Talking Spanish English

‘Talking Both Languages’: 20
Perspectives on the Use of Spanish and

English Inside and Outside the
Workplace
Laura Callahan
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, The City College of
New York, New York, NY, USA
Strategies for deciding which language to use when forms part of the sociolinguistic
competence of speakers who can speak more than one language. Language choices
are shaped by a number of factors, including linguistic proficiency of both speaker
and interlocutor, the ingroup or outgroup status of each, and the setting in which an
exchange takes place. Language choices in the workplace are further influenced by
company policies and by the asymmetrical power dynamic in worker customer
interactions. This paper reports on interviews with 20 Latino workers who each use
Spanish and English in a different workplace in New York City. Participants were
asked about their use of the two languages with customers, coworkers and
supervisors in the workplace, and with friends, family members and strangers
outside the workplace. The major themes that emerged from the interviews are
presented, including some commonalities found with other studies of language pairs
in the commercial setting.
Keywords: ingroup versus outgroup, language choice, language ideology,

sociolinguistic competence, Spanish and English in the USA, workplace
Introduction
This paper reports on the reflections of 20 individuals with regard to their
use of Spanish and English in the workplace and elsewhere. The research was
undertaken as part of a larger project entitled Language Choice in Interethnic
Communication: Spanish and English in Urban Service Encounters. Data
collection for the parent project includes anonymous encounters between
service workers and researchers posing as customers, and passive or
participant observation in selected workplaces. It will thus produce quantita-
tive data based on observed behaviour. The present study offers triangulation
of those results with qualitative data based on reported behaviour. The
purpose of the interviews was to discover what factors dictate language choice
in the workplace, and what differences there are between choosing Spanish or
English at work as opposed to outside of work.
Sociolinguistic competence
Having communicative, or sociolinguistic, competence involves having
knowledge of the social rules governing the appropriate use of a language in a
variety of contexts (Hymes, 1972). A speaker with such competence controls
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276 Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
not only basic grammatical structures, but also the address system, locutions
for greeting and leave-taking and other formulas, both verbal and nonverbal.
He or she must have an awareness of which topics may be discussed when, by
whom and with whom. These variables are influenced by several factors, such
as the speech situation and the age, gender and socioeconomic status of both
speaker and addressee (e.g. Tsitsipis, 1989). A speaker with a reasonable
degree of communicative competence also knows which register or degree of
formality to use for most situations.
Having the ability to speak more than one language adds an important
dimension to communicative competence. A speaker who knows more than
one language has to decide which language to use when. Such speakers meet
this challenge in different ways, but, as we will see, there are some common
rules and strategies. This paper focuses on ingroup members: all 20 of the
interviewees were members of a Latino ethnic group.1 An outgroup member
using a community language may encounter a different reception, and must
therefore follow different rules than a speaker who is judged to be a member of
the ingroup (Bernsten, 1994; Callahan, 2004; SanAntonio, 1988: 36; Weyers,
1999; Woolard, 1989). Outgroup members have to be able to determine when
reciprocal rather than anticipatory codeswitching is more appropriate. In other
words, when not to initiate conversation in a minority language, but to wait
for ingroup members to do so. Some of the rules that are in force in other
situations may be suspended for outgroup members engaged in a service
encounter, at which time their categorisation as outsiders may be overridden
by their customer status.
Method
Semi-structured interviews were conducted in March and April of 2004.
There were eight men and twelve women, ranging in age from 18 to 48, with a
median age of 21.2 Sixteen of the interviews were conducted in English and four
in Spanish.3 This was a convenience rather than random sample; participants
were recruited with fliers and by word of mouth at a four-year commuter
college in New York City. Prior to the on-campus recruitment, unsuccessful
attempts were made to recruit workers directly from commercial establish-
ments. Hence, all of the interviewees were students who also held or had
recently held positions off-campus. Although all of the interviewees were
students, the college from which students were recruited has a very working-
class student population. Various types of workplaces were represented, from
beauty salon to supermarket to car rental agency to law office. At each
informant’s worksite, Spanish and English were used on a regular basis with
customers and coworkers. The structure common to service encounters across
business types is considered to be sufficiently uniform, notwithstanding minor
variations between one type of store and another. Hence, the heterogeneity of
the workplace type is not considered to be an obstacle to the generalisations that
will be made about workercustomer and workerworker language selection.
Interviewees were asked closed and open-ended questions to elicit
information about their use of Spanish and English. In addition, they were
shown photographs of eight people, each one of whom represented an age:
‘Talking Both Languages’ 277
under 30 and over 30, a gender, and an ethnic group: Latino or non-Latino. The
interviewees were asked to comment on what their language choices would be
if they were to participate in an exchange with each one of the eight
individuals pictured.
Results
In this section the major themes that emerged from the interviews are
presented. The terms ‘interviewee’, ‘informant’ and ‘worker’ are used inter-
changeably, and Spanish and English are referred to as ‘opposite languages’.
Workers follow different language choice rules in the workplace

