draft SPANISH AND ENGLISH IN PUERTO RICO Melvin González Rivera 1 & Luis A. Ortiz López 2 1 University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, 2 University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras The islands that form the Puerto Rican archipelago were populated by aboriginal peoples who have been grouped together as the Taino, whose ethnicity and indigenous language, arahuaco, disappeared with the advance of Caribbean colonization by Spain and other European nations from the XV century onward. In the case of Puerto Rico, which was claimed for the Spanish Crown on the 19 th of November in 1493, Spanish became the de facto language of the territory (Álvarez Nazario, 1982; Picó, 1988; Silén, 1993). The Spanish spoken in Puerto Rico is mainly a product of immigration from Andalusia, notably Huelva and Seville beginning in the XVI century. In addition to this first wave of Andalusian immigrants, a second wave of Canarian immigrants arrived at the beginning of the XVII century. Although the island was populated by diverse immigrants of diverse origin from northern, central, and southwestern Spain, Andalusian and Canarian numbers dominate (Álvarez Nazario, 1982; 1990). To these sources for Puerto Rican Spanish one can add a number of African elements introduced during the XVI and XIX centuries as a product of the slave trade (Álvarez Nazario, 1974; Lipski. 2009) and Anglophone elements beginning in the XIX and XX centuries following the Spanish-American War and the U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico on the 25 th of June, 1898 and the eventual surrender by Spain under the Treaty of Paris on the 10 th of December of the same year (Delgado Cintrón, 1994). As a consequence of the change in political sovereignty in 1898, the political and (socio)linguistic landscape of Puerto Rico, which for four centuries had been under the control of Spain, radically changed, and language became an issue or battlefield, which after more than one hundred years of coexistence between both languages, Spanish and English, has still not been resolved (López Laguerre, 1989; Trias Monge, 1999). This debate extends to many spheres, including the linguistic, political, sociological, historical, and pedagogical (Torres González, 2002). In this brief introduction to the main issues at hand, we examine the debate around language policy in Puerto Rico from an historical, political-juridical, and linguistic perspective. Attempts to impose English in Puerto Rico arose very early in our most recent political history. These include the Language Law of 1902 that made both Spanish and English official by stipulating that “in all insular government departments, in all courts of this island and in all public offices, Spanish and English will be used interchangeably”, the Notarial Law of 1906, which officialized the writing of official documents in both languages (Muñiz Argüelles, 1999; Nickels, 2005), and attempted to implement the compulsory teaching of English (Orama, 2011). The following statement made in by Philip C. Hanna, the last American consul on the island, sums up the prevailing attitudes held by the US authorities: “I hope as well that the Spanish language will be a thing of the past on this island” (Delgado Cintrón, 1988; 1993 [translated]). Nonetheless, the