Spanish in the United States: Attitudes and Variation (Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics) 0367256843, 9780367256845

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of tables
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: new research on Spanish in the United States
Part 1 Spanish in the United States: language attitudes
1 Language, contact, and the negotiation of Salvadoran identities in a mixed-Latino community
2 Perceptions of Spanish(es) in the United States: Mexicans’ sociophonetic evaluations of [v]
3 A socio-onomastic study of Spanish receptive bilinguals: attitudes, ascription, and audience design
Part 2 Spanish in the United States: language in contact
4 Pro-drop to non-pro-drop: question word order in New York City Caribbean Spanish bilinguals
5 Bare if-clauses as a politeness strategy in US Spanish
6 The effect of level of instruction, dialect, and extended time abroad on the L2 acquisition of Spanish speech rhythm: results and methodological concerns
Part 3 Spanish in the United States: heritage speakers of Spanish
7 Connecting the classroom and the community: service learning and the heritage language student
8 Systematizing the use of the aspectual distinction by level of proficiency: a case of Spanish as a heritage language
9 Heritage speakers, monolingual policies, and Spanish-language maintenance in Kansas
Epilogue
Index

Citation preview

Spanish in the United States

Spanish in the United States: Attitudes and Variation is a collection of new, cutting-edge research with the purpose of providing scholars interested in Spanish as it is spoken by bilinguals living in the United States a current view of the state of the discipline. This volume is broad and inclusive of the populations studied, methodologies used, and approaches to the linguistic study of Spanish in order to provide scholars with an up-to-date understanding of the complexities of the Spanish(es) spoken in the United States. In addition to this snapshot, this volume stimulates new areas of inquiry and motivates new ways of analyzing the social, linguistic, and educational aspects of what it means to speak Spanish in the United States. Scott M. Alvord is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Brigham Young University, USA. Gregory L. Thompson is Associate Professor of Spanish Pedagogy at Brigham Young University, USA.

Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Series Editor: Dale Koike University of Texas at Austin

The Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics series provides a showcase for the latest research on Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics. It publishes select research monographs on various topics in the field, reflecting strands of current interest.

Titles in the series: Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact Sociolinguistic Case Studies Edited by Eva Núñez-Méndez Lusophone, Galician, and Hispanic Linguistics Bridging Frames and Traditions Edited by Gabriel Rei-Doval and Fernando Tejedo-Herrero Pragmatic Variation in Service Encounter Interactions across the SpanishSpeaking World Edited by J. César Félix-Brasdefer and María Elena Placencia Dialects from Tropical Islands Caribbean Spanish in the United States Edited by Wilfredo Valentín-Márquez & Melvin González-Rivera Interface-Driven Phenomena in Spanish Essays in Honor of Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach Edited by Melvin González-Rivera and Sandro Sessarego Spanish in the United States Attitudes and Variation Edited by Scott M. Alvord and Gregory L. Thompson For more information about this series please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Hispanic-and-Lusophone-Linguistics/book-series/RSHLL

Spanish in the United States Attitudes and Variation

Edited by Scott M. Alvord and Gregory L. Thompson Series Editor: Dale Koike Spanish List Advisor: Javier Muñoz-Basols

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Scott M. Alvord and Gregory L. Thompson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Scott M. Alvord and Gregory L. Thompson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Alvord, Scott M., editor. | Thompson, Gregory L. (College teacher), editor. Title: Spanish in the United States : attitudes and variation / edited by Scott M. Alvord, Gregory L. Thompson. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019053019 (print) | LCCN 2019053020 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367256845 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429289125 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Spanish language—United States—Spoken Spanish. | Bilingualism—United States. | Languages in contact—United States. Classification: LCC PC4826 .S63 2020 (print) | LCC PC4826 (ebook) | DDC 467/.973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053019 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053020 ISBN: 978-0-367-25684-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28912-5 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of tablesvii List of figuresix List of contributorsx Acknowledgmentsxi

Introduction: new research on Spanish in the United States

1

SCOTT M. ALVORD AND GREGORY L. THOMPSON

PART 1

Spanish in the United States: language attitudes9 1

Language, contact, and the negotiation of Salvadoran identities in a mixed-Latino community

11

JOSÉ ESTEBAN HERNÁNDEZ

2

Perceptions of Spanish(es) in the United States: Mexicans’ sociophonetic evaluations of [v]

31

WHITNEY CHAPPELL

3

A socio-onomastic study of Spanish receptive bilinguals: attitudes, ascription, and audience design

56

MARYANN PARADA

PART 2

Spanish in the United States: language in contact75 4

Pro-drop to non-pro-drop: question word order in New York City Caribbean Spanish bilinguals CAROLINA BARRERA-TOBÓN AND ROCÍO RAÑA RISSO

77

vi  Contents 5 Bare if-clauses as a politeness strategy in US Spanish

95

EMILY BERNATE

6

The effect of level of instruction, dialect, and extended time abroad on the L2 acquisition of Spanish speech rhythm: results and methodological concerns

111

BRANDON M. A. ROGERS, SCOTT M. ALVORD, AND DOUG PORTER

PART 3

Spanish in the United States: heritage speakers of Spanish 7

Connecting the classroom and the community: service learning and the heritage language student

137 139

GREGORY L. THOMPSON

8

Systematizing the use of the aspectual distinction by level of proficiency: a case of Spanish as a heritage language

163

LAURA VALENTÍN-RIVERA AND EARL K. BROWN

9

Heritage speakers, monolingual policies, and Spanishlanguage maintenance in Kansas

187

RACHEL E. SHOWSTACK AND KELLY GUZMAN

Epilogue

206

EDWIN M. LAMBOY

Index

216

Tables

0.1 0.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Total US population and total Hispanic or Latino populations (US Census Bureau) 2017 US Census estimates of Hispanic or Latino population by place of origin Listeners’ basic demographic information Best mixed-effects model for good Spanish (significant predictors bolded, N = 1,800) Best-fit mixed-effects model for intelligence (significant predictors bolded, N = 1,800) Best-fit mixed-effects model for confidence (significant predictors bolded, N = 1,800) ANOVA pronoun rate by generation (Caribbeans) ANOVA preverbal (subject pronoun) rate by generation (Caribbeans) ANOVA lexical preverbal rate by generation (Caribbeans) Cross-tabulation of subject placement in direct wh-questions by generation (Caribbeans) Cross-tabulation of subject placement in direct wh-questions with copular verbs by generation (Caribbeans) Cross-tabulation of subject placement in direct wh-questions with non-copular verbs by generation (Caribbeans) Cross-tabulation of subject position in direct wh-questions with subject personal pronouns by generation (Caribbeans) Postverbal subject placement rates in direct wh-questions by generation and question function (Caribbeans) Participants in each contact situation Items in questionnaire If-clauses produced in each contact situation Syntactic function of if-clauses in each contact situation Description of often-used rhythm metrics Background information of L2 participants Participants by level of instruction nPVI-V means by speaker group

2 3 38 42 43 46 86 86 87 88 88 89 89 89 101 102 103 106 113 118 119 123

viii  Tables 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11 6.12 6.13 6.14 8.1 8.2 8.3

Post-hoc rnPVI-V results by speaker group nPVI-V means by level of instruction L1 Spanish speaker nPVI-V means by country of origin rPVI-C means by speaker group Post-hoc rPVI-C results by speaker group rPVI-C means based on time abroad rPVI-C means by level of instruction L1 Spanish speaker rPVI-C means by country of origin AB learner rPVI-C means by country L2 Spanish nPVI-V and rPVI-C scores from previous studies Preterite and imperfect tenses (based on Andersen, 1993) Semantic qualities of Vendler’s (1967) lexical predicates Andersen’s (1991) sequence of development of Spanish verbal morphological markers (from Labeau, 2005) 8.4 Examples of aspectual contextual meanings (from Montrul, 2002) 8.5 DELE scores among the 23 participants 8.6 Native speaker (NS) control group: average deviation from consensus = 2.23% 8.7 Descriptive statistics by level of proficiency based on DELE (for nonnative speakers) 8.8 Tukey honest significant differences post-hoc test among HS groupings and NSs 8.9 Deviancy from NS consensus by test item and by HS group 8.10 Most frequent divergence by proficiency level and by item

123 123 124 124 124 125 125 125 125 130 164 165 166 167 171 171 172 173 174 174

Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Screenshot of what listeners saw as they evaluated each speaker 39 Mosaic plot of listeners’ evaluations of speaker origin 41 Evaluations of how Hispanic the speaker groups sounded 41 Evaluations of good Spanish by speaker gender and speaker type 43 Interaction plots of intelligence evaluations including speaker type and speaker gender 45 Violin plot of evaluations of intelligence for the speaker types by gender 46 Conditional inference tree for evaluations of confidence 47 Boxplot of listener evaluations of speakers’ snobbishness 48 Distribution of if-clauses by syntactic function in each contact situation 107 Equations for nPVI-V metric (Equation 1) and rPVI-C metric (Equation 2) 120 Example of how vocalic and consonantal intervals were marked in the phrase De hecho, me apuñalaron, pero lo alcancé a . . .122 Distribution of rPVI-C scores 131 Distribution of nPVI-V scores 131

Contributors

Scott M. Alvord is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at Brigham Young University, USA. Carolina Barrera-Tobón is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Co-director of the Bilingual Development Lab at DePaul University, USA. Emily Bernate is Assistant Professor of Spanish at St. Edward’s University, USA. Earl K. Brown is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Brigham Young University, USA. Whitney Chappell is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Texas, San Antonio, USA. Kelly Guzman, MSW, is a social worker for USD 259 in Sedgwick County, Kansas, USA. José Esteban Hernández is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA. Edwin M. Lamboy is Associate Professor of Secondary Spanish Education and Hispanic Linguistics at The City College of New York (CUNY), USA. Maryann Parada is Assistant Professor of Spanish at California State University, Bakersfield, USA. Doug Porter is Academic and Professional Development Manager at Brigham Young University, USA. Rocío Raña Risso is Substitute Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA. Brandon M. A. Rogers is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Ball State University, USA. Rachel E. Showstack is Associate Professor of Spanish at Wichita State University, USA. Gregory L. Thompson is Associate Professor of Spanish Pedagogy at Brigham Young University, USA. Laura Valentín-Rivera is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Kansas State University, USA.

Acknowledgments

As with any project like this one, it would not be possible without the help of so many people. We would like to thank the many anonymous reviewers who provided valuable feedback for each of the authors of this edited volume. Their careful feedback improved each submission and their selfless service to the field is deeply appreciated. We would also like to thank Scarlett Lindsay and her team of student editors at BYU Faculty Publishing Service for their initial copyediting and comments on the individual chapters. We would be remiss to not thank Rosie McEwan, of Routledge Press, and Dale A. Koike, the series editor of Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, for their patience, support, encouragement, and suggestions during the process of moving this edited volume from the proposal stage to this final version. We are also grateful to each of the authors of the different chapters in this book for trusting us with their cutting-edge research and their willingness to make the necessary edits for publication. Finally, we thank God and our families for their support and loyalty in all our endeavors.

Introduction New research on Spanish in the United States Scott M. Alvord and Gregory L. Thompson

Introduction to the volume The current volume is a collection of new, cutting-edge research with the purpose of providing scholars interested in Spanish as it is spoken by bilinguals living in the United States a current view of the state of the discipline. The volume is organized around the three broad topics related to Spanish in the United States that are not mutually exclusive: language attitudes, language variation, and heritage speakers of Spanish. Each chapter explores these topics by examining distinct populations (including bilingual advanced second-language learners), representative of the many Spanish-speaking groups in the United States. These populations range from New Yorkers of Caribbean origin (Chapter 4) to Salvadorans in Texas (Chapter 1); from Mexican-origin speakers (Chapters 2 and 5) to advanced learners of Spanish as a second language (Chapter 6); and diverse groups of speakers of Spanish as a heritage language (Chapters 3, 7, 8, and 9). The goal of this volume is to be broad and inclusive of the populations studied, methodologies used, and approaches to the linguistic study of Spanish in the context of the United States in order to provide scholars with a current view of the complexities of what Lamboy, in the epilogue of the current volume, calls the Spanish(es) of the United States. In addition to this snapshot, an important goal of this volume is to stimulate new areas of inquiry and motivate new ways of analyzing the social, linguistic, and educational aspects of what it means to speak Spanish in the United States.

