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Negotiating Home Language: Spanish Maintenance And Loss In Latino Families, Amy Lutz
Negotiating Home Language: Spanish Maintenance And Loss In Latino Families, Amy Lutz
Sociology - All Scholarship
Based on in-depth interviews and fieldwork in and around Dallas, Texas, this paper explores the ways in which Latino parents and their children negotiate home language and offers a theoretical framework for understanding language maintenance and loss in the home. The parents in this study overwhelmingly view bilingualism as the ideal, yet many parents, especially those who are English-dominant or bilingual, find it difficult to maintain Spanish at home because of outside pressures that prioritize English and concerns about their children's English-language acquisition. The family, as the environment in which children first begin to learn language, and family dynamics regarding …