This study investigated how comfortable and secure heritage Spanish speakers feel about communicating in Spanish in public spaces of San Diego County, as well as the geographic distribution of Spanish use there. The goal was to determine the prevalence of Spanish use in the public sphere. Adult heritage Spanish speakers completed a survey about…

This study reports how authors use Spanish in award-winning Latinx children's picturebooks in the USA. Teachers, families, and librarians use these books to support heritage language and culture or to broaden children's understanding of cultures other than their own. Thus, how these books use Spanish matters because of the potential of these books…

In this article, I analyse the programme and pedagogy of "Karmelo Ikastola," a Basque immersion school that promotes parental involvement and language use within the family. The "Karmelo" case is noteworthy due to its success at effectively promoting the use of Basque among students inside and outside the school along with its…

In recent years there has been a focus in language policy research on understanding how national policies are interpreted and negotiated by social actors on the ground. This paper looks at the interplay between government and grassroots initiatives to create Galician-speaking spaces in predominantly Spanish-speaking urban settings. While official…

This article discusses the usage of the Spanish language by Hispanic mothers with their children, their views on language maintenance and culture within their bilingual families and their opinions on the benefits of bilingualism in a globalised world. Drawing upon detailed case studies of 16 native Spanish-speaking mothers married to…

Conceptions of identity in multilingual multicultural societies still seem to be dominated by the perception that human beings are born into social locations and categories of ethnicity that are pre-existing. This fails to acknowledge the current reality for the progeny of interracial marriages, who may find themselves belonging neither to their…

This article presents the results of an analysis of reported interlocutors in Spanish in a group of heritage speakers (HS), in three communities of the US Midwest. Participants were college-aged bilinguals developing their own personal and professional networks outside the direct influence of their parents. Responses are compared with those from…

Catalan companies have, until very recently, had the Spanish-speaking world as their main market. Following long periods of legal and official repression of the public and commercial use of Catalan, globalisation now places them in a new, multilingual context that makes feasible the use of Catalan alongside that of other languages. This paper…

Drawing on data from 14 communities in California and Texas, this paper examines the variability in language and literacy resources across communities with large numbers of Latino families. Spanish-speaking children live in communities that vary considerably with respect to language use, ethnic composition and education levels. Children's…

The "working emotion vocabulary" typically shows a preponderance of words for negative emotions (50%) over positive (30%) and neutral (20%) emotions. The theory of affect-as-information suggests that negative emotions signal problems or threat in the environment and are accompanied by detailed and systematic cognitive processing, while…