Switching Language: Identity over Acculturation

• In Event: Politics of Assimilation and Acculturation

Abstract

Language competence has been used by researchers as a measure of acculturation among immigrant-based communities. However, due to transnationalism and a globalization of media, the loss of an individual's mother tongue is less certain than in the previous century. A fairly recent methodological development has been the proliferation of bilingual surveys and interviewers. These allow respondents to choose the language of interview while holding many of the aspects regarding the interview constant.

Previous research has found that the language of interview is related to differences in attitudes in English-Spanish surveys (Welch, Comer, and Steinman 1973; Lee and Pérez 2014; Hill and Moreno 2001) as well as the accessibility of attitudes and concepts (Pérez 2016). But the language of interview might reflect a group signal more than language ability. Fully bilingual individuals might choose one language over another based on their group identities and political attitudes (Garcia Bedolla 2003). The first part of this project explores the differences between different languages of interview and the self-reported levels of proficiency of respondents.

In order to further learn about symbolic, rather than functional, use of the mother tongue, we look into language switchers in a survey of Latinos in the United States (LINES2006). While sixteen years old, this survey has an invaluable amount of information, among the variables in the survey is one that tracks whether the respondent moved from one language to another during the survey. We look at the attitudinal profile of these language switchers. We then explore whether switching from Spanish to English is distinctive from switching from English to Spanish across a set of attitudes. We propose that these differences should be present in non-immigrant populations, since answering in English should be difficult for newcomers to the United States. We use the LINES 2012 and 2016 to expand upon the LNS2006 to explore how language effects are different among immigrant Latinos

We hope the findings here help illustrate the ideological bases of language of interview that are distinctive from effects due to proficiency or linguistic proximity (see Pérez 2016).

Author

• Angel Saavedra Cisneros, St. Norbert College