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
Recommended Citation
Barbosa, Mara Raquel, "SPANISH-SPEAKING IMMIGRANTS IN A U.S. MIDWESTERN COMMUNITY: AN EXPLORATION OF ATTITUDES TOWARDS SPANISH, SPANISH IN THE U.S., LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE, AND BILINGUALISM" (2015). Open Access Dissertations. 1164.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/1164