U.S. Spanish and the Standard Language Myth

Abstract: The Spanish spoken in the U.S. contains certain elements from English due to the sustained sociocultural contact between these two languages. Unfortunately, it is for this very reason that many monolingual Spanish speakers (and even some bilinguals) denigrate bilingual varieties of U.S. Spanish, which they see as impure (Mata 2023; Rangel et al. 2015). This negative view of U.S. Spanish is common among “journalists, translators and educators,” as noted by Cecilia Montes-Alcalá (99). Confronting these deeply rooted prejudices at a societal level represents a tremendous challenge. However, this is also the view of some linguists, though it is based principally or wholly on ideology and not on the results of empirical research. As language scholars, we have a role to play in bringing attention to these ideologies within our discipline and questioning them based on empirically grounded studies. In this article we suggest means of employing extant research to better inform the linguistic study of U.S. Spanish, which has wide-ranging implications for current and future research agendas.