The workplace represents a setting distinct from many others, and workers
follow a different set of parameters when deciding which language to use
there. A worker may have to modify his or her personal language choices
whether these be dictated by ideologies or intuition to comply with
workplace policies or to please the customer. For example, a worker who
might use knowledge of the community and of the physical appearance and
speech characteristics to identify Spanish speakers may suspend these
techniques at work in favour of automatic English use, at least at the initiation
of an encounter.
Answering in the opposite language is a dispreferred response in the
workplace. Workers recognise the negative affective consequences of not
following a customer’s language choice once the latter makes this known.4
Asked to comment on a situation in which the customer addressed the worker
first, 18 of the 20 interviewees stated that they would answer in Spanish if
addressed in Spanish, regardless of the customer’s ethnicity. One interviewee,
when asked to confirm that she would answer in Spanish if addressed in
Spanish by hypothetical customers of various ethnic appearances, seemed
incredulous at the question. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘You know, they’re
customers, so you’ve got to be nice to the customer’ (103). Another interviewee
echoed this, stating that he would respond in Spanish to any customer who
addressed him in that language ‘because they’re the customer’ (006). This
parameter imposes itself in exchanges between strangers; in conversations
with co-workers, friends and family members less significance is attached to
answering in English when addressed in Spanish, or vice versa:
(1) Researcher: And how about the reverse, have you ever found yourself
answering in English when someone speaks to you in
Spanish, someone addresses you in Spanish.
Informant: To my mom.
Researcher: Any situations with strangers that you’ve done that?
Informant: Strangers?
Researcher: Or with, you know, with non-family members in other
situations?
Informant: That they speak in Spanish and I answer them in English?
Researcher: Right.
Informant: No, not with strangers. (104)
All participants either implicitly or explicitly acknowledged the assumption

that accommodation to an interlocutor’s language choice is the preferred
response. More language accommodation takes place in the workplace than
outside the workplace. In (2), for example, a worker who reported switching to
Spanish as needed for her own customers’ comprehension recounted an
incident in which she herself was the customer and she declined to
accommodate to the dominant language of her interlocutors, even when
doing so would have facilitated communication:
(2) Researcher: Do you, um, if somebody speaks to you in English that is
hard to understand, do you ever switch to Spanish?
Informant: Work situations, definitely. But when I’m outside, and I
don’t know why I do this, I, I guess um, I don’t know, in a
sense I’m resentful because of the fact that, they, I don’t
know, I judge them. I’m, I’m, it’s horrible. But it doesn’t, I, I
don’t speak to them in Spanish right away.
Researcher: So you’re talking about in what type of situation?
Informant: In a situation where I’m on the street or I’m in a grocery
store. This happened the other day. I’m in a grocery store
and I’m asking for cayenne pepper. They have no clue what
cayenne pepper is. I was like, OK, where are your condi-
ments? They have no clue what it is that I mean by
condiments. So, I’m frustrated because they don’t under-
stand, and I should speak Spanish right away, but I’m like
[sighs], and I get really mad and I just walk away, and just
look for the condiments myself. I tend to do that in the
street. I get annoyed that, I don’t know, I mean, I know that
it’s wrong because I shouldn’t judge a person, you know
perhaps they’ve been here one year or two, but I just, I’m
just to the belief that you should try to move outside of your
neighborhood. (104)
Workers are sensitive to and will accommodate the language proficiency or
language preferences of interlocutors in the workplace more than they may be
willing to do in other situations. Seventeen (85%) of the interviewees stated
that they would switch to Spanish with a customer or coworker who spoke to
them in nonfluent English. Language proficiency and preference do not
always coincide, and workers are aware of this. Several mentioned that they
would ask first whether the person preferred to speak Spanish, and that they
would continue the conversation in English if their interlocutor wished to
practice English. In (3), an informant described the language display technique
he used to offer assistance to second language English speakers in a non-face-
threatening manner:
(3) . . . if I see them [having] difficulty, I don’t know if they’re trying to use the
language, because they studied the language, they came to the US, they
want to really practice it, or they don’t know I know Spanish. So I jump in
with a Spanish word so they could hear the Spanish word and they can
understand it. So I use it every time I see the person having difficulty with
the language. Because, like I said before, people are very sensitive with that,
because they study it and then they want to use it. (001)
When approached by persons speaking nonfluent Spanish, some workers
reported that they do not switch to English, because they assign a voluntary
motive to the person’s use of Spanish, and assume that the person wishes to
practice using the language. Note this differential treatment in (4):
(4) Researcher: Si alguien te habla en inglés, y es difı́cil de entender, su
inglés, ¿cambias tú al español para contestarle?
Informant: Sı́, por supuesto, sı́. Si yo veo que esa persona luce como
hispana, entonces sı́, inmediatamente.
Researcher: Y al revés, si alguien te habla en un español que es difı́cil de
entender, ¿cambiarı́as tú al inglés?
Informant: No, realmente, cuando las personas hablan español, es
porque quieren practicar su, tal vez están estudiando
español y quieren practicarlo, entonces por lo general tengo
mucha paciencia con ellos.. . . Si le quiero decir algo que
quiero que entiendan bien, se lo digo en inglés y entonces
otra vez al español otra vez. (101)
Researcher: If someone speaks to you in English, and it’s hard to

understand, their English, do you switch to Spanish to
answer them?
Informant: Yes, of course, yes. If I see that that person looks Hispanic,
then yes, immediately.
Researcher: And the other way around, if someone speaks to you in
Spanish that’s hard to understand, would you change to
English?
Informant: No, really, when people speak Spanish, it’s because they
want to practice their, maybe they’re studying Spanish and
they want to practice it, so I generally have a lot of patience
with them.. . . If I want to tell them something that I want
them to understand well, I tell them in English and then
[switch] back to Spanish again. (my translation)
In contrast, a person speaking English as a second language, perhaps
nonfluently, is more likely to be doing so because of its status as the default
language for public encounters. Nevertheless, other workers stated that they
would automatically switch to English if addressed in nonfluent Spanish.
Fewer of the workers had had this experience; being addressed in nonfluent
English was more common.
When workers will address a customer in Spanish

