Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States: The State of the Field

4. Key Concepts for Theorizing Spanish as a Heritage Language

C H A P T E R 4 Key Concepts for Theorizing Spanish as a Heritage Language Andrew Lynch, University of Miami D URING THE 1970S, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the formation of La Raza, a critical mass of studies on Spanish in the United States emerged. The scholars who undertook these studies were different than their early-twentieth-century predecessors, who had developed detailed descriptions of language use and form. Instead, many scholars in the 1970s and early 1980s took up ideological and theoretical issues (e.g., language ‘‘loyalty,’’ as discussed by Sánchez 1972; and ‘‘diglossia,’’ as proposed by Fishman, Cooper, and Ma 1971).1 With the growing presence of ‘‘native speaker’’ students in university Spanish courses, the phenomena of fluent vernacular bilingualism and language ‘‘loss’’ posed pedagogical challenges. At that time, Valdés (1978, 103) affirmed that ‘‘defining native language instruction for the profession . . . is simply a question of deciding exactly what teaching a standard dialect of a language involves’’ (emphasis in the original). The first premise that she posited for a ‘‘comprehensive language development program’’ for bilingual speakers was ‘‘a dedication to bringing about the acquisition of ‘educated’ language use to include an overall development of total proficiency as characteristic of educated speakers of any language’’ (p. 106). This philosophical premise seems to have remained at the heart of the emerging field of Spanish as a heritage language (SHL). Key to its interpretation are the concepts of ‘‘educated’’ or ‘‘standard’’ language, which is the concern of sociolinguistic inquiry; and ‘‘proficiency,’’ which is a construct borrowed mostly from the field of second-language acquisition (SLA). This chapter presents a brief, critical overview of these central concepts as they relate to SHL, highlighting their connection to the theory of diglossia and the phenomena of language 79 80 ANDREW LYNCH register, social agency, and generational continuity of the language. Clearly, all these theoretical notions have been intricately bound up together in the conceptualization of SHL: ‘‘Diglossia’’ is concomitant with notions of ‘‘register’’ and ‘‘standard language’’; ‘‘register’’ appears as a crucial (albeit at times implicit) dimension of the ‘‘proficiency’’ of heritage language learners; ‘‘agency’’ provides an ideological basis for hypotheses (again, at times implicit) regarding the processes of acquisition and use generally correlated with degrees of ‘‘proficiency’’; and in the great majority of studies about these processes, ‘‘generation’’ appears as the fundamental extralinguistic variable. Because the still-nascent field of SHL lacks a cohesive theoretical framework, the aim of this chapter is to generate further dialogue in advancement of this agenda by shedding critical light on several principal concepts that have guided the field thus far. First, however, a historical perspective on the notion of ‘‘diglossia’’ is in order, given that it seems to have provided the basis for Valdés’s initial ideas regarding a ‘‘standard dialect’’ and to have laid the ground for the major theoretical proposals and research agendas that were to follow. A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON DIGLOSSIA In her seminal publications on teaching Spanish to US Hispanic bilinguals, Valdés (1976, 1977, 1978) made an argument that was characterized by a sort of ‘‘language deficit’’ model—that is, the notion that heritage speakers (who were at that time called native speakers) lack some aspects of an idealized ‘‘complete’’ repertoire, relative to a ‘‘high’’ or ‘‘formal’’ variety, suggestions that evoke Ferguson ’s (1959, 325) theory of diglossia. Adapting the French diglossie, Ferguson elaborated ‘‘diglossia’’ as a model for societies in which ‘‘two or more varieties of the same language are used by some speakers under different conditions, . . . with each having a different role to play.’’ He took the situations of Arabic, Modern Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole as the basis for his proposal, observing that, in all these cases, one variety (‘‘high,’’ or H) serves public, formal functions and is highly standardized, whereas another variety (‘‘low,’’ or L) of the same language, which is limited to orality, serves private and informal functions and lacks prestige and standardization. In Fishman’s (1967) extension of this model to bilingual societies—that is, societies where two different languages are used rather than two varieties of the same language—five important characteristics of diglossia, as defined by Ferguson , were disregarded: (1) speakers’ feeling that H is more prestigious than L is sometimes ‘‘so strong that H alone is regarded as real and L is reported ‘not to exist’’’ (Fishman 1967, 329–30); (2) H has a literary...