2.1 Diglossia, assimilation, and bilingualism among the hispanics  (Page 2/17)

It was diglossia in the beginning

            It is now very common to apply, in its ampler sense, the concept of diglossia that Charles A. Ferguson developed in 1959. According to this author, diglossia is the discriminated use of two varieties of the same language, as is observed with the classic and popular Arab and classic and popular Greek. Nevertheless, after the revision of the concept on behalf of John A. Gumperz (1966), and especially of Joshua A. Fishman (1992), an agreement of convenience on behalf of the sociologists of the language was reached, far more than the sociolinguists; everything has to be said, that the diglossia applied to the discriminated use of two varieties linguistics of any type (two different languages for example), as long as a variety took care of the functions of the higher culture and the other was limited to cover the functions with the lower culture. This way things are clear that the English and Spanish and of the U.S. is in this type of situation, since they have been in contact with each other in the North American southwest since the first half of the 19th century. A situation in which the English of the winners covers the fields of policy, administration, and education, while Spanish of those who were overcome or are recent immigrants is relegated to the scope of the family, conversations of the kitchen, or to a folkloric oral tradition that has been progressively diminished. More than the numbers of the surveys, the testimonies of qualified informants are eloquent. Rubén Salazar (1992), news director of the TV channel AMEX in Los Angels, and columnist of the Los Angeles Times stated,

One knows from the beginning: to speak Spanish marks to you. Your mother, your father, your brothers and sisters, your friends, all speak Spanish. But the bus driver, the teacher, police, the store employee, the man who we pay rent to every month - all this people who do things important – none speak Spanish. (p. 329)

There is no doubt that English is what is used in public spaces or occupations with a minimum of social recognition, while Spanish is reduced to familiar relations and friendships. Richard Rodriguez is a Hispanic writer who constructs this distribution of the English and Spanish languages with diglostic thoroughness. In his autobiography, Hunger of Memory , Rodriguez (1982), with diligent meticulousness, relates the terrible experience of a 6-year-old boy, son of Mexican immigrants, who attends a parochial school run by Irish nuns in Sacramento, California for the first time:

...in my condition as a socially underprivileged boy, I considered that Spanish was a private language. What I needed to learn in school was that it had the right, and the obligation, to speak the public language of the gringos... luckily, my teachers fulfilled their responsibility without any kind of concession to sentimentality. They clearly knew that what I needed was to speak the public language... because I suspected that English was intrinsically a public language whereas Spanish was private. This is how I quickly learned the radical difference between the language at school and the language at home. (p. 19-20)