Ethnicity of interlocutor, as determined by physical appearance, has been
observed to determine which language is selected by adults and by children as
young as two (e.g. Genessee, 2003; Schiffman, 2002; Villa, 2002; Zentella, 1997).
In many cases language choice is a form of accommodation, based on what
knowledge the speaker has about the linguistic competence of the person he or
she is talking to. Assumptions about linguistic competence similar to

assumptions about ethnicity are often based on appearance. In cases where
the addressee is known to have proficiency in more than one language, the
speaker is likely to select whichever one is supposed to be the addressee’s
‘native’ language, or the one which is most associated with the addressee’s
ethnic group.
The corpus was almost evenly split between workers who stated that their
default language to initiate any encounter was English, and those who said
they would address someone in Spanish if the person appeared to be Hispanic,
as in (5) and (6):
(5) Researcher: . . . you might address them in Spanish?
Informant: Yeah, sometimes, yeah, like if they look, like really Hispanic
or something, and I know they would speak Spanish. (106)
(6) Researcher: When you, when you decide what language, if you ever
have to talk to somebody before they’ve spoken to you yet,
you’re the one who’s initiating it, how do you decide . . .
Informant: By the way they look. If they look, I don’t know how, but if
they look like, more Hispanic, I will, like I, I don’t know, I
guess the way they look, if they, I don’t know, I kind of
know, like, who will speak Spanish. (111)
Tokens (7) and (8) show that workers also take cues from customers’
conversation among themselves to decide which language to use:
(7) Also, yeah, if I, also if I hear them speak to someone they’re with speaking
Spanish then I will approach them in Spanish. (111)
(8) If I hear that they’re talking in a certain language, then I’ll talk to them in
that language. (003)
These workers’ ingroup status makes such an approach fairly unproblematic.
Nevertheless, as discussed in the next section, workers’ language choices
occasionally encounter obstacles.
When workers make a mistake in predicting a customer’s language

preference
This is most relevant when the worker decides to initiate an exchange in
Spanish, as English-initiated exchanges that meet with incomprehension are
easily repaired. All workers stated that they would simply switch to Spanish if
a customer indicated incomprehension or responded in Spanish to the
worker’s English. The negative consequences are greater when a worker
chooses Spanish to address a customer who does not speak Spanish or does
not wish to speak it because the selection of Spanish entails a greater social
risk than the selection of the default language, English. The worker’s selection
of Spanish carries several possible implications. One is that the worker
considers him or herself to share membership in a group with the customer.
Other implications are that the customer prefers to be attended to in Spanish, is
fluent in Spanish, and perhaps does not speak English. The worker’s selection
of English carries fewer implications, because it is the default language which

can be used even in predominantly non-English-speaking communities in the
USA as a starting point in a commercial encounter (Weyers, 1999).
When the worker’s prediction of the customer’s language preference is
accurate, the rewards for speaking Spanish can be considerable: improved
comprehension, a sense of solidarity and overall increased customer satisfac-
tion. But the costs, in the case of an inaccurate prediction, can also be higher.
The use of Spanish may carry the implication, noted above, that one’s listener
cannot speak English. This was expressed by an interviewee who described
her experiences being addressed in Spanish (see also example 12, below):
(9) Informant: Well, when I was young, people noticed that I was Spanish,
you know, and they would automatically talk to me in
English, I mean in Spanish. Yeah. They would, yeah, like
they’d look at me and then automatically talk in Spanish,
they’d automatically assume . . .
Researcher: When you were a child?
Informant: No, even in high school. Yeah, they would look at me and
say that I’m Spanish, you know, so they’d start speaking to
me in Spanish you know, thinking that I don’t know any
English.
Researcher: So what situations, like what kind of people, friends, people
in, like store clerks?
Informant: Like staff from school, you know, people who work in the
school, um jobs, past jobs, friends, you know, people that I
know from other, through other people, might speak to me in
Spanish automatically or just people in the street who want
to ask me something, you know.
Researcher: And so how would you react?
Informant: I would react, well, automatically, I would think, ‘Oh,
he thinks I don’t know English’. But yes, I would just reply
back in Spanish. Or sometimes in English just to show them
that I know English. (108)
An incorrect assumption that a customer is capable of speaking Spanish can
cause embarrassment, threatening the face of both the worker and the
customer. Both parties apologise: the worker for placing the customer in a
position in which he or she must admit to the lack of a skill, and the customer
for forcing the worker to change languages:
(10) . . . they don’t speak Spanish so then they’re like, ‘Ah’, they’ll just be like
really, ‘Oh, I don’t speak Spanish’, and then I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I’m
sorry’ . . . I started out in Spanish but then they’re like, ‘Oh, no, I don’t
speak Spanish, sorry.’ (005)
The three workers who mentioned this situation said it arose when they
categorised a customer as Hispanic based on physical appearance. Two would
take the customer’s profession of a lack of Spanish-speaking ability at face
value, one ascribing it to the person’s having been raised in the USA, and
accepting that, in the words of one worker, ‘there’s a lot of Hispanic people
that they, even though they look Hispanic, they don’t speak Spanish’ (005). But
the third worker expressed disbelief in one customer’s profession of ignorance:
(11) . . . una vez le hablé a una señora en español, y ella no hablaba
español . . . ella dijo que no hablaba español, y yo me quedé sorprendida.
Ella parecı́a que hablara español. Y ella [dijo] No, yo no hablo español.
Pero yo me quedé pensando que ella hablaba español y tal vez no le
gustaba hablarlo . . . Porque ella . . . parecı́a dominicana. (1010)
. . . one time I spoke to a lady in Spanish, and she didn’t speak
Spanish . . . she said that she didn’t speak Spanish, and I was surprised.
She looked like she would speak Spanish. And she [said], ‘No, I don’t
speak Spanish.’ But I got the feeling that she did speak Spanish and
maybe she didn’t like to speak it. Because she . . . looked Dominican. (my
translation)
If this worker’s intuition were correct, it could mean that her customer wished
to distance herself from shared membership in a group with the worker.
When workers answer in the opposite language

