Multilingual Realities, Monolingual Ideologies: Social Media Representations of Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States

Abstract Little is known about how monolingual ideologies and their effects manifest in online contexts as compared to offline contexts. We conducted a corpus-assisted discourse study investigate this, with focus on Twitter representations of Spanish heritage language the USA. analysed two corpora (one English one Spanish—over 30 million words), examining frequencies, collocations, concordance lines, larger text segments. The results revealed evidence same found contexts: normative monolingualism (drawing one-nation-one-language ideology purity ideologies) well raciolinguistic ideologies. show semiotic processes iconization erasure lead (evidently erroneous) essentialization speakers homogeneous group un-American, racialized immigrants broken language. This discursive creation difference constitutes basis for systematic discrimination speakers, thus reflecting reproducing social inequality. Our findings therefore indicate necessity extending planning measures protect (and other minority groups) from