The discourses of heritage language development: Engaging ideologies in Canadian Hispanic communities - 2014

1 Heritage Language Journal, 11(1)

April, 2014

The Discourses of Heritage Language Development:

Engaging Ideologies in Canadian Hispanic Communities

Martin Guardado

University of Alberta

ABSTRACT

The goal of this article is to investigate the discourses surrounding the development and

maintenance of Spanish in Canadian Hispanic families and community groups. Although the

research literature already contains abundant insights into a variety of issues and factors, such as

the individual, familial and societal benefits of heritage language maintenance, its

conceptualization from a theoretical perspective of discourses and ideologies in families is less

frequently discussed explicitly. Therefore, via analyses of interviews and daily interactions

drawn from a 1.5-year ethnography conducted in Western Canada, the article draws attention to

the diversity of meanings present in the families’ discursive constructions of heritage language

development and maintenance. The interviews with parents were found to contain discourses that

embodied implicit and explicit ideologies about language. Some of the metalinguistic

constructions of language maintenance discussed in the article include discourses that can be

categorized as utilitarian, affective, aesthetic, cosmopolitan and oppositional. The article

concludes with implications for theory, research and families.

Keywords: discourse, metalinguistics, heritage language development, language maintenance,

Spanish, Canada, cosmopolitanism

INTRODUCTION

The present article attempts to contribute to the understanding of heritage language development

(HLD) and maintenance by examining data emerging from a 1.5-year ethnographic study

conducted in Metro Vancouver, Canada. The broader study focused on the ideologies and

practices present in Canadian Hispanic families in relation to the development and maintenance

of Spanish as a heritage language (HL) in their children. The study investigated the families’

perceptions of the role of their cultural heritage in the language socialization (Ochs &

Schieffelin, 2012) of their children and their desires for their future lives. It also analyzed their

micro-linguistic practices in the context of the broader Canadian sociocultural milieu. This

article examines one aspect of the larger study by focusing on the various discourses surrounding

the families’ conceptions of the development and maintenance of Spanish.

An understanding of a variety of issues and factors, such as the individual, familial and societal

benefits of HLD, is well established in the sociolinguistics research literature (e.g., Kouritzin,

1999; Schecter & Bayley, 2002). Certain discourses of HLD have been discussed at a broad level

in the United States, such as those produced by advocates of HL education (see Ricento, 2005,

e.g., for a discussion of 'language as commodity' discourses) and the discourses found in

textbooks for Spanish as a HL (Leeman & Martínez, 2007). Yet to my knowledge, explicit

empirical analyses of discourses at the family level have not been attempted.


April, 2014

It is by and large recognized in several interrelated traditions of discourse analysis (Fairclough,

1992; Foucault, 1980; Gee, 2005; van Dijk, 2008; Wodak, de Cillia, Reisigl, & Liebhart, 1999)

that discourses are a social practice. Furthermore, based on comprehensive macro- and

microanalyses of discourses on a range of topics (e.g., racism, national identity), these scholars

argue that discourses are produced by particular ideologies, situations and contextual realities,

and at the same time are constitutive of them. Following these theoretical and research traditions,

the article takes the position that discussions of factors related to HLD, and of the consequences

of maintenance and loss, can be fruitfully enriched by drawing on the ample interdisciplinary

scholarship on discourses. Therefore this article focuses on the diversity of meanings present in

the families’ discursive construction of HL development and maintenance. I suggest that, as is

the case with all discourses, talk about HLD contains elements that indicate their ideological

origin, and at the same time, such talk has the potential of effecting, or at least contributing to

enacting, HLD in the new generations.

Although there appear to be countless themes, factors, ideologies, advantages, consequences and

other issues associated with HLD and multilingualism, these have not been discussed in terms of

discourses. Therefore, the next section introduces the related notions of discourse and language

ideology, reviews some of the ways in which these have been defined and used, and proposes

discourses as a way of categorizing HLD issues.

DISCOURSE AND IDEOLOGY

A multitude of competing definitions of discourse can be found in various related scholarly

traditions. Attempting to synthesize such complexity would most likely prove futile, particularly

in the context of a journal article; therefore the following is a simplified summary outline of a

selection of discourse conceptualizations, which I hope will facilitate an operationalization of the

concept as it is used in this article. In general terms, discourse refers to extended text—that is,

text beyond the sentence level. Scholars working within critical discourse analysis (CDA) and

critical discourse studies (CDS), however, regard discourses more broadly as social practice.

What can be seen as a narrow view may refer to the classic understanding of discourse as

“language above the sentence or clause” (Schiffrin, 1994, p. 23). The focus of analysis from this

perspective is on the linguistic structure of linked speech or writing extended beyond a sentence

(Savignon, 1987). Gee (2005) distinguishes between two types of discourses: small “d” discourse

and capital “D” Discourse. Small “d” discourse is language in use, in some ways similar to the

classic notion, but in other ways going beyond structure itself. Gee defines this discourse as

“how language is used ‘on site’ to enact activities and identities” (p. 7), thus bridging small “d”

with big “D” Discourse through its functions. Gee goes on to explain that identities and activities

are seldom enacted through language in isolation, so to him, when small “d” discourse is

combined with what he calls “non-language ‘stuff’” then ‘big D’ Discourses are also at play. For

Gee, language is deeply political and its use is always related to more than simply exchanging

information. He posits that language is used to make visible who we are (identity) and what we

do (practice), but this process requires more than just language. It also entails acting, thinking,

valuing and interacting in ways that others recognize as the particular kind of person we are and

the particular activity in which we are engaged. Even though Gee’s Discourse is perhaps too


April, 2014

broad for the present purposes, the central notion relevant to the discussion is his emphasis on

social practice as the site where Discourses are enacted.

Gee’s broad conceptualization of discourse can be grouped under the discourse-as-social-practice

umbrella. With recent roots in critical theory and the Frankfurt School, scholars using

interdisciplinary approaches within the CDA and CDS paradigms more closely exemplify this

view (Wodak & Meyer, 2009). There are at least three distinct—but interrelated—approaches

from this perspective, which engage in productive intellectual and empirical cross-pollination.

Fairclough’s (1992) approach uses textual analysis and is closely related to Halliday’s (1978)

systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Examples of Fairclough’s work include examinations of

official public discourses and their impact on society. Ruth Wodak and colleagues (1999) have

developed the discourse-historical approach, which uses textual analysis in combination with

other elements understood historically. Their work in the Austrian context has analyzed the

construction of national identity, as well as how discourses can contribute to maintaining the

status quo by, for instance, justifying and obscuring discriminatory practices in society. Van

Dijk’s (1993) sociocognitive approach addresses the reproduction of racism and prejudice

toward different stigmatized groups. Using news media as his data, van Dijk examines how

knowledge, beliefs and ideas are internalized in people’s minds. Despite their unique features,

these three approaches have a common goal of exposing the purposes served by the discourses

under study.

A key commonality CDA and CDS approaches share, as Wodak and Meyer (2009) explain, is

the inclusion of four elements: discourse, critique, power and ideology. All of their work deals

with how discourses are used to exert power, oppress, or otherwise other individuals and groups

for political reasons. Because of the nature of these goals, it is not surprising that the work of the

leading scholars in CDA/CDS—and that of others working across disciplines in the rest of the

world—often focuses on negatively-deployed discourses, such as the discourses of

dehumanization (Steuter & Wills, 2009), the discourses of colonialism attached to English

(Pennycook, 1998), the discourses of terrorism (Bhatia, 2009), and the discourses of patriarchy

(Iyer, 2009), to cite but a few. A key departure between the study of discourse from a CDA/CDS

perspective and the one taken in this article is that my intention is not to uncover such types of

discourses—that is, negatively-oriented ones—but rather, to make explicit the ways in which

linguistic minorities discursively construct the continuation of their languages in the new

generations. Hackett and Moore (2011) provide an accessible definition of discourse that fits the

focal point of this article. To them, discourses are “those shared, structured ways of speaking,

thinking, interpreting and representing things in the world” (p. 4). Following this

conceptualization, I will take discourses to mean a collection of ideas and opinions—

ideologies—about a particular topic. In other words, the article deals with how a group of

families that participated in a research project talked about HLD—the shared ways of thinking

and speaking about HLD.

