Date of Award

January 2015

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Languages and Cultures

First Advisor

Lori A Czerwionka

Committee Member 1

Colleen Neary-Sundquist

Committee Member 2

Daniel Olson

Committee Member 3

Margie Berns

Committee Member 4

Mariko Wei

Abstract

This study investigated Spanish-speaking immigrants’ attitudes towards Spanish, which includes the evaluative reactions that people have towards the language. One hundred participants living in three different cities in Indiana completed a background questionnaire, a language attitudes questionnaire, and a one-on-one interview about their attitudes towards Spanish. It is imperative to know about Spanish-speaking populations’ attitudes in states with lower numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants like Indiana, because this knowledge helps to influence and make predictions about that language’s maintenance and shift in the community (Luo & Wiseman, 2000; Rivera-Mills, 2000); it guides language policy and planning and promotes language awareness (Pennycook, 2001) by demystifying the idea that some languages are superior to others (Bugel, 2009). In addition to quantitative analysis of the language attitudes questionnaire, leading to results related to four attitudes components (attitudes towards Spanish in general, Spanish in the U.S., Spanish language maintenance, and Spanish/English bilingualism), ten of the interviews were analyzed using Discourse Analysis (DA) (Martin, 2002; Gee, 2014) and

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