The Changes in Family Language with Hispanic Families
Most Latino families in America feel the pressure of integrating English into their lives while not letting their own native language slip away, and this is just one of the many changes in family language with Hispanic families. This is not the first time that Latinos see their language going to the wayside. Let’s look into this a little bit deeper.
The language website, AILLA, reports that hundreds of indigenous languages can be heard today across Latin America. However, that’s a big reduction as there used to be as many as 1,700 before the European invasions. Now, it’s believed that there are about 500 to 700 languages for the whole Latin American region.
The speakers of these languages, according to AILLA, are also under considerable pressure to shift to the more dominant European languages. Unless the situation changes, in fact, it’s thought that many of these languages won’t survive into the next century.
AILLA also states that it doesn’t help when many Hispanics have the idea that a person can speak only one language well, and as such, their kids should only learn the dominant language of a country. However, experts know that people can easily speak more than one language, if not two or more.
The Pew Research Center on Hispanic trends states that the number of Hispanics speaking Spanish in the adult Latino population is greater than Hispanics who are English-dominant. English is quickly making ground, however, and the second generation is becoming even more English dominant than in Spanish.
A journal article from Syracuse University on negotiating the home language states that Hispanic parents cannot help but feel the strong pull that schools have in wanting their kids to learn English. As a result, Spanish is being sacrificed in the high hopes of becoming bilingual, and that’s not necessarily a good thing, as most families would like to keep their native language intact.
Finding educational programs that support ELL students’ first language, such as The Latino Family Literacy Project, can make an enormous difference on their overall academic and language acquisition success.