| Summary: | This pilot project studies the differences in knowledge about Spanish language between inmigrants from Spanish speaker countries and its descendants in Växjö, a small town insouthern Sweden. It has been noticed the extended use of Swedish terms and structuresamong inmigrants. This phenomenon has been studied by other researchers as an exampleof language displacement where users of a mimority language, in our case Spanish,gradually change their vocabulary and grammar for that of a present language of morecommon use in the community, which is Swedish in Växjö. Unlike most them, we suggestthat in the case of new users of the minority language, this is, descendants of originalinmigrants, there is no displacement but actually a lack of learning of the minoritylanguage, due to a limited acces to Spanish resources, which is compensated with the useof Swedish terms. This would results in an apparent language displacement.Based on different theories, among which we should name Bloomfield´s model oflanguage learning, Sarmiento´s division of identity in three aspects: language, traditionsand appearance, and Esquivel´s findings about adjacent languages; researchers havedeveloped these questions: what effect has over Spanish language the genealogicaldistance between first inmigrants and each successive generation? What other variablescan influence language differences? And where can these differences be found? Theresults of our study show a factual tendency to the impoverishment of the Spanishlanguage for every generation after the migration, although the results are not statisticallysignificant, what makes it interesting to continue the study at a bigger scale. We have alsofound out a correlation between Spanish language knowledge and language identity andthe perception of acceptance by the Swedish community. Among the studied areas ofknowledge, the ones that present with biggest lacks are technical subjects.
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