This week, renowned linguistics professor and researcher Kim Potowski came to Brandeis to discuss the myths that surround the American variation of the Spanish language. Potowski is a professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago and has conducted research on a wide variety of topics, such as Spanish in the U.S., language change between generations and language diversity in America. Due to her thought-provoking research and its relevance to many of the programs offered at Brandeis, the Latin American and Latino Studies program, the Romance Studies department, the Linguistics program and the Dean of Arts and Sciences worked in tandem to invite Potowski to speak about her research.

Potowski’s presentation was divided into critiques of a few myths about the Spanish language in the United States. The first myth she discussed was that the U.S. is the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country. She disproved this statistic by explaining that this calculation excludes the 11 million undocumented Latin-Americans and the 3 million Americans who speak Spanish but have no Hispanic heritage. Therefore, Potowski concluded that the U.S. actually possesses the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world.

The next myth Potowski aimed to debunk is that American Spanish is “less than others.’” This notion brings up the question of whether, if the U.S. is not an official Spanish-speaking country, the American variation of Spanish is less proper or correct than the others. Potowski explained that the variations of Spanish come from the different regions in which they are spoken. Thus, if the U.S. has the second-largest Spanish-speaking population, U.S. Spanish should command as much importance and respect as the other variations. Potowski is a firm advocate of U.S. Spanish becoming an official variation of Spanish. “We need to demand linguistic status for U.S. Spanish because you should speak or adjust to the variation of Spanish that corresponds to where you live, and the U.S. has its own type,” she explained. Potowski’s idea is that if American Spanish speakers have developed their own type of Spanish, they should use that type. Why would one need to learn Venezuelan or Ecuadorian Spanish to speak Spanish in the U.S.?

Potowski concluded her presentation by breaking down the myth that the goal of Spanish teachers is to eliminate forms of informal Spanish. As Potowski believes that the type of Spanish a person speaks should match the region in which they are speaking it, she stated that discouraging students from using the variation of Spanish that they grew up using or are familiar with could be damaging. Modifying their native language would damage their Spanish-speaking skills, because they would constantly be unsure of which grammatical and structural rules to embrace and which to disregard. It would also damage their identities, because the language they speak is a “marker of identity” for them. “Spanglish,” for example, a term that Potowski resents due to its inaccurate representation of the U.S. variant, represents the culture and upbringing of many Spanish speakers in the U.S., whose entire knowledge of the Spanish language is this “informal” variant.

Potowski engaged the audience with her take on Spanish in American society and concluded by asking for both students and teachers to respect all forms of Spanish so as not to offend anyone’s culture or upbringing.