"Pero like, you don't speak Spanish?" exploring the role of language fluency on Latine intragroup identity denial, likability, and befriending.

Abstract

Objective: Anecdotal narratives and recent qualitative studies demonstrate that in Latine communities, language proficiency can be a form of gatekeeping (i.e., determining the legitimacy of people's claims to a particular status by unilaterally imposing criteria for acceptance) Latinidad. Latine individuals who are not fluent in Spanish frequently report having their Hispanic/Latine identity questioned and denied. Across two experiments, we investigated whether Latine individuals perceive non-Spanish-speaking Latine individuals as identifying less with their Latine identity.

Method: Across two studies, Latine adults (N = 302, M_age = 35.21, SD_age = 10.83) were randomly assigned to view one of two Latine individuals' social networking profiles (i.e., fluent in English or fluent in both English and Spanish). Afterward, they reported their perceptions of the targets' perceived ethnic identity, likability, and likelihood that they would befriend the target.

Results: Latines, regardless of how strongly they identified as Latine, or if they themselves were bilingual (Study 2), perceived a Latine person only fluent in English as being less likely to identify as Latine and were less likely to want to befriend them (Study 1) compared to a Latine target fluent in both English and Spanish.

Conclusions: Latine perceivers use language fluency to challenge the identity of their non-Spanish-speaking Latine counterparts and, in some cases, to make judgments about potential friendship. These findings extend previous research on identity denial and intragroup dynamics by advancing our understanding of the relationship between language fluency, identity denial, and other forms of intragroup rejection within the Latine community. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).