Lo (1999: 472) shows how English is used to rebuff outgroup use of
an ingroup language. Hers was a study of two young Asian American men
in Los Angeles, one of whom was a Chinese American learner of Korean,
and the other was Korean American. Pedraza, in his 1987 study of the
Puerto Rican community of East Harlem, noted that in age asymmetrical
intraethnic interactions, the younger person would respond in the language in
which he or she was addressed. In peer exchanges, adolescents ‘would often
answer each other in English even if addressed in Spanish, assuming that the
interlocutor was part of the group, or at least familiar enough so that this
would not be taken as an insult’ (Pedraza, 1987: 38).5 In other words, to use
English after being addressed in Spanish could be considered offensive, unless
the degree of intimacy between addressor and addressee allowed for such
liberties.
Workers are much more apt to report answering in the language opposite
from the one in which they were addressed when the addressee is someone
known to them, such as a co-worker, friend, or relative. Seventeen (85%) of the
workers reported differential behaviour in this regard when the addressor was
a customer. In other words, while they acknowledged switching languages
between turns with co-workers, friends and family members, they stated that
they would always follow a customer’s language choice, responding in
whatever language the customer used first.
The three workers who reported that they had or would answer a
customer in the opposite language were all referring to an exchange in
which a non-Latino customer were to address them in Spanish. Each alluded
to the customer’s proficiency in Spanish as the factor that would
determine whether or not they would respond in the same language. Two
stated that they would continue the conversation in English if the person’s
Spanish were not fluent, whereas one worker said she would do this only to
give a brief display of her English-speaking ability for the customer, before
returning to Spanish:
(12) If it’s like good, good Spanish, you know, if they’re fluent, fluent in
Spanish, otherwise if I see that they’re probably stereotyping me, then,
you know, to speak to me in Spanish, but they don’t really speak
[Spanish], I’ll continue in English so I could, so they can know that I
speak English, yeah. Like if they speak broken up Spanish just to try to
help me, then I’ll answer them in English, [and] whichever language they
feel comfortable [in], I’ll continue. (111)
Nonreciprocal language choice was reported to take place most often in non-
work settings. In some cases, informants would answer a friend or family
member in Spanish after being addressed in English, even if their interlocutor
did not understand Spanish. However, there were more reports of answering in
Spanish when addressed in English by a Spanish speaker. Referring to
fellow members of an organisation for young Dominicans, an interviewee
reports:
(13) . . . muchas veces ellos hablan inglés, porque les es más fácil expresarse
en inglés. Y yo contesto en español porque yo sé que ellos entienden.
(109)
. . . a lot of times they speak English, because it’s easier for them to
express themselves in English. And I answer in Spanish because I know
that they understand. (my translation)
Workers mentioned two main causes for nonreciprocal response: the ability to
access vocabulary faster in one language, or what they termed confusion. The
vocabulary motive is illustrated in (14) and (15), and the confusion as a cause
is illustrated in (16). Specific concepts were mentioned to illustrate the first
type of scenario:
(14) Researcher: Do you ever answer in Spanish when somebody speaks to
you in English?
Informant: Math. Like if it’s a, like a quantity, I still, I can’t do math in
English. (104)
Again, a non-work situation and familiarity with interlocutors makes a language
change more likely to occur. Both factors are noted by the informant in (15):
(15) Researcher: . . . if somebody speaks to you in English, do you ever
answer in Spanish?
Informant: No.
Researcher: Not necessarily with customers, but with co-workers?
Informant: Yeah, I’ll speak Spanglish, yeah definitely, everybody that
knows both languages and they’re amongst themselves,
sometime you forget a word in one language. You go into
the Spanish or vice versa.
Researcher: How about the reverse, if somebody, do you ever answer in
English . . .
Informant: Usually, that happens more. Usually my parents talk to me;

oh, you want to know about at work? (001)
The instances that workers ascribed to confusion generally included an
immediately previous conversation in which they were speaking the opposite
language. For example:
(16) Oh, that happens to me, when, for example, after a meeting or when I’m
doing a lot of things, or when I, when I’ve been speaking English all day,
and then somebody speaks Spanish to me, then I answer in English
because I’ve, I’ve been speaking English or listening to English and doing
everything in the English language, and so . . . when a person asks
me something in Spanish then I will answer in English. It’s happened to
me many times. Or when I pick up the phone and somebody asks me
something in Spanish, then I answer in English. (102)
English as a neutral language

As noted above, English can be used as a starting point when the speaker is
either uncertain of the addressee’s language preference, or is prevented from
using it by other factors. In the USA and in many other parts of the world,
English has become a neutral language, a code that can be used to avoid
whatever implications may result from choosing a more identity-laden
language (Bernsten, 1994). Eight of the interviewees reported that they would
use English to initiate any first-time encounter with customers, and a ninth
said he would do so unless he heard the customer speaking Spanish to
companions.6
English as the language of work

Informants reported switching from Spanish to English within the work-
place in response to a topic or task change. As illustrated in (17)(20), a worker
might joke and discuss personal matters with co-workers in Spanish, but
switch to English to discuss business, participate in a meeting or handle a co-
operative task:
(17) Informant: I don’t know, like, for me English is more professional, it’s
like, yeah, like this gets the job done, this language. I use my
Spanish like, for my down time, to relax, and have fun, and
goof around, that’s how I feel. So it depends on what I have
to do. If we have a job, we have a task, we’re talking
English.
Researcher: Even with people who speak Spanish.
Informant: Right. But if we have some down time, and we relax, there’s
no customers, and we’re just fixing the store, we start joking
around, we talk Spanish. More relaxed.
(18) Informant: The attorney, he’s my supervisor, trial counsel, and he
speaks exclusively to me in Spanish and I answer him in
English.
Researcher: Do you know why you answer him in English?
Informant: No. It just happens. It just naturally happens. Now when

