The language practices of Heritage Learners (HLs) of Spanish are frequently regulated and stigmatized in academic and community settings when their Spanish is perceived as deficient. By ignoring institutional structures that accelerate Spanish loss, the "inadequacy" of Latinxs' Spanish is regularly perceived to be the fault of…

The concept "language legitimacy", which entails issues of social class, ethnicity and culture as well as those of dominance and power, is a very important one with implications for both educational policy and practice. This article begins with a brief discussion of the two major ways in which the concept of "language…