Abstract:

The main objective of this study was to asses the impact of English in the Spanish spoken by young Spanish heritage speakers with regard to the use of the Spanish connector entonces (so). The sociolinguistic variables of Spanish language competence and generational adscription were taken into account. The data stem from 56 semi-formal interviews with Spanish heritage language students at the University of Florida. All occurrences of Spanish entonces and English so were codified according to their functions to later correlate those functions with the sociolinguistic variables mentioned above.

The results revealed that entonces is used to mark primarily narrative progression, consequence and conclusion while so is used to express consequence and conclusion, as reported in previous studies (Torres, 2002; Aaron, 2004). While both so and entonces share those functions, so never is used to mark temporality.

With respect to the social variables, the most significant one is participants’ Spanish level of proficiency. The general results indicate that Spanish dominant speakers tend to use more entonces and fewer so, in contrast to those least proficient in Spanish. Also, for the English dominant speakers so triggers a code-switch from Spanish into English, and for the Spanish-dominant speakers the insertion of so is considered an integrated borrowing.

Author: Aixa Said-Mohand