we’re talking, if it’s business. If we’re talking on a personal
basis, you know, something personal about myself, or even
gossiping, then we both speak Spanish.
Researcher: Oh, OK. So maybe topic.
Informant: Yes. Depending, I guess, on the topic and maybe the
seriousness of the matter, but when I was gossiping with
him recently, it was Spanish. All the way. All the way. But
then when the conversation shifted onto something, it went
right back. Him Spanish and me English. (112)
(19) . . . with my supervisors, I speak more English. Most of the time, like,
more than with my co-workers... when I speak to my co-workers it’s
mostly things that I did or we did and, you know. And when I speak to
my supervisor it’s business or something so I will have to, I speak to
them in English. I don’t know why. (111)
(20) I speak sometimes Spanish, sometime English, but when it’s a meeting,
when I have a meeting, or when I pick up the phone or when
somebody else is coming, I speak English. Or if there is somebody else
besides my boss and the super . . . the coordinator. Because they, they
both speak Spanish. Because we are, three of us who speak Spanish.
But if there is somebody else, we, we speak English, or if there is a
meeting or, you know, when I pick up the phone, it’s English. (102)
While all of the workers interviewed were expected to attend to customers in
Spanish whenever the need arose, half had been told not to speak Spanish
with coworkers in the presence of non-Spanish-speaking coworkers or in the
presence of customers. These were not official company policies, but were
made clear to the workers nonetheless7:
(21) Researcher: At this job, or at another job in your life, can you remember
anyone ever telling you to speak only English?
Informant: Yes. This job does it a lot. [Company name] does that a lot.
And I used to work at my other jobs, yeah, and [company
name] does that a lot. A lot of places do it.
Researcher: So, is, is it like a policy, a supervisor says that?
Informant: Yeah, supervisors. Like, I read the rule books, they make
you read the rule books before you start working at these
places. And nowhere in the rulebook do they say: ‘You
must speak English’.
Researcher: It’s not written down.
Informant: Yeah. Like at this job, due to the fact that we’re interna-
tional, we got all international people. They prefer you talk
in two languages, but they don’t like you talking, when it’s,
when you have to be professional about it.
Researcher: So they only want you to use it . . .
Informant: When it’s necessary. When it’s necessary.
Researcher: So there’s sort of, it sounds like there’s kind of an
unwritten policy.
Informant: Yeah.
Researcher: At this job and at other jobs you’ve had, too.
Informant: Yeah. Stick to the English. (001)
Some of the workers expressed their attitudes toward these restrictions, but for
the most part they were reported without evaluation:
(22) No, yeah it was the manager. It was on Upper West Side, in a
store, . . . and she speaks Spanish, that’s her first language. And she
was just like, no, we can’t speak Spanish here in the store, even if you
want to talk to me in Spanish. So sometimes, you know, it happened
that I would speak Spanish to her, so when I talked to her she would
answer me in English, then she’d say, remember we aren’t speaking,
we don’t speak Spanish here. And I was just like, OK. But, you
know I, I felt uncomfortable because she speaks Spanish. She’s
Spanish. (102)
(23) Well, at my job, actually, I basically got hired because I speak Spanish, but
when I’m with, like an employee break room, or at a meeting with other
people that don’t speak Spanish, I’m not allowed to speak Spanish. Like
if I’m with a friend and some other person, whoever it is, another
employee, that doesn’t speak Spanish, I have that conflict, I can’t speak
Spanish to my friend, because that other person is there, so I’m restricted.
But if it’s to the customers or job-related, I can. (107)
(24) Researcher: Have you ever had the experience of, on a job, being told
not to speak Spanish, to speak only English?
Informant: Well, actually, yeah, I was, for example, because my other
co-workers, they speak Spanish also, and sometimes, you
know, I’ll be actually trying to talk Spanish with them.
We’re from the same country. But the uh, employer, he
actually tells us that when somebody who looks white, or
you should be trying to have your conversation in English,
that way they won’t feel weird about it, or that way, the
customer doesn’t think that you’re talking about them, or
something like that. So actually he said, ‘Oh, when some-
body comes like that, you should actually talk English, that
way they can actually know what you’re talking about.
And they won’t feel like, OK, like, they’re talking bad
about you.’ (006)
The interviewees who had never been subject to language restrictions worked
for the most part in predominately Spanish-speaking environments.
The language workers prefer to speak in the workplace

Workplace language preferences seemed to be for the most part driven by
relative proficiency and utility: the worker expressed a preference for the
language in which he or she felt most comfortable, or the one used by most of
the other workers.8 But there were exceptions. Two interviewees saw work as
an opportunity to practice their English; one of these two workers also saw his
current job, at which there were many Spanish-speaking customers, as an

opportunity to maintain his Spanish. Language ideologies were also ex-
pressed. One informant stated that she used English as the base language for
attending to all customers, changing to Spanish only when necessary for
comprehension. Whereas such a practice was mandated at some of the
interviewees’ workplaces, in this case it was the informant’s personal choice:
(25) . . . if they don’t understand something, then I’ll ask them if language is a
problem, and I’ll explain to them in Spanish. But I choose to speak
English because I think it’s very important that people from Latin
America or anyone, just anyone that knows another language, that if
they’re going to be living here that they should know English. (104)
Twelve (60%) of the interviewees had been hired in part for their ability to
speak Spanish, but none had ever received a salary differential. Although their
ability did not translate into higher wages, some of the workers did express a
feeling of satisfaction at being able to help customers and enhance the quality
of the service encounter via the use of Spanish.
(26) Well, I have a lot of positive things when I speak Spanish because I work
in retail. So in retail, I work in Times Square, and there’s a lot of tourists.
So my good experience is getting to know people from different places
around the world. And because I can communicate with them in Spanish,
they come back to me and they really appreciate me, because they don’t
find anybody that can talk Spanish sometimes, so they feel uncomfor-
table. So they come back to me, and it’s a good experience, I really find,
like they enjoy it when they find out I speak Spanish. (001)
(27) I help them out because I speak Spanish. Like I get to, to help more
customers, to help translate if anybody needs anything, or, you know,
it’s more useful . . . Because I speak Spanish it’s more, I’m more able to do
it. (107)
Spanish as the language of intergenerational communication

