Validating and Promoting Spanish in the United States: Lessons from Linguistic Science

Abstract

With U.S. Hispanics constituting a culturally, racially, and economically diverse group, the Spanish language represents a key identity factor for this community. Regrettably, the derisive attitudes about Spanish in the United States, as well as abroad, present a serious obstacle to the preservation of Spanish in this country. This paper argues that the Spanish for native speakers (SNS) curriculum represents the single most important forum where such attitudes can be exposed as groundless, and where the dual task of validating the regional variants represented in the classroom while teaching the standard language can be accomplished. Well-chosen linguistic examples hold the key to demonstrating four issues that are vital to the education of bilingual Hispanics and the preservation of Spanish in the United States. These are: (a) the arbitrary nature of linguistic prejudice, (b) the linguistic validity of all dialects of a language including nonstandard variants, (c) the overwhelming linguistic overlap between nonstandard and standard dialects of Spanish, and (d) the instrumental value of learning the standard language.