more longitudinal studies that follow children over a period of time to see how their
Spanish system changes (such as Silva-Corvalán’s 2014 study of her two grandsons).

Part III: Educational issues

In the U.S., three-fourths of all Hispanics aged five and older speak Spanish. However, that share
is projected to fall to about two-thirds in 2020 (López & González-Barrera 2013). In addition,
one out of every four school-age students in the U.S. today is Latino, yet the National Center for
Educational Statistics reports that Latino fourth and eighth graders score about two grade levels
lower than the national average on tests in math and reading. There is an even larger difference –
up to four grade levels – between Hispanic students who are proficient in English and those who
are not. We also know that 12% of all U.S. Latino students drop out of high school, compared
to 5% of White students. It is painfully obvious that our current educational approaches are not
benefitting these students’ Spanish, their English, or their academic achievement.
In the fortunate event that these students make it to college, many of them are classified
as “heritage Spanish speakers” and take Spanish courses specifically developed based on their
strengths and needs. There have been excellent recent collections detailing educational issues
related to teaching Spanish to heritage speakers at the college level, including Pascual y Cabo
(2016), Fairclough and Beaudrie (2016), and Beaudrie, Ducar, and Potowski (2014). This Part
presents a few new explorations of this theme as well as important considerations for promoting

8
 Spanish as a heritage/minority language

successful outcomes among Latino children at the K-8 level. Valdés and Parra set the stage by
exploring a seven-step process that underlies most attempts at “curricularizing language” and
how each step might apply to the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language. Important elements
include ideologies of language, race (connecting nicely with the chapter by Negrón), class, and
identity (the topic of Showstack’s chapter) as well as theories of second language acquisition
and bilingualism. In general, the authors support the goal of raising students’ critical language
awareness “as a way to decolonize their thoughts and feelings about their use of the Spanish
language, so they can become active users and address their communities’ needs.” Similarly,
Leeman’s chapter focuses on critical language awareness, highlighting the unfortunate central
role of mainstream educational institutions in the legitimization of linguistic subordination. She
challenges educators to examine how they can engage students in questioning dominant ideolo-
gies surrounding bilingualism and bidialectalism and alter the status quo.
The Part then moves from these larger curricular issues to more micro classroom-level
themes. As explained by Bowles, we have several decades of research on instructed second
language acquisition – most using a pre-test, treatment, and post-test design – yet few such
studies in heritage speaker classrooms. This is despite indications that heritage language develop-
ment probably differs from that of second language learners. Her chapter seeks to answer two
fundamental questions: (1) Is instruction in a classroom setting beneficial for heritage language
acquisition? If so, (2) What features make such instruction most effective? She concludes with
concrete suggestions for future research in this sorely understudied area, arguing for a new sub-
field of research called instructed heritage language acquisition. In keeping with the volume’s insist-
ence on bridging areas of inquiry, I would like to also suggest that pre-test/treatment/post-test
studies also be carried out on K-8 Spanish speakers in dual language programs (see Lindholm-

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Leary’s chapter, this volume) as well as with high school students in heritage speaker programs.
Focusing on classroom processes instead of outcomes, Carreira and Hitchins Chik describe how,

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unlike second language students whose Spanish proficiency is mostly a direct result of prior
coursework, heritage speakers’ knowledge and abilities are much more heterogeneous because
they derive from life experiences. They then summarize principles in differentiated teaching,
offering eight concrete tools for teachers to help their students get the most out of their Spanish
classes. This is important both for separate heritage speaker classrooms as well as in Spanish
programs where heritage speakers and second language learners come together at some point.
Returning again to a more macro perspective, the Part features Beaudrie’s chapter on herit-
age language program administration. Given the exponential growth of these programs around
the nation, as well as the increase in Hispanic Serving Institutions4 (which are logical places for
heritage Spanish programs to blossom and which could ideally form a coalition to support these
programs), this is a particularly important area of practice and scholarship. Her chapter includes
important topics such as course placement procedures, curriculum development,5 and evaluat-
ing student success. Abbott and Martínez examine issues in the increasingly popular fields of
Spanish for the professions and community service learning and some specific applications for
heritage speaker populations. Spanish for the professions grew out of a need to connect second
language learners with functional language that was absent from traditional textbooks, includ-
ing business and healthcare, while community service learning sought to expand opportunities
for second language learners to interact with native speakers while developing a sense of social
responsibility. Yet these two key areas were absent from heritage language education until
recently, and the authors make a compelling case for the transformative educational experiences
that these approaches can foster for heritage speakers connected to issues of immigration, health
care, and cultural perspectives. Also in the university context, noting that the number of U.S.
students studying abroad has more than tripled since the late 1990s, Shively examines issues