Brief overview of Spanish in the United States The Spanish language has a long history of being spoken within the territory that now makes up the Unites States. Spanish arrived in what is now the United States in the sixteenth century with Spanish colonizers who, as part of the colonial legacy, introduced the language to indigenous groups of the Americas, leading many linguists to also classify Spanish as an indigenous language within the current borders of the United States (Lozano, 2018). Within the United States, the Hispanic or Latino population has been steadily growing to the point that the United States has the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, following only Mexico (Fernández Vítores, 2018). While the US Census Bureau

2  Scott M. Alvord and Gregory L. Thompson Table 0.1 Total US population and total Hispanic or Latino populations (US Census Bureau)

2000 Census 2010 Census 2017 Estimate

Total US population

Total Hispanic or Latino

% Hispanic or Latino

281,421,906 308,745,538 321,004,407

35,305,818 50,477,594 56,510,571

12.5 16.3 17.6

estimated in 2017 that 17.6% of the total population of the United States is of Hispanic or Latino origin (see Table 0.1), the number of Hispanic or Latinos in the United States does not necessarily correspond to the number of Spanish speakers. According to the same 2017 American Community Estimates, 21.3% of the US population speak a language other than English. Spanish is the most commonly spoken language other than English in the United States, representing 62% of those that speak a language other than English, or 13.2% of the total US population (US Census Bureau, 2017). There are many possible factors that might explain the difference in numbers between those of Hispanic or Latino origin (approximately 56.5 million) and those who self-report speaking Spanish at home (approximately 39.8  million). One possible factor is underreporting by people who might speak Spanish as a heritage language but don’t claim to speak Spanish due to linguistic insecurities. For many Hispanics or Latinos in the United States, Spanish proficiency is not necessary in order to have a “dual Hispanic and U.S. identity” (Showstack, 2018, p. 99). The long history of Spanish and the sheer number of Spanish speakers in United States have led to a situation of linguistic diversity and bilingualism that form part of the identities of millions of Americans. Table 0.2 displays the range of places of origin, showing that, unsurprisingly, the majority of Hispanic or Latinos in the United States are of Mexican origin but with large populations of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and a recently increasing number of Venezuelans (US Census Bureau, 2017). Lipski (2008) gives an overview of the different varieties of Spanish spoken by these groups while also calling attention to the fact that Spanish is spoken not only by immigrants: most of the Hispanic population in the United States was born in the United States and many Spanish speakers speak it as a second language. The United States has the largest number of secondlanguage learners of Spanish, with over 8.1 million people studying the language at all levels (Fernández Vítores, 2018), including over 700,000 students enrolled in institutions of higher education (Modern Language Association, 2016). The number of higher education students enrolled in Spanish is greater than all other languages combined, making a mention of the second-language acquisition of Spanish within the United States a natural part of any study of Spanish in the United States. Interest in Spanish/English bilingualism and the maintenance/shift of the Spanish language in generations of Americans born to Spanish-speaking forebears has

Introduction: new research  3 Table 0.2  2017 US Census estimates of Hispanic or Latino population by place of origin

Total United States Total Hispanic or Latino Mexican Puerto Rican Cuban Dominican Central American: Costa Rican Guatemalan Honduran Nicaraguan Panamanian Salvadoran Other Central American South American: Argentinean Bolivian Chilean Colombian Ecuadorian Paraguayan Peruvian Uruguayan Venezuelan Other South American Other Hispanic or Latino: Spaniard Spanish Spanish American All other Hispanic or Latino

Population

% Total population

% of Hispanic or Latino population

321,004,407 56,510,571 35,709,528 5,418,521 2,158,962 1,879,477 5,178,110 150,014 1,375,723 871,941 417,201 196,259 2,127,293 39,679 3,474,318 276,651 119,282 152,607 1,123,443 703,184 23,497 647,603 64,925 332,477 30,649 2,691,655 786,892 492,901 18,583 1,393,279

100.00 17.60 11.12 1.69 0.67 0.59 1.61 0.05 0.43 0.27 0.13 0.06 0.66 0.01 1.08 0.09 0.04 0.05 0.35 0.22 0.01 0.20 0.02 0.10 0.01 0.84 0.25 0.15 0.01 0.43

100.00 63.19 9.59 3.82 3.33 9.16 0.27 2.43 1.54 0.74 0.35 3.76 0.07 6.15 0.49 0.21 0.27 1.99 1.24 0.04 1.15 0.11 0.59 0.05 4.76 1.39 0.87 0.03 2.47

sparked the interest of linguists for many decades; see, for example, seminal works by Valdés (1976), Poplack (1980), García and Otheguy (1988), Silva-Corvalán (1994), Portes and Schauffler (1996), Zentella (1997), and Valdés (2000) to name but a few. The interest in the linguistic study of Spanish in the United States is also evident in the number of academic conferences and number of publications dedicated to its study. For example, in 1980 the first Conference on Spanish in the United States took place in Chicago and has been held every two years since then, the most recent held in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2019. As the field has matured, the linguistic areas through which Spanish in the United States has been analyzed have multiplied. Many studies have focused on linguistic variation, in particular morphosyntactic variation (e.g., Flores-Ferrán, 2002; Otheguy & Zentella, 2012; Silva-Corvalán, 1994) and phonetic variation (e.g., Bills & Vigil, 2008; Fought, 1999; Hidalgo, 1987; Lipski, 2008; Varela, 1974, 1992). Others have examined language attitudes and ideologies (e.g., Alfaraz, 2002, 2014; Leeman, 2011, 2015;

4  Scott M. Alvord and Gregory L. Thompson Rivera-Mills, 2000; among many others). These areas of linguistic study are but a sampling of the many ways that Spanish in the United States has been examined. More recently, the field has turned to studying Spanish as a heritage language (e.g., Beaudrie & Fairclough, 2012; Brown & Thompson, 2018; Pascual & Cabo, 2016; Potowski, 2018). This more recent focus on Spanish as a heritage language is also reflected in a number of conferences and academic journals with this focus—for example, the 6th Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language was held in 2019; the Heritage Language Journal, while not focused exclusively on Spanish, was founded in 2002; and the journal Spanish as a Heritage Language was recently created, with an inaugural issue to be published in 2020. Given the widespread usage of Spanish across the United States, there is a growing need for research to better understand how Spanish usage across the United States impacts both individuals and diverse communities. In addition, the extensive use of both Spanish and English across the United States has led to dialectal and structural changes that are common as languages are shared by multiple (native, heritage, and second-language) speakers. The current volume provides state-of-the-art research on developing areas of Spanish in the United States and is unique in its broad yet coherent approach to the ever-evolving nature of Spanish in the United States by investigating current issues in the field through welldesigned research and innovative analyses.

Overview of the volume This volume is a collection of new research on Spanish in the United States by established and up-and-coming scholars. It is divided into three sections, each corresponding to a major theme—Language Attitudes (Part 1), Language in Contact (Part 2), and Heritage Speakers of Spanish (Part 3),—which together focus on some of the major issues important to the linguistic study of Spanish in the United States. The principal goal of this edited volume is to further the understanding of researchers, practitioners, and educators as to current trends and developing areas within the area of Spanish in the United States, filling important gaps in the current knowledge in the field through the use of innovative research methodologies in areas such as synchronic language variation and change, language attitudes, and heritage learners, as well as innovations in language use, and how language contributes to the formation of identity. This book is meant to be a valuable resource to all those involved in research on Spanish/English bilinguals living in the United States and will be valuable to all of those working with heritage language learners in a wide variety of settings. Part 1: Spanish in the United States: language attitudes The first section of the manuscript contains three chapters focused on language attitudes expressed by Spanish speakers toward certain varieties of Spanish or toward other languages spoken in their multilingual communities and how those attitudes affect the construction of identity. In Chapter 1, Hernández examines

Introduction: new research 5 attitudes toward the distinct types of Spanish spoken by two different groups living side by side in the United States. In this particular chapter, Mexican Spanish speakers’ attitudes are compared to those of Salvadoran Spanish speakers, and it is shown how the variety of Spanish spoken is intrinsically connected to social and ethnic identity. Chappell (Chapter 2) provides an important study on how Spanish/English bilinguals living in the United States are perceived based on their production of [v] in their spoken Spanish, finding that “Mexican listeners do perceive [v] to be a socially meaningful marker of identity, and the interpretation of the variant depends crucially on both speaker gender and speaker type” (p. 48). In the last chapter (3) of this section, Parada focuses on bilinguals with limited proficiency in Spanish and how their proper names factor into how they identify themselves as well as how their identity is constructed with others in spite of their limited proficiency in their heritage language. This onomastic research reveals that proficiency in a heritage language is not needed to impact how individuals construct their identity. Part 2: Spanish in the United States: linguistic variation The second section of this volume contains three chapters that focus on phonological and morphosyntactic aspects of Spanish in the United States. Chapter 4 continues the rich tradition of research on pronoun expression in the Spanish spoken in New York City. Barrera-Tobón and Raña Risso examine the relationship between pronoun expression (pro-drop) and word order in interrogative utterances in Caribbean Spanish spoken in New York by two generations of immigrants. The focus of Chapter 5 is on a type of grammatical construction used to perform requests in Spanish—namely, the use of if-clauses in hypothetical constructions to perform a request. By comparing the speech of three different communities (Mexico City, Brownsville, TX, and Houston, TX), Bernate shows that contact with English corresponds to diminishing use of the canonical if-clause structure in Spanish as well as an increase in the use of bare if-clauses. In Chapter 6, Rogers, Alvord, and Porter examine Spanish in contact with English in the context of advanced learners of Spanish as a second language and their acquisition of the rhythm of spoken Spanish. The population of bilinguals studied in this chapter is distinct from those studied in other chapters in this volume. While advanced second-language learners’ experiences are different (and privileged in many ways) than those of heritage speakers or other immigrant group Spanish speakers, they are very relevant to any discussion on the Spanish(es) spoken in the United States. In addition to Chapter 6’s treatment of L2 Spanish in the United States, one of its contributions to the field is its discussion on methodologies to analyze speech rhythm. Part 3: Spanish in the United States: heritage speakers of Spanish The Spanish spoken by the children and grandchildren of immigrants is of special interest to those studying Spanish in the United States, and these three chapters represent cutting-edge research on these varieties of Spanish. The first chapter

6  Scott M. Alvord and Gregory L. Thompson (7) of this section, written by Thompson, explores how language policies can be implemented and applied through service learning in educational settings. This research shows how service learning can promote language acquisition among heritage speakers of Spanish while also allowing these learners, as community insiders, to provide valuable service and to also learn about the important work that goes on in their own communities. In Chapter 8, Valentín-Rivera and Brown explore the Spanish aspectual system, in this case examining the Spanish of heritage speakers in an educational setting and comparing their usage of preterite and imperfect constructions to those produced by monolingual Spanish speakers living in Mexico City. Finally, Showstack and Guzman (Chapter 9) examine language policies in Kansas and how they negatively affect minority-language speakers. They also show the hopeful result of young adults who have formed strong identities based on their bilingualism and their desire to work “to create a more just environment for Spanish-speaking Latinos.” The final part of this volume is an epilogue written by Edwin Lamboy, providing an in-depth summary of the book, exploring the major themes brought up in the chapters, and concluding the current volume by pointing out important areas for future research. Lamboy shows how the different chapters combine to inspire questions on the role of linguistic research on Spanish in the United States and paints an optimistic picture of the future “place of Spanish in this country.”

References Alfaraz, G. G. (2002). Miami Cuban perceptions of varieties of Spanish. In D. Long & D. R. Preston (Eds.), Handbook of perceptual dialectology (Vol. 2, pp. 1–11). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. Alfaraz, G. G. (2014). Dialect perceptions in real time: A restudy of Miami-Cuban perceptions. Journal of Linguistic Geography, 2, 74–86. Beaudrie S., & Fairclough M. (2012). Spanish as a heritage language in the United States: The state of the field. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Bills, G., & Vigil, N. A. (2008). The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic atlas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. Brown, A., & Thompson, G. L. (2018). The changing landscape of Spanish language curricula: Designing higher education programs for diverse students. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Fernández Vítores, D. (2018). El español: una lengua viva. Informe 2018. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes. Flores-Ferrán, N. (2002). A sociolinguistic perspective on the use of subject personal pronouns in Spanish narratives of Puerto Ricans in New York City. Munich: Lincom-Europa. Fought, C. (1999). A majority sound change in a minority community: /u/-fronting in Chicano English. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(1), 5–23. García, O., & Otheguy, R. (1988). The language situation of Cuban Americans. In S. McKay & S. C. Wong (Eds.), Language diversity: Problem or resource (pp. 166–192). New York, NY: Newbury House. Hidalgo, M. (1987). Español mexicano y español chicano: Problemas y propuestas fundamentales. Language Problems & Language Planning, 11(2), 166–193. Leeman, J. (2015). Identity and heritage language education in the United States. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 100–119.