A line of scholarly inquiry that is contemporaneous with CDA—which is also concerned with

critique and power—is the work on language ideologies, an area that was dismissed in both

anthropology and linguistics for much of the 20th

century (Kroskrity, 2010). Language ideologies


April, 2014

refer to people’s and communities’ implicit and explicit beliefs, attitudes and values regarding

the worth of their languages. These ideologies also include how those languages ought to be used

in people’s daily lives (Baquedano-Lopez & Kattan, 2008). Empirical work within language

ideologies has been conducted across settings and with various foci, such as national language

ideologies (e.g., Bjornson, 2007; Jaffe, 1999). Bjornson analyzed shifting ideologies of Dutch

language in the Netherlands. Her work traced the shift from an ideology of Dutch as the basis for

national identity to an ideology of language as commodity in the newly implemented burgering

program, which encapsulated a linguistic minority integration project. Jaffe’s (1999) research on

Corsica, a European language minority context, focused on how Corsican activists attempted to

resist the dominance of French, particularly the processes involved in the shift from the HL,

Corsican, to French as a result of top-down language planning.

Research has revealed the impact of local and broader language ideologies on the language

practices of particular ethnolinguistic groups (Baquedano-Lopez, 2000; Fader, 2001; Field, 2001;

Kroskrity, 1992, 2000; Kulick, 1992). A sub-theme within this line has examined shifting

ideologies towards more powerful languages, sometimes motivated by the construction of these

languages as more economically advantageous (Field, 2001; Gal, 1998; Hill, 1985; Meek, 2007).

Another thread, but again in a different ideological direction, is the role of ideologies in

maintaining linguistic purism and ethnic cohesion. Kroskrity (1992), for instance, investigated

the role that broader language ideologies play in the formation of particular multiethnic cultural

identities among the Arizona Tewa, a North American Pueblo Indian group that left their

traditional homeland in New Mexico to escape Spanish colonial oppression. Kroskrity (2000)

explains that language ideology and use have contributed to the maintenance of their ancestral

language and distinct ethnic identity after 300 years of migrating to Hopi territory. In this vein,

Friedman’s (2009) analysis of feedback practices in a Ukrainian classroom provides insights into

the socialization of ideologies of Ukrainian language purity in relation to Russian. Her data show

that code-mixing in the classroom was equated with speaking incorrectly, an ideology that

stood in sharp contrast with community practices.

Emerging trends include examinations of language ideologies in Hispanic populations and with

Spanish as a HL. Baquedano-Lopez (1997, 2000) researched the language socialization of

Hispanic children into particular ideologies and religious identities. By analyzing teacher-student

linguistic interactions in doctrina classes (Spanish catechism) in California, Baquedano-Lopez

revealed the construction of a multiplicity of Mexican identities of the past and the present.

Leeman and Martínez (2007) examined language ideologies in Spanish HL instructional

materials. By analyzing the discourses used in the prefaces and introductions of textbooks

published over three decades, they demonstrated a shift in ideology from language as identity to

language as commodity in the United States.

In the Canadian context, Abdi (2011) examined linguistic interactions in a secondary school

Spanish language class that included both HL and foreign language learners in Metro Vancouver.

She analyzed the language ideology of displayed speaking ability as a sign of language

proficiency and heritage, underscoring the impact of this overt ideology on the classroom

dynamics. One of the HL students was reluctant to speak Spanish in class and was positioned as


April, 2014

non-Hispanic as a result, equating willingness to speak with the right to ethnic inheritance.

Relatedly, my recent work has looked at the socialization of language ideologies in Hispanic

homes and grassroots groups (e.g., a Spanish-language Scout troop) in Western Canada

(Guardado, 2008). Using a multi-site ethnographic approach, I found that the adults—and

sometimes also the children—used admonitions in the home and in the community groups to

force the children to avoid the use of English in favor of Spanish. Despite implicit and often

severe explicit efforts to socialize the children into language ideologies that privileged Spanish,

at times their actual language practices seemed to reproduce the dominance of English

(Guardado, 2009).

The above summaries suggest that ideologies of language have particular bearing on the present

analysis. Following Pêcheux, who saw discourse as “the place where language and ideology

meet” (Fairclough & Wodak, 2004, p. 262), I posit that a critical probe into discourses is bound

to uncover ideologies, which are most commonly expressed discursively. Thus, the next section

presents the shared ways of speaking about HLD as expressed by a group of families that

participated in an ethnographic research project.

METHODOLOGY

This article draws on data generated in a 1.5-year ethnography conducted in Metro Vancouver,

Canada. The larger study (Guardado, 2008)1

investigated the expressed language ideologies of

the families as well as their everyday linguistic interactions. The article focuses on the variety of

ways the families in the study talked about their desires, expectations and practices surrounding

the HLD of their children and recasts these comments as discourses. In the following sections, I

describe the recruitment strategies, the participants and the data collection and analysis

procedures.

Participants, Settings and Data Collection

The participants in this multi-site ethnographic study were 34 Hispanic families and their

children, and occasionally extended family members, living in Metro Vancouver and with ties to

ten Spanish-speaking countries. The initial phase of the study consisted of in-depth interviews

with families. Participant observation, interviewing and other forms of ethnographic data

collection in the second phase of the study took place in families’ homes and in grassroots

groups in which they participated. These small grassroots groups were formed, funded and

operated by parents with the mandate to transmit the language and culture to their children. The

three groups were: El Grupo Scout Vistas, El Centro de Cultura and La Casa Amistad (The

Vistas Scout Group, The Centre for Culture and The Friendship House) (detailed descriptions of

each site can be found in Guardado, 2008). These three groups and the home of one family from

each group became the main research sites. Out of the pool of 34 families that participated, data

from 15 are included in this article.


April, 2014

Table 1

Participating Parents

The data collection strategies included multiple interviews with parents and children, in Spanish,

and participant observation over 18 months. The present article draws mainly on data from 68

interviews with parents and children for a total of about 100 hours of digitally recorded audio.

The Discursive Construction of Heritage Language Development

Given that ideologies of language are present in all aspects of human life, these ideologies are

often made visible through language users’ discursive interactions. The discourses of HLD,

therefore, can be found in both public as well as private settings, and in both settings, language

Family2

Place of

Birth

Length of

Residence in

Canada (years)

Formal Schooling

(years)

M=mother/F=father

Group Membership

Mrs. Ruedas

Mr. Blanco

Peru 4 M=15/F=17 El Centro de Cultura

Mrs. Pérez

Mr. Feiz

Spain

Afghanistan

14 M=17/F=12 El Centro de Cultura

El Grupo Scout Vistas

Mrs. and Mr.

Hernández

Mexico 2.53 M=17/F=17 Grupo Scout Vistas

Mrs. Asturia

Mr. Morales

Colombia 3 M=22/F=21 Grupo Scout Vistas

Mrs.

Fernández Mr.

Maradiaga

Guatemala 10 M=16/F=17 Grupo Scout Vistas

Mrs. Aguirre

Mr. Ramírez

Mexico 4 M=17/F=17 La Casa Amistad

Mrs. Gordon

Mr. Herrera

Canada

Mexico

17 M=18/F=18 La Casa Amistad

Mrs. and Mr.

Clavel

Mexico 11 M=17/F=17 La Casa Amistad

Mrs. and Mr.