9
 Kim Potowski

related to heritage speakers studying abroad in Spanish-speaking countries. For many of these
students, study abroad may be more of a “return home” than an “immersion in difference”
which typically characterizes the second language study abroad experience. But even so, these
students often encounter being positioned as “foreign,” which ushers in a certain amount of
identity renegotiation. Carvalho and Child explore issues in the acquisition of cognate languages
(such as French, Italian, and Portuguese) by heritage Spanish speakers. Specifically, when com-
pared with the acquisition of second language learners, heritage speakers’ acquisition of these
languages is characterized by a faster rate, early high competence in receptive skills, and ease
of communication. The authors detail efforts of curriculum designers to develop materials that
best suit heritage Spanish speakers in these courses – which are technically third language (L3)
contexts – using activities that capitalize on their implicit linguistic knowledge, while also keep-
ing in mind that heritage Spanish speakers are a linguistically heterogeneous group. Questions
about linguistic transfer and language change that emerge here are also relevant where Spanish-
speakers have immigrated to countries where Italian or French are spoken (see the chapters by
Bonomi and Sanfelici and by Sánchez Abchi, respectively).
The Part concludes with two chapters that focus on the elementary school years, a critical
topic given that the seven hours per day that kids spend in school constitute approximately half
of their waking hours. Lindholm-Leary focuses on a topic close to my heart, dual language
programs, which teach between 50% to 90% of the curriculum in Spanish. Over 30 years of
research findings demonstrate that both native Spanish speakers and native English speakers
benefit from dual language programs on standardized achievement tests, course grades, school
attendance and dropout rates, and student attitudes. I have not seen any other school model
with as strong an impact on Latino youth (who at the national level are at risk on many meas-

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ures) and on Spanish language development, both of which constitute key components of a
social justice-driven curriculum. Unfortunately, there are far too few Spanish dual language

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programs around the U.S., with a recent estimate of under 300 schools for almost 8 million
Latino students (Potowski 2016) based on data from the dual language directory of the Center
for Applied Linguistics (2007).6 Given the resounding success of dual immersion programs for
Latino students’ Spanish, English, and overall academic development, the Spanish heritage lan-
guage community should be fighting for the creation of more such programs as well as greater
availability of high quality teacher preparation programs for the professionals who work there.
Finally, the chapter by Mancilla-Martinez explores what we know about how Spanish-
English bilingual Latino children develop literacy skills in Spanish. Unfortunately, we know
relatively little about this process, due in large part to a lack of assessments designed for and nor-
med on Spanish-English bilinguals. The author reviews research on English literacy develop-
ment and on Spanish literacy development, highlighting important differences between the two
and suggesting important areas for how best to support this growing and vulnerable population’s
literacy achievement in both languages.

Part IV: Spanish as a minority/heritage language outside of the U.S.

