2.1 Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among the hispanics

This manuscript has been peer-reviewed, accepted, and endorsed by the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) as a significant contribution to the scholarship and practice of education administration. In addition to publication in the Connexions Content Commons, this module is published in the International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation , Volume 5, Number 1 (January – March 2010). Formatted and edited in Connexions by Julia Stanka, Texas A&M University.

Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among hispanics in the united states

Secundino Valladares

With the publication of the U.S. Population Census data for the year 2000, an agreement arises between the social analysts that the Hispanic community, the largest minority of the country, is the carrier of a great demographic potential: socio-cultural, political, and economic. Because of this ascertainment, and among the field of the projective sociolinguistics, diverse authors have set out to draw scenarios of the future of the Spanish language in the U.S. These scenarios are basically related to situations of diglossia, linguistic assimilation, and bilingualism; a trio that does not exhaust the possible alternatives that could be derived from the coexistence of the English and Spanish languages as languages in contact on the same territory.

In this work I try to conceptually outline these three alternatives: to empirically observe its development; to suggest the viability of any other, as is formation of a new language; to equip this exposition with a certain historical perspective, particularly to the 1970s, when I studied the phenomenon of the linguistic assimilation of the Hispanics in the area of the San Francisco Bay, California; and finally to contribute to clear the horizon with my proposal that, in spite of its founded reasons, is much of a gamble. Unfortunately, sociolinguistics does not have the degree of prediction as linguistics. But, not for that reason, is this work a mere exercise of wishful thinking . Nor does it aspire to become a prophecy that demands its own fulfillment. The intention is more modest. The future of Spanish in the U.S. is about to be written. That reality, like all socio-cultural facts, will be the result of a laborious process of social reconstruction, where the creativity and imagination of a multitude of social actors will be jeopardized. This paper tries to participate in that complex process of social construction of the linguistic reality of Hispanics.