Steinberg

Argentina 2 M=17/F=17 La Casa Amistad

Mrs. Amado4 El Salvador 19 M=12 N/A

Mrs. and Mr.

Corral

Colombia 3 M=17/F=19 N/A

Mrs. and Mr.

Delgado

El Salvador 20 M=16/F=12 N/A

Mrs. Nuñez

Mr. Pedroza


Mrs. and Mr.

Ovando


Mrs. and Mr.

Vanegas

Guatemala 4 M=14/F=17 N/A


April, 2014

ideologies are discoverable in their ways of talking about HLD. This section, then, attempts to

make public the private discourses of HLD found in a selection of Canadian Hispanic families.

This is accomplished through a thematic analysis of the participants’ discursive constructions of

Spanish language development and maintenance. Table 2 summarizes the criteria that were

applied to the data in order to identify the ten discourses that are presented in this section.

Table 2

Summary of Discourse Descriptions Discourse Description

Utility The HL as a means to different pragmatic ends (e.g., socioeconomic,

academic)

Cohesiveness HLD as key to fostering a sense of unity, continuity and understanding

(e.g., in nuclear and extended family, ethnic community)

Identity HLD as part of identity formation (e.g., linking to ethnic roots)

Affect The HL as emotional connection or means to express emotion

Aesthetics The HL as inherently beautiful or expressive (e.g., compared to other

languages)

Validation The need for opportunities for the HL and its speakers to be recognized and

valued

Correctness Linguistic ideologies surrounding ‘correctness’ (e.g., accuracy, code-

mixing)

Opposition Resisting assimilative forces (e.g., defending the HL)

Access Door-opening metaphor (e.g., key to learning other languages, interacting

with broader range of people)

Cosmopolitanism HL as fostering a commitment to local and global social justice and forms

of diversity

Utility

A commonly cited motivation for HLD was often expressed in the form of utilitarian discourses.

Echoing the majority of studies on HLD, this study’s participants talked about HLD in terms of

future economic benefits for their children through enhanced business and employment

opportunities. The participants saw HLD as key to their children’s future successful careers,

hence leading to their eventual social mobility. The examples below serve to illustrate the

discourses the families used in reference to utility.

When Mr. Pedroza spoke of HLD in economic terms, he saw it as becoming his daughter’s

“cashbox”:

Necesita el español, porque ese será el plus de ella. Su caja de ahorros para el

futuro. Su alcancía para el futuro. (Mr. Pedroza, Interview: 05/31/05)


April, 2014

[She will need Spanish because that will be her plus. Her savings box for the

future. Her piggybank for her future]

As Mrs. Aguirre said:

…[la lengua de herencia] puede ser muy bien aprovechada ya después cuando

ellas crezcan ya en su campo de trabajo. Te permite moverte mucho más fácil.

(Interview: 05/14/05)

[…(the heritage language) can be used to their advantage in the future when

they grow up; in their line of work. It allows you to be more mobile]

Mrs. Corral also understood HLD as a means to give her children an economic advantage. She

stated:

Es una herramienta más que los va a ayudar a posicionarse y a ser competitivos

en un mercado laboral. (Interview: 04/29/05)

[It’s one more tool that will help them position themselves and become more

competitive in the job market]

In these particular statements the three participants were beginning to construct a discourse that

built on the extrinsic aspect of their motivation (Petri, 1991) to promote the HL because of the

tangible rewards that this promised: namely, future economic benefits. Mobility and flexibility in

employment were goals they expected to achieve as part of their “investment” (Norton, 2000) in

the linguistic marketplace, reminiscent of language as commodity discourses found in a variety

of settings (Bjornson, 2007; Leeman & Martínez, 2007; Ricento, 2005). In sum, these families

constructed Spanish through utilitarian discourses that referred to HLD as a tool for attaining

higher socioeconomic status.

COHESIVENESS

Discourses surrounding the creation and cultivation of cohesion were a recurrent theme in the

interview data. These discourses were constructed both in relation to family and at times also

broadened to the local Hispanic community. Although the latter were found in the data, their use

was not as abundant or fervently expressed as the former. By contrast, as expected,

intergenerational communication and family unity were pervasive elements in all of the families’

discourses of HLD. In fact, when asked about their main motivation for pursuing Spanish

maintenance, many of the parents cited family communication as the most important. When I

posed this question to Mrs. Pérez, her answer was unequivocal:


April, 2014

Mis padres. Toda la familia está en España. Si mis padres no se pueden

comunicar con los nietos, me matan. (Interview: 05/12/06)

[My parents. The whole family is in Spain. If my parents cannot communicate

with their grandchildren, they will kill me.]

Although other families did not make such extreme case formulations, this rhetorical device

enabled Mrs. Pérez to construct a cohesion discourse that accentuated its importance in her own

family. In constructing the discourses of family cohesion the families often drew on other

elements, such as the quality of their relationships with different family members. More

interesting and relevant to the discussion, however, was the explicit deployment of language

ideologies in their discourses. Mrs. Pérez’s husband was from Afghanistan, but the only HL that

the parents were committed to transmitting to their children was Spanish, thereby excluding

Persian.5 According to Mrs. Pérez, her husband deemed Spanish a more ‘useful’ language

internationally, compared to Persian, and even though she did not express an opinion regarding

this ideology, utilitarian motives were privileged in practice.

Mr. Pedroza, from Colombia, explained that his nuclear family members had a strong family

relationship, which was made possible by their language:

Estamos sostenidos por un mundo de palabras, todas dichas en español.


[We are really sustained by a world of words, all of them spoken in Spanish.]

The family accepted the fact that their public life in Canada was conducted in English, but their

private home life and connection to their family in Colombia could only be mediated by their

mother tongue.

IDENTITY

The families’ interviews were filled with explicit identity discourses. One of the most pervasive

features of these discourses was the construing of Spanish as: “part of who we are;” “part of our

roots.” The families stated that their ability to successfully maintain the HL in their living

environment gave them a stronger sense of identity and of self. They claimed that the HL was a

necessary resource for maintaining cultural tradition and fostering ethnic identity in the new

generations. Furthermore, it was crucial for them to maintain Spanish as the basis for cultivating

a Hispanic cultural identity and for building up their children’s self-esteem culturally in order to

save them from future identity contradictions. In other words, to help them become proud of who

they were in order to value their origins and to have a strong ethnic point of reference. Mrs.

Corral said about her children:

El español es necesario para su identidad cultural. (Interview: 04/29/05)

[Spanish is important for their cultural identity]


April, 2014

Mrs. Amado went further when referring to HL loss:

Van a perder su propia identidad. Es importante para ellos mantener sus raíces.


[They’ll lose their very identity. It’s important for them to maintain their

roots.]

Mrs. Steinberg asserted that both were necessary and the same:

Identidad cultural e idioma es lo mismo. Se puede llegar a la cultura a través de otro

idioma, pero se pierde mucho en el camino. (Interview: 06/24/05)

[Cultural identity and language are the same. One can learn the culture through another

language, but one loses a lot along the way]

A significant aspect of the construction of HLD discourses for the families was the key role of

Spanish in promoting a strong attachment to their original cultures. They regarded Spanish as

essential for the healthy development and continuous shaping of their children’s sense of self.

They saw Spanish as part of their culture and identity, in a sense that was similar to Anzaldúa’s

(1987) need to be proud of her language in order to be proud of herself. Thus, these discourses

point to the relationship between language and culture and to a strong interdependence between

the two.

Affect

The families’ comments included many examples of discourses addressing emotions and the

discourses themselves were often expressed emotionally. This was not only true for the

discourses of affect, but also for most of the other categories. Thus, the affective discourses

could be analyzed at several levels. One aspect was related to the role of the Spanish language in

their emotional well-being and that of their children. Mrs. Asturia, a member of the Spanish

language Scout group, stated that the family participated in the group because of the

opportunities it provided to use the language and to obtain other perceived affective benefits:

Les ayuda a crear un poco de independencia y de autoestima. (Interview:

01/13/06)

[To boost their [children’s] independence and self-esteem.]

