Skip to content 
75% of Latinos in the U.S. can carry on conversations in Spanish. But in South Florida, Spanish is often interchangeable with English, used to greet shop owners or to order food. Miam
Latinos account for more than 70% of Miami-Dade County’s population, according to the United States Census Bureau; Latinos make up 25% of Palm Beach County’s population, and approximately 32.8% of Broward County. Nationally, roughly 20% of any county’s given population is represented by Latinos.
What about the 25% of the Latino community that does not speak Spanish as a second language?
Sebastian Lopez, 18, an incoming student at Georgetown University, grew up in Palm Beach County and was raised by Peruvian and Italian parents. Although both parents spoke their own languages to him growing up, when Lopez began attending school, he spoke only English at home and at school.
For Lopez, growing up in a monolingual household led him to feel distant from his grandparents and his culture. He shares that he didn’t realize the toll it had taken on him until he realized he had never had a conversation with his grandfather.
“I really wanted to know more about like what life was like, and especially with the government, because he was involved in like some stuff [in Peru], so I just wanted to know more about that stuff. But then I realized I really don’t speak Spanish,” said Lopez.
Lopez’s experience is common among the non-Spanish-speaking segment of the Latino community. But language wasn’t the only thing connecting Lopez to his Hispanic heritage.
Growing up in South Florida, Lopez was a part of a large community of other Latino students, and through programs such as the Hispanic Scholarship Fund’s Youth Leadership Institute, he was able to further connect with his culture.
Anna Luisa Daigneault is a current linguistic anthropology PhD student at the University of Montreal. Her research focuses primarily on endangered languages and how the loss of a language typically affects how people connect to their cultures.
Daigneault believes that although language is an important marker of one’s cultural identity, it isn’t the only one.
“Food, music, religion, cultural celebrations, and family traditions are also important aspects that help anchor identity,” Daigneault wrote in an email to the Latino News Network. “These elements vary from person to person, and are shaped by how much their families or close counterparts value certain retaining these elements.”
When Lopez got to high school, a trip to his family’s home in Peru allowed him to learn Spanish. He explains that after getting to learn the language, his newfound attachment to Latino culture made him emotional.
“When I learned it, I felt very emotional, because I was able to convey more emotion in Spanish than I was in English,” Lopez joked. “In Peru, every street, there’s an aunt or an uncle, and so I felt so warm over there in comparison to here, and the contrast between feeling their warmth through the WhatsApp call, but not understanding them, to now, I was just face to face with them, and I could understand all the love that they had for me.”
Daigneault acknowledges that although knowing Spanish is an important part of a Latino person’s identity, it is still possible to learn the language later on in life.
“Language is also like a ‘building block’ of identity in that it helps open the door to other aspects of being Latino. Luckily, even if a person did not acquire Spanish early in life, it is really easy to start learning a bit of Spanish at any age. There are a lot of resources available to learn Spanish,” wrote Daigneault.
Natalia Builes, a student at Florida Atlantic University’s Wilkes Honors College, was raised by two Colombian-American parents and grew up between Seattle, Washington, and Boca Raton, Florida, surrounded by the city’s large Latino community, making up about 15.7% of the city’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Builes remembers speaking Spanish early on in her childhood, taught to her by her parents at home. However, as time went on, she began to realize her ability to speak the language was slipping. Builes explains that a large part of this came from her fear of being judged for her Spanish-speaking abilities
“My dad, oddly enough, wouldn’t help me learn, per se, or strengthen that Spanish, but the fact that I didn’t speak Spanish to him, and then I wouldn’t speak Spanish to his parents,” said Builes.
She explains that because of this, she typically avoids speaking Spanish in general. However, not speaking Spanish created a space for her to feel removed from her heritage. She expressed that she questions at times whether or not she can identify herself as Latina because of it.
“Can I really call myself a Latina and a Colombian specifically if I don’t speak the language? Leaving out on your job application or a job application, intern application, that you just can’t speak the language, you just say that you can’t speak any other languages, because you know you don’t speak it well enough to interact with people that will come to the job,” said Builes.
Whitney Chappell, a professor of modern languages and literatures at the University of Texas at San Antonio, shares that within the second-generation Latino population in the U.S., Spanish often serves as an oral language rather than as a primary one.
“You have speakers who are relatively balanced bilinguals, speaking high levels of Spanish and high levels of English. But generally, those languages are used in different contexts, so it’s not going to be a situation of two monolinguals in a single body; that’s not how bilingualism works,” Chappell said. “For many second-generation speakers, Spanish is often an oral language spoken out loud and generally in more informal settings.”
Chappell shares that although Spanish can be retained over generations, the language will not remain completely intact.
“It tends to not be the same Spanish that their parents brought with them. How their grandparents grew up is not how their grandchildren grew up. The languages their grandparents were exposed to it’s not the same linguistic situation for those grandkids,” said Chappell. “We respond to the linguistic situation that surrounds us.”
For Builes, not speaking the language as well as others in the local Colombian community made her feel left out of the larger Latin American experience. She recounts not having a Quinceañera as one of these experiences.
She explains that as she gets older, she is scared of not being able to pass down her heritage to the next generations of her family.
“Not knowing the culture, or not knowing enough about the culture or the language, and not being able to pass it down, in a way, it felt like being Colombian kind of dies with me in a weird way,” said Builes.
As for the future, Builes doesn’t think of letting the language die anytime soon. She shares that she is trying to integrate the language within her life, whether through listening to Colombian music, and hopes to visit her family in Medellin sometime soon.
“I’m trying to like rediscover it slowly, but it’s definitely like a hard journey,” Builes said.
For Chappell, being located within a large Hispanic community should allow Latinos, regardless of their generational status, to connect to their heritage.
“The larger the Hispanic enclave, the more likely it is to preserve the Spanish language across generation,” said Chappell. “There are more opportunities to hear and use Spanish in more practical ways.”
Gabriela Quintero is a High School senior at Florida Atlantic University High School and will be attending Barnard College at Columbia University in the fall to pursue her B.A. in Political Science and English. Interested in politics, migration, policy, and culture, she hopes to pursue a career in political and cultural journalism.