La versión web en español de los organismos federales de los Estados Unidos. ¿Un intento de desminorización lingüística?

Abstract

Over the last few years, some movements that aim to institute English as the exclusive language of public administration, education and all governmental aspects in general have appeared. Concurrently, opposing movements aiming to maintain the linguistic identity of immigrants have campaigned for stimulating English-language learning without minoritizing other languages. Meanwhile, the federal government during President Obama’s administration adopted what could be considered a conciliatory position, offering a Spanish version of many of the citizen information services. The aim of this paper is to analyze this conciliatory position by studying the Spanish version of the websites of the US federal government at the end of Obama’s administration. We will analyze the information available in Spanish to check if the websites contained full versions of the original or adaptations, and we if the strategies used on these websites could decrease the level of minoritization of the Spanish language in the United States.