Bilingual Youth: Spanish-speakers at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Spanish is spoken by approximately 406 million people, making it the second most commonly spoken language in the world. A fair estimate is that approximately one-third of this population is bilingual. This article focuses on Spanish-speaking bilingual youth in a variety of sociolinguistic situations around the world, summarizing a sample of research in four broad areas – linguistic structure, family language policy, education, and identity – and points out areas for future research.

[1]  Maryann Parada.  Sibling Variation and Family Language Policy: The Role of Birth Order in the Spanish Proficiency and First Names of Second-Generation Latinos , 2013 .

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[4]  Kendall A. King,et al.  Family Language Policy , 2008, Lang. Linguistics Compass.

[5]  J. Phinney,et al.  The Role of Language, Parents, and Peers in Ethnic Identity Among Adolescents in Immigrant Families , 2001 .

[6]  Kathryn J. Lindholm-Leary.  Bilingual and biliteracy skills in young Spanish-speaking low-SES children: impact of instructional language and primary language proficiency , 2014 .

[7]  Sarah J. Shin.  Birth Order and the Language Experience of Bilingual Children , 2002 .

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[9]  Iliana Reyes,et al.  Functions of Code Switching in Schoolchildren's Conversations , 2004 .

[10]  Raquel T Anderson.  Loss of Gender Agreement in L1 Attrition: Preliminary Results. , 1999 .

[11]  A. Sorace,et al.  Pronominal objects in English?Italian and Spanish?Italian bilingual children , 2012 .

[12]  J. Cenoz.  Achievements and challenges in bilingual and multilingual education in the Basque Country , 2008 .

[13]  Barbara J. Merino.  Language loss in bilingual Chicano children , 1983 .

[14]  Sonia Barnes.  Variable final back vowels in urban Asturian Spanish , 2016 .

[15]  S. Vagh,et al.  Growth in toddlers’ Spanish, English, and conceptual vocabulary knowledge , 2013 .

[16]  Kim Potowski,et al.  Command of gender agreement in school-age Spanish-English Bilingual Children , 2007 .

[17]  Jürgen M. Meisel.  Code-Switching in Young Bilingual Children , 1994, Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

[18]  C. Hammer,et al.  Bilingual children's language abilities and early reading outcomes in Head Start and kindergarten. , 2007, Language, speech, and hearing services in schools.

[19]  Michael Brunn.  The Absence of Language Policy and its Effects on the Education of Mexican Migrant Children , 1999 .