Spanish As a Heritage Language in the United States: a Study of Speakers' Register Variation

One of the fundamental principles of sociolinguistics is no single person speaks in the same way all the time. This book explores variation across registers in Spanish as a heritage language. Additionally, it examines second language learners since Spanish is also their non-dominant language. This work analyzes several linguistic features including discourse particles, contractions, and various lexical choices. The results indicate that both heritage and second language speakers show linguistic variation in their Spanish across registers. The results also reveal some quantitative as well as qualitative differences between the two groups of speakers, which have important pedagogical implications for the teaching and learning of heritage languages. This book contributes to further our understanding of bilingualism by providing evidence of variation in speakers¿ non-dominant language. This is an important finding since it shows that even when the use of the language is largely limited to a particular domain (home/family interactions for heritage speakers and classroom interactions for second language learners), we can still find register variation.