Presidential Address
Mark Waltermire, New Mexico State University
Mark Waltermire is a Professor of Linguistics at New Mexico State University. His main research areas are sociolinguistic variation and language contact, particularly regarding the linguistic results of Spanish in contact with Portuguese along the Uruguayan-Brazilian border and Spanish in contact with English in New Mexico. He has published original research findings in these areas in journals such as the International Journal of Bilingualism, Journal of Language Contact, Spanish in Context, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics,and Hispaniaas well as in multiple edited collections published by Routledge, John Benjamins, Mouton, and Edinburgh University Press. Most recently, he co-edited the book Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas(Routledge).
Discrimination of Bilingual Dialects of Spanish in the Americas
Mark Waltermire • New Mexico State University
The discrimination of different dialects of Spanish is well known throughout Latin America. At one end, there are normative dialects that approximate written language; at the other, there are dialects that no Spanish speaker would consider normative in the slightest. This is the same for other languages, of course. In no language can anyone agree on the dialects in the middle. However, there is general consensus that bilingual dialects of a language receive the most stigma and its speakers the worst discrimination. This is true for bilingual dialects of Indo-European languages such as Spanish and Portuguese and Spanish and English, however they are labeled (e.g., portuñol, fronterizo, Spanglish, etc.), and particularly so for dialects of Spanish and an indigenous language.
This presentation focuses on Spanish dialects in contact with Portuguese and English and how purist language ideologies have led to their outright denigration in certain spheres (e.g., print media; language academies) and more tacit undermining in others (e.g., Spanish language instruction; linguistic description). It is in these latter spheres that we can make a difference. We have a responsibility to elevate bilingual dialects using a bottom-up approach. All too often, the opposite has occurred, with bilingual dialects being compared to monolingual dialects of those languages. This has the effect of representing bilingual language as somehow deviant and sub-standard. The same can be said of advocating for the teaching of two dialects (one “standard” and one local) à la Fairclough (2016) and Porras (1997), regardless of the good intentions for doing so. There is a pressing urgency to address this shortcoming in Spanish language instruction in the United States and in how Spanish is described and represented in this country. Not addressing it allows entrenched purist ideologies to push local dialects to the fringes when they are, in fact, the most important to Spanish speakers.