For outside the workplace, workers reported the highest use of Spanish
with their mothers. In most cases the mother’s lack of proficiency in English
was cited, but one informant, a person who refused to speak Spanish with
nonfamily members unless it were unavoidable, also refused to speak English
with her mother, who was fluent in both languages. Fourteen (70%) of the
workers reported speaking only or mostly Spanish with their parents, and
either 5050 Spanish and English or more English than Spanish with people of
their own generation, whether these were siblings, friends or coworkers.
Workers reported being more apt to address younger customers in English,
regardless of ethnic appearance. When shown the photographs of the eight
hypothetical customers, workers who said that they would address an older
Latino man or woman in Spanish said that they would address all of the
younger people in English. The excerpts in (28) and (29) illustrate this
association between youth and the use of English:
(28) Most of the time it’s more English than Spanish, it’s more like youth-
oriented . . . Probably because they’re younger, you’ll probably catch
what they’re saying more easily. Probably they’ll speak English and
Spanish. (002)
(29) . . . it depends on the situation. For example, if I see a young person,
Hispanic, for example, my age, I usually talk to them in English because
sometimes I feel more comfortable, and they could feel more comfor-
table, and we could communicate better. But if it’s like, for example, an
old, an older person, like usually most of the time we speak, we talk in
English, I mean, sorry, in Spanish. (006)
Race, ethnicity and language

A California high school student of Vietnamese ethnicity who learned
Spanish reports, ‘. . . people are like, ‘‘Why is this Asian girl speaking
Spanish?’’’ (San Jose Mercury News , 2004). As we have seen, race and ethnicity,
as judged by physical appearance, is often used by workers to determine the
linguistic proficiency of an individual. When they were shown the photo-
graphs of hypothetical customers, those interviewees who did not report using
English as the categorical language in which to initiate all encounters with
customers stated that they would address in Spanish the people who, in the
words of several informants, ‘looked Hispanic’, and in English those who
did not. A person’s use of a language not popularly associated with their
ethnicity even when the language is their first language continues to be
cause for comment, as illustrated in (30):
(30) Nunca me imaginé . . . Rusos hablando un español bien fluido, siendo
rusos . . .
. . . fui a un Dunkin’ Donut, y pedı́ en inglés una, algo para desayunar, y
la mujer me contestó perfectamente en español, y yo quedé tan
sorprendido que no podı́a creerlo, */Ud. habla tan buen español; */
¡Es que yo soy peruana!
Ella no me dijo que */Yo soy china. Me dijo */Yo soy peruana. (011)
I never imagined . . . Russians speaking very fluent Spanish, being
Russian . . .
. . . I went to a Dunkin’ Donut, and I ordered in English a, something for
breakfast, and the woman answered me in perfect Spanish, and I was so
surprised that I couldn’t believe it.
‘You speak Spanish so well’; ‘I’m Peruvian!’
She didn’t say, ‘I’m Chinese’. She said, ‘I’m Peruvian.’ (my translation)9
Just as it does outside of work, race plays a role in everyday interactions in the
workplace. In one case, an interviewee felt that his coworker was the target of
deprecatory treatment due to the colour of his skin. In other words, his race
motivated his interlocutors’ lack of sympathy with his low proficiency in
Spanish:
(31) . . . I’m going to tell you something about Spanish people

from Spain. They’re, I don’t know, I feel like they’re a little
racist, should I say. Because every time they come into the
store, they come in and they’re talking Spanish, and
remember that guy I told you, half Black, half Dominican?
He really tries with them, to talk Spanish with them. But
they just make fun of him. I feel so bad, I feel so, because the
guy’s really trying to learn the language. But they just make
fun of him. I’ll be like, and then I step into it, step to it, and
I’ll be like, I come in and I’m like, ‘Hey, why you treating
him so bad?’ in Spanish; I’m like ‘¿Por qué lo está tratando
tan mal? No lo trate mal. Está tratando bien duro con
usted.’ And they feel bad. So I put them in their place.
Researcher: So do you get like, um, that doesn’t happen with him and
people from other Spanish-speaking places?
Informant: It, basically Caribbean Spanish [people], no, South
American people, no.. . . I guess it’s because, it’s his skin
tone. That’s what I think. (001)
In another case race was a factor in customers’ assessment of a worker as
incapable of understanding Spanish:
(32) Informant: Well, sometimes, people don’t know, they, sometimes they
judge you by how you look. Sometimes they think I’m Black
and not Hispanic. And they say something in Spanish,
thinking that I don’t know what they’re saying.
Researcher: So do you do anything when that happens?
Informant: Yeah. I speak Spanish. ‘You think I don’t know Spanish?
I’m Dominican’, I tell them. ‘Oh, you don’t look it.’ ‘Yeah, I
speak Spanish.’ (1010)
Nonprestige varieties of Spanish