The final Part of the book presents profiles of Spanish-speaking communities in nine nations
around the globe. As noted in the Introduction, it would be difficult for a single volume
to include all contexts where Spanish is a minority language, and this one is no exception.
Several interesting contexts that are unfortunately not represented include Brazil, Morocco,
Gibraltar, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines. However, the countries profiled (shown in
Table 1.2) provide an interesting range of contexts in Europe, Australia/New Zealand, and

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 Spanish as a heritage/minority language

Table 1.2 Spanish speakers in nine countries outside the U.S. featured in Part IV

Country Estimated number of Spanish-speakers Most common countries of origin

Canada 410,700 Mexico, Colombia

Italy 400,000 Peru, Ecuador
United Kingdom 300,000 Spain, Colombia
Germany 238,000 Spain, Mexico
Switzerland 160,000 Spain, Colombia
Australia 117,000 Chile, El Salvador
Sweden 81,500 Chile, Colombia
New Zealand 27,000 Varied
Mexico n/a United States

North America. Some of these chapters represent the first publications to my knowledge about
Spanish and its speakers in these locations.
Jones Díaz and Walker combine quantitative data with qualitative original research with
Latin American immigrants in Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand, with several poignant
anecdotes that highlight the role of Spanish in identity construction and cultural maintenance.
Due in large part to the similarities between Spanish and Italian, Bonomi and Sanfelici’s chapter
about Italy includes the concept of Spanish in-motion to describe the set of hybrid and multiple
language practices performed by Latinos there, which occur despite the nation’s largely mono-
lingual ideology that seeks to assimilate migrants through the exclusive use of Italian. Similarly,
beliefs about how to best promote German acquisition is a focus of Ramos Méndez-Sahlender’s

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chapter about Germany, where declining resources are a main factor in the lack of Spanish
maintenance programs. The chapter on Switzerland by Sánchez Abchi documents that despite

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the challenge of extremely diverse backgrounds, students have been shown to write better in
Spanish after attending “Language and Culture of Origin” classes. Parada summarizes linguistic
research to date on the Chilean-Swedish community before describing the climate of herit-
age language support in the country’s educational system. Guardado examines Canada and the
UK (a combination I requested in order to represent two Anglophone contexts), summarizing
research on morphosyntax, language and identity, and educational experiences among Spanish-
speaking immigrants to these two locations.
Finally, the inclusion of Mexico in this Part might seem surprising, particularly since we saw
in Table 1.1 that this is the Spanish-speaking nation with the largest number of inhabitants in
the world. In this chapter, Mar-Molinero focuses on a phenomenon that is increasingly com-
mon: that of individuals raised for most or all of their lives in the U.S., who are descendants
of Mexican nationals and who have returned to Mexico. Growing up in the U.S. frequently
leads to certain linguistic phenomena in their Spanish (explored in Part II) as well as cultural
knowledge and experiences that are out of harmony with what is expected of their Mexico-
raised peers. The author details ways in which Mexican schools might best meet the needs of
these “returnee” students.

Conclusions and future directions

Minoritized languages around the world, especially those spoken by immigrants, are very typi-
cally on a path towards loss. This volume explores linguistic, social, and educational issues
germane to understanding Spanish as a heritage/minoritized language in ten different nations.

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 Kim Potowski

There are, of course, many other important and relevant topics that could have been included
here, including some that I was simply unable to procure (such as Spanish in U.S. mainstream
media and in U.S. literature) as well as others that did not occur to me. I conclude by briefly
describing four additional areas that may be fruitful for future investigations into the topic of
heritage/minoritized languages.

Social justice
In what ways can researchers bring about greater social justice for speakers of Spanish as a
minoritized language? Can we work to lessen linguistic prejudice? Help stem language loss?
Encourage speakers to develop a sense of pride in their Spanish in the face of negative forces, as
does the curricular work of Wolfram (2013) and of Charity Hudley and Mallinson (2014)? As
noted by Heleta (2016), a lot of researchers’ work is “largely sitting in academic journals that
are read almost exclusively by [our] peers.” Instead we need to share our work with the broader
public in order to effect change. For example, it is shocking that the field has not yet produced
an educational, mainstream-oriented feature-length documentary about Spanish in the U.S.
akin to American Tongues or Do you speak American? Such a video could not only generate pride
among U.S. Spanish-speakers but also educate the broader public about the history and value of
the language in the present-day U.S.

Mothers as minority/ized language transmitters

Mothers may play an especially important role in the development of a minoritized language.

