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  • Bilingualism in the USA: The Case of the Chicano-Latino Community by Fredric Field
  • María Carmen Parafita-Cuoto
Field, Fredric. Bilingualism in the USA: The Case of the Chicano-Latino Community. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-90-272-8509-6.

In Bilingualism in the USA: The Case of the Chicano-Latino Community, Field walks us through the different dimensions of the extraordinarily complex topic of bilingualism in the United States, taking the Chicano-Latino community as a case study. The book addresses a range of linguistic, attitudinal, and educational issues affecting bilingual phenomena in this community that can be easily extended to other similar communities within the USA and beyond. Although the volume’s focus is specific to the Chicano-Latino community, Field manages to provide a very comprehensive account of bilingualism studies in general that is accessible and ambitious in breadth. This makes the volume a very valuable resource for researchers, teachers, and students of bilingualism, linguistics, and education.

The introductory chapter brings up a number of issues that are covered in greater depth in the rest of the book, which is divided into two parts. Part 1 (chapters 2–4) lays the theoretical basis for the study of language contact and bilingual situations while part 2 (chapters 5–8) focuses on applied issues such as attitudinal factors, education, and language policy that can have an effect on bilingualism. Every chapter ends with a list of key terms, a summary, a number of activities/topics for discussion, and practice essay questions. These pedagogical merits make the book very suitable for use in the classroom setting. Although single chapters are key parts of a whole, their structure makes them suitable for use as stand-alone reading assignments too. This flexibility could be very useful in planning courses of different lengths.

In addition to providing a general introduction to bilingualism, multilingualism, and language contact, chapter 1, “Bilingualism as a worldwide phenomenon,” describes different bilingual situations in the United States and then moves on to the specific case of Spanish-English bilingualism, which leads to a discussion of the term “Hispanic” as a cover term for a variety of subgroups (e.g., “chicano” or “tejano”) who are all unique. Chapter 2, “Bilingual acquisition and the bilingual individual,” provides a very comprehensive overview of bilingual and multilingual language acquisition situations, which are very typical outside of the United States. In this chapter, Field introduces different types of acquisition (e.g., native, second, subsequent), various types of bilingualism (e.g., sequential, simultaneous, additive, etc.) and bilingual family types (e.g., one parent, one language, inter alia), as well as the types of bilinguals that can result (e.g., balanced, passive, etc.). The third chapter, “Bilingual phenomena in the US,” discusses typical phenomena that occur when two languages are in contact: dialect, register, social and linguistic change, diglossia, convergence, and attrition, among others. The highly debated difference between borrowing and code-switching is also addressed and described as a possible continuum. This leads to a discussion of code-switching types (e.g., inter-sentential and intra-sentential). The social attributes that delimit code-switching patterns are given due consideration, followed by a brief explanation of one of the main theoretical models (the Matrix Language Framework, Myers-Scotton 1993, and further works) that attempts to account for these code-switching patterns. There is no mention, however, of the theoretical debate between Myers-Scotton and MacSwan (see Bilingualism, Language and Cognition 2005), which would have enhanced this discussion. Similarly, even though psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research is acknowledged, no references are provided (see for example the interdisciplinary [End Page 591] research in the edited volumes of Bullock and Toribio [2009] or De Bot, Isurin and Windford [2009]). To finish part 1, in chapter 4, Field describes the origins and the main linguistic features of “Chicano English” (a non-standard minority dialect).

The more applied part of the book begins with a chapter on American attitudes to bilingualism. In this fifth chapter, the factors behind positive and negative attitudes towards multilingualism are explored both synchronically and diachronically. This naturally leads to “Bilingualism and Education,” which is behind heated debates such as the “English...

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