Introduction: new research 7 Leeman, J., Rabin, L., & Román-Mendoza, E. (2011). Identity and social activism in heritage language education. Modern Language Journal, 95(4), 481–495. Lipski, J. (2008). Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lozano, R. (2018). An American language: The history of Spanish in the United States. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Modern Language Association. (2016). Enrollments in languages other than English in United States institutions of higher education. Retrieved from www.mla.org/content/ download/110154/2406932/2016-Enrollments-Final-Report.pdf Otheguy, R., & Zentella, A. C. (2012). Spanish in New York: Language contact, dialectal leveling and structural continuity. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Pascual y Cabo, D. (2016). Advances in Spanish as a heritage language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English y termino en español. Linguistics, 18, 581–618. Portes, A., & Schauffler, R. (1996). Language and the second generation: Bilingualism yesterday and today. In A. Portes (Ed.), The new second generation (pp. 8–29). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation. Potowski, K. (2018). The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language. New York, NY: Routledge. Rivera-Mills, S. (2000). New perspectives on current sociolinguistic knowledge with regard to language use, proficiency, and attitudes among Hispanics in the U.S.: The case of a rural Northern California community. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press. Showstack, R. (2018). Spanish and identity among Latin@s in the U.S. In K. Potowski (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of Spanish as a heritage language (pp. 92–106). New York, NY: Routledge. Silva-Corvalán, C. (1994). Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. US Census Bureau. (2017). 2013–2017 American community survey 5-year estimates. Retrieved from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview. xhtml?pid=ACS_17_5YR_B03002&prodType=table Valdés, G. (1976). Social interaction and code-switching patterns: A case study of Spanish/ English alternation. In G. Keller, R. V. Teschner, & S. Viera (Eds.), Bilingualism in the bicentennial and beyond (pp. 53–85). New York, NY: The Bilingual Press. Valdés, G. (2000). Bilingualism and language use among Mexican Americans. In S. McKay & S. Wang (Eds.), New immigrants in the United States (pp.  99–136). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Varela, B. (1974). La influencia del inglés en los cubanos de Miami y Nueva Orleans. Español actual, 26, 16–25. Varela, B. (1992). El español cubano-americano. New York, NY: Senda Nueva de Ediciones. Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Part 1

Spanish in the United States Language attitudes

1 Language, contact, and the negotiation of Salvadoran identities in a mixed-Latino community José Esteban Hernández Introduction This study is primarily about dialects in contact, but instead of investigating whether two or more dialects are becoming more alike, I examine ideas and perceptions about language that permeate linguistic production and notions of identity among Latinos of Salvadoran and Mexican origin. My discussion of the notions of language and identity is based on the testimonies of Salvadorans referencing the perceptions and evaluations made about ways of speaking Spanish in a linguistically heterogeneous community. The study of dialects in contact has focused on the subjective evaluations that emerge toward dialects and their speakers. These judgments about dialects have been discussed qualitatively in connection to the role of language and the construction of identity in contact societies (e.g., Edwards, 2009; Le Page & TabouretKeller, 1985); their effects also have been measured quantitatively (e.g., Kerswill, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2002; Trudgill, 1983, 1986, 2004) to account for processes of language change in contact. Ideas about language have repercussions beyond the communicative scope because the choice to use or reject a linguistic feature functions as a way of affirming in-group or out-group identities and associations. In the case of prolonged interaction between Salvadorans and Mexicans, perceptions, opinions, and evaluations of the ethnic groups in contact are often tied to language and to “ways of speaking” within shared grounds in the community. In the testimonies that are analyzed here, speakers comment on features in lexicon, phonology, and syntax, characteristics of the speech of Salvadorans that stand out to their Mexican peers. Thus, the purpose of the present study is to determine the repercussions that ideas and perceptions about language have on the linguistic production and on the construction of identity among Salvadorans in contact with Mexicans. Latino demographics The ethnic and linguistic composition of many cities in the United States has been dramatically transforming since the mid-twentieth century (see Bayley, 2004; Fishman, 2004). And as the overall growth in the Latino population confirms,

12  José Esteban Hernández Latino communities in the United States are at the forefront of this demographic change. Census data show a gradual increase in the Latino population, rising from 11.7 million in 1980 to 21.9 million in 1990, and to 32.8 million in 2000 (Lipski, 2008, pp. 6–8). The 2010 census confirmed the same upward trend, showing that the Latino population had grown to 50.5 million (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). Areas of earlier Latino settlements, including those in the Southwest, the Northeast, and in southern Florida, have received an important share of the recent Latino immigration, boosting the numbers of Spanish speakers in long-established Latino communities in Texas, California, Illinois, New York, and Florida. Growth comes hand in hand with a greater internal diversity that has changed the face of many Latino communities. This greater diversity is representative of more areas of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula (Lipski, 2008). In addition to the “other Latino” category, a direct consequence of this growth is that regional or national identities, such as Central American, South American, Caribbean, Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Salvadoran, Dominican, and Colombian, are found side by side with Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican regional or national identities (e.g., Potowski, 2013). Some groups have arrived in such high numbers that they are associated with a certain region or city in the United States: Dominicans in New York (Alba, 2009), Salvadorans in Los Angeles and in the Washington-Baltimore area (Sorenson, 2013), and Nicaraguans in Miami, to name a few (Lynch, 2009). In addition, diversity brings an increase in hybrid identities. MexiRicans in Chicago are a well-documented case study of the effects of contact on the speech and attitudes of Latinos of mixed origins, such as Mexican and Puerto Rican (see Potowski, 2016, 2004; Potowski & Matts, 2008; Torres & Potowski, 2008). This diversity has transformed Latino communities into fertile ground to test contact-induced change in language and changes in the way speakers think about language and identities. Situations of dialects in contact where one or two groups of speakers of different, yet related, varieties relocate in significant numbers to the same geographical location are of particular importance because they often bring about a reevaluation of speaker attitudes and community attitudes toward particular features—evaluations that are then extended to the varieties in contact and to their speakers. The case in question involves close interaction between Latinos of Mexican and Salvadoran origin living in a Houston neighborhood. Since the early 1980s, the contact between Mexican- and Salvadoran-origin speakers has increased throughout the southwestern United States. In the Houston case, as Salvadorans arrive to an area that is numerically dominated by speakers of a variety different than their own, the Salvadorans tend to adjust certain features in their speech to more closely match features found in the speech of their Mexican interlocutors in their daily exchanges. Speakers coming in contact seem to be more aware of the use of features that act as linguistic stereotypes and that have the function of indexing identity and community evaluations. In situations of dialectal contact, emerging attitudes toward members of a particular group, whether negative or positive, are often distorted and extended as judgments about features or the varieties in contact.

Salvadoran identities  13 Latinos are the fastest-growing segment of Houston’s population. Their numbers increased from 730,865 in the 2000 census to 917,993 in 2010, when they accounted for 43.4% of the city’s residents. Mexican-origin Latinos make up the majority of the city’s Spanish speakers. According to the 2010 census, a Mexicanorigin population of 696,279 makes Houston their home, compared to 84,866 Salvadorans. The official census figures also showed that Mexicans alone make up 32.9% of the city’s population and 75.7% of the Latino population. Salvadorans, the second-largest group, make up 3.4% of the city’s population and 9.1% of the Latino population. Most of the speakers interviewed live in the Second Ward or Segundo Barrio area, one of the most important Latino enclaves in the city. Figures from the 2010 US Census showed that Latinos make up 94.7% of the overall population in the Segundo Barrio zip code. The Mexican-origin Latinos account for 83.1% of that population; Central Americans, the majority of them Salvadorans, comprise 6.5%; other Latinos make up the remaining 5.6%, and only 4.9% are non-Latinos. Language and identity In multilingual societies, the complexity attached to the construction and negotiation of identities is often twofold. Among Latinos in Houston, the collective perceptions and evaluations of the dialects in contact are often used by speakers when indexing identities and when ascribing individuals to specific social groups. In defining the construction of ethnic identity, for example, Fought (2006, p. 6) places as much importance on self-identification as on the ascriptions and perceptions of others. Thus, the way that others see us and what others think of us are as important as our own notions of self. From this perspective, identity is better understood as being partially imposed and partially self-selected. In my discussions of the role of language in indexing identity, I look beyond the communicative functions of language and focus on the symbolic functions. As explained by Edwards (2009), The essence of the distinction between the communicative and the symbolic functions lie in the differentiation between language and its ordinarily understood sense as an instrumental tool, and language as an emblem of groupness, a symbol, a psychosocial rallying-point. (p. 55) In mixed communities, the role of language becomes essential when establishing identities because language is a salient characteristic at the time of marking differences, just as dress, food, music, and religious customs. In heterogeneous Latino communities, language is perhaps the key resource at the disposal of speakers at the time of constructing the multiple layers of identities needed to surf the daily interactions. Ideas about language and the attitudes that speakers have toward languages, or in this case dialects, often materialize in speaker choices in communicative exchanges, shaping images of self and of the identities conveyed to others.

14  José Esteban Hernández

Participants and data The testimonies that I analyze here come from interviews of the naturally occurring speech of 25 Salvadoran participants in Houston, Texas, and eight transitory Salvadoran migrants interviewed in Brownsville, Texas. All speech samples were obtained through conversations. These hour-long interviews are characterized by an informal style and a semi-directed slant, which allowed informants to talk about growing up in El Salvador, their experiences in crossing—in most cases as undocumented immigrants—through Mexico when applicable, the hardships of the civil war for first-generation Salvadorans, their arrival in Houston, and their adaptation to life in Houston; younger-age-of-arrival participants talked about growing up in Houston, interaction with fellow Latinos—mainly Mexicans or Mexican Americans, their adaptation to life in the United States, their perceptions of the war, based mostly on second-hand accounts, and in many cases their perceptions of travel in Mexico or El Salvador. These participants come from different areas of El Salvador, but the eastern part of the country is well represented in our sample. For many of the Salvadoran participants, coming to the United States involved crossing through Mexico. Thus, immigrants traveling by land came in contact with Mexicans long before reaching Houston. In fact, it is not uncommon for Salvadorans to stay anywhere from a couple of days to several months in Mexico before continuing their journey north. Once in the United States, it is also likely that they may first come in contact with someone of Mexican origin (Rodriguez, 2007). Salvadoran immigrants have carved unique enclaves within the greater Houston area, but even then, they still live in close proximity to the Mexican-origin majority. Many Salvadorans continue to take reside within established Mexican enclaves where the use of a common language and the similarities in work and housing patterns generate a prolonged and intense contact with repercussions on the speech and identities of the groups involved. Contact creates many opportunities for interethnic associations. For instance, almost half of my informants had a Mexican spouse, many declared that they have close Mexican friends, and all reported going to church services, stores, and restaurants that cater to Mexicans. The Salvadorans interviewed in Brownsville share several characteristics that define them as transitory migrants. All of them had traveled through Mexico for two to five weeks and they had entered the United States rather recently at the time when they were interviewed. They all had the intention of remaining in the border region for a couple of weeks before continuing their journey north.

