ucation. The explosion of immigration from Mexico and Central America that
began in 1985 altered this situation, but the level of research in CE remains very
low. Carmen Fought’s (2002)Chicano English in Contextis the first book-
length investigation of CE in 20 years.
There are several reasons for this general lack of interest. The most pressing
appears to be the overwhelming number of students entering our schools who
are monolingual in a language other than English. Schools reasonably identify
these students as their first priority. As soon as these English language learners
(ELL) are reclassified as English proficient, they are treated essentially like na-
tive speakers and receive no accommodation. Another factor is the politics of
education, which set priorities in terms of funding and policy. Research re-
quires money. Even though our Hispanic population now outnumbers our
black population, Hispanics have, historically, been uninvolved politically.
Quite simply, they don’t vote in high numbers, so they receive little attention
from government. Thus, there is no money available to research CE.
Chicano English Grammar
Even though most speakers of Chicano English have little or no Spanish, Span-
ish exerts a significant influence on their dialect. We can see this influence in
various structural and phonetic features of CE. For example, Spanish is an in-
flected language, so it relies less on word order than English does. As a result,
the sentenceMacarena ate the applecan be expressed in two ways in Spanish:
- Macarena comió la manzana. (Macarena ate the apple.)
or- Comió la manzana Macarena. (literal translation: Ate the apple Macarena.)
Although CE does not allow the structure shown in the second sentence, it
does allow for a variation that involves pleonasm, or redundancy, that is related
to the freer word order we see in Spanish. A pronoun marks the subject, which
is repeated as a noun at the end of the sentence, as in:
- He hit the ball, Fred.
- She gave me a ride, my mother.
Spanish also uses the double negative, which is reflected in the grammar of
CE. Students regularly produce statements such asI didn’t do nothingandShe
don’t want no advice.
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