Mrs. Aguirre felt that the children would benefit from socialization that allowed them to feel

proud of their own roots, holistically raising children they described as more emotionally stable

human beings. As she asserted:

Todo esto le refuerza esa parte emocional, y yo digo que puede a la larga pues

dar seres humanos, espero, más seguros y más fuertes, más orgullosos de sí

mismos. (Interview: 05/04/06)


April, 2014

[Participation reinforces the emotional aspect and I think that in the long run it

can, I hope, foster human beings that are more secure, stronger and prouder of

themselves]

Hence, the affective domain seemed to be a crucial part of their HL socialization goals. The

parents assigned a vital role to HLD in the transmission of values by stressing the emotional and

moral benefits. In constructing these discourses, the families drew on popular and academic

notions related to the psychological consequences of not transmitting the HL, thus connecting the

successful continuation of their cultural roots and HL with their social, mental, moral and

emotional development.

Additionally, these discourses constituted Spanish maintenance as key to the construction of

children as experts at certain times, which also contributed to the enhancement of their self-

esteem. For instance, of all the benefits Mrs. Aguirre saw in La Casa Amistad for her daughters,

she ranked the emotional advantages as the most important. She believed that her daughters

benefited from their involvement in the language development of other children—novices—

which assigned them an identity as “experts,” further strengthening their own self-esteem.

Likewise, Mrs. Ruedas’ oldest daughter, Olivia, often found herself playing the role of an expert

in El Centro de Cultura, where she assisted the teachers with the rest of the students. This,

according to Mrs. Ruedas, was important for Olivia’s self-esteem when her language ability was

recognized and valued and she was portrayed as a resource in the class activities.

Finally, the most poignant versions of the affective discourses were produced when parents

talked about their ability to communicate with their children and others close to them. A

common manifestation of this discourse was often a version of “I can’t express my feelings in

English.” Mrs. Corral stated,

Los sentimientos no se pueden transmitir en inglés. (Interview: 05/29/05)

[Feelings cannot be transmitted in English.]

She described her feelings when her son talked to her in English:

Si él me dice “I love you” yo no le entiendo. Y si me dice “ay te amo mamá”

allí me toca el alma.

[If he says to me “I love you” (in English) I don’t understand it. But if he says

to me “oh, I love you mom” (in Spanish), he touches my soul]

Surrounded by English daily, Mrs. Nuñez found an intimate oasis in her grassroots group:

Necesito desahogarme; necesito escuchar mi lengua. (Interview: 05/31/05)

[I need to unwind; I need to hear my tongue.]


April, 2014

AESTHETICS

Many participants referred to their language as “such a beautiful language” as if Spanish were

vested with inherent splendor and magnificence. These discourses were produced spontaneously

during interviews, family interactions and impromptu lectures parents gave to children during

group gatherings. For example, Mrs. Ruedas regularly attempted to encourage her children to

become more aware of their own cultural origins and to appreciate the beauty of their language.

She once admonished her 13-year old daughter for being ashamed of speaking Spanish in public,

telling her:

Que te de vergüenza mentir, pero no hablar un idioma que es tan bonito.


[You should be ashamed of being dishonest, but not of speaking such a

beautiful language.]

Mr. Hernández, one of the parents who participated in the Scout troop with his children, once

talked to the children about the beauty of Spanish and the value of maintaining it in the group:

Yo quiero decirles que estoy contento que hablen la lengua española, castellano. Este

en sí es un idioma muy bonito, y una de las cuestiones muy importantes de este grupo

es…y conservar eso. A los nuevos y a todos, yo les pediría que insistieran en hablar

en español, que traten de hablarse en español. Es un idioma muy lindo ¿okay?

(Observation: 06/24/06)

[I’d like to tell you that I’m happy to see that all of you speak the Spanish language,

Castilian. This is a very beautiful language and one of the most important features of

this group is…to maintain that. To the newcomers and to everyone, I would like to ask

you to persevere in speaking in Spanish; to try to speak Spanish with one another. It’s

such a pretty language, okay?]

As the extract shows, he constructed a discourse that contained positive assessments of the

Spanish language (“Este en sí es un idioma muy bonito”), and stated that maintaining it was one

of the group’s objectives and appealed to the children to continue using it. Subsequently, he

engaged in a second round of positive assessments: “Es un idioma muy lindo,” appealing to them

to persevere in their efforts.

VALIDATION

In this section I draw attention to discourses of validation produced by families that deemed

themselves relegated to the status of subordinated linguistic minorities. As a result of this

perceived condition, they used discourses designed to reconstruct themselves in a legitimate

light. In a context where Spanish does not enjoy a high status, families that have enough social,

linguistic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1977) can exert their agency in order to offset the

potential linguistic devaluing effect of the wider society. Having lived their entire lives as

cultural and linguistic majorities in their countries of origin, many families used a variety of

strategies to come to terms with their new reality, such as the formation of grassroots groups as

socializing agents and as spaces for reiterating to their children the value of Spanish. These


April, 2014

groups provided the children a weekly linguistic and cultural immersion in the Vancouver

context where Spanish does not enjoy strong ethnolinguistic vitality, casting the groups as ideal

sites of production and reproduction of discourses of validation. Therefore, the various language

and cultural activities conducted helped turn these spaces into “agents of linguistic legitimation”

(Jaffe, 2005, p. 26).

Mr. Herrera, for instance, felt that beyond La Casa Amistad, his children’s opportunities to

practice and become meaningfully involved in a Spanish-rich context were limited. His family

did not have an extended family circle to provide authentic language practice, and the only

opportunity to access such linguistic resources was La Casa Amistad. In the same vein, Mrs.

Pérez felt that El Centro de Cultura offered her children an authentic context for Spanish practice

and validation:

Veo que es muy bueno que mis niños vean que hay otras personas que hablan

español aparte de mí. (Interview: 05/12/06)

[It’s good for my children to see that there are other people, besides me, who

speak Spanish]

Many parents produced similar discourses that asserted that it was essential for them to show

their children that Spanish was a useful language and that there was a whole world out there

where Spanish was the medium of communication. Thus, an analysis of the discourses of

validation used by the families shows that the grassroots groups were places where the existence

of their HL and culture became validated and legitimated, indicating to their children that their

culture had a legitimate place in the world and their language was a legitimate means of

communication. Beyond this goal, some parents constructed critical discourses of validation that

expressed a yearning for equality in diversity. The words Mr. Pedroza used in this regard were:

El derecho a la diferencia. (Interview: 05/31/05)

[Our right to difference.]

Hence, in the Canadian context, the discourses of validation sometimes also implied that the

children should not only feel proud of maintaining and using their HL, but also expect their

voices to be valued and respected, heard and understood.

CORRECTNESS

An ideology of correctness was prevalent both in the parents’ discursive conceptualizations of

HLD, such as those generated during our interviews, and in their day-to-day interactions with

their children, such as the ones analyzed elsewhere (Guardado, 2008, 2009, 2013). Speaking

Spanish in the home was often equated with “linguistic correctness,” construing English as a

threat (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994) to the development of HL ideologies. In daily linguistic

interactions between adult caregivers and children, ideologies of correctness were abundant and

frequently manifested themselves quite explicitly, and sometimes relatively implicitly, in

discourse. For example, parents used a range of linguistic tools in their efforts to foster sustained


April, 2014

HL use, including direct imperative forms such as “hablen español” [Speak Spanish]. These

often carried a particular intonational contour in order to further—and unequivocally—constitute

them as orders. Other times, caregivers used less directive forms, in which the message was

expressed indirectly (Clyne, 1996). One such form included commands phrased as clarification

requests, as in uttering “no entiendo” when a child spoke in English, in order to “correct” the

perceived linguistic anomaly, namely, the child’s failure to use Spanish in that context. The

following interaction between a three-year old child and her mother exemplifies this (Mrs.

