Profiles of an Acquisition Generation: Nontraditional Heritage Speakers of Spanish

ABSTRACT

Though definitions vary, the literature on heritage speakers of Spanish identifies two primary attributes: a linguistic and cultural connection to the language. This article profiles four Anglo college students who grew up in bilingual or Spanish-dominant communities in the Southwest who self-identified as Spanish heritage speakers, citing linguistic and cultural connections developed at home and in their communities. It compares their experiences to attributes of Latin@ heritage speakers more commonly described in the literature and suggests the term acquisition generation to describe how new speakers develop and negotiate a heritage speaker identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Acquisition generation
• heritage speakers
• language socialization
• Spanish
• translanguaging

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all of my research participants; this work would not be possible without their contributions. I am also grateful to the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions; to Drs. Judith Franzak and Daniel Villa for their guidance and support during the data collection and analysis; and to the encouraging members of my writing group, Drs. Rebeca Maseda and Zeynep Kılıç.

Notes

¹ Though this article focuses on language socialization and identity formation, there is extensive work in structural linguistics that describes HS’ language patterns (see, for example, Montrul, 2002, 2011; Montrul & Bowles, 2009; Montrul & Sánchez-Walker, 2013).

² This article was reviewed during the 2016 presedential primaries and subsequent general election and revised during the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, which is likely to change these contexts significantly.

³ Though heritage language courses were developed to meet the needs of HS, they are not available in all higher education institutions (Beaudrie, 2011; Carreira, 2014; Ingold, Rivers, Tesser, & Ashby, 2002), and many HS avoid these classes or upper-division sections because they doubt their own language skills (Beaudrie & Ducar, 2005; Pino, 2001).

⁴ See DeFeo (2013) for a discussion about identity-affirming selection processes in qualitative research.

⁵ Though this discussion is referring to language and race, many Latin@ HS also doubt their legitimacy as Spanish speakers (Beaudrie & Ducar, 2005; Valdés et al., 2003) and are nervous about using Spanish with other speakers who they perceive to have more developed language skills, fearing they will struggle with vocabulary or be judged for their limitations (Bustamante-López, 2008) or for speaking a regional dialect (Helmer, 2011; Potowski, 2002; Sayer, 2013) that is only appropriate for colloquial applications (Pomerantz & Schwartz, 2011; Villa, 2002). Though my participants had similar feelings of trepidation, the root of that sentiment differs significantly.