Spanish. Her goal is to help educators work more effectively with heritage learners to build upon their language and cultural knowledge.
“First, I want people to understand that just because it (U.S. Spanish) sounds different, it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, not useful or shouldn’t be celebrated,” Bernate said. “The problem is that we’re telling heritage speakers that they don’t really speak Spanish. We are teaching them to deny their language skills, and say things like, ‘Oh, I don’t really know Spanish, I just speak Spanglish,’ rather than recognize that they have a vast range of linguistic and sociolinguistic tools.”
A linguistics researcher, Bernate believes that lessons gleaned from syntax, morphology and pragmatics can help to leverage the nation’s resource of bilingual speakers. About 40 million people in the U.S. say they speak Spanish in their home, making Spanish the second most spoken language in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center.
She believes a better understanding of how and why heritage speakers rely on linguistic shortcuts, such as verb simplification, can help educators validate what speakers are already doing and help them “expand their linguistic repertoire to communicate more effectively.”
Bernate has authored a soon-to-be-published book chapter on the expression of linguistic politeness in U.S. Spanish. Meanwhile, she’s applying her linguistics research to her own classroom, teaching a Spanish course designed for heritage speakers at St. Edward’s. We asked her about her research and teaching:
What is U.S. Spanish and why does it matter?
I would define U.S. Spanish as the variety of Spanish spoken by Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States, a dialect which reflects the dominance English holds in our society.
When we fail to see how U.S. Spanish is just another case of language variation, we start to discount the language resources that we have in this country. We have a growing Hispanic population here, and we're not tapping into those resources.
Why is it important to study the linguistics of Spanish in the United States?
When I look at something as minute as bare-if clauses (like ‘if you could help me, please’), I’m really just analyzing how U.S. Spanish differs from other dialects, particularly because of the influence and power that English has over Spanish. In the case of bare-if clauses, Spanish is different from English in that when we make requests, we express different levels of politeness through different verb conjugations. And speakers of U.S. Spanish don’t use as many verb conjugations because they don’t have as many opportunities to hear them and reproduce them. It’s not like speakers of U.S. Spanish are incompetent. It’s very natural to use fewer verb forms in your non-dominant language. That’s just a normal thing.
Your latest research focuses on the expression of politeness. How is politeness in U.S. Spanish different from other varieties of Spanish? Can you give an example?