Heritage language socialization at work: Spanish in Miami

Abstract

Abstract In recent decades, the increasingly blurred boundaries between work, home, and various other spheres of social life have brought greater complexity to the notion of the workplace. In many contemporary workplace environments in the U.S., the demand for Spanish is unequivocal and uncontested; in some areas, Spanish is a de facto requirement. Because U.S. Latinx bilinguals show a broad social preference for English and lack formal education in Spanish, they may feel challenged to meet workplace language demands in Spanish, particularly where specialized vocabulary or formal registers are concerned. Carried out in the highly dynamic bilingual context of Miami, this study posed the following questions: Do adult heritage speakers of Spanish in Miami – where a broad majority of the population speaks Spanish – appear to draw linguistic benefits from participation in the local labor market? Does this participation have the potential to curtail language loss? To answer these questions, semi-structured interviews were carried out with heritage speakers of Spanish in Miami. Their personal accounts of adult heritage language socialization suggest that Spanish use in the U.S. workplace is a highly situated, localized discourse practice that depends largely on the individuals involved. Despite the uncontested value of Spanish in Miami and the demand to speak it in most workplace settings, conscious choice to do so remains with the individual. The participants’ related experiences reveal the importance of speaker agency and manifest the potential of workplace environments to engender more positive orientations toward Spanish as well as active use of the language during adulthood.