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For example, Walker (2011) observed that mothers exerted a definitive influence on Spanish
language use among Latino children in New Zealand. Potowski (2016) studied the Spanish of

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‘MexiRicans’ (individuals who have one Mexican parent and one Puerto Rican parent) raised
in Chicago, where Spanish is a minority language and Puerto Rican Spanish is the minority
dialect compared to Mexican Spanish. She found that those MexiRicans who exhibited Puerto
Rican phonological features always had a Puerto Rican mother, suggesting that in order to
develop features of a locally minority dialect within a minority language, having a mother
who speaks that minority dialect is necessary. Zentella (1997) found that Puerto Rican girls
in a New York City neighborhood developed stronger Spanish than the boys – because they
were required to stay near the home with their mothers, while boys were allowed to leave the
block – which meant that when they became parents, girls were in a stronger position to pass
on Spanish than their U.S.-raised male partners. Work on other languages, too, has made a con-
nection between successful minority language transmission and having a mother who spoke the
minority language (Williams 1987 in Wales; Kamada 1997 in Japan; Kondo 1997 in Hawaii;
Boyd 1998 in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden; Chiaro & Nocella, 1999 in Britain).7 This sug-
gests that a society might bolster minority language maintenance via mother-friendly policies
including postpartum leaves of absence, equal pay, jobsite childcare, and incentives to stay home
with children until they go to preschool.

Technology
What is the role of technology in the bilingualism of the world’s Spanish-speaking individuals?
Trenchs (2013) comments on the value of the Internet, specifically YouTube, for purposes of
cultural entertainment tied to ethnolinguistic identity among Chinese immigrant adolescents in
Barcelona, while Vincent (2015) explores the role of mobile phones and Internet cafés among

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 Spanish as a heritage/minority language

Latino diaspora members in maintaining cultural and linguistic connections. Yet a digital divide
in broadband access continues to exist in the U.S., with only 46% of Latinos (vs. 73% of Whites)
having home access in 2015 (Pew Hispanic Center 2016), constituting yet another inequity in
Latinos’ socioeconomic realities that might be addressed through dedicated policies.

Notes
1 An airtight definition of the term “native” speaker is elusive, hence my use of quotation marks. Criteria
such as “commencing acquisition at birth” or “speaking the language at home” are imperfect because
both situations can lead to linguistic systems that could not sensibly be referred to as “native-like.”
Monolingualism obviously cannot be a requirement, either.Thus, I use instead the term “Spanish speaker”
with the goal of identifying the number of individuals who use Spanish with locally adequate proficiency to
accomplish tasks in their lives.This includes, for example, speakers of indigenous languages in Latin America
as well as the estimated 3 million non-Latinos in the U.S. and the 400,000 in Italy who identify as home
Spanish speakers. Given the near impossibility of ascertaining reliable data for such an imprecise defini-
tion, these figures should be taken as estimates only.
2 The U.S. number was calculated by adding 37.6 million home Spanish speakers (American Community
Survey, U.S. Census 2011) and an estimated 8.9 million undocumented Spanish speakers from Latin
America as of 2014 (Pew Hispanic Center 2016).
3 Rei-Doval (2016) reports that in 2013, 31% of Galicians were monolingual in Galician.
4 A federal designation meaning that 25% or more of the student population is Hispanic.
5 The Hispanidades project is another excellent curricular model that links Latino students from around the
U.S. in sharing first person, locally relevant material (www.lrc.columbia.edu/hispanidades/collaborations).
6 Although this is likely an undercounting. Unofficial estimates place the national number of dual language
schools in the U.S. between 1,000 (Maxwell 2012) to over 2,000 (Watanabe 2011). But even if there were
2,000 such programs, that would not be nearly enough for almost 8 million Latino students.

Taylor and Francis

7 In her summary of a large body of work, DeHouwer (2009) found no effect for parental gender on
language development. It may be only in language minority contexts, such as those explored by Walker,

Not for distribution

Potowski, Zentella, and others, that the mother might exert greater influence on children’s bilingual
language development.

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