Chicano Spanish: The Problem of the “Underdeveloped” Code in Bilingual Repertoires

Little research has been carried out on Mexican‐American university students that focuses on the characteristics of the different levels and styles of language found in the repertoires of bilingual speakers or about the awareness that they may have about the existence of different registers or levels of language. This article explores one dimension of this issue by describing the characteristics of oral texts produced by second‐ and third‐generation bilingual Chicano speakers when they were required to carry out a set of functions in only one of their available codes. The analysis focuses on the characteristics of planned, noninteractive spoken language produced in Spanish by university‐level Chicano students in a classroom setting as compared with Spanish monolinguals of comparable age, education and social background. Results of the analysis suggest that although the bilingual students' lexical production appears to be “less rich” than that of their monolingual counterparts, both bilingual and monolingual subjects appear to use an “approximative” academic register that is still clearly in a state of development.