Dialect contact and its social repercussions Situations of dialects in contact are well known for the beliefs about languages (and dialects) and their speakers that often materialize. Martín Butragueño (1993), for example, carried out a detailed examination of the attitudes that emerged in a suburb of Madrid as speakers of Southern Peninsular varieties (mainly Andalusian) came in contact with speakers of Castilian Spanish. In this situation, the

Salvadoran identities 15 local dialect enjoyed a generalized prestige in the community. As a result, most comments about the local dialect were overwhelmingly positive, but they were somewhat negative in respect to the dialects of the migrant population. As a practical strategy, Salvadorans in the United States take advantage of the different codes at their disposal when negotiating identities. Lipski (2008, p. 160) proposes that Salvadorans in the United States sometimes show a “linguistic ambivalence” that eases their incorporation into the at-large Latino communities where they live. As a strategy, the manipulation of codes and linguistic features helps Salvadorans to modify their lexicon, phonology, and syntax when “blending in” with other Latinos is perceived as beneficial (Lipski, 2008, pp. 160–161). Converging with the dialect of an interlocutor or diverging from it has been explained in terms of accommodation, a process often understood as the intricate contextualized alternatives that create a feeling of solidarity or distance through speech (Giles & Coupland, 1991; Giles, Taylor, & Bourhis, 1973, p. 179). Accommodation theory maintains that speakers modify their speech in the day-to-day communicative exchanges (Coupland, 1985, p. 153; Giles & Powesland, 1975; Giles et  al., 1973; Trudgill, 1986). Accommodation has a practical side. When brought about by the need to make communication possible, it enhances the interlocutor’s involvement and brings about a heightened social acceptance within the speech community (Trudgill, 1983, p.  143). Thus, accommodation can trigger adjustments to pronunciation and to other levels of the grammatical structure. Previous studies by Hernández (2011, 2009, 2002) and Aaron and Hernández (2007) determine that, in their interactions with Mexican interlocutors, Salvadorans in Houston increase their use of a fully realized, syllable-final /s/, in detriment of the two weakened variants, aspiration and deletion, a characteristic feature in Salvadoran speech. The increase in the full realization of syllable-final /s/ points to processes reminiscent of accommodation as the possible reason for this adaptation. In an earlier study that compares speech data from El Salvador to data gathered in Houston, Hernández (2002, pp. 104–105) shows that Salvadorans in Houston use higher rates of verbal tuteo (e.g., hablas “you speak”), the preferred form of address in the local Mexican variety, in detriment of voseo (e.g., hablás “you speak”), the preferred form in El Salvador. When compared to speakers in El Salvador, the Houston participants decrease their use of voseo dramatically. In addition, participants who are of a younger age at the time of arrival to the contact area produce lower rates of voseo, suggesting that the contact of dialects in Houston involves the incorporation of traits and distribution patterns of a new dialect and that the distribution is always subjected to internal and external constraints. Accommodation theory explains the linguistic choices made by Salvadorans living in an area where speakers of Mexican Spanish predominate. In this particular situation, Salvadorans may opt to adjust their speech to their Mexican interlocutors or not. When they make that decision, Salvadorans and Mexicans in Houston seem to be aware of the symbolic function of features that differ considerably in the two dialects and that come to index the speech and identity of the groups in contact. A speaker’s decision to resist (diverge) or yield (converge) to accommodation is closely linked to attitudes and evaluations that emerge from

16  José Esteban Hernández the community and that are often expressed as judgments and attitudes about ways of speaking. Thus, while dialect contact acts as a major agent in bringing about language change, the force that has a bearing on molding linguistic competence originates in the evaluations of the individual and of the group, as language change is often influenced by the prestige and stigma that speakers attach to linguistic features (Garrett, 2010, p. 19). In what follows, I look at some of the effects of the contact situation on speaker perceptions about language and identity, as articulated in the testimonial evidence. I consider the practical aspects of negotiating identities through linguistic means for Salvadorans; I look at the emerging language attitudes particular to this situation of contact; I discuss the linguistic stereotypes that are ascribed to individuals and groups and the way that speakers challenge individual and collective ascription to generalized ideologies; I also present some of the issues that bring about insecurities attached to identity ascriptions, to language production, and to the choice of linguistic forms in speech. The practical aspects of negotiating identities In describing the collective situation of Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, Arias (2007) perceives that, in their effort to blend in, Central Americans displaced from war-torn communities often find themselves coping “with the angst of having to pass for Mexican” (p. 110). Arias goes on to say that for this population, blending in has a practical effect since “being confused with Mexicans sometimes works to the Central American’s advantage as a mechanism of survival, enabling them to camouflage themselves” in an often hostile environment (p. 110). For undocumented Salvadorans in Houston or on their way to the United States, negotiating their identities by blending in linguistically can have a practical side as well, as seen in Example 1. 1. Bueno, en Chiapas [México] fue cuando uno coge el miedo tú coges el miedo ya de, pues ya estás en territorio mexicano ya, ya vas a empezar a, a hacer lo que te dijieron, ¿vedá? Tener cuidado y mira pa’ todos los lados y fíjate a quién le preguntas, no hables [risas] con acento y, y para adelante. (SBC—JG/M/22/14/Mex) Well, in Chiapas [Mexico] was where one becomes afraid of, since you are in Mexican territory, you are going to start to, to do what you were told, right? Be careful and to be on guard and to notice who you ask, do not talk with an accent [laughter] and, and onwards. For these immigrants, “passing for Mexican” is a coping strategy that relies heavily on making the most of the linguistic codes at hand. Immigrants traveling through Mexico depend on features that in their mind index a Mexican identity. The mediation of identities through linguistic means, however, is often a difficult task for recent immigrants. In an extreme case, and given the initial unsuccessful attempts to accommodate, the Salvadoran informant with a Mexican family

Salvadoran identities 17 in Example 2 pretended to be mute when interacting with other Mexicans while traveling through Mexico. 2. Y entonces este, a la niña le digo, si te preguntan algo tú vas a decir de que yo soy muda, que no sé hablar, para que no me conozcan el acento. (SBC—GU/F/28/18/Mex) And then uhm, I tell the [Mexican] girl, if they ask you something you are going to say that I am mute, that I do not know how to talk, so that they [Mexican immigration agents] do not recognize my accent. This “passing for Mexican” strategy is adopted as soon as the Salvadoran migrants cross into Mexico, where sounding less Salvadoran during the journey north is a conscious effort that increases the possibility of reaching their final destination unharmed. The emerging attitudes toward language Beliefs about members of a specific group and their languages are more readily promoted and externalized in situations of contact. As noted by Garret (2010), “language attitude issues extend to all manner of sociolinguistic and social psychological phenomena, such as how we position ourselves socially, and how we relate to other individuals and groups” (p. 15). The opinions that speakers have about their language and the language(s) of others may be positive or negative, but in situations of contact, individuals and groups externalize feelings that endorse the superiority of a dialect or language over another (see Fought, 2006). In the present contact situation, specific linguistic elements in the speech of Salvadorans are less positively evaluated, meaning that Salvadorans often give in to the pressures of accommodation. Most often, when a negative value is assigned to a specific linguistic feature, and in turn to one of the varieties in contact, those values tend to share similar pan-Hispanic appraisals outside the contact community and are supported by views about which linguistic forms are “correct” and which are “wrong”—that is, which features of speech have prestige, whether overt or covert, in the speech community. Social perceptions toward some of the most marked features in Mexican and Salvadoran Spanish differ. Demographics probably weigh in on this because Mexicans make up the majority of the Latino population, and their dialect is closely associated with the formal and informal registers used by the local media. Many of the nonstandard features found in the speech of Mexicans in Houston tend to have some degree of covert prestige, a situation that is not extended to many of the nonstandard forms in the speech of Salvadorans. The two varieties also differ significantly at the lexical, syntactic, and phonological level. At the phonological level, consonants in syllable-final position undergo greater phonological reduction or change in Salvadoran Spanish when compared to Mexican Spanish. For example, syllable-final /s/ is reduced to an aspiration or deleted more in

18  José Esteban Hernández Salvadoran than in Mexican speech; a word such as desde “since” may sound as dehde or dede. Word-final /n/ tends to be velarized, becoming more like the final sound in the English pronunciation of sing, and making a word such as Jiuston (Houston) sound as Jiustoŋ or Jiutoŋ. Thus, features in Mexican speech are evaluated more positively, and features that are evaluated positively carry a greater degree of social prestige in comparison to those that are not, a fact that determines speech patterns in this situation of contact. Salvadorans may not be embracing or rejecting Mexican speech as much as they are attempting to approximate their own speech to an idealized standard—a standard in which consonants are neither weakened nor changed in word- or syllable-final position. The association is made between language and ethnic identity in the community, where the linguistic ideologies draw a closer parallel between nonstandard dialect features and those more marked features in the Salvadoran dialect. For Salvadorans in the United States, the linguistic awareness that is brought about by dialect contact can have important implications because linguistic production plays an important role in asserting or rejecting group identity and association. The acceptance or rejection of the phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features that are characteristic of Salvadoran speech functions as a way of affirming Salvadorans’ association or disassociation with their ethnic group. In Houston, Salvadorans are aware that evaluations take aim at particular features in speech, as shown in the brief explanation in Example 3. 3. Antes [los mexicanos] me hacían chistes, y quizá por eso no decía mucho también. Me hacían chistes por ser salvadoreño, por decir cipote o vos o. . . . Es diferente porque los mexicanos a veces dicen tú, se tratan de tú, y no es porque lo queramos decir porque sale naturalmente, hay muchas palabras que son distintas y todavía stereotypes, lo estereotipan a uno. (Hou—MP/M/19/4)1 Before they [Mexicans] used to make jokes and that’s probably why I didn’t say much. They made jokes because I was Salvadoran, for saying cipote “boy” or vos “you.” . . . It’s different because Mexicans sometimes say tú “you”, they address each other by tú “you”, it’s not because we want to say it because it comes out naturally, there are many words that are different and still stereotypes, they stereotype you. Differences are articulated in terms of the variation found in the two varieties, and it seems that lexical items, such as the use of cipote “child” instead of niño “child,” and features—such as voseo, the use of the pronoun vos “you” instead of tú “you” and its corresponding verb forms—characteristic of the speech of Salvadorans receive more negative evaluations in person-to-person interaction. The apologetic tone in the testimony of the speaker can be understood only in terms of the fostered collective mind-set that does not weigh the competing features in the same light. Attitudes are not always positive, or even neutral, toward the speech of Salvadorans, nor to some of the forms associated with it.

Salvadoran identities 19 Similar attitudes toward Spanish linguistic varieties are reported by De Genova and Ramos-Zayas (2003, p. 152) among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago, where speakers are often keen to imitate each other and pinpoint characteristic “habits of pronunciation” attributed to the groups. One of the Puerto Ricans interviewed by the authors jokes about the way that Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in the community speak by making reference to features that distinguish the two varieties. De Genova and Ramos-Zayas also maintain that Mexicans in the community often view the situation in terms of a hierarchy, where Mexicans evaluate their own use of Spanish in a more positive light when compared to the Spanish spoken by Puerto Ricans. Interviewees mention specific features in the Spanish spoken by Puerto Ricans that are targeted by Mexicans, such as lateralization of syllablefinal /r/ and weakening of syllable-final /s/. Thus, one of the most marked points of friction between Puerto Ricans and Mexicans emerges from the perceived differences in their use of Spanish. Negative attitudes are the forerunners of language change. Once a negative evaluation is attached to a target form in the speech of Salvadorans, the use of that characteristic feature may start to decrease in the public sphere, particularly among adolescents exposed to the close scrutiny and scorn of peers. Among some of the younger informants, the rejection of all Salvadoran forms in speech, and in extreme cases of the home language itself, seems to be the result of contact, which is not free of interethnic friction. 4. Y pues sí, no queríamos hablar español y entonces este . . . y mi hermano, mis compañeros y todos, más mis amigos, y o sea pos ya ‘horita ya los veo más grandes y veo que ya, como que quiero saber más [español]. (Hou—CR/M/23/9) And well yes, we refused to speak Spanish and then uhm . . . and my brother, my classmates and everyone else, my friends more than anything, and that is well now I see them a lot older and I see that now, it’s like I want to know more [Spanish]. Interethnic relations in the community are complex. Changes in attitudes and in language are possibly due to the close interaction between the groups. In a study that analyzes Salvadoran-Mexican encounters in Los Angeles, Osuna (2011, p. 9) notes that the internal tensions that are palpable in the community environment continue to exist alongside displays of solidarity that align the two communities in opposition to the established dominant order of Anglo-Saxon Americans. In many ways, Mexicans and Salvadorans in Houston also form close-knit associations. Rodriguez (2007, p. 94) suggests that, overall, there appears to be less physical separation between the two populations in Houston today than in the previous decades, a fact that eases communication and contact. Likewise, Rodriguez claims that in the workplace “Mexican and Central American immigrants seem to have greater contact as they reach beyond their ethnic social networks” (p. 94). An increase in intragroup interaction has a predictable effect on the psychological

