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Is Spanish taking over the United States?

Maria Carreira

Is Spanish in the U.S. to stay? Will it remain the same as Spanish in other countries?

Th e story of Spanish in the United States is an amazing one. Th e U.S.

is now the fi ft h largest and the third wealthiest Spanish-speaking country in the world. New York has as many Puerto Ricans as San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico. Miami is the second-largest Cuban city, Los Angeles the second largest Mexican city.

But what’s the future of Spanish in the U.S.? During more than three centuries of immigration, dozens of languages have landed on American shores, only to fade away in a generation or two. Th ink of Italian, Dutch, or Japanese. Judging purely from history, Spanish could be expected to follow the same path, gradually losing speakers and eventually disappearing. But will Spanish go the way of other immigrant languages—or will it fi nd a way to survive?

As a general rule, immigrants to the U.S. strongly prefer their native language over English. Th is certainly applies to the millions

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of foreign-born Latinos now in the U.S. However, with each succes-sive generation of Latinos, Spanish use declines sharply. By the third generation, few Latinos remain profi cient in the language of their parents and grandparents. Th ey overwhelmingly prefer English.

Latino youth abandon Spanish to fi t in, or to attain the social status that comes with English. And practically speaking, some worry that Spanish will interfere with their ability to speak English, and their ability to make a good living. So it’s only a matter of time before Spanish fades away. Or is it?

So far, the generational loss of speakers has been off set by a steady fl ow of new immigrants from Latin America—up to a million a year. But even if immigration declines as some experts predict, the sheer number of speakers in the country gives Spanish the advan-tage of critical mass—far larger than any other immigration in his-tory—which will give it staying power. As of 2006, there were over 45 million Hispanics in the U.S., living in every state of the union.

Th ere are parts of the country—places such as Texas, Florida, California, and New Mexico—where Spanish has a history dating back many decades, if not hundreds of years. Recently, Spanish is also making its presence felt in places as far away from the nation’s southern contours as Washington State, Oregon, and Minnesota, as new waves of immigrants travel further into the country in search of a livelihood.

From the newly arrived to the native born, Latinos in the U.S.

are avid consumers of all things in Spanish. In Los Angeles and Miami, Spanish-language television and radio have a larger audience than their English-language counterparts. Everywhere Latinos live, Spanish can be heard and seen in churches, businesses, schools, and government offi ces.

And let’s not forget non-Latinos who, for many reasons, choose to become fl uent in the language. From kindergarten to postgradu-ate programs, Spanish is the most widely-studied language in the U.S. At the secondary level, it is the language of choice of an astounding 70 percent of learners. But Spanish is not just for those

in school. Professionals from all walks of life—including America’s most powerful politicians—are fl ocking to learn the language. For members of the U.S. Congress seeking to attract the Latino vote, there’s even a ten-week program titled ‘Spanish on the Hill’.

However, the future of U.S. Spanish doesn’t depend just on external factors like social pressures, economic incentives, and demographics. What becomes of it may also be aff ected by how it develops linguistically. Impressive as the numbers of speakers are, what’s perhaps even more impressive is the variety of accents, usage and dialects, as Spanish-speaking immigrants arrive from places ranging from Buenos Aires to Tijuana. Mexicans are by far the largest national group, but there are sizable immigrant populations from all of the other Spanish-speaking countries, particularly in the Caribbean and Central America. Th ere’s been nothing like this in the history of the Spanish-speaking world.

In this new world, sometimes dubbed the ‘United Hispanic States of America’, Spanish is being negotiated and reinvented day by day, in part because of the mixing of dialects, in part because of the incorpo-rating of elements of English. A U.S. mixture of Spanish and English is evolving, oft en referred to as ‘Spanglish’. Th ink of ‘Yo quiero Taco Bell,’

or ‘Hasta la vista, Baby.’ Spanglish is both popular and contagious, and is even spreading to other Spanish-speaking countries.

Spanish in the U.S. is mutating, adapting to its linguistic environ-ment, and therefore more likely to thrive. It is not the traditional Spanish of Mexico or, for that matter, the Spanish of any other country you know. Th ree generations from now U.S. Spanish will likely be a new blend, still understandable by people in Spanish-speaking coun-tries, but diff erent from what we hear today, enriched by the mixture of Spanish dialects that fl ow into it and by the infl uence of English.

Whatever new shape Spanish takes, we should recognize that it is no longer a foreign language in the United States. Th e state of New Mexico has acknowledged that by proclaiming itself offi cially bilingual in Spanish and English. Th e rest of the country, while not taking that offi cial step, is rapidly adapting to the fact that Spanish now functions as a U.S. language second only to English.

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About the author

Maria Carreira is professor of Spanish linguistics at California State University, Long Beach. Her publications focus on Spanish in the United States and Spanish as a world language. She is the co-author, with Sherri Spaine Long, of a beginning Spanish textbook (Nexos, Houghton Miffl in, 2005) and, with Michelle C. Geoff rion-Vinci, of a forthcoming textbook for teaching Spanish to bilingual Latinos (Sí se puede, Houghton Miffl in). Dr. Carreira received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Suggestions for further reading

In this book: Various languages of America are discussed in chapters 25 (revitalizing threatened Native American languages), 35 (languages of the U.S.), 36 (America’s language crisis), 38 (Cajun), 39 (German in the U.S.), 40 (Gullah), and 49 (Native American languages). Chapter 52 discusses the relationship between Spanish and Portuguese.

Elsewhere:

Dávila, Arlene. Latinos Inc.: Th e Marketing and Making of a People (University of California Press, 2001). Documents the growing infl uence of Latino culture in the U.S. and explores Latino identity and ethnicity through the prism of the Hispanic marketing industry.

Carreira, Maria. ‘Mass media, marketing, critical mass and other mechanisms of linguistic maintenance’, in Southwest Journal of Linguis-tics (2002) Vol. 21, No. 4. Discusses the role that the Spanish-language media, Latino demographics, and commercial factors are playing in maintaining and promoting Spanish in the U.S.

Krashen, Stephen. ‘Bilingual education, the acquisition of English, and the retention and loss of Spanish’, in Ana Roca, ed. Research on Spanish in the United States: Linguistic Issues and Challenges (Cascadilla Press, 2000). Written by one of America’s foremost authorities on foreign-lan-guage education, this article examines the impact of bilingual education in reversing the generational loss of immigrant languages in the U.S. It argues that American society and business, in particular, stand to benefi t from stemming this loss.

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