And on the other hand, Latinos having a family with Japanese also means, more probability on using Japanese in all the social domains because… That’s another question to examine.

Carolina — your study sound really interesting, would you like to share more?

I am an Argentinean. And married with a Japanese and having a boy speaking with different kind of degree Japanese and English (his best) and Spanish as his third language.

In my case, when people does not know me, they supposed that I am speaking English with my son and they associated that I am from the US or and European country because I have more “whited” features (?).

Although sharing the same native language, Spaniard and Latinos are differently socially evaluated in public spaces, work-related areas, etc.

Also, I found in my research what it has been said below, when the partner has the same native language, Spanish, that meant that they did not perceived a significant reaction from the Japanese people, while married with a Japanese received a more positive reaction. Being in a couple with a national and native of Japanese, means more social acceptation? As Lisa wrote the relationship between “race” or “ethnicity” and language

Ingrid, actually the three examples I gave are from three different sets of interview data that I’ve been working with. The Korean-American example comes from a paper forthcoming in a special edition of the IJSL edited by Jiri Nekvapil (who I hear you know well) and Tamah Sherman. The Mexican example is from a work-in-progress on the Japanese plurilingual workplace, part of which I’ll be presenting at the LASC Roundtable at Monash this February, while the Indian example is from another paper I’m working on that looks at the connection between perceptions of visual “foreignness”(Neustupny 1985, Fan 1994) and language use. Interestingly the Indian example comes from reports of encounters with the Japanese police. If he speaks in Japanese he’ll be taken to the police station but if he speaks in English he’ll be left alone. In this case the use of English appears to remove him from the lower level immigrant category.

Thanks, Lisa. Sounds like a fascinating piece of research. Has it been published? Do you have a reference?

Agree about Spanish being a very popular language in the EU. Many Central/Northern Europeans I think feel quite romantic about Spanish 🙂 – motivations to learn Spanish would make a great case study of ‘language desire’ – similar to this study of Japanese young single women’s desire for English. The German magazine Der Spiegel reported a few years ago that Spanish had overtaken German as the 2nd most popular language in the UK because British teenagers associated the language with the pop star Shakira (see ‘Hasta la vista, Deutschunterricht‘).

And so you find these Italians that study Spanish since a very young age (5-6 yo) and go on at college, and use it at work, and love to go to Spain on holidays. And on the other hand you find these latinos (not all of them, of course) that have problems passing on their mothertongue to their children.

Thank you! I am working mostly on the language transmission of latinos (and Spaniards) living in Italy. In the US you have Spanglish, in Italy we have Itañol or Itagnolo. Spanish and Italian, as you all know, are two neo-Latin languages — code-mixing and code-switching are very frequent and at one’s elbow, mostly because of the apparent easiness to learn them for a native speaker of a Romance language.

Spaniards tend to be prouder of their language heritage and they don’t feel the need to renounce. Spain is part of the UE, so it’s a union language — high status language. Latinos, on the other hand, relate their mothertongue to their past in their countries, to poverty and maladjustment (also in Italy) — low status language. Italians themselves show different feelings and perceptions regarding the same language spoken by different persons. Spanish is a level A language in Italy, very present at school and college, very important for business. But it’s also a language of immigration

“People wouldn’t believe I came from Spain (I am rather pale)”:

I forgot to tell that someone even asked me where in Mexico Spain was!

I live in Italy, am married to an Italian and we are raising two bilingual kids (Spanish-Italian). I have found the same duality in Italy: Spanish spoken by Spaniards is “cool” (a lot of Italians study and learn Spanish, it’s a language they love), Spanish spoken by latinos is not that “cool”. I am currently conducting a research on this topic at the PhD I am pursuing in sociolinguistics and bilingualism.

Thanks for an enlightening blog.

Khan