El español en la comunidad latina de Curazao: uso, actitudes y mantenimiento

Abstract

Abstract

This study is based on reasons that may influence the maintenance or loss of Spanish by Latin-Americans that live on Curaçao. Curaçao is a multicultural island with Papiamento, English and Dutch as the official languages, but Spanish is also one of the languages most can speak or at least understand. Although Spanish might not be one of the official languages of the island, Curaçao has a significant group of Spanish speakers who are part of the population of Curaçao. Besides the fact that there are a lot of Latin Americans that live on the island, there are a lot of Spanish-speaking tourist who visit the island. This means that Spanish is not an unknown language to people from Curaçao. Something else to keep in mind, is that Spanish and Papiamento have a lot of linguistic similarities, making the comprehension and communication between Latin Americans and people from Curaçao easier. Despite the linguistic similarities between these Latin American groups barely adopt Papiamento or not at all. An example would be that in family dynamics. In this case many Latin Americans maintain Spanish as the primary language, even though they have been living on the island for years. This phenomenon is intriguing, especially when compared with Latin American families in the United States. In that case you can see that as soon as children learn to speak English, the use of Spanish decreases drastically (Babino & Stewart, 2017). This raises the question of whether the same pattern would occur if the language in question were Papiamento. Even so, this behavior depends on the language in question and the perception of its social status (Giles & Billings, 2004), as language attitudes can significantly influence the maintenance or abandonment of a language. This indicates that the language choices of Latin Americans on the island not only depend on practical factors but also on perceptions associated with the languages in question. In this case, the languages in question are Spanish, Papiamento, and the other official languages in Curaçao. This research focuses on analyzing the possible social and linguistic causes that affect the maintenance and loss of Spanish among the Latin American community in Curaçao.

Keywords Spanish, Curaçao, Papiamento, language attitudes, multilingualism, Caribbean, Latinos, identity, language maintenance, intergenerational transmission, languages in the Caribbean, Spanish in migratory contexts, identity, dual identity.