The Tutoring Book - California State University, Sacramento

Like other immigrant groups and Native American groups, Chicanos/as and Mexican Americans
have historically been pressured to assimilate into the “dominant culture.” Who in California hasn’t heard
a story about someone who was reprimanded in school for speaking Spanish? The social pressure to
abandon Spanish, and legislative legal moves towards English Only laws (see Crawford, Perea & Moran),
have led to more passive bilingualism. Passive bilingualism refers to people who can speak a non-
English language, but make the political choice not to. Most often passive bilinguals are parents who feel
their kids will be better off if they only teach them English. This impacts ChE in two ways: first, passive
bilinguals are often ChE speakers and so, their children learn ChE as a first language; secondly, children
who are kept from learning Spanish may try to learn ChE or cling to it as their only linguistic link to their
ancestry.
On a more positive note, plenty of Chicanos/as, Mexican Americans and others are maintaining or
learning Spanish as a second language. This means that more people are able to code-switch, and
consequently, can understand and pick up on the syntactic and systemic features of ChE. So, SSL
speakers may also normally or naturally write or speak in ChE, as it is the dialect of English that is most
in-line with their linguistic make-up. SSL speakers of ChE are also important to note because, while they
do speak Spanish, they may not have the grammar skills in Spanish that we sometimes assume they have.
Many Chicano/a or Mexican American Spanish speakers speak a North American dialect of Spanish that
follows several regional and archaic usage rules that are not standard in Mexican Spanish (Anzaldua,
1999, 79). Therefore, it’s probably not going to aid them in understanding a non-standard English usage
error by saying, “how would you say this in Spanish?” or by trying to figure out what Spanish usage rule
they may be applying.
Some Common Characteristics of ChE
Spelling Notes: While English has eleven stressed vowel phonemes, Spanish only has five (i, e, u,
o, a), so in both speech and writing, words like read and rid may sound and be written the same way
(Fromkin & Rodman, 1998, 419). This means that when ChE writers attempt phonetic spelling in SAE,
they may have some difficultly seeing or hearing the difference between their spelling and the standard
spelling of a word. ChE spelling and speech may also use ch and sh interchangeably, resulting in words
like chow for show and share for chair. The same is true of the letters b and v and c, s, and z (1998, 419).
Another spelling difference between ChE and SAE that you may see, is called word-final consonant
simplification, where past tense suffixes are deleted, for example, I star school at 2pm or she marry him
yesterday (1998, 420). The words for to may also be used instead of only for or to since in Spanish they
are more often strung together. An example of this would be a phrase like, we are ready for to go on the
trip.
Syntactic Differences: Fromkin and Rodman note that “in Spanish, a negative sentence includes a
negative morpheme before the verb even if another negative appears; thus negative concord is a regular
rule of ChE syntax” (1998, 420). The written and spoken result of this rule may be sentences like I don
have no more or he don know nothin. These linguists also point out that there is a regular difference
between the “use of comparative more to mean more often and the preposition out from to mean away
from. The resulting ChE sentences may look like I want to get out from my apartment or She uses
cilantro more (1998, 420). Something else that may appear in ChE writing is a habitual use of the words
the, that and to. Since in Spanish masculine or feminine markers usually precede nouns, ChE writers may
insert the, that or to to compensate for the lack of SAE markers. For example, a sentence may read In
that book, The Awakening the mother to commit suicide drown herself.
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