Positioning Heritage Languages in the United States

Author(s): Ofelia Garca

Source: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Winter, 2005), pp. 601-605
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language
Teachers Associations
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Positioning Heritage Languages in the United States

OFELIA GARCIA, Teachers College, Columbia University
i

~~~ ~ ~ ~

Lengua de herencia ?... Como algo viejo, mi

bisabuela.
Heritage language?... As if something old,
my great-grandmother.
Sonia, a 17 year-old Dominican recently arrived
in New York City, May 10, 2005
What does the term heritage language mean to
Sonia, the newly arrived Latina adolescent whose
words appear above? It means "something old,
her great-grandmother." And how does this differ
from Spanish? Well, she tells me, Spanish is what

she speaks every day not only in her home, but

also in the streets of Washington Heights, a Latino
neighborhood in upper Manhattan.
I agree with Sonia. Positioning languages other
than English in the United States as heritage languages clearly is rear-viewing. It speaks to what was
left behind in remote lands, what is in one's past.
By leaving the languages in the past, the term
heritage languages connotes something that one
holds onto vaguely as one's remembrances, but
certainly not something that is used in the present
or that can be projected into the future. The use

The ModernLanguageJournal 89 (2005)

602
of the term heritagelanguagesin the United States
is, as Cummins so aptly notices, recent. This short
reflection offers insights into why U.S. academics
might have adopted the term, 20 years after the
Canadians popularized it. Why, we must ask, has
the term heritage languages caught on recently
in the United States? Does it represent new languages? New language ideologies? New language
policy or planning? What terms were used previously and what has happened to those terms?
These questions form the basis for my reflections. I believe the use of the term heritagelanguages in the United States signals a losing of
ground for language minorities that was gained
during the civil rights era. And yet, I agree
with Cummins that the use of the term heritage
languages in education in speaking with teachers, parents, schools, administrators, and children
provides a way to "crack" today's homogenous
monolingual schooling of very different children
in the United States, providing a space for the
use of languages other than English in educating
children.

TABLE1
Nativityof the Population: 1850 to 1930 and 1940 to
2000

THE LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPEOF THE

UNITED STATES

ber of immigrants rising, their countries of origin

were shifting dramatically. By 1980, immigration,
especially from Latin America and Asia, was on
the increase while immigration from Europe was
declining rapidly. In 2000, over 50% of the immigrants to the United States were from Latin
America.
For the most part, Latin American immigrants
speak Spanish. The number of Spanish speakers, combined with second and third generation
Latinos who live in Spanish-speaking homes or
who claim Spanish as the language of their ancestors, has simply led to a shift in U.S. language
ideology, with the language tolerance of its his-

The United States has had a long bilingual tradition that was aptly described in the
1960s and 1970s especially by Heinz Kloss (1963,
1977), Einar Haugen (1953), andJoshua Fishman
(1966). As Table 1 makes clear, the foreign-born
population in the United States has been approximately 10% since 1850, with the exception of
the period of immigration restriction surrounding World War II, a restriction that was lifted as a
result of the amendments to the Immigration and
Nationality Act of 1965.
It is instructive to link passage in 1968 of
the Bilingual Education Act with the historical period of lowest immigration. Those people
who originally benefited from bilingual education
were ethnolinguistic groups who were not
immigrants-Mexican Americans who had long
lived in the Southwest, Puerto Ricans who were
U.S. citizens by virtue of the Jones Act of 1917,
and the indigenous peoples of the United States,
Native Americans. By 1974, when the Bilingual
Education Act was reauthorized, immigration was
on the increase and the transitional definition
of bilingual education came into being. But with
this rise in immigration, which returned the levels of the foreign-born to their long-term historical trends, came another change, which affected
how the country viewed its bilingual tradition. Table 2 makes evident that, not only was the num-

Decade
1850
1860
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
1920
1930
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000

Native-Born
Population

Foreign-Born
Population

90.3
86.0
85.6
86.7
85.2
86.4
85.3
86.8
88.4
91.2
93.1
94.6
95.3
93.8
92.1
88.9

9.7
13.2
14.4
13.3
14.8
13.6
14.7
13.2
11.6
8.8
6.9
5.4
4.7
6.2
7.9
11.1

Source:U.S. Census Bureau,Pop DivisionNo. 29 and

SummaryFile 3.

torical past and the language

promotion

of its

civil rights era being replaced by the language

restriction of the English Only movement. As in
its historical beginnings, the United States has to
contend particularly with Spanish, despite the recent growth of Asian and African languages in the
country.
SPANISHAS A HERITAGELANGUAGE?
Kloss (1977) attributed the greatest language
rights to languages spoken by original settlers.