20  José Esteban Hernández disposition of speakers as sensibility to marked features in the contact varieties heightens and in time affects particular speech forms and patterns. In addition, the attitudes that materialize become an added burden in the underlying language contact situation in which the local variety of Spanish is not always evaluated as highly as the local variety of English. The linguistic stereotypes and the assertion and rejection of identities As explained by Garrett (2010, p.  33), the differences between varieties and styles can trigger generalized assumptions about the members of a particular group. In contact situations, perceptions of self and of others, whether ethnic or linguistic, are tied to the generalized stereotypes and prejudices that groups often have of each other. Thus, speech plays an important role in determining identity and in shaping the categorization of social, ethnic, and cultural background, which may later materialize as preconceptions about the individual or the group and their way of speaking (Hammer & Blanc, 1998, p. 129). Salvadorans that establish themselves in areas where Mexicans predominate may end up accommodating to Mexican interlocutors in everyday interactions. The acceptance or rejection of any adjustment to their own way of talking is based on the evaluations that stem from the community norms prescribed by the contact situation. Milroy and Milroy (1997, p. 51) talk of this in terms of attitudinal changes that surface out of the social practices that sooner or later permeate linguistic practices. In Houston, many of the Salvadorans interviewed reveal that at one point or another they have been harassed by their Mexican peers, as seen in Example 5. 5. Entonces sí, mi novia, mi novia era de México porque yo o sea, siempre, siempre ha sido atraído o sea [risas] a las muchachas de México [risas] entonces este—(. . .) Entonces el, el papá de ella que era de México, y ella había nacido aquí, se enojó porque no quería que ella, ella tuviera un novio salvadoreño entonces yo le dije [hace una seña] . . . entonces hubo un problema pero eso fue todo, y ya de allí pues. (Hou—CR/M/23/9) So yes, my girlfriend was from Mexico because I, that is, have always, always been attracted, that is [laughter], to girls from Mexico [laughter] so uhm— (. . .) so the, the girl’s father was from Mexico and she had been born here he got mad because he didn’t want her to have a Salvadoran boyfriend so I told him [gesture] . . . so that was a problem but that was it, and from there on. Attitudes and judgments, whether negative or positive, about individuals or a particular group may be distorted to the point where the same judgments are ascribed to the speech of those individuals. Attitudes and judgments are often externalized as stereotypes of the group and of their particular variety, or their way of speaking, as is recurrently expressed by the Salvadoran informants in Houston. When asked

Salvadoran identities 21 to talk about the main problems young Salvadorans face in the area, the informant (Inf.) in Example 6 commented to the interviewer (Int.) about the problem of stereotypes: linguistic stereotypes. 6. Int.: Inf.:

Int.: Inf.: Otra voz: Inf.:

¿Qué tipo de problemas tienen los estudiantes salvadoreños en Houston? Uhm . . . o sea, ahora creo que . . . no sé pero . . . es que hay una sección de Houston que hay mucho salvadoreño y como que está mal—right? [a otro salvadoreño en el cuarto] mal vista, o sea sí . . . se les mira mal, entonces ya la gente crea una imagen que todos somos así. ¿Todos? ¿Cómo? Así como, no sé, mal hablados, que hablan feo, no hablan muy bien, y no se visten muy bien, algunos, right? Es la imagen. Ahum, entonces ya la gente creó una imagen de los salvadoreños. (Hou—FR/F/22/4)

Int.: Inf.:

What type of problems do Salvadoran students face in Houston? Uhm . . . well, right now I think that . . . I don’t know but . . . it’s just that there is a section of Houston where there are a lot of Salvadorans and it seems that it’s not well—right? [to another Salvadoran in the room] not well seen, yes that is . . . they’re not well seen, so people already created an image that we’re all like that. Int.: All? How? Inf.: Like, I don’t know, foulmouthed, that their speech is ugly, they don’t speak very well, and they don’t dress very well, some, right [to another Salvadoran in the room]? Another voice: That’s the image. Inf.: Ahum, so people already created an image of Salvadorans. The stereotypes mentioned here center on language use and on language evaluations, mainly on the aesthetics of Salvadoran speech and on the apparent linguistic practices that are ascribed to the entire group. Similar stereotyping was found in a study of transitory Salvadoran migrants traveling through Mexico. Hernández and Maldonado (2012) found that transitory migrants are the target of rampant discrimination; negative evaluations prevail among Mexicans, as is evident in Example 7. 7. Un día estaba yo en la central y se acercó una señora a ofrecerme trabajo pa’ pintar una casa, le dije que sí y le pregunté dónde era, y nomás donde me oyó hablar me dijo, pero eres de El Salvador verdad, y le dije que sí, y ella dijo, olvídalo ustedes son bien ratas, entre mí pensé, los ratas son ustedes. (Mex Mig—JR/M/28/-)

22  José Esteban Hernández Once I was in the bus station and a lady walks up to me and offers a job to paint a house, I said yes and I asked where it was, and as soon as she heard me speak she said, but you’re from El Salvador right, and I said yes, and she said, forget it all of you are crooks, inside of me I thought, you are the crooks. Language is the distinctive feature in this situation of contact where attitudes are linked to predetermined notions about ways of talking. Linguistic differences are used to epitomize the acts and deeds of a whole group, as in Example 7, where a Salvadoran accent triggers the worst biases in the Mexican interlocutor. In their study of the contact situation in Houston, Hernández (2009) and Aaron and Hernández (2007) reported a similar intensification of the negative attitudes toward Salvadoran features and speech. In the case of transitory Salvadoran migrants, phenotypic and cultural similarities mean that the linguistic behavior gains relevance because the migrant’s origin is revealed only in communicative exchanges, often triggering negative perceptions and attitudes in their Mexican interlocutors. Language functions as a distinguishing marker in situations of contact, and transitory Salvadoran migrants traveling through Mexico on their way to the United States are well aware of the benefits that knowing new linguistic codes affords them. Salvadorans face a longer trek than Mexicans in their journey north and face added risks as they travel by land. For many Salvadorans, blending in linguistically has a practical aspect that begins as soon as they cross into Mexico. Sounding the least Salvadoran possible is a conscious effort that increases the chances of reaching their final destination safely. For many, being able to surf smoothly between linguistic codes broadens their ability to negotiate identities in their journey through Mexico, as seen in Examples 8 and 9. 8. Int.: Inf.: Int.: Inf.:

Adoptas alguna característica mexicana en tu ruta hacia los Estados Unidos? Cuando quieren abusar les decimos: ¡Chales güey! ¡Si somos mexicanos cabrones! (Mex Mig—RO/M/32/-) Do you adopt any Mexican characteristics on your way to the United States? When they want to take advantage of us we say, “Come on man! We’re just as Mexican!”

9. Nomás cruzando Guatemala, enseguida empiezas a hablar como mexicano pa’que crean que eres de ahí. Rápido nos queremos quitar el acento y decir chales, vato, güey, ése, joto y cabrón. (Hou—JG/M/22/14) As soon as you leave Guatemala, you begin talking like a Mexican so that everyone thinks we’re from there. We want to get rid of our accent quickly and we say things like chales, vato, güey, ése, joto y cabrón.

Salvadoran identities  23 Migrants resort to the use of lexical items in their attempts to boost their interlocutor’s credibility when posing as Mexicans. It is interesting to notice that personifications in Examples 8 and 9 consist of lexical items that turn out to be linguistic stereotypes of what the migrant assumes to be “Mexican speech.” Thus, opinions and judgments about the ways of speaking in this situation of contact materialize as prejudices in speech. Attitudes toward speakers of Salvadoran varieties emerge as soon as these migrants arrive in Mexico. However, for Salvadorans traveling through Mexico, making sense of the complexity of the new linguistic resources at their disposal— their semantic nuances, and their pragmatic functions—in such a scant time is not an easy task. Consequently, the burden is often abridged by resorting to linguistic stereotypes and to marked forms that stand out to the migrant ears. Example 10 shows a detailed account of the crossing experienced by a returning immigrant now living in El Salvador. 10. Entonces le—el vato dijo, eh, ¿cómo se llama? . . . que era primo de mi señora y me dice . . . oye me dice—todos dijimos que éramos mexicanos, sí pues soy de acá le digo, órale dice—porque él, se hizo—él era amigo de uno que se llama . . . y dice estos son . . . unos amigos ves que han venido de Veracruz ‘hora, ya empezamos a platicar, pero es fregado como usté no conoce—no, no conocía nada de lo que era Veracruz—ya le—Veracruz, pero conocía el puerto nomás, y entonces me decía el baboso, ¿vos te acordás? [le preguntó su primo a él] no, fíjate que yo me vine muy chico le dije. (ES—MC/M/52/-) So I—the guy said, uhm, what’s your name? . . . he was my wife’s cousin and he says . . . hey he told me—we all said we were Mexican, yes well from here I said to him, okay he says—since he, became—he was a friend of one called . . . and he says they’re from . . . see some friends who came from Veracruz now, we started talking, but it’s hard since you don’t know—I didn’t know anything about Veracruz—so I—Veracruz, but I just knew the port, and so the jerk kept saying, do you remember? [His cousin was asking him] not really, I left at a very early age I said. In his account, this migrant simulates a Mexican origin by assuming a Veracruz identity, because the speech of certain areas of the state are well known throughout Mexico for their aspiration and deletion of syllable-final /s/, a feature also shared by Salvadoran speech. Ultimately, the persona resorts to lexical items (e.g., vato “guy” and órale “okay, come on”), which pump up the interlocutor’s credibility. Salvadorans in transit and in Houston seek to neutralize their “otherness” through the appropriation of linguistic elements unique to Mexican speech. Linguistic consciousness is raised by contact, as demonstrated by the previous testimonies. In examples like 9 and 10, speakers come to terms with the fact that accent or pronunciation is the key when concealing or negotiating identities. But

24  José Esteban Hernández until that level of phonological proficiency is mastered, migrants rely on more readily available linguistic sources. The issue of linguistic insecurity What are the linguistic and psychological repercussions of the linguistic chauvinism that speakers in this situation of contact endure? In situations of societal bilingualism, negative attitudes expressed toward one of the two codes in the community bring about an asymmetrical relation in the way that individuals and groups relate to the varieties in contact, and ultimately to the individuals claiming affiliation to each of the groups. In cases where two varieties meet, attitudes attached to the speech varieties are often construed around beliefs that focus on the standard/nonstandard debate. Shared opinions about language may also convey perceived ideas about socioeconomic differences, and they may even claim discrepancies in the degree of cognitive aptitudes or the social integrity of the individuals that make use of a particular language variety. Such a harsh linguistic environment, where the speech of a particular group is under constant scrutiny, brings about a state of linguistic insecurity in speakers: a state of mind that results in a vigorous hypercorrection in speech. In extreme cases, linguistic insecurity prompts individual decisions to stop using specific features or a particular variety. In the collective sphere, insecurity generates shift, and in the present situation, it is the speech of Salvadorans that is under fire and directly impacted. Many of the younger-age-of-arrival informants mention the difficulties of dealing with a Salvadoran identity in a locus of language and dialect contact, as seen in Example 11. 11. De ahí quise saber más de mí porque todo el tiempo que tenía aquí, pues no sé, hasta me daba pena decir que era de El Salvador porque tanto la cultura de acá de los Estados Unidos tuvo mucho impacto en mi vida, entonces no sé cuando estaba en high school iba y me daba como vergüenza decirlo [que era de El Salvador]. (Hou—CR/M/23/9) From then on I wanted to know more about myself because during my time here, well I don’t know, I was even ashamed to say that I was from El Salvador because the culture here from the United States had a lot of impact on my life, so I don’t know when I was in high school I would go and I was ashamed to say it [that he was from El Salvador]. The linguistic choice made by the speaker in Example 12 mirrors a tendency seen among other Latinos and immigrants in the United States. According to census figures, close to 97% of Salvadorans in Houston who are 5 years old and older claim to speak Spanish at home (Garoogian, 2012, p. 937); however, one potential outcome of linguistic insecurity consists of the denial of a Salvadoran identity,

