This interview aired on the August 13, 2024 episode of Crosscurrents
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UC Berkeley Sociolinguist Justin Davidson is on a mission to make American Spanish an officially recognized language. He’s a professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Cal and is studying the speaking patterns of Spanish-English bilinguals to create a “linguistic map” of American Spanish.
Professor Davidson says there’s a language discrimination that happens with American Spanish, often seen by linguists as lower quality or ‘bad Spanish’. He says- languages evolve and change depending on the peoples that speak them, and that the Spanish spoken by American hispanic communities should be seen as legitimate.
This interview was produced by Julia Haney.
