2.1 Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among the hispanics  (Page 5/17)

Diglossia without bilingualism

The linguistic policy of the U.S., with respect to the immigrants, has been openly assimilationist. The persistence of any other language by any group of immigrants on North American ground is considered as a characteristic of anti-Americanism. President Theodore Roosevelt said it loud and clear: “Here there is only room for one language, and that language is English.” Today, it is possible to say that such politics of assimilation have fulfilled its objectives, and the world agrees that the linguistic change to English is a process that lasts three generations: the first generation immigrants learn as much English as they can, which is actually very little, and it resorts to its maternal language for domestic functions; the second generation continues to speak the maternal language at home, but uses English in public spaces like school and work; the third generation loses control of the maternal language, while the English language is not only used in public spaces, but also at home and for domestic use. With this said, it is possible to say that the U.S. is a cemetery of foreign languages, since rarely any of the maternal languages carried by immigrant groups remain beyond the third generation.

With some clarifications, this scheme is applied to the Hispanics in the U.S. With regards to the first generation of immigrants, it is to say that they fulfill the requirements of a situation identified by Fishman: diglossia without bilingualism. With the situation of diglossia being previously explained, we are going to try to explain why that first generation does not acquire English as a second language in a level that can be characterized as bilingual. In this segment of Hispanic population occurs, in the first place, what is known as functional restriction of the English language. According to Smith’s terminology (1972), the functions of the language can be that of communication, integration, and of symbolic and identification expression. So that the function of communication between immigrant groups and the members of the welcoming society are fulfilled, there are some lexical, morphologic, and syntactic minimum requirements. Even in the case of a vague phonology, a scarce lexicon, a morphology that does not respect regimes, agreements, or norms of prefixes or suffixes, the function of communication could occur between both interlocutors. This is not the case of the integration function. For a language to work as a social marker of an affiliation or group property, the phonological, lexicons, morphologic requirements must be observed strictly.

            The Hispanic group of first generation, like all immigrant groups, has a project of improving their life, but not of integrating to the host country once and for all. This is a differential characteristic with respect to other immigrant groups coming from Europe in the first half of the 20th century. When the Polish traveled as immigrants to America, they made a trip without return, burned their ships, and decided to construct a new life. For many reasons, Hispanics, especially the Mexican group, which is the most numerous, do not come to the U.S. with the aim of immediately integrating themselves to the American way of life. This means that their relation to English as a second language is solely with the object of communication and not of integration. But as it was said before, to communicate in a routinely working surrounding there is no need of a precise control of the language. Certain rudiments are enough. This explains the phenomenon of linguistic fossils, according to Selinker’s terminology (1972). It is observed in immigrant groups, and in first generation Hispanics, that the acquisition of English as a second language does not progress with the years of permanence. It is stagnant and fossilized, due to that restriction of the English language to the simple functions of communication, a function that does not demand a phonetic precision, the morphologic redundancies, and the lexical property; all requisites that do not add anything to the basic contents of communication, but that are indispensable so that the speaker is identified like a member of a group. In the background of this explanation are the well-known hypotheses of pichinización and creolización exposed by Keith Whinnom (1990).