A=Mrs. Aguirre):

(Observation: 07/23/06)6

Mrs. A: ¿que es eso Penélope?

Penélope: es un paper

Mrs. A: ¿es un QUE?

Penélope: un paper

Mrs. A: no entiendo

[Mrs. A: what is that Penélope?

Penélope: it’s a paper

Mrs. A: it’s a WHAT?

Penélope: paper

Mrs. A: I don’t understand.]

These types of utterances often had a meaning that was quite different from what was actually

said. In my analyses I found that they could be paraphrased as “I heard your answer, but I’m not

going to accept it and I will pretend not to understand it until you say it in Spanish, the ‘proper’

language in the family.” The very fact that parents saw the need to make a “correction” when

children used English is a clear indication that an ideology of correctness was evident in their

discourses. In other words, such linguistic tools formed part of the discourse of ordering, a

common feature of the correctness discourse.

Another feature of the correctness discourse is its silencing function. I have discussed elsewhere

(Guardado, 2013) that when care-givers use imperatives such as speak Spanish or clarification

requests such as I don’t understand, the correctness discourse performs a further task: that of

silencing. Given that many parents disapproved of any type of code-switching, or code-mixing,

the correctness discourse often contained ideologies of purity. Linguistic purity, in this case,

refers to attempts at avoiding low prestige varieties, such as Spanglish (for a detailed discussion

of the linguistic systematicity and social functions of Spanglish, see Zentella, 1997). This

discourse feature exhibits a striking resemblance to Friedman’s (2009) findings in the Ukraine,

where mixing Russian words in Ukrainian speech was denounced as linguistic incorrectness.

Given that individuals living in multilingual societies readily incorporate elements of the

languages in their environment into their own linguistic toolkit, discourses that chastise children

for drawing on all of their linguistic resources at the same time is tantamount to denying their

hybridity and their identity as multilingual individuals.


April, 2014

OPPOSITION

Perhaps the most common ideological and discursive thread found at macro and micro levels of

analysis of the dataset is one of resistance. Oppositional discourses were pervasive both

implicitly and explicitly in daily life for all participating families. While some parents used

rhetorically gentle discourses to index their oppressed condition as subordinated linguistic

minorities, others spoke more directly and almost militantly about the need to work “en defensa

de nuestro idioma español” (in defense of Spanish; Mr. Pedroza, Interview, 05/31/05) or used

war metaphors to refer to the battles they were fighting against assimilation. These discourses

characterized Spanish as a language relegated to a lower class. The more radical discourses

found in the data portrayed Spanish as a socially weak, underdog language, which needed

protection and whose speakers faced systematic oppression.

Arguably, at the broadest level, engaging in any discussion regarding the families’ commitment

to the promotion of the HL can in itself be seen as a discourse that challenges the prevalent

assimilative forces. Moreover, by merely engaging in conversations with like-minded families in

grassroots HLD organizations, such as the ones in this study, these families can be seen as

producing discourses that contest the official language structures. Adapting an idea from hooks

(1989), minority families’ asserting their identities through discussions of HLD is in itself a

discursive act of resistance. On the moderate end of the oppositional discourse continuum,

parents talked about their dreams, aspirations, goals and strategies for pursuing what they

referred to as an uphill journey in socializing their children into Spanish use, and covertly

challenging the dominant linguistic practices. For instance, Mr. Morales, a medical doctor, spoke

of the Spanish language Scout group in which his family participated as enabling them to further

resist assimilation into the dominant culture:

De una u otra manera…los niños en ese momento están aprendiendo ya sea a

través de la comida o de la música o de cualquier otra palabra que surge en los

momentos que se reúnen y van a vivenciar y en ese momento los niños están

aprendiendo algo propio de nosotros. Es una manera de inculcarles algo

diferente, pero diferente con relación a nuestra cultura, no a la cultura de acá

canadiense, sino a la cultura latina. (Interview: 01/13/06)

[One way or another…the children are learning, either through food, music, or

words that emerge in their sessions, and they have lived experiences and are

learning something unique to us. It’s a way of inculcating into them something

different, but different because it’s related to our culture, not to the Canadian

culture, but to the Latin American culture.]

Mr. Maradiaga, one of the leaders of the Scout group, spoke of the challenges that families faced

with regards to their daughters’ HL socialization using oppositional discourses in the form of war

metaphors that alluded to a type of war against assimilation. In relation to what he referred to as

a major struggle to socialize his children into the use of Spanish, he said:


April, 2014

La guerra no está ganada, pero hemos ganado una batalla. (Interview: 05/02/05)

[We have not won the war, but we have won a battle]

Again using the war metaphor in an interview the following week,, Mr. Maradiaga added:

Las batallas más grandes ya se han ganado. (Interview: 05/09/05)

[The biggest battles have been won.]

Mr. Pedroza, a lawyer, created the most explicitly oppositional discourses of HLD, echoing

critical cultural scholarship, and argued for minorities’ “right to difference” and the need to work

“in defense of Spanish.” Additionally, he produced discourses that depicted the struggle for

Spanish as a “huge problem” but also as a “huge possibility,” clearly attempting to utilize

rhetorical devices that juxtapose a negative state of affairs with its potential, thus avoiding

speaking from a deficit-view-of-the-world perspective. Finally, all the discourses produced could

be categorized as oppositional, including the ones on the politics of identity and ethnolinguistic

validation. Despite most of the families’ ability to function in an English-speaking context, many

chose to develop—or join—a Spanish-language group in which they could affirm and attempt to

maintain their sense of identity and transmit it to children in the community.

Access

The study participants constructed discourses of HLD as a key that opened doors of different

types. Although these discourses contained elements of other discourses (e.g, utility and

cosmopolitanism), there was enough variation to warrant a separate category. These discourses

suggested that HLD facilitated access to the families’ languages and cultures and made it feasible

for children to learn other, similar, languages and cultures.

Mrs. Ovando said:

Estamos conscientes de que ser bilingües abre muchas puertas. (Interview,

05/24/05)

[We are aware that being bilingual opens many doors.]

Mrs. Vanegas equated multilingualism with “the educated” and saw it as a vehicle for

employment prospects:

El mundo se mueve en rededor de la gente preparada, de la gente bilingüe.

Tienen mejores oportunidades, están mejor preparados, y lógicamente es el

futuro de ellos…y se abren puertas por todos lados inimaginables. (Interview:

04/23/05)


April, 2014

[The world revolves around educated people, people who are bilingual. They

have better opportunities, are better prepared, and obviously that is their

future…doors open in the most unimaginable places]

Therefore, the families’ access discourse revealed that they did not only count on Spanish to

provide these opportunities, but also saw it as a starting point for learning other languages, thus

further increasing their professional potential. In Mrs. Pérez’ discourse, the doors that she

expected to be opened through the HL were the doors of cultural understanding and awareness.

Such notions were particularly applicable in this case because the Spanish language is associated

with cultural, racial, religious, dialectal and regional diversity. To Mrs. Pérez, the Scout group

and El Centro de Cultura, along with her family’s other Spanish language socialization efforts,

were keys to helping open those doors:

Y claro, una vez ya lo tienen [idioma español], pues te abre muchas más

puertas y puedes apreciar toda una cultura, no una, muchas, como España,

México, Guatemala, Argentina. Es que’s maravilloso, claro imagínate. Aparte

te abre las puertas para aprender otras lenguas latinas. (Interview, 05/12/06)

[And of course, once they have it [Spanish language], it opens many more

doors for you and you can appreciate a whole culture, not one, but many, like

Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina. Because it’s so wonderful, for sure,

imagine. Besides, it opens doors for learning other Latin languages]

Mrs. Aguirre’s access discourse addressed the transferability of skills from one language to

another (Crawford, 1992; Cummins, 1981, 2000; Krashen, 1996), as evidenced in this quote:

Yo creo que abriéndote el canal de un idioma más, estás abriendo las opciones

para otros idiomas. (Interview, 05/14/05)

[I think that by creating an avenue for one more language, one is broadening

the options for other languages]

The above examples are but a few of many that illustrate the pervasiveness of the door-opening

metaphor in the families’ discourses. The parents’ discourses about Spanish show they

recognized the value of linguistic resources in society and identified their potential for accessing

other forms of capital.

