groundbreaking work on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of
Massachusetts. Using quantitative methods and statistical analysis, he
examined the diphthong /ai/ and found that the first element was raised in
the speech of fisherman and others who showed a dislike of or resistance
to the many summer visitors to the island, and a high degree of pride in
local heritage. In the course of his fieldwork he also established that
adolescents who intended to move off the island as adults and live on the
mainland began to give up local language markers well before that day
came, while those who intended to stay and take up traditional
employment were far more likely to retain local language markers such as
the raised first vowel in /ai/.
It is this kind of pattern that Fought found among Chicanos/as in
California. People who grew up speaking Spanish and who speak it
fluently sometimes choose not to speak it at all; at the other extreme are
those who never learned Spanish and who see this as a lack in themselves,
because it is seen that way by the rest of their community or peer group.
Consider Fought’s interview with Veronica, a 17-year-old from Los
Angeles who identifies herself as Mexican, but (as she relates) is then
corrected by other Chicanos/as. She is told that she can’t be Mexican,
because she doesn’t speak Spanish. In a similar way, another student,
Amanda, is often told that she’s a disgrace because she doesn’t speak
Spanish at all, a statement that will be delivered with differing degrees of
disapproval (Fought 2002b: 201).^10
The link between nation and language is so strong that the terms for the
two are often used interchangeably. For example, it is not uncommon to
hear one person ask another, “Do you speak American?” Mexican and
Spanish are also used interchangeably:
CF: Even if they’re Mexicans, some people don’t speak Spanish.
E: No! Some people are like that. I hate people like that, that are
Mexican, and they try to act like if they don’t know Mexican. So- but some of my friends that are Mexican, and – they don’t
know how to speak Mexican.
(ibid.: 202)