A few of the workers expressed their own or others’ beliefs about which
dialects of Spanish are less desirable. Spanish with single word borrowings
from English, or with frequent intrasentential codeswitches, was the variety
most often noted in pejorative terms, as in (33)(35):
(33) . . . lo que no me gusta es que me vengan a hablar en español y en
inglés . . . Yo me tiro para uno de los dos . . ..Por ejemplo, si algún hispano
me quiere hablar con algunas palabras metidas de inglés, hablando
español, entonces me voy al inglés solo . . . (011)
. . . what I don’t like is for them to come speak to me in Spanish and in
English . . . I’ll go with one of the two. For example, if a Hispanic person
tries to talk to me with some English words thrown in, while speaking
Spanish, then I’ll switch to English alone . . . (my translation)
(34) We didn’t substitute words because we didn’t know the word for
something. We didn’t interject Spanish for the word; if we didn’t know
what dog was in English, we didn’t say perro [‘dog’], we just, we knew
what both of them were. It just happened naturally. Now, you see people
speaking what they think is bilingual, but they can’t speak either one.
And that’s a problem, and I find that very insulting. Sometimes I tell
them, let’s just stick to one. You know, one language. (112)
Referring to a Spanish professor, one interviewee noted that this person’s
negative view of using English and Spanish together was not restricted to the
language classroom, and therefore did not stem solely from pedagogical
concerns:
(35) . . . [a] ella no le gustaba que mezcláramos los dos idiomas. Ella dice que
es una falta de respeto para el español, si mezclamos palabras en inglés.
Ella no está de acuerdo con el Spanglish, porque no está bien para
ella . . . en su vida personal, no le gustaba. (109)
. . . she didn’t like for us to mix the two language. She says that it’s
disrespectful of Spanish, if we mix in words in English. She doesn’t
approve of Spanglish, because it’s not good in her view . . . in her
personal life, she doesn’t like it. (my translation)
In (36), in addition to some morphological features of a contact dialect, a
stigmatised pronunciation characteristic of Caribbean Spanish was mentioned.
(36) Informant: . . . I’m proud to speak Spanish, and I am proud to be able to
read and write it. What makes me upset is the Latin
Americans who, or whomever, using the Spanish language,
well, I would say native Latin Americans, or those who
have grown up here with Latin American parents, who
don’t speak the language properly, who massacre the
language. I cannot stand that.
Researcher: And, and you, what you would consider to be not speaking
it properly, can you give any examples?
Informant: Um, just not making a proper sentence or just not, um, like
saying: ‘Mira para allá ’ or ‘Subiendo para arriba ’ which means
‘going up’; it’s like a way of saying you’re going up the
stairs up, of course you’re going up the stairs up. You know,
things like that.
Researcher: So, redundancies?
Informant: Yeah, redundancies. Or just the way they massacre the
language not pronouncing it correctly: ‘Arroz’ [with uvular
R]. It’s not ‘arroz’ [with uvular R], it’s ‘arroz’ [with trill].
Um, so I can’t stand the way they mas-, I would understand
more if you’re learning English and you have a problem
pronunciating [sic] the English language. But when you’re
Spanish, and you have problems pronunciating [sic] it, just
don’t speak it at all, just don’t massacre the language. (104)
The requirement of a higher standard of proficiency however defined by the
informant for speaking Spanish, is a theme that has emerged in earlier
investigations (Callahan, 2004). There is overall a much greater tolerance for
imperfect English. Nevertheless, workers do show some tolerance for speakers