COSMOPOLITANISM

Cosmopolitan discourses were only produced in some of the families, but these were

unequivocally articulated with contemporary conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism. When

these families spoke about HLD, they referred to it as an important catalyst for socializing their

children into a progressive worldview. The Fernández-Maradiaga and Aguirre-Ramírez families

emphasized this notion most strongly in their discourses. While they seemed to subscribe to a

syncretic notion of cultural identity that strongly embraced their own culture, they also appeared


April, 2014

to be aware that their children’s sense of identity was different from their own. Mrs. Fernández

stated in this regard:

La identidad cultural de las niñas es un híbrido. No podemos hacer un pequeño

mundo dentro de estas cuatro paredes. Ellas tienen que conocer su cultura, pero

tampoco encerrarlas en eso. No se puede. No estaríamos logrando nuestros

objetivos de que ellas tengan una visión amplia. (Interview: 05/09/05)

[The cultural identity of the girls is a hybrid. We can’t create a mini-world

inside these four walls. They have to know their culture, but we can’t enclose

them in it. It can’t be done. We wouldn’t be achieving our goals for them to

have a broad outlook.]

The parents were aware of the outside influences on their daughters’ evolving identities and

understood that they could not confine them to a cultural bubble. One of their aims was to

socialize the children into a “broad world outlook,” a discourse that can be seen as consistent

with the pursuit of an understanding and appreciation of other cultures, drawing from these in the

course of their identity formation. The Aguirre-Ramírez family used a similar discourse. They

placed a central value on multilingualism as part of a belief system that included valuing all

languages and cultures equally. Mr. Ramírez said that the family was interested in transmitting a

sense of value for languages other than Spanish, stating that they wanted to raise children who

were “interested in others,” echoing scholars studying cosmopolitanism (e.g., Delanty, 2006). He

added that they wanted their daughters to benefit in several ways:

Para absorber todo lo que están viviendo a su alrededor, pero sin perder las

raíces y las tradiciones que traían o que tenemos en México ¿no? (Interview:

04/15/06)

[Absorb everything they [are] experiencing in their surroundings, but without

losing their roots and the traditions they brought or that we have in Mexico]

The value Mr. Ramirez placed on multilingualism could be understood as an attempt to socialize

their children into hybrid identities as Canadians, which to them meant embracing an affiliation

to an identity beyond that of Latin American or Mexican. They produced a HLD discourse that

described Spanish in the context of the Canadian multicultural milieu as key to socializing their

children to be “ciudadanos del mundo” [citizens of the world]; Mr. Ramírez, Interview,

05/14/05) and incorporating aspects of the Canadian cultural fabric into their identification.

The Fernández-Maradiaga family produced these types of discourses both in relation to their

home as well as to the Scout group of which they were leaders. Their socialization discourse cast

Spanish maintenance as an essential factor in providing their daughters with a broadening

experience:


April, 2014

A las niñas [el español] les da una visión más amplia del mundo. (Mr.

Maradiaga, Interview, 05/09/05)

[The [Spanish] language gives the girls a broader vision of the world.]

Their views on HLD revealed a cosmopolitan discourse that related their daughters’ socialization

with local, national (i.e., Canadian and Guatemalan) and global perspectives (Starkey, 2007) and

promoted identity development that benefited from multiple cultural sources (Kastoryano, 2000).

I have elaborated more fully on this discourse elsewhere (Guardado, 2010, 2012).

DISCOURSES OF HERITAGE LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN THE RESEARCH LITERATURE

In the preceding section, I examined the discourses of HLD produced by a sample of Hispanic

families. These discourses, both individually and collectively, tell the story of HLD among the

participants. Some of the families were acquainted with each other through common social

networks, including grassroots HLD organizations. In this sense, I may refer to these as

dominant—albeit contextually situated—discourses of HLD. The analysis empirically

demonstrates that these discourses are in fact used and that the proposed typology may be a

starting point for taking a discourse-based approach to the study of HLD. This tentative, and

evolving, taxonomy has been applied to a selection of the HLD literature, revealing that the

proposed discourses also exist in this body of knowledge. Due to space constraints, I only

provide a summary of how this discourse typology articulates with the extant scholarship on the

topic.

Over 30 relevant publications were examined through the lens of HLD discourses as described in

this article, but only 24 met the basic criteria of direct topic relevance and data-based analysis.

When multiple publications were based on the same study (e.g., Schecter & Bayley, 1997, 2002),

the most comprehensive one was chosen. Table 3 presents the studies included in this quasi

meta-analysis and a breakdown of how each of the discourses was distributed across the selected

sources.


April, 2014

Table 3

Distribution of Discourses in the Literature Consulted

Sources

Utility

Co

hesiv

e-

ness

Iden

tity

Affect

Aesth

etics

Va

lidatio

n

Co

rrectness

Op

po

sition

Access

Co

smo

poli-

tan

ism

Cho (2008) Chumak-Horbatsch (1999) Comanaru and Noels

(2009)

Dagenais and Day (1999) Decapua and Wintergerst

(2009)

Gibbons and Ramirez

(2004)

Iqbal (2005) Li, G. (2006) Li, X. (1999) MacPherson and Ghoso

(2008)

Maguire (2005) Nesteruk (2010) Nicholas (2009) Oriyama (2010) Pacini-Ketchabaw et al

(2001)

Park and Sarkar (2007) Pease-Alvarez (2002) Schecter and Bayley (2002) Slavik (2001) Sodhi (2007) Tannenbaum and Berkovich

(2005)

Thomas and Cao (1999) Wong Fillmore (1991) Xiao (1998)

Overall, discourse representation ranged between three and 21 out of the 24 publications. That is,

each discourse was found in the literature at least 12.5 percent of the time and as often as 87.5

percent. The most common discourse was cohesiveness, with 21 out of 24 publications

containing some version of the discourse. Although the classic study on family cohesiveness

could well be Wong Fillmore’s (1991), more recently, Thomas and Cao (1999) wrote about a

Vietnamese family where family cohesiveness had become compromised due to the loss of the


April, 2014

HL in the new generation. Discourses of cohesiveness in relation to the broader heritage

ethnolinguistic community were found in Dagenais and Day’s (1999) study.

The least common discourses found in the literature were cosmopolitanism and aesthetics. The

fact that cosmopolitanism discourses were largely absent from the literature was to an extent

predictable. A strong commitment to HLs and cultures may appear as narrow thinking based on

nostalgia and on attempts to cling to a romantic past, whereas a cosmopolitan outlook is perhaps

more readily interpreted as progressively looking to the future. Only five out of the 24 studies

contained some type of discourse that could be described as cosmopolitan, but in most cases only

mentioned in passing as part of larger themes. Although budding traces of the discourse can be

found, by and large the scholarship on HLD has not, as of yet, taken up this relationship in and of

itself. Finally, the least discussed discourse in the literature was aesthetics, with only three

studies containing any references to this category. Oriyama (2010), for instance, writes that one

of his participants “likes Japanese as a language and believes that Japanese often has better

expressions [than English]…” (p. 86). Whereas the lack of cosmopolitan discourses in the HLD

literature may be seen as a shortcoming by some readers, it could be that the relative absence of

aesthetics discourses could be interpreted as a possible sign that views that assign certain

languages inherent characteristics, such as magnificence and beauty, and other languages as

primitive and repulsive, may be on the decline.