Spanish was present in the continental United
States before English. In 1513, Ponce de Leon
discovered Florida, and soon afterwards, Panfilo
de Narvaez established the first colony of Europeans near present-day Pensacola. Then, in
1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded

603

Perspectives
TABLE2
Region of Birth of the Foreign Born Population:1850 to 1970 and 1980 to 2000
Decade

Europe

Asia

Africa

1850

92.2%

0.1%

1870
1890
1910
1930
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000

88.8%
86.9%
87.4%
83.0%
75.0%
61.7%
39.0%
22.9%
15.8%

1.2%
1.2%
1.4%
1.9%
5.1%
8.9%
19.3%
26.3%
26.4%

0.1%
0.4%
0.9%
1.5%
1.9%
2.8%

Oceania

LatinAmerica

0.9%

0.1%
0.1%
0.1%
0.1%
0.4%
0.4%
0.6%
0.5%
0.5%

1.0%
1.2%
2.1%
5.5%
9.4%
19.4%
33.1%
44.3%
51.7%

Source:U.S. Census Bureau,Pop DivisionNo. 29 and SummaryFile 3.

half of the Mexican territory to the United States.

Spanish could be considered an original language
in the United States, albeit with different histories
and fortunes depending on the area in which it
was spoken.
Besides being an original language, Spanish is
widely spoken today in most of the United States.
In July, 2004, Latinos numbered 41.3 million,
accounting for one out of seven people in the
country (Jelinek, 2005). According to the U.S.
2000 census, there were 35 million Latinos in
the United States, comprising 13% of the population. Of those, 21 million or 59% were of Mexican descent, 10% were Puerto Ricans, and 4%
were Cubans. Of the total population, 27 million
people, or 10%, claimed in the 2000 U.S. census
that Spanish was spoken in their homes. Although
these figures suggest that over one third of U.S.
Latinos do not speak Spanish in the home and
may have shifted to English, they also indicate that
approximately two thirds of U.S. Latinos continue
to speak Spanish in the home, even when they are
fully bilingual. In fact, only 11% of those Latinos
who speak Spanish at home do so because they do
not speak English at all.
With 27 million speakers of Spanish in 2000, the
United States is the fifth largest Spanish-speaking
country in the world and is only short a million
speakers to be on a par with Spain, a multilingual country where Spanish is spoken only by 28
million (Garcia, in press). Spanish in the United
States is clearly not simply a heritage language,
but: one that is spoken, most of the time alongside English, by millions of people who are U.S.
citizens. In fact, for many of us, Spanish is no
more our heritage language than English is. Both
languages form part of our bilingual and transcultural identities, and perhaps it is our bilingualism
that is our heritage, a heritage important in our

globalized world, but increasingly denied to U.S.

citizens in U.S. global politics.
In describing the vicissitudes of globalization,
especially as it relates to language policy and language planning, Wright (2004) explained:
Some of the most robustresistanceto globalisation
comes from within the United Statesitself.... The
U.S. governmentis able to guardits sovereigntyand
autonomyin the classicmannerof the nationstate....
Weappearto be witnessingasymmetric
developments
within globalisation: loss of economic autonomy and

politicalsovereigntyfor manystates;continuingeconomic autonomyand politicalsovereigntytogether

withthe survivalof some elementsof traditional"one
for
nation,one territory,one languagenationalism"
the UnitedStates.(pp. 163, 165)
I agree with Wright. Perhaps it is in the distancing of the United States from the globalization
that it has spearheaded for other countries that
we find the meaning of the shift in calling languages other than English heritage languages. As
the languages of the world transcend their traditional territories and English spreads, languages
other than English in the United States are being controlled through a shift in discourse. This
shift is perhaps best exemplified by the silencing
of the word bilingual and replacing it with heritage
languages.
CLOSING UP THE BILINGUALSPACE
It is obvious that the word bilingual has disappeared from the national discourse and that bilingual education has undergone a successful slandering campaign that has left it unable to name
itself. As heritagelanguagescame into our national
use in the 1990s, the term bilingual was being
phased out. Table 3 shows some of the changes
in naming that have silenced the words bilingual

TheModernLanguageJournal 89 (2005)

604
TABLE3
Changes in Names
Office of Bilingual Education and Minority
LanguagesAffairs (OBEMLA)

National Clearinghousefor Bilingual Education

(NCBE)

Title VII of Elementaryand Secondary

EducationAct: The BilingualEducationAct

education and minoritylanguages, replacing them

with language instruction and acquisition and English language.
As these official name changes were taking
place, the bilingual education enterprise moved
to support programs that did not call themselves
bilingual but dual language, another way of referring to bilingual education without naming our
country's bilingualism. In theory, dual language
education programs, the great majorityof them in
English and Spanish, integrate English language
learners with Spanish language learners. In reality, however, these programs are more what Herv6
Varenne (2005) called examples of"unauthorized
education" or instances of the "centrifugal, hidden and playful activity of all human beings, even
under oppression." That is, as bilingual education programs, even those of the transitional kind,
have come under attack, committed educators
have found ways to continue to educate Latino
students using their bilingualism as a resource. As
a consequence one finds mostly Latino students
in dual language classrooms; at least in New York
City, they are Latino students who for the most
part speak Spanish, but who are also bilingual.