Salvadoran identities 25 which for some younger arrivals may involve the rejection of the heritage language in out-group communication. 12. Porque yo sí, yo he notado, yo sé que muchas personas uhm—son salvadoreños, pero no quieren que la demás gente sepa, yo digo que es ignorancia eso porque uno siempre debe sentirse orgulloso . . . es una de las cosas de que a mí, que yo, yo siempre ha [he] pensado y yo, yo sé de mucha gente que niega—más a muchachos en la escuela, jóvenes que por ejemplo que vinieron aquí de, de tres o cinco años de edad y luego aquí se crecen ya costumbres americanas sin costumbres salvadoreñas y ellos niegan que son salvadoreños. (Hou—RO/M/23/11) Because I have, I have noticed that a lot of people uhm—they are Salvadorans, but they do not want others to know, I say that this is ignorance because one must always feel proud . . . it is one of the things that I, that I have always thought and I, I know about many persons that deny—more among young people in school that for example came here of, of three or five years old and then they grow up here and acquire American habits without Salvadoran habits and they deny that they are Salvadorans. Another possible consequence involves avoiding a Salvadoran accent, which may involve holding back phonological and morphosyntactic traits and lexical items that can be traced back to the speech of Salvadorans. 13. Int.: Háblame un poco sobre lo que dijiste ahorita que por el acento te veían como diferente, ¿no? Inf.: Oh, pues eh—pues uno tiene uhm—bueno, los salvadoreños tenemos un acento diferente, ¿no? Se nota y yo no lo he perdido todavía, es algo con que uno se creció, yo me crecí hablando de esa manera y hasta cuando hablo inglés yo puedo tener el acento salvadoreño, a veces, a veces que yo me doy cuenta lo trato de, de eliminar, ¿no? de sacarlo, pero y si se me olvida lo, lo vuelvo, lo sigo haciendo porque pues a veces es difícil este . . . con mi familia pues hablo bien el español, ¿verdá? Muchos amigos ahora que tengo mexicanos no saben que yo soy de El Salvador ni cuenta se dan, hasta a veces que yo, yo les digo que yo soy salvadoreño y, y no me creen, piensan que estoy jugando con ellos. (Hou—EL/M/26/10) Int.: Inf.:

Talk to me about what you mentioned earlier that they looked at you differently [in school] because of your accent, right? Oh, well, uhm, well one has uhm—well, Salvadorans have a different accent, right? It is obvious and I have not lost it yet. It is something with which one grows up. I grew up talking that way and even when I talk

26  José Esteban Hernández English I can have a Salvadoran accent, sometimes, sometimes when I realize, I try to eliminate it, right? To discard it, but if I forget, I—I do it again, I continue doing it because sometimes it is difficult uhm . . . with my family I talk good Spanish, right? Many Mexican friends that I have now do not know that I am from El Salvador they do not even notice, even sometimes when I tell them that I am Salvadoran and, and they do not believe me, they think that I am joking with them. Example 13 illustrates the case where characteristic features and patterns of the speaker’s earliest vernacular have been modified. The informant’s assertion about talking “good Spanish” at home refers to speech forms used with his children and Mexican wife, suggesting that the speech patterns used at home are perhaps closer to a Mexican norm, and more positively evaluated in the public sphere. In discussing attempts to blend in culturally with Mexican spheres by Central Americans, Arias (2007) comments that it led many to “adopt an identity that was not truly their own, an identity they were somewhat familiar with, but that they did not master nor act out with the same casualness of gesticulation than if they were simply being themselves” (p. 110). At the same time, and as an added burden, the speech of many Salvadorans, and particularly the speech of the younger generations, is often evaluated in a less positive light by recent arrivals or by Salvadorans back home, as we see in Example 14. 14. Y entonces este cuando están—ah, mis primos acababan de venir y entonces fui a ‘garrarlos a ellos al aeropuerto y se están burlando de cómo hablamos nosotros. (Hou—CR/M/23/9) And so uhm when they’re—uhm, my cousins had just arrived and so I went to pick them up at the airport and they’re making fun of the way we speak. These Salvadorans seem trapped between two forces that are prone to judge their ways of speaking. Likewise, Salvadorans in their home country attribute specific features, such as tuteo, to the speech of kinship living in the United States. 15. Int.: ¿Cuándo usan el vos, cuándo usan el tú y cuándo usan usted? Inf. 1.: Inf. 2: Inf. 1: Inf. 2: Inf. 1: Int.: Int. 2:

Vos cuando hay confianza— Sí. Pa’ las personas— Pero el “tú” casi nunca lo usamos. Sí, los que vienen de Estados Unidos de aquí, que vienen hablando así Oh, los salvadoreños que vienen a— Sí hablan de “tú”, los absorbe el ambiente. (ES—AR/M/37/-)

Salvadoran identities 27 Int.: Inf. 1: Inf. 2: Inf. 1: Inf. 2: Inf. 1: Int.: Inf. 2:

When do you use vos [you casual], when do you use tú [you casual], and when do you use usted [you formal]? Vos when there is a relationship of closeness— Yes. For those persons— But we never use “tú.” Yes, those that come from the United States, they come here talking like that. Oh, [returning] Salvadorans that come to— Yes, they use “tú,” their environment absorbs them.

The negative reinforcement that many Salvadoran speakers receive from all the different fronts discussed has a harmful effect on their linguistic output. Among our informants, the criticism that some of them undergo brings about a state of linguistic insecurity in speakers (particularly among the young) that results in a vigorous hypercorrection in speech. In extreme cases, linguistic insecurity prompts individual decisions to stop using distinctive features that speakers associate with the speech of Salvadorans.

Conclusion In their testimonials, speakers indirectly maintain that accommodation has a practical aspect for Salvadorans in their contact with Mexicans. Perhaps, in the most concrete aspect, speakers are concerned with easing communication between the groups. However, I attribute accommodation a more symbolic role, one where speakers negotiate identities through linguistic means. This is of high importance for Salvadoran migrants traversing Mexico, where migrants risk discrimination, detention, and deportation and are the target of physical and psychological abuses when singled out as Salvadoran or Central American. Navigating identities by decreasing their use of marked features and increasing the use of features with higher prestige is also beneficial to Salvadorans interacting with Mexicans on a daily basis. The attitudes that emerge, as a consequence of contact, adhere to language features that stand out to the speakers of the contact varieties, and these attitudes may be ultimately ascribed to members of the groups in contact. Speakers in this contact situation target features not present or shared by the repertoires of the two contact varieties, but the most vulnerable features are those that do not have an overt or covert prestige for Mexican speakers. Mexicans and Mexican Americans have a long-standing presence in the area and constitute the overwhelming numerical majority among Latinos in Houston. Stereotypes and their ascription to speakers, either using a particular feature or speaking in a particular way, are also a derivative of the contact situation. As a side effect, speaker insecurities materialize and target speech production, affecting choices in speech. Often, forms that have become stigmatized are not regarded as suitable for generalized use and are conferred a more restricted use. Thus, the contact situation brings about a heightened linguistic awareness in speakers. In the testimonials presented, it is clear that

28  José Esteban Hernández this consciousness has important repercussions on the speech of the Salvadorans that interact with Mexicans in Houston as well as among the Salvadorans that have journeyed through Mexico. The linguistic awareness that is brought about by contact has important psychological repercussions that are reflected on linguistic output and on individual and group identities. In addition, language use among Salvadorans has important repercussions because the use or rejection of the phonological, grammatical, and lexical features associated with Salvadoran speech affirms group associations or disassociations.

Note 1 The information included in parenthesis is the following: Corpus: Hou = Houston, ES = El Salvador, Mx Mig = Mexican migrant—speaker/sex/age/age of arrival.

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Salvadoran identities 29 Hammer, J. F., & Blanc, M. H. A. (1998). Bilinguality and bilingualism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hernández, J. E. (2002). Accommodation in a dialect contact situation. Revista de filología y lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 28(2), 93–110. Hernández, J. E. (2009). Measuring rates of word-final nasal velarization: The effect of dialect contact on in-group and out-group exchanges. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13(5), 583–612. Hernández, J. E. (2011). Measuring rates and constraints of word-final nasal velarization in dialect contact. In L. A. Ortiz-López (Ed.), Selected proceedings of the 13th Hispanic linguistics symposium (pp. 54–69). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Hernández, J. E., & Maldonado, R. A. (2012). Reducción de /s/ final de sílaba entre transmigrantes salvadoreños en el sur de Texas. Lengua y Migración, 4(2), 25–42. Kerswill, P. (1994). Dialects converging: Rural speech in urban Norway. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Kerswill, P. (1995). Phonological convergence in dialect contact: Evidence from citation forms. Language Variation and Change, 7, 195–207. Kerswill, P. (1996). Children, adolescents, and language change. Language Variation and Change, 8, 177–202. Kerswill, P. (2002). Koineization and accommodation. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, & N. Schilling-Estes (Eds.), The handbook of language and variation and change (pp. 669– 702). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Le Page, R. B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lipski, J. (2008). Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Lynch, A. (2009). Otras procedencias. In H. López Morales (Ed.), Enciclopedia del español en los Estados Unidos (pp. 382–389). Madrid: Instituto Cervantes, Santillana. Milroy, J., & Milroy, L. (1997). Varieties and variation. In F. Coulmas (Ed.), The handbook of sociolinguistics (pp. 47–64). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Osuna, S. (2011). Latina/o encounters in Los Angeles: Mexican and Salvadoran intraLatina/o struggles and Mexican/Salvadoran subjectivities (Master’s thesis). University of California, Santa Barbara. Potowski, K. (2004). Spanish language shift in Chicago. Southwest Journal of Linguistics, 23(1), 87–116. Potowski, K. (2013). El contacto de dialectos del español en los Estados Unidos. In D. Dumitrescu & G. Piña-Rosales (Eds.), El español en los Estados Unidos: E pluribus unum? Enfoques multidisciplinarios (pp. 151–168). New York, NY: Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española. Potowski, K. (2016). IntraLatino language and identity: MexiRican Spanish. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins. Potowski, K., & Matts, J. (2008). Interethnic language and identity: MexiRicans in Chicago. Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 7(2), 137–160. Rodriguez, N. (2007). Comparing Mexicans and Central Americans in the present wave of U.S. immigration. In J. L. Falconi & J. A. Mazzotti (Eds.), The other Latinos: Central Americans in the United States (pp. 81–100). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sorenson, T. (2013). Voseo to tuteo accommodation among Salvadorans in the United States. Hispania, 6(4), 763–781.

30  José Esteban Hernández Torres, L., & Potowski, K. (2008). A comparative study of bilingual discourse markers in Chicago Mexican, Puerto Rican and MexiRican Spanish. International Journal of Bilingualism, 12(4), 263–279. Trudgill, P. (1983). On dialect: Social and geographical perspectives. New York, NY: New York University Press. Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in contact. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Trudgill, P. (2004). New dialect formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. United States Census Bureau, United States Department of Commerce, Economic and Statistics Administration. (2010). American fact finder: Community facts. Retrieved from http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml

2 Perceptions of Spanish(es) in the United States Mexicans’ sociophonetic evaluations of [v] Whitney Chappell Introduction Indicative of a former phonemic contrast that was merged over time, orthographic and in Modern Standard Spanish fall under the scope of a single phoneme, /b/, and both graphemes receive the same pronunciation in most varieties: either [b] or [β] depending on phonological context (Morgan, 2010, pp. 171–178). In addition to [b] and [β], some dialects, like Spanish in the United States, feature the voiced labiodental fricative [v]—for example, vampiro “vampire” as [vam. ˈpi.ɾo]. In Texas Spanish the realization of [v] is most likely in the speech of women, English-dominant bilinguals, and when it corresponds to orthographic (Trovato, 2017), and these findings suggest that [v] in Spanish is likely a contact feature reinforced by the contrastive English phoneme /v/—for example, van and ban as [væn] and [bæn], respectively. Recent studies have shown that phonetic contact features can acquire local social meaning (Barnes, 2015; Davidson, 2019) and, given the high frequency of the variant and its relationship with extralinguistic factors like sex and language dominance, it is possible that [v] has become associated with specific social properties as well. The present chapter seeks to establish the range of social meanings indexed by [v], which will shed light on why Spanish speakers in the United States might agentively opt to employ the variant. Exploring the Spanish spoken in the United States is a rather tall order, however, as it is far from singular. On the contrary, many different Spanish(es) are spoken as the result of disparate sociohistorical conditions, linguistic and cultural contact, and language-learning curricula. For this reason, I investigate how monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers perceive three different Spanish-speaking groups in the United States: late immigrants from Mexico, heritage Mexican Spanish speakers, and learners of Spanish as a second language (L2). Such a multipronged approach will paint a clearer picture of the way in which [v] is interpreted across Spanish-speaking voices in the United States. To motivate and situate the quantitative analysis, the second section briefly discusses the most relevant work on the populations explored in this chapter, sociophonetic perception, and [v] in the Spanish spoken in the United States.