of nonfluent Spanish, as illustrated by some of the informants’ willingness to
maintain a conversation with second language learners.
Discussion
This is a qualitative study, using a nonrandom sample, which is in any case
too small to permit statistically reliable generalisations to a larger population.
Nevertheless, some tendencies do emerge. In addition, there is a high degree
of congruence between the behaviour reported here and the behaviour
observed in the course of the anonymous encounters carried out in the parent
project, Language Choice in Interethnic Communication: Spanish and English
in Urban Service Encounters. To wit, in 91% (n /146) of the 160 total
encounters conducted by the researcher, informants answered at least partially
in Spanish when addressed by an outgroup member in Spanish.10 Anecdotal
evidence suggests that, in the absence of the desire to please the customer,
there might be more nonreciprocal language choice, and less accommodation
to the outgroup member trying to initiate an exchange in Spanish. On two
occasions, both in a neighbourhood in which Spanish is heard more than
English in public, the researcher was answered in English after she had spoken
in Spanish. In both cases, the person she had addressed in Spanish had been
speaking Spanish to another person on the scene.
Workers who have linguistic competence in Spanish and English demon-
strate their sociolinguistic competence inside and outside the workplace by
using a variety of strategies. Their knowledge of the community and of
workplace norms affords them a high degree of accuracy in matching
speakers’ characteristics with the appropriate language choice. Similar
patterns have been documented elsewhere, between other language pairs.
For example, Gardner-Chloros (1997: 364) found that:
. . . an understanding of the situational norms is relevant. These norms
are, on the one hand, common to many different social groups, such as
the rule that ‘the customer is always right’, which makes the customer’s
variety dominate in customer-salesperson interactions (Genesee &
Bourhis, 1982), and, on the other hand, they are enmeshed with the
particular diglossic configuration in question: thus in Strasbourg an
Alsatian-speaking customer might well refrain from imposing her
language because there is a conflicting norm tending to prefer French
as the language of public conversations with interlocutors one does not
know personally. (emphasis in the original)
Many of the workers in the present study gave preference to English as a
public language, in as much as the workplace and many of the situations
found therein are defined as public. These included working in the presence
of customers, meeting with supervisors and performing work-related
tasks with coworkers. Nonpublic situations within the workplace were limited
to conversations with Spanish-speaking coworkers when no non Spanish-
speaking person was present. The majority of the informants would
accommodate the customer’s preference; the customer’s preference thus had
the power to make Spanish the public language in the workplace. Outside of
work, the interlocutor’s language continued to exercise influence, but less
rigidly so than in a service encounter.
In Gardner-Chloros’ study, which was quantitative rather than qualitative,
it was correctly predicted that ‘less Alsatian and more French would be spoken
between customers and salespersons than within groups of customers or
within groups of salespersons: the independent variable was therefore the
ingroup/outgroup distinction’ (Gardner-Chloros, 1997: 365; emphasis in the
original). This also finds a parallel in my data, although not exact. It would be
most accurate to say that more monolingual English and more monolingual
Spanish is spoken between customers and workers in my study, and more
Spanish and English together is spoken by the workers in ingroup situations.
Workers base their language choices on both linguistic competence and
episode-external ideological factors (Torras & Gafaranga, 2002). Linguistic
competence has to do with what language(s) the speakers in an exchange have
proficiency in, and episode-external ideological factors have to do with
questions of allegiance to and ownership of a language. As discussed above,
English in the USA is available for use by all parties in most public situations.
Spanish may be used by ingroup members between themselves and to address
others they categorise as Spanish speakers. Outgroup members may attempt to
use Spanish in commercial encounters, and their status as customers assures
them a higher rate of success than they may enjoy in other situations. Linguistic
competence prevails over ideological concerns when communication would
otherwise be impossible, for example, when a customer is monolingual in
Spanish or English. When competence is not an overriding factor, when both
parties are capable of speaking both languages, a combination of situational
norms and each interlocutor’s ideologies determine language choice.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the interview participants for sharing their experiences and
insights with me, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on
an earlier version of this paper. This project was partially funded by the
Research Institute for the Study of Language in an Urban Society, at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Professor Laura Callahan,
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, The City College of New
York, Convent Ave. at 138th St, New York, NY 10031-9198, USA (Lcallahan@
ccny.cuny.edu).
Notes
1. Thirteen of the participants were of Dominican descent, three Puerto Rican, three
Colombian and one Venezuelan. In this paper the terms ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’
refer to Latino and non-Latino ethnicity, respectively.
2. See Appendix 1 for demographic information on the interviewees.
3. The language of the interview was left up to the informants; however, the
researcher’s outgroup status and the semi-formal situation of the interview may
have influenced their choices. For the same reasons, although several informants
mentioned codeswitching, none did so during the interview.
4. For seminal work on speech accommodation in monolingual exchanges, see Giles
and Powesland (1975) and Giles and Smith (1979); for accommodation in service
encounters, see Labov (1966).
5. For another seminal work on language choice between Spanish and English in
New York City, see Poplack (1998).
6. Another worker used Spanish in the same fashion; in her workplace Spanish was
the default language. This notwithstanding, non-Spanish-speaking customers were
frequent in this informant’s workplace and she knew how to identify them. She
addressed them in Spanish also, to avoid being accused of judging people by their
appearance.
7. For an overview of language policies in the workplace, see Aguirre, 2003; Fishman,
1988; Imahara, 1993; Macı́as, 1997; Teboul, 2002; Ugalde, 1990; Valdés, 1997; Wyld,
1997.
8. The worker’s language preference was not discussed in all of the interviews. In the
ones in which it was, workers indicated the following preferences (E /English;
S/Spanish; B /both): (001) B; (002) B; (003) B; (004) S; (005) E; (006) B; (007)
E; (101) S; (102) E; (103) E; (104) E; (105) B; (106) E; (107) S; (108) S; (1010) S; (111) E.
9. Note that in this exchange, the informant, whose dominant language is Spanish,
was judged by the worker to be a Spanish speaker based on his accented English.
10. Seventy per cent (n/ 112) responded in monolingual Spanish, and 21% (n/ 34)
with a Spanish/English codeswitched utterance.
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Appendix: Demographic Characteristics of the Interviewees
Code Sex Age Self- Place Parents’ Age of Years

reported of birth place of arrival in USA
dominant birth in USA
language
001 M 24 English USA DR 0 24 (life)
002 M 20 English USA DR 0 20 (life)
003 M 18 Both DR DR 7 11
004 M 18 Spanish DR DR 14 4
005 M 20 Both USA DR 0 20 (life)
006 M 20 Both DR DR 6 14
007 M 18 Both USA DR 0 18 (life)
011 M 48 Spanish Col Col 36 12
101 F 22 Spanish Ven Ven 18 4
102 F 23 Spanish Col Col 18 5
103 F 29 Both PR PR 18 11
104 F 29 Both USA* Col 10 20
105 F 19 Both DR DR 5 14
106 F 21 Both USA DR 0 21 (life)
107 F 18 Both USA** DR 10 8
108 F 20 Both USA DR 0 20 (life)
109 F 22 Spanish DR DR 15 7
1010 F 19 Spanish DR DR 8 11
111 F 32 English USA PR 0 32 (life)
112 F 44 Spanish USA PR 0 44 (life)
*Moved to Colombia at age 4. Returned to USA at age 10. Finished high school
in Colombia.
**Moved to DR at age 1.

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‘Talking Both Languages’: 20

Perspectives on the Use of Spanish and

Keywords: ingroup versus outgroup, language choice, language ideology,

0143-4632/05/04 275-21 $20.00/0 – 2005 L. Callahan

Workers follow different language choice rules in the workplace

All participants either implicitly or explicitly acknowledged the assumption

Researcher: If someone speaks to you in English, and it’s hard to

When workers will address a customer in Spanish

she is talking to. Assumptions about linguistic competence similar to

When workers make a mistake in predicting a customer’s language

of English carries fewer implications, because it is the default language which

When workers answer in the opposite language

Informant: Usually, that happens more. Usually my parents talk to me;

English as a neutral language

English as the language of work

Informant: No. It just happens. It just naturally happens. Now when

The language workers prefer to speak in the workplace

current job, at which there were many Spanish-speaking customers, as an

Spanish as the language of intergenerational communication

Race, ethnicity and language

(31) . . . I’m going to tell you something about Spanish people

Nonprestige varieties of Spanish

imperfect English. Nevertheless, workers do show some tolerance for speakers

Appendix: Demographic Characteristics of the Interviewees

Code Sex Age Self- Place Parents’ Age of Years

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