Words and phrases that are stigmatized in some varieties of Spanish do not always hold the same level of stigmatization in U.S. Spanish varieties. Our study centers on the perception of so-called “vernacular” forms stylistically used by speakers of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). U.S. Spanish has traditionally been viewed from a deficit perspective— as only partially assimilated to English or “vernacular” varieties of Spanish— and relegated to a linguistic borderland. Spanish-English bilinguals from Southern California (n= 52) were asked if they had ever been told that particular words and phrases from seven categories indexing different social meanings were “incorrect.” Categories that the bilinguals reported as being corrected on the most included English borrowings (50%) followed by redundancies (32%) and Mexican patrimonial forms (32%). Responses were compared to matched control sentences containing non-stigmatized forms (5 experimental and 5 control sentences per condition). Chi-square tests (with Bonferroni correction) showed that English borrowings had significantly higher rates than all other conditions (p < .001). Qualitative analyses will be conducted on participants’ responses describing how they’ve been corrected on these forms. These preliminary results expose the need to address these categories in different ways during instruction. The sociocultural norms of speakers' own communities should be incorporated into the study of language and cognition as well as the development of more suitable pedagogical approaches to Spanish language education. When the language varieties that SHL students bring from their families and communities are valued as primary sources of knowledge they are better prepared to critically discern the social meanings of linguistic styles and articulate how their own linguistic decisions shape and are shaped by social values that either perpetuate or resist structures of racial inequality and intersectional oppression.

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