32  Whitney Chappell

Literature review Heritage speakers, L2 learners, and late immigrants in the United States This section presents a brief overview of the three speaker profiles investigated in this experiment: heritage Spanish speakers, L2-Spanish learners, and late immigrants from Mexico. Unfortunately, spatial issues prevent a more thorough examination of each group, but the reader can consult Beaudrie and Fairclough (2012), Mackey and Gass (2012), and Bhatia and Ritchie (2012) for more information and helpful points of departure for additional research. Heritage Spanish speakers, or individuals raised in the United States and exposed to Spanish at home (see Valdés, 2001), represent a deeply heterogeneous group with varied linguistic abilities in their home language.1 While individuals’ experiences with and attitudes toward Spanish vary widely, most heritage speakers identify emotionally and culturally with their home language (Fishman, 2001). However, heritage speakers tend to become more dominant in the majority language, English, because it serves as the language of instruction, power, and prestige in the United States (Bustamante-López, 2008). Internalized language attitudes may also play a role in heritage speakers’ shift away from the home language. According to Zentella (2007), “the Spanish of those born and/or raised in the U.S. is attacked by insiders and outsiders” (p. 33), and even bilingual teacher candidates in Texas, many of whom have themselves been subjected to hostility or even violence because of their Spanish, often uphold dominant ideologies by devaluing local varieties of Spanish that deviate from prescriptive norms (Ek, Sánchez,  & Quijada Cerecer, 2013). Mexicans often describe American-born bilinguals as speaking pocho, mocho, Spanglish, or Tex Mex rather than Spanish, and prescriptivists, including teachers, can treat heritage speakers as semilingual or even alingual speakers whose Spanish is contaminated by English or whose English is contaminated by Spanish (Zentella, 2007). In addition to impacting language use, these biased attitudes can deprive students of educational opportunities (Chin, 2010) and affect self-esteem. Next, the profile of Spanish-language learners in the United States tends to be more uniform than that of heritage speakers. The educational system in the United States generally introduces Spanish into the curriculum in junior high school or high school (Montrul, 2012), and L2-Spanish speakers grow to be proficient to varying degrees in the Spanish language. In terms of pronunciation, there is a consensus in the literature that heritage speakers appear to enjoy phonetic benefits over L2 learners given their exposure to the Spanish sound system early in life (Au, Knightly, Jun, & Oh, 2002; Au, Oh, Knightly, Jun, & Romo, 2008; Knightly, Jun, Oh,  & Au, 2003; Oh & Au, 2005; Rao  & Kuder, 2016; Rao & Ronquest, 2015). Finally, while far from homogeneous, postadolescent Mexican immigrants in the United States generally maintain higher proficiency levels in the first language than the second (Jia & Aaronson, 1999), with more limited second-language

Perceptions of Spanish(es)  33 influence on the first language than early bilinguals (Grosjean, 1989, 1997; Grosjean & Soares, 1986). Several studies have found this difference to be reflected in pronunciation. Given heritage speakers’ early exposure to the English language, their production is more influenced by English phonology than late immigrants, with English cognate words impacting heritage speakers’ voice onset time (VOT) (Amengual, 2012) and orthographic resulting in higher rates of [v] production (Hualde, Nadeu, & Simonet, 2010; Rao, 2014; Trovato, 2017). Additionally, the acoustic distribution of Spanish vowels and rate of unstressed vowel reduction differ between heritage Spanish speakers and monolingual or Spanish-dominant speakers (Alvord & Rogers, 2014; Ronquest, 2012, 2016; Willis, 2005), showing the extent to which age of acquisition and language dominance can alter production. Sociophonetic perception Expanding upon the work of Silverstein (2003), Penelope Eckert (2008) has proposed the concept of the indexical field, which has shaped the way sociolinguists view the relationship between sound and social meaning. She contends that “the meanings of variables are not precise or fixed but rather constitute a field of potential meanings—an indexical field, or constellation of ideologically related meanings, any one of which can be activated in the situated use of the variable” (Eckert, 2008, p. 454). For instance, a hyperarticulated variant, or “a stylized and clarified form of pronunciation” (Oviatt, MacEachern, & Levow, 1998), can be used to signal intelligence, articulateness, and politeness, among other qualities (Eckert, 2008, pp. 467–470), which is likely why hyperarticulated /t/ has come to be associated with nerd girl speech in California (Bucholtz, 2001). More standardized, hyperarticulated speech is often associated with women, as female speakers tend to have a more exaggerated vowel space than men across languages (Hay, Sato, Coren, Moran, & Diehl, 2006) and behave more conservatively than men in cases of stable variation or change from above (Labov, 1990, 2001). For example, in English women tend to avoid consonant cluster reduction and the alveolar variant of (ING) more than men (Byrd, 1994; Labov, 1966; Trudgill, 1974), and they reduce coda /s/ less frequently than men in several varieties of Spanish (Cedergren, 1973; Dohotaru, 1998; López Chávez, 1977), which highlights the link between women and hyperarticulated forms across languages. Sociolinguistic perceptions of speakers are not exclusively based on a single factor like hyperarticulation; rather, they involve the interpretation of numerous, layered linguistic variables given knowledge of the speaker, style, register, and the local social evaluations afforded to them, which together create more nuanced and complex social meanings (Eckert, 2008, 2012). However, altering a single linguistic variable can and does influence social perceptions of a speaker (see Chappell, 2019). For instance, manipulating coda /s/ to [h] prompts lower evaluations of status and higher evaluations of male heteronormativity (Walker, García, Cortés, & Campbell-Kibler, 2014), and presenting Costa Rican listeners with intervocalic [z] rather than [s] yields heightened evaluations of masculinity, niceness,

34  Whitney Chappell confidence, and localness for men and decreased status for all speakers (Chappell, 2016). Particularly important to the present study is the fact that phonetic variants that result from linguistic contact are often connected to social meaning as well. The first example comes from Barnes (2015), who investigated the social meaning of contact variants in Asturias, Spain. In Asturian Spanish, which includes features of both Spanish and Asturian, the masculine singular morpheme /o/ and the feminine plural morpheme /as/ can be raised to [u] and [es], respectively—for example, perro “dog” as [ˈpe.ru] or casas “houses” as [ˈka.ses]. Local listeners associated both of these Asturian variants with a more rural origin, and listeners also linked [u], but not [es], with lower status, which highlights two key points. First, like noncontact variants, contact variants can become imbued with social meaning, and second, some contact variants appear to be more salient than others. Next, Davidson (2019) explored two common Catalan-Spanish contact features: /l/ velarization and intervocalic /s/ voicing, both of which are common among bilinguals in Catalonia. Each variant evoked social evaluations from listeners, with both [z] and [ɫ] resulting in higher evaluations of in-group solidarity among Catalonia bilinguals, but only [ɫ] prompted higher evaluations of accented speech, rurality, and bilingualism. Participants’ explicit commentary on the ele catalana “Catalan l” confirmed the stereotype status of /l/ velarization in Catalonia, while [z] appears to function as a less salient indicator to Catalonians (Labov, 2001). The fact that contact variants can acquire social meaning has inspired the present exploration of [v] in the United States, and a more detailed description of the variant of interest is provided ahead. [b]/[β] vs. [v] variation According to traditional phonological accounts, the /b/ phoneme may be realized as [b] or [β] in Modern Standard Spanish depending on preceding phonological context, with [b] emerging in utterance-initial, post-pausal, and post-nasal contexts and [β] occurring elsewhere (Morgan, 2010, pp. 171–178). The presence of orthographic or , a relic of the former two-phoneme system (Pharies, 2015), does not affect the articulation of /b/ in the vast majority of Spanish-speaking dialects. To date, no Spanish phonetics textbook acknowledges [v] as a possible allophone of /b/ (Takawaki, 2012, p. 8); [v] is only recognized as a possible allophone of syllable-final /f/ in very limited cases of regressive voicing assimilation—for example, afgano “Afghan” as [av.ˈɣa.no] (Piñeros, 2009, pp. 276–279). The production of [v] as a variant of /b/ serves as a particularly fascinating locus for sociophonetic exploration because it appears in monolingual Spanish, contact Spanish, and L2 speech. For instance, monolingual speakers of Chilean Spanish produce [v] as an allophone of /b/ regardless of orthography (Sadowsky, 2010; Vergara Fernández & Pérez, 2013), and monolingual Venezuelan Spanish speakers, especially women, often produce orthographic as [v], perhaps due to the didactic effort to phonetically distinguish between the graphemes in Venezuelan schools (Romero, Guerreiro, & Alviárez, 2008). Similarly, [v] in monolingual Mexican Spanish is most common in formal or emphatic speech, and it

Perceptions of Spanish(es)  35 has been described as la v’ pedante “the pedantic [v],” given its association with hypercorrect speech found in educational settings (Lope Blanch, 1988; Salvador, 1987). In contact varieties, [v] has been noted in the Spanish spoken along the BrazilUruguay border (Carvalho, 2006, p. 89); Paraguay (Lipski, 1994, p. 309); regions of Spain, including Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands (Hualde, Olarrea, & Escobar, 2009, pp. 420–421); northern Mexico (Takawaki, 2012); and the United States (Phillips, 1972; Timm, 1976; Torres Cacoullos & Ferreira, 2000;2 Trovato, 2017). In the aforementioned dialects, the presence of a contrastive /v/ phoneme in the contact language likely reinforces the distinction between and in Spanish. In the United States, [v] has been documented in the speech of Mexican Americans in California, where it was most frequent among Englishdominant speakers (Phillips, 1972; Timm, 1976). In Texas, Trovato (2017) finds that orthography is the single best predictor of [v], with [v] significantly more likely with a written than , especially in word-medial position. Additionally, Trovato (2017) shows that [v] is more likely in the speech of women and those with higher levels of written proficiency in English. Finally, L2-Spanish learners exhibit the same tendency to produce Spanish as [v]; Face and Menke (2009) demonstrate that all L2-Spanish learners in their study, regardless of proficiency, produced and differently, with higher rates of fricative and approximant production for and higher rates of stop production for . However, it should be noted that the pronunciation of among Spanish speakers may not be exactly like English [v]; Rao (2014, 2015) finds that the grapheme does correspond to more tense approximants than among heritage speakers in the United States, but these tense approximants were not produced with the high-frequency noise typical of [v]. In other words, the production of in the United States may be an intermediate realization between a lax approximant and [v]. In sum, [v] serves as a potentially interesting marker of regional and social identity given its high frequency in the United States and appearance across different speaker groups. With this in mind, the present chapter seeks to answer the following research questions: 1

What social properties do Mexican Spanish speakers associate with [b]/[β] and [v] in the Spanish spoken in the United States? 2 How will evaluations differ for heritage Spanish speakers, late immigrants from Mexico, and L2-Spanish learners in the United States?

