Spanish language sows both unity and division among US Latinos: survey

Latinos in the United States have a complicated relationship with the Spanish language.

While the language can be a unifying force and even a competitive advantage, it’s also a source of tension, particularly among immigrant generations, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.

The report found that most Hispanics in the U.S. speak Spanish, with 75 percent of adults reporting “they can carry on a conversation in Spanish, both understanding and speaking, at least pretty well.”

Foreign-born Hispanics are more likely to have Spanish as a first language, and 93 percent of them speak it.

Though 57 percent of U.S.-born Hispanics speak the language, the children and grandchildren of immigrants report speaking Spanish at a lesser rate: 69 percent of second-generation Latino immigrants speak Spanish, and only 34 percent of third-generation immigrants speak the language.

“There’s tension among Latinos — on the one hand, the U.S.-born are not necessarily growing up speaking Spanish like their parents did, but they also have a great sense of pride about the importance of the Spanish language,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, director of race and ethnicity research at Pew and one of the co-authors of the report.

A broad majority of Latinos say it’s not necessary to speak Spanish to hold a Latino identity: 78 percent disagree that the language and identity are linked, while 21 percent say they are.

Foreign-born Latinos are the most likely to link identity and language, and even in that group, only 34 percent say speaking Spanish is a prerequisite for Hispanic identity.

Yet many Spanish speakers use bilingualism or Spanish-dominance as a cudgel against non-Spanish speakers.

The survey found 54 percent of Hispanics who don’t speak Spanish well have at some point been shamed by Spanish speakers for their language skills.

Spanish-shaming is more or less stable generationally, but 61 percent of college graduates who don’t speak Spanish reported being showed up by their peers.

The survey also reported a majority of Latinos have sometimes or often heard their friends and family make fun of other Latinos who do not speak Spanish.

Among all Latinos surveyed, 40 percent said they often witnessed friends and family mocking or commenting on third-parties’ use of the language, 29 percent said they sometimes witnessed mocking, and 30 percent said they rarely or never witnessed language shaming.

Shaming was most prevalent among younger Latinos — 50 percent of respondents aged 18-29 reported often witnessing mocking — and among bilingual Latinos, 47 percent of whom reported witnessing shaming regularly.

Those trends reflect a complex web of migration, centuries-old Southwestern Hispanic identity, elitism in Latin America and competition among Latin American nations.

Language chauvinism is prevalent in Latin America and Spain, where comparisons of linguistic purity or quality in the larger Spanish-speaking countries are common.

That hispanophone elitism has historically been used to demean U.S. Latinos, in particular by Mexican nationals against Mexican-Americans.

That tension, in conjunction with U.S. attitudes toward Spanish speakers, was likely a disincentive for Spanish-language instruction in the United States through the 20th century.

Whether bilingualism has faced a resurgence or whether it endured under-the-radar among U.S. Latinos, the Pew survey found that 85 percent of Hispanics say it’s somewhat, very or extremely important that future generations keep up their language skills.

“While we do see that about half of non-Spanish speaking Latinos are shamed for not speaking Spanish, we also do see that a large majority — in fact, I might even say a vast majority of Latinos, no matter their language skill, say that it’s important that future generations of Latinos speak Spanish in the country,” said Lopez.

“However, at the same time we also see that the majority of Latinos say that you don’t have to speak Spanish to be considered Hispanic.”

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