A point that is beyond the scope of this article, but that nevertheless should at least be cursorily

addressed, is the existence of a persistent overlap across discourse categories. This was evident

both in the data from which this discourse typology was developed, as well as in the meta-

examination of the research literature. As Gee (2005) explains, there are no discrete discourse

boundaries. These are constantly changing and new ones are created, contested or reconfigured

all the time. Gee argues that it does not matter so much how we count discourses as what they do

as they are always “defined in relationships of complicity and contestation with other Discourses,

and so they change when other Discourses in a society emerge or die” (p. 31). Clearly, the

discourses analyzed in this article do not exist as discretely defined entities; rather, they are fluid

and in flux as a result of social life factors and processes of ideology formation and socialization,

among many other aspects. Likewise, each discourse can be further divided into other discourses

that have complex relationships among themselves and other categories, and the categories

themselves can be grouped in different constellations of discourses. To provide just one example,

the discourse of access overlaps, on one hand, with utility, as the HL is useful when accessing

people’s own ethnic community. The frequent use of the ‘door-opening metaphor’ in

participants’ discourses is further evidence of this overlap as the HL is seen as a key that opens

different types of doors, including those leading to economic opportunities. On the other hand,

access overlaps directly with cosmopolitanism. Access is part of a cosmopolitan outlook when

seen as a passageway to other cultures and communities. Thus, discourses can be understood in

terms of interconnected constellations of discourses that can work in a multitude of

configurations and sub-divisions.

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS

Drawing on ethnographic data, this article presented a discourse-based approach to the study of

HLD, positing that dominant discourses of HLD may be found in ethnolinguistic groups. In my


April, 2014

analysis, I have taken a rather broad look at the discourses of HLD as a first attempt to use this

lens. I do not intend for this meta-view of HLD discourses to be seen as exhaustive; rather, it is

to be understood as a preliminary effort of this nature. Many other discourses were identified and

considered as part of this project, but it was beyond the scope of an article of this length to

attempt to provide a more comprehensive examination. It is expected that many other discourses

of HLD may be proposed (e.g., religious discourses), and alternate relationships attempted, in

future work.

An objective of the preceding analysis was to illustrate the diversity of discourses related to HLD

that circulated among the participating families, many of which have also been discussed amply

in the literature, albeit implicitly. At the same time, through this discussion I intended to further

stress and describe the conceptual and practical complexity of HLD by promoting the view that

the discourses of HLD are as complicated as any other social phenomenon and that these

discourses are interrelated and changing through time, space, socioeconomic and other contexts.

Moreover, this analysis may enable scholars to look at HLD from a different perspective by

providing discursive resources to address it in new ways. This collective of discourses can be

seen as a typology that may help further theorize HLD, potentially offering a useful heuristic to

probe factors affecting HLD in families.

Likewise, the outcomes of this analysis may be a starting point for researchers to relate this

heuristic usefully to the substance of their own data and contribute to building a framework for

future HLD study. Further research and theoretical scrutiny will no doubt expand and fine-tune

this line of inquiry or otherwise dismiss it as unproductive. Given that discourses are constitutive

of and constituted by social reality (Wodak et al. 1999), the contexts and situations in which

discourses emerge shape and affect them. Similarly, discourses of HLD may have an impact on

families and communities’ sociolinguistic realities. It is my contention that regardless of whether

these expectations are too ambitious or not, the fact that such desires are being thought and

expressed discursively, in itself, may have an effect on what families do practically. Following

Foucault (1972), who saw discourses as "practices that systematically form the objects of which

they speak" (p. 54), I argue that making these discourses explicit and public may contribute to

the spread of an ideology that ultimately contributes to the promotion of heritage language

development and maintenance.

REFERENCES

Abdi, K. (2011). ‘She really only speaks English’: Positioning, language ideology, and heritage

language learners. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 67(2), 161-190.

Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands/La frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute

Books.

Baquedano-Lopez, P. (1997). Creating social identities through doctrina narratives. Issues in

Applied Linguistics, 8(1), 27-45.

Baquedano-Lopez, P. (2000). Narrating community in doctrina classes. Narrative Inquiry, 10(2),

429-452. doi: 10.1075/ni.10.2.07baq


April, 2014

Baquedano-Lopez, P., & Kattan, S. (2008). Language socialization in schools: An historical

overview. In P. A. Duff & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of language and

education. Vol. 8: Language socialization. Philadelphia/Heidelberg: Springer.Bhatia, A.

(2009). The discourses of terrorism. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 279–289.

Bhatia, A. (2009). The discourses of terrorism. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 279–289.

Bjornson, M. (2007). Speaking of citizenship: Language ideologies in Dutch citizenship regimes.

Focaal--European Journal of Anthropology, 49, 65-80.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information, 16(6),

645-668.

Cho, S. P. (2008). Korean immigrants' social practice of heritage language acquisition and

maintenance through technology (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of British

Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Chumak-Horbatsch, R. (1999). Language change in the Ukrainian home: From transmission to

maintenance to the beginnings of loss. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 31(2), 61-75.

Clyne, M. (1996). Inter-cultural communication at work: Cultural values in discourse.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Collins, J. J. (2011). Understanding war in Afghanistan. Washington, DC: National Defense

University Press.

Comanaru, R., & Noels, K. A. (2009). Self-determination, motivation, and the learning of

Chinese as a heritage language. Canadian Modern Language Review, 66(1), 131-158.

Crawford, J. (Ed). (1992). Language loyalties: A source book on the official English controversy.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Cummins, J. (1981). The role of primary language development in promoting educational

success for language minority students. In California Department of Education (Ed.),

Schooling and language minority students: A theoretical framework,. Los Angeles:

Evaluation, Dissemination and Assessment Center (pp. 3-49).

Cummins, J. (2000). Language, power, and pedagogy: Bilingual children in the crossfire.

Buffalo, NY: Multilingual Matters.

Dagenais, D., & Day, E. (1999). Home language practices of trilingual children in French

immersion. Canadian Modern Language Review, 56(1), 99-123.

Decapua, A., & Wintergast, A. C. (2009). Second-generation language maintenance and identity:

A case study. Bilingual Research Journal, 32(1), 5-24.

Delanty, G. (2006). The cosmopolitan imagination: Critical cosmopolitanism and social theory.

The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 25-47.

Fader, A. (2001). Literacy, bilingualism, and gender in a Hasidic community. Linguistics and

Education, 12(3), 261–283.

Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (2004). Discourse studies: A multidisciplinary introduction. In T.

A. van Dijk (Ed.), Discourse as social interaction. London: Sage Publications.

Field, M. (2001). Triadic directives in Navajo language socialization. Language in Society,

30(2), 249–263.

Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. London, UK: Tavistock Publications

Limited.


April, 2014

Foucault, M. (1980). In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other

writings, 1972-77. New York: Pantheon Books.

Friedman, D. A. (2009). Speaking correctly: Error correction as a language socialization practice

in a Ukrainian classroom. Applied Linguistics, 31(3), 346-367.

Gal, S. (1998). Multiplicity and contention among language ideologies: A commentary. In B. B.

Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard & P. V. Kroskrity (Eds.), Language ideologies: Practice and

theory (pp. 317-331). New York: Oxford University Press.

Gee, J. P. (2005). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method. New York, NY:

Routledge.

Gibbons, J., & Ramirez, E. (2004). Different beliefs: Beliefs and the maintenance of a minority

language. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 23(1), 99-117.

Guardado, M. (2008). Language socialization in Canadian Hispanic communities: Ideologies and

practices (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of British Columbia, Vancouver,

Canada.