Methodology Speakers and stimuli The audio files used in the experiment came from three groups of speakers: four late immigrants from Mexico, four heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish, and four L2-Spanish-language learners. The late immigrant group consisted of two

36  Whitney Chappell women and two men between the ages of 21 and 37 (mean: 26, median: 23). These speakers were all born and raised in Mexico and came to the United States after the age of 13. All exclusively spoke Mexican Spanish in school, with family, and in society until arriving in the United States, at which point they began learning and speaking English. The heritage speaker group included two men and two women, all 20–21 years of age (mean: 20.25, median: 20), who were exposed to English and Spanish before the age of 5 in the household. All heritage speakers were schooled in the United States with English as the language of instruction, and all speakers in this group spoke Spanish with their grandparents, a mix of English and Spanish with their parents, and English with their siblings. Additionally, all rated their English abilities as stronger than their Spanish abilities. Finally, the language learner group consisted of two female speakers and two male speakers ranging in age from 20 to 49 (mean: 32.75, median: 31) who were born and raised in the United States as monolingual English speakers. All speakers from the language learner group started studying Spanish as a foreign language in school between the ages of 10 and 15 and currently claim they understand and speak Spanish with great difficulty or with some difficulty. All 12 speakers were recorded with a Plantronics DSP–400 digitally enhanced USB headset microphone connected to a laptop. In line with Walker et al. (2014) and Chappell (2016), the speakers were given fictional maps that included a series of named streets and buildings, and they were asked to use the maps to give directions to ten destinations from a designated starting place. The street names and destinations deliberately included cases of orthographic —for example, Avenida Veinticuatro “24th Avenue,” Bulevar Volcanes “Volcanoes Boulevard,” Hotel la Villa “The Villa Hotel,” and Hostal Oveja Negra “Black Sheep Hostel”—which would provide numerous opportunities to splice [v] or [b]/[β] into the speakers’ realizations. In addition to the street names and destinations, speakers were also expected to produce many forms of the verb ir “to go” and ver “to see”—for example, Vas a doblar . . . “You’re going to turn . . .” or Vamos a ver . . . “We’re going to see . . .”, resulting in additional splicing opportunities. When the map task was complete, speakers were trained to say each street name, destination, and commonly used conjugations of direction-giving verbs written with once with [v] and once with [b]/[β]. The destinations, street names, and verb conjugations were repeated until the author determined the pronunciation to be natural and fluid. Matched-guise test and listeners One utterance was extracted from each speaker, including at least two cases of orthographic : for example, “Vas a pasar el bulevar. Eh, sigues caminando y a tu izquierda está el Hostal Oveja Negra.” “You’re going to pass the boulevard. Um, you keep walking and on your left is the Black Sheep Hostel.” Again, in line with the methodology of Chappell (2016) and Walker et al. (2014), each extracted utterance was used to create two final guises: the first with spliced [v] in all cases of orthographic and the second with spliced [b]/[β] in all cases of orthographic .

Perceptions of Spanish(es)  37 In order to keep the manipulated utterances naturalistic, the [v] and bilabial segments could not be extracted on their own but rather were extracted along with the preceding (if applicable) and following vowel, which ensured onset and offset transitional cues remained intact. For example, in the [v] guise of an utterance involving restaurante vegetariano “vegetarian restaurant” the [eve] sequence would be spliced into the recording rather than the [v] alone. The creation of the bilabial guise is a bit more complicated, as both [b] and [β] occur for /b/, depending on phonological context. As previously mentioned, [b] occurs in utterance-initial, post-pausal, and post-nasal environments, while [β] tends to occur elsewhere (Morgan, 2010, pp. 171–178). The late immigrant and heritage speakers involved in creating the stimuli were able to successfully articulate both the stop [b] and the approximant [β] in their recordings, but three language learners struggled with the approximant [β] that does not occur in English.3 For the language learners unable to naturally articulate [β], the stop [b] was spliced into all contexts in the bilabial guise. The pronunciation of [b] where [β] would occur in native speech is not expected to significantly change listener evaluations, as all language learners were clearly identified as English speakers by the nine stimuli raters given other nonnative features—for example, atonic vowel reduction and the pronunciation of [h] in words like hotel and hostal “hostel”, where the grapheme should be silent. Three linguists, three native Spanish speakers, and three Spanish-language learners listened to the recordings and deemed the recordings to sound naturalistic. Additionally, they could clearly tell which guise involved [b]/[β] and which guise involved [v], and the linguists and native Spanish listeners were able to identify the late immigrant Spanish speakers, the heritage speakers, and the language learners from their recordings. After the stimuli had been tested with nine listeners, the perception experiment was designed using SurveyGizmo (Vanek & McDaniel, 2006), a survey tool that allowed the manipulated recordings to be uploaded and organized in a way that would streamline the experiment and simplify the analysis of the data. The manipulated stimuli were presented in a fixed pseudorandom order that was consistent for all listeners. This allowed for the guises to be maximally separated, for male and female voices to be separated, and for an even number of [v] guises to be presented alongside [b]/[β] guises. The reader is referred to the appendix for the exact stimuli heard by the listeners. Next, 75 native speakers of Mexican Spanish participated in the perception experiment, most of whom were relatively young college students in Central Mexico. The basic demographic information of the listeners is presented in Table 2.1. After answering these basic demographic questions, listeners were directed to one practice audio file, which featured a voice not used in the rest of the perception task and showed the listeners what they would be expected to do for the target voices. After the practice audio file, listeners heard the target voices interspersed with ten filler audio files. After listening to each audio file, the participants would evaluate each speaker on a scalar matrix of different social attributes—for example, Hispanicity and intelligence.4 Listeners also had to identify the speaker’s approximate age and place of origin, and they were invited to add optional

38  Whitney Chappell Table 2.1  Listeners’ basic demographic information Median/mean age (years) Age range (years) Male: Female (n) Highest education level (n) State of provenance (n) Total number of listeners

21/25 18–65 23:52 College graduate (18), Some college (45), High school graduate (10), Some high school (2) Querétaro (33), State of Mexico (23), Guanajuato (5), Puebla (3), Tamaulipas (2), Other (9) 75

comments if they had anything else to say about their perception of the speaker. Figure 2.1 contains a screenshot of exactly what the participants saw for each audio file throughout the experiment. Statistical analysis Following data collection, a statistical analysis was conducted to better understand the distribution and behavior of the data. Before this analysis could be conducted, the categorical evaluations of perceived age were first transformed into a numerical scale from younger to older, with 1 representing the youngest age category and 7 representing the oldest age category. Next, the evaluations needed to be centered and standardized to allow for comparison of the social properties, which were rated on a scale of 1–6, and perceived age, which had been converted to fall along a scale of 1–7. After standardizing and centering the evaluations, all listener ratings fall along comparable scales, with 0 as the new midpoint. That is, evaluations above 0 should be understood as above the midpoint, and evaluations below 0 should be interpreted as falling below the midpoint. Using the standardized and centered evaluations, a factor analysis (FA) was conducted to determine (a) which factors accounted for the majority of variation in listeners’ evaluations and (b) if evaluations of any of the individual factors were correlated and could be combined in any joint factors. The factors accounting for the majority of the variation in the dataset were determined using the Kaiser rule and the visual assistance of a scree plot. The FA determined three factors accounted for the most variation, including two complex factors and one simple factor: (a) evaluations of speakers’ intelligence and work ethic both loaded for the first factor, (b) evaluations of how Hispanic the speakers sounded and how well they spoke Spanish loaded for the second factor, and (c) ratings of how stuck-up (or fresa) the speakers sounded loaded for the third factor. However, a more detailed investigation of the data’s behavior showed that evaluations of intelligence and work ethic responded differently to variant ([v] or [b]/[β]). In other words, while listeners gave speakers similar ratings for their perceived intelligence and work ethic, they responded to the labiodental and bilabial guises differently as they evaluated each property. The same is true of evaluations of hispano and good Spanish; although listeners gave speakers similar evaluations for both qualities, the variant heard conditioned their evaluations in different

Figure 2.1  Screenshot of what listeners saw as they evaluated each speaker

40  Whitney Chappell ways. For this reason, the social properties that jointly loaded onto a single factor in the FA were not conflated in joint factors for the analysis. Rather, the social property with the strongest relationship to the variant heard was analyzed individually (intelligence and good Spanish, respectively), and models fitted to the coloading social property with a weaker statistical relationship to variant heard (work ethic and hispano, respectively) are not presented. Next, individual mixed-effects linear regression models fitted to intelligence, good Spanish, age, snobbishness, niceness, heteronormativity, and confidence were constructed in R (R Core Team, 2018), using the lmer function in the packages lme4 (Bates, Maechler, Bolker, & Walker, 2017), ƒ, and lmerTest (Kuznetsova, Brockhoff, & Christensen, 2016). In each model, listener and speaker5 are included as random effects, and evaluations of a particular social property (e.g., intelligence or niceness) serve as the dependent variable. The independent variables tested in each model include variant heard ([v] or [b]/[β]), listener gender, speaker gender, listener age, speaker type (late immigrant speaker, heritage speaker, or language learner), variant presentation order ([b]/[β] heard first or [v] heard first) to ensure variant order did not affect participants’ judgments, and the point in the experiment at which the audio file was heard (e.g., first, seventh, or twentieth audio file heard) to determine if ratings changed as the experiment progressed. All motivated interactions were also tested and, if the interaction reached significance, it was kept in the model. A multinomial logistic regression model was also fitted to evaluations of speaker origin in the package nnet (Ripley & Venables, 2016), testing the aforementioned independent variables, with p-values calculated manually. Only the models in which variant alone or an interaction between variant and another independent variable reached significance will be presented and discussed in the next section.

Results and discussion Before discussing the statistical models that include speaker type (late immigrant Mexican Spanish speakers, heritage Mexican Spanish speakers, or L2-Spanish learners) as an independent variable, it should be established that listeners could distinguish between the speaker groups. Delving into evaluations of speaker origin and how Hispanic the speakers sounded should help determine if listeners perceived linguistic differences among the groups. First, the mosaic plot presented in Figure 2.2 shows that the late immigrant group was predominantly evaluated as coming from Mexico, while language learners were predominantly evaluated as coming from the United States. Heritage speakers were more difficult for the listeners to place, with a relatively even split between the United States and some other or unknown place of origin. Relatively few listeners thought the heritage speakers sounded Mexican or Caribbean. Providing additional evidence that listeners perceived the three groups differently is the boxplot presented in Figure  2.3, which shows numeric evaluations of how Hispanic the groups sounded on the y-axis, and the speakers are divided by speaker type along the x-axis. The boxes represent the middle 50% of listener

Figure 2.2  Mosaic plot of listeners’ evaluations of speaker origin

Figure 2.3  Evaluations of how Hispanic the speaker groups sounded

42  Whitney Chappell evaluations, with the horizontal line indicative of the median value. The lines extending above and below the boxes show the upper and lower quartiles of evaluations, and the dots represent outliers. The L2 group was clearly evaluated as less Hispanic than the heritage group, which, in turn, was viewed as less Hispanic than the late immigrant group. These figures demonstrate that a clear difference was heard among the three speaker groups, which justifies the inclusion of this independent variable in the following models. Variant ([b]/[β] or [v]) on its own or in an interaction with another independent variable did not reach significance in the best-fit models of age, snobbishness, niceness, heteronormativity, or perceived speaker origin, and these models will not be discussed further. However, this independent variable did reach significance in the best-fit models of three social properties: good Spanish, intelligence, and confidence. The best-fit mixed-effects linear regression models fitted to these three social properties are presented ahead. The first model was fitted to evaluations of how well the speakers spoke Spanish, and the best-fit model included speaker type (learner, heritage, or late immigrant), speaker gender, variant, and an interaction between speaker gender and variant. As noted in Section  3, speaker and listener were included as random effects to decrease the noise caused by individuals and identify the broader, group-based patterns in the data. Although heritage speakers were evaluated as significantly more Hispanic than language learners (p < 0.001, see Figure 2.3), Table 2.2 shows that their Spanish was not evaluated as significantly better than language learners, while late immigrant speakers were viewed as speaking significantly better Spanish. Of particular importance to this chapter, a significant interaction emerges between variant and speaker gender. Given this significant interaction, both individual factors were kept in the model, but in the tables that follow the main effects are presented within parentheses because they are marginal to the interaction effect, in line with the principle of marginality. Following the results of the best-fit model in Table 2.2, the boxplot in Figure 2.4 shows the relationship among speaker type, speaker gender, and variant. Unsurprisingly, the late immigrant speakers are viewed as speaking the best Spanish, with language learners and heritage speakers receiving lower evaluations. Interestingly, male Table 2.2 Best mixed-effects model for good Spanish (significant predictors bolded, N = 1,800) Estimate (Intercept) −0.806 Variant = [v]: speaker −0.358 gender = male Speaker type = heritage 0.257 Speaker type = late immigrant 1.318 (Variant = [v] 0.126 (Speaker gender = male) 0.137 Listener evaluation range: −1.924 to 1.157

SE

t-value

p-value

0.115 0.066

−7.009 −5.434