What’s the future of Spanish in the United States?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
Maria Carreira [+ ]
California State University, Long Beach
Maria Carreira is professor of Spanish linguistics at California State University, Long Beach and Co-Director of the National Heritage Language Research Center at UCLA. Her publications focus on Spanish in the United States and Spanish as a world language. She has co-authored four college-level Spanish textbooks: Nexos (2015), Alianzas (2013), Cuadros (2013) and Sí se puede (2008). She is also a co-author of Voces, Latinos Students on Life in the United States (Praeger, 2014) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Heritage Language Education (2017). Dr. Carreira received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
Description
The future of U.S. Spanish doesn’t depend just on external factors like social pressures, economic incentives, and demographics; it may also be affected by linguistic developments. Spanish is being reinvented day by day, and Spanglish is only one sign that Spanish in the U.S. is adapting to its linguistic environment, and becoming more likely to thrive, functioning as a U.S. language second only to English.