Guardado, M. (2009). Speaking Spanish like a Boy Scout: Language socialization, resistance and

reproduction in a heritage language Scout troop. Canadian Modern Language Review, 66(1),

101-129.

Guardado, M. (2010). Heritage language development: Preserving a mythic past or envisioning

the future of Canadian identity? Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 9(5), 329-

346. doi: 10.1080/15348458.2010.517699

Guardado, M. (2012). Toward a critical multilingualism in Canadian classrooms: Making local

inroads to a cosmopolitan identity. TESL Canada Journal, 30(1), 151-165.

Guardado, M. (2013). The metapragmatic regimentation of heritage language use in Hispanic

Canadian caregiver–child interactions. International Multilingual Research Journal, 7(3),

230-247.

Hackett, S. C., & Moore, M. C. (2011). Enviromental and natural resources economics: Theory,

policy, and the sustainable society. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language

and meaning. Baltimore, MD: University Park Press.

Hill, J. H. (1985). The grammar of consciousness and the consciousness of grammar. American

Ethnologist, 12, 725-737.

hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking Black. Boston: South End Press.

Iqbal, I. (2005). Mother tongue and motherhood: Implications for French language maintenance

in Canada. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 61(3), 305-323.

Iyer, R. (2009). Entrepreneurial identities and the problematic of subjectivity in media-mediated

discourses. Discourse & Society, 20(2), 241-263.

Jaffe, A. (1999). Ideologies in action: Language politics in Corsica. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Jaffe, A. (2005). Collaborative literacy practices in French and Corsican: The ideological

underpinnings of a bilingual education. Crossroads of Language, Interaction, and Culture, 6,

3-28.

Kastoryano, R. (2000). Global trends and issues: Settlement, transnational communities and

citizenship. International Social Science Journal, 52(165), 307-312.

Kouritzin, S. G. (1999). Face[t]s of first language loss. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.


April, 2014

Krashen, S. D. (1996). Under attack: The case against bilingual education. Culver City, CA:

Language Education Associates.

Kroskrity, P. V. (1992). Arizona Tewa Kiva speech as a manifestation of linguistic ideology.

Pragmatics, 2(3), 297-309.

Kroskrity, P. V. (2000). Language ideologies in the expression and representation of Arizona

Tewa ethnic identity. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and

identities. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Kroskrity, P. V. (2010). Language ideologies--Evolving perspectives. In J. Jaspers, J.-O.

Östman, & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Society and language use (Handbook of pragmatics

highlights). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kulick, D. (1992). Language shift and cultural reproduction: Socialization, self and syncretism

in a Papua New Guinean village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leeman, J., & Martínez, G. (2007). From identity to commodity: Ideologies of Spanish in

heritage language textbooks. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 4(1), 35-65.

Li, G. (2006). Biliteracy and trilingual practices in the home context: Case studies of Chinese-

Canadian children. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 6(3), 355-381.

Li, X. (1999). How can language minority parents help their children become bilingual in

familial context? A case study of a language minority mother and her daughter. Bilingual

Research Journal, 23(2 & 3).

MacPherson, S., & Ghoso, D. W. (2008). Multilingualism in emerging diasporas: A Tibetan case

study. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 2(3), 188-216.

Maguire, M. (2005). Identity and agency in primary trilingual children’s multiple cultural

worlds: Third space and heritage languages. In J. Cohen, K. T. McAlister, K. Rolstad, & J.

MacSwan (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism.

Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.

Meek, B. A. (2007). Respecting the language of elders: Ideological shift and linguistic

discontinuity in a Northern Athapascan Community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology,

17(1), 23-43.

Nesteruk, O. (2010). Heritage language maintenance and loss among the children of Eastern

European immigrants in the USA. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development,

31(3), 271-286.

Nicholas, S. E. (2009). “I live Hopi, I just don't speak it”--The critical intersection of language,

culture, and identity in the lives of contemporary Hopi youth. Journal of Language, Identity,

and Education, 8(5), 321-334.

Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity, and educational change.

Harlow, England: Pearson Education.

Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. B. (2012). The theory of language socialization. In A. Duranti, E.

Ochs & B. B. Schieffelin (Eds.), The handbook of language socialization (pp. 1-21). West

Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Oriyama, K. (2010). Heritage language maintenance and Japanese identity formation: What role

can schooling and ethnic community contact play? Heritage Language Journal, 7(2), 76-111.

Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Bernhard, J., & Freire, M. (2001). Struggling to preserve home language:

The experiences of Latino students and families in the Canadian school system. Bilingual

Research Journal, 25(1 & 2).


April, 2014

Park, S. M., & Sarkar, M. (2007). Parents' attitudes toward heritage language maintenance for

their children and their efforts to help their children maintain the heritage language: A case

Study of Korean-Canadian immigrants. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 20(3), 223-235.

Pease-Alvarez, L. (2002). Moving beyond linear trajectories of language shift and bilingual

language socialization. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 24(2), 114-137.

Pennycook, A. (1998). English and the discourses of colonialism. London: Routledge.

Petri, H. (1991). Motivation: Theory, research and application. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Ricento, T. (2005). Problems with the 'language-as-resource' discourse in the promotion of

heritage languages in the U.S.A. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9(3), 348-368.

Savignon, S. J. (1987). Communicative language teaching. Theory into Practice, 26 (4), 235-

242.

Schecter, S. R., & Bayley, R. (1997). Language socialization practices and cultural identity: Case

studies of Mexican-descent families in California and Texas. TESOL Quarterly, 31(3), 513-

541.

Schecter, S. R., & Bayley, R. (2002). Language as cultural practice: Mexicanos en El Norte.

Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Schiffrin, D. (1994). Approaches to discourse. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Slavik, H. (2001). Language maintenance and language shift among Maltese migrants in Ontario

and British Columbia. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 152, 131-152.

Sodhi, P. (2007). Respecting the East, embracing the West: A tribute to the women of the

Maritime Sikh Society. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 9(1), 285-296.

Starkey, H. (2007). Language education, identities and citizenship: Developing cosmopolitan

perspectives. Language and Intercultural Communication, 7(1), 56-71.

Steuter, E., & Wills, D. (2009). Discourses of dehumanization: Enemy construction and

Canadian media complicity in the framing of the war on terror. Global Media Journal -

Canadian Edition, 2(2), 7-24.

Tannenbaum, M., & Berkovich, M. (2005). Family relations and language maintenance:

Implications for language educational policies. Language Policy, 4, 287-309.

Thomas, L., & Cao, L. (1999). Language use in family and in society. English Journal, 89, 107-

113.

van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4 (2), 243-

289.

van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Society and discourse: How social contexts control text and talk.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (1999). The discursive construction of

national identity. Translated by A. Hirsch and R. Mitten. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press.

Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2009). Critical discourse analysis: History, agenda, theory, and

methodology. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis. Los

Angeles: SAGE.

Wong Fillmore, L. (1991). When learning a second language means losing the first. Early

Childhood Research Quarterly, 6, 323-346.

Woolard, K. A., & Schieffelin, B. B. (1994). Language ideology. Annual Review of

Anthropology, 23, 55-82.


April, 2014

Xiao, H. (1998). Chinese language maintenance in Winnipeg. Canadian Ethnic Studies, 30(1),

86-96.

Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Cambridge,

MA: Blackwell.


April, 2014

NOTES

1. The larger study was my doctoral research project, which was supervised by Dr. Patricia Duff.

2. All names are pseudonyms.

3. The children were born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, until the family’s relocation to

Vancouver.

4. This is a one-parent family.

5. Afghan Persian (Dari) is one of the two official languages of the country along with Pashto. It

is the most widely spoken language and therefore Afghanistan’s lingua franca (Collins, 2011).

6. This is a simplified transcription. The detailed transcription and analysis can be found in

Guardado (2008, 2013).

The discourses of heritage language development: Engaging ideologies in Canadian Hispanic communities - 2014

Documents