Linguistic Hybridity

Among English language learners (ELLs) in the United States, linguistic hybridity, or the mixing of languages to create hybrid forms of language, has emerged as an important aspect of language acquisition. This entry examines the impact of immigration on linguistic hybridity and considers its implications for educators.

The overall student population speaking a non-English native language in the United States rose from 6% in 1979 to 14% in 2009, and the number of ELLs in K–12 schools has been recently estimated to be more than 14 million, with the greatest number in early education. Young ELLs (ages 0–8 years), therefore, have been the fastest growing student population in the country over the past few decades, due primarily to increased rates in (legal and illegal) immigration as well as high birthrates among immigrant families. The significance of this linguistic and cultural population in the United States can be understood to some degree in the discourses generated by their presence in such abundance. This population has created a discourse of linguistic hybridity, which influences the scope of negotiation (acceptance/opposition/adaptation) on the part of this new “participant” and the U.S. schooling system. This means that the new “participant” does not simply passively accept an instructional text but negotiates the meaning of that text. The meaning depends on the cultural and linguistic background of the student, thus producing linguistic-related hybrid circumstances in the U.S. schooling process.

Although a majority of these new participants come from Spanish-speaking immigrant families, they represent many cultural groups and more than 350 languages. Most of these children have cultural roots in Latino immigrant families; however, at least three in four children in immigrant families are born in the United States. While immigrant families continue to be concentrated in California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey, seven states experienced a more than 100% increase in the number of children from immigrant families attending PreK–5th grade from 1990 to 2000.

Research on bilingual development and English as a second language for these students over the past 3 decades suggests that linguistic structures (i.e., phonology, morphology, and syntax) between languages influence one another and that bilingualism is heavily influenced by the environments in which children develop. For these reasons, bilingualism cannot be viewed simply as the arithmetic sum of two languages, but instead is a hybrid of language development. Educators of ELLs often find this theoretical framework helpful because it conceives of learning as an interaction between individual learners and an embedding context. This context may be as immediate as the social environment of the classroom or as indirect as the traditions and institutions that constitute the history of an educational system. Both contexts and many other factors come into play whenever teachers and students interact.

It is useful, therefore, to conceive of the co-occurring linguistic, cognitive, and social character of a child's development as inherently interrelated. As children develop their ability to use language, they absorb more and more understanding of [Page 1400]social situations and improve their thinking skills. If language is a tool of thought, it follows that as children develop more complex thinking skills, the mental representations through which language and culture embody the child's world play a significant role.

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