"Enclave/in chiave": bilinguismo spagnolo-inglese

The essay investigates the relevance of Spanish-English multilingualism in the United States. The analysis leans on the two ideas of “language community” (with its concurrent term “repertoire”) and “code-switching” (with its concurrent phenomen of “code-mixing”). It raises questions of how the persistence of Spanish contributes to the US language community and challenges notions of cultural deprivation for people living in a bilingual Spanish-English enviroment. Latino mulitlingualism is defined in terms of a reperoire of languages which includes not only Spanish and English, but also their varieties (included varieties of BEV). The anlysis is done on the background of language politics and language attitudes of both Anglo-American speakers and Spanish speaakers and intellectuals. Particular relevance is acknowledged to discourse studies, on the one hand, and to Latino bilingual creative writers, on the other.