In a recent article (Garcia, 2004), I referred
to bilingual education in New York City as "lost
in transculturation," as I decried the loss of the
"safe spaces" that bilingual education programs,
even of the transitional kind, provided for language minorities. As I reflect on what is happening in dual language classrooms today, however,
I can also speak of what has been found-a way,
"a crack"in the educational homogenization that
surrounds the No Child Left Behind Act, that enables bilingual instruction to continue in an era
of restrictions and attacks on language rights. The
same may be said of the use of the term heritage
languages in education-it is a way of continuing
to operate even a small modicum of professional
bilingual activity in times of an increasingly bilingual U.S. reality but strict English monolingual
imposition.

Office of English LanguageAcquisition,

Language Enhancement and Academic
Achievement for LEPstudents (OELA)
National Clearinghousefor English Language
Acquisitionand Language Instruction
EducationalPrograms(NCELA)
Title III of The No Child Left Behind, Public
Law 107-110:Language Instructionfor
Limited English Proficient and Immigrant
Students
HERITAGELANGUAGEAS OPENING UP
NEW SPACE
Despite what has been lost, that is, the potential
for full bilingualism and biliteracy of U.S. citizens,
the introduction of the term heritagelanguage in
U.S. education discourse has opened up some new
educational possibilities within the public schools.
On the one hand, in opposition to foreign language education, heritage language education,
mostly at the secondary and tertiary level, makes
it possible to have classes for those students who
have some measure of proficiency in the language
because they speak it at home or in the community. On the other hand, in elementary and secondary school, heritage language education provides the possibility of using languages other than
English for instructing those students who are in
English as a second language, Sheltered English,
or monolingual English-only programs. The use
of heritage languages in children's learning even
when instruction is in English has been shown to
be highly effective (Cummins, in press; Fu, 2003).
These heritage languages are used for their crosslinguistic transfer potential in educating children.
They are different from the language awareness
programs that make children cognizant of other
languages. Heritage languages in education are
good for language minority children who are receiving no mother-tongue support in schools. But
they are a far cry from what we should be doing with the nation's bilingualism and biliteracy
potential.
TWO SOLITUDES VERSUS ENGLISH
SOLITUDE
I agree fully with Cummins that the two solitudes of the languages in second language immersion and bilingual/dual language programs
are no longer useful in a globalizing world
where different degrees of multilingual abilities
are needed for different purposes and where

605

Perspectives

monolingual spaces are seldom isolated. Schools

need to calibrate their expectations to meet the
world's plurilingual reality, and new instructional
arrangements must be developed to benefit from
the linguistic hybridity of the 21st century and
its attendant technology. The use of heritage languages in every child's education may be one way
to develop a well-protected space for this activity.
It is important to understand that, despite its
promise, recognition of heritage languages in education has only come about as a fall-back position, when the potential for bilingualism and
biliteracy became restricted. In the United States,
we have gone from the two solitudes of our
two languages in bilingualism, to our sole solitude in English, with whispers in other languages.
Our multiple identities have been silenced, with
one language identity reduced to that of a
heritage.

Those of us who work with language know that

our use of language has the power to change realities. It is important to acknowledge the shift in
the sociopolitical context and in our democratic
process of giving voice to language minorities, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and refugees that
is indexed by the silencing of the words bilingual
and mothertongue.The recognition and use of the
term heritagelanguages harks back to a mythical
era when English only reigned supreme in the
nation's public schools, an era before bilingualism, before the recognition of two solitudes. It
relegates languages other than English to a powerless position-backward and unimportant. But
the term heritagelanguage also keeps feeding the
possibility of expressing our multiple identitiesplural transcultural identities that refuse to disappear even when the solitude of U.S. English
spreads throughout the globe.

REFERENCES

Cummins,J. (in press). Identitytexts: The imaginative construction of self through multiliteracies
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schools.Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Fishman, J. A. (Ed.). (1966). Language loyalty in the

UnitedStates.The Hague,The Netherlands:Mouton.

Fu, D. (2003). An island of English: TeachingESL in Chinatown. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
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in Hispanophone countries: From a plurilingual
and minority perspective]. In M. Lacorte (Ed.),
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minority. WashingtonPost. RetrievedJune 9, 2005,
from http://www.washingtonpost.com
Kloss, H. (1963). Das Nationalititenrechtder Vereinigten
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Opening and Filling Up Implementational and Ideological Spaces

in Heritage Language Education
NANCYH. HORNBERGER,The University of Pennsylvania
Wonderfully and characteristically,Jim Cummins has written a startlingly clear and practi-

cal piece on a topic both theoretically and politically complex. I agree with everything he has
to say-from his definitions of what we mean by
heritage languages to his classroom-level strategies
of what to do to consolidate and affirm them.
There is nothing for me to add there. What I can
do, though, is reinforce and extend some of his
points, with particular attention to international,

indigenous, and policy perspectives. In the comments that follow, I take up three such extensions:
(a) the notion of opening and filling up ideological and implementational spaces in order to
advance heritage language education, (b) the significance of bottom-up language planning in relation to heritage language resources, and (c) the
value of working (at both policy and classroom levels) from a conception ofbiliteracy in developing
learners' heritage language talents and identities.