Variety in LanguageSpring 2011

Variety in LanguageSpring 2011

Walt Wolfram and Erin Callahan-PriceWalt Wolfram and Erin Callahan-Price

Latino English in the Mid-Atlantic South

Hispanic English Assumptions and Dialect Reality

Latino varieties of English are simply derived from imperfect learning and/or Spanish language transfer

Latino varieties of English have complex sociolinguistic patterning and are independent of Spanish and other English varieties

Hispanic English Assumptions and Dialect Reality: YOUR

TURN!?

?

The Great Language Shift in North Carolina

The Demographic Shift Almost 400% increase in Latino Population in

North Carolina since 1990, highest percentage of monolinguals in U.S.

Speakers in process of generational shift from Spanish-language dominance

Latino/a English is in its incipient stage of ethnolinguistic development in the Mid-Atlantic South vis-à-vis other regions (e.g. Southwest)

Latino Population Density 1990-2000

Latino Population Growth 1990-2000

1995-2004: 38.2% NC Latinos came from another country, 40.2 % another U.S. jurisdiction 21.6 % born in NC (Kasarda and Johnson 2006)

Attributes of the Great Language Shift

The Local Context Urban and rural, small-town populations

become home to emerging ethnic communities

Local and non-local models of language learning

Attributes of the Great Language Shift

The Sociopolitical Challenge Language as a proxy for broader political and

cultural concerns—the “Spanish-as-threat” ideology (Wolford and Carter 2008)

The English-Only Movement (1987) wakes up in North Carolina

The symbolic, attitudinal effect of dialect accommodation, transfer, and substrate

The Regional Dialect Context

Some Research Questions

What are the linguistic and social processes involved in the emergence of new ethnic varieties of language?

Is an emerging variety of Latino/a English developing from persistent substrate influence from Spanish-transfer or fossilized interlanguage features?

Do Latino speakers accommodate the local dialect characteristics of their cohort English-speaking communities, and if so, which cohort community? Why?

Research Questions: Emerging Varieties in North Carolina

Who are the primary models of English for the acquisition of English?

How does the emerging variety of Latino/a English compare with established varieties in other regional contexts?

What linguistic and social principles account for the emergence of a new ethnic variety?

Types of Linguistic VariablesTransfer variables:

Light [l] lateral monophthongal vowels [bet]’bait’ [bot] ‘boat’ More syllable-like timed rhythm), intonation

Dialect Accommodation Variables Southern diphthong ungliding ([tam] ‘time’ (Quantified) measure noun unmarking (five mile_) Habitual be (my ears be itching) Selected lexical items (e.g. y’all, address hey)

Interlanguage/Interdialectal tense marking negation

Types of Social VariablesDemographic:

Length of Residency (LOR) Birthplace Proportional ethnic density

Social Interactional Social networks, peer groups Institutional affiliations Subcultural affiliation

Ideological Cultural orientation Language attitudes Values, aspirations

Contrasting SitesHickory, NC (Kohn 2007a)

• Hickory (Pop. 39,476) A town located 1.5 hours north from Charlotte, NC near the Appalachian mountains

Anglo

AA

Latino

(77.2% Anglo, 14.1% African American, 7.7% Latino)

Contrasting SitesDurham, NC (Callahan 2007)

Durham (Pop. 209,009) located 45 min. (depending on traffic) W. of Raleigh

Durham Population

Anglo

AA

Latino

(45.51% Anglo, 43.81% African American, 8.56% Latino)

Contrasting SitesPearsall, TX (Callahan 2007, Wolford & Carter 2007)

Pearsall located two hours from the Mexican border, heavily Latino, four generations of Spanish-speaking residents

(84.2% Latino, 14.8% Anglo, 0.3% African American, 0.7% other)

Pearsall

On the Significance of Accommodating Local Dialect

On the Significance of Accommodating Local Dialect

I’m just doin’ it here. It’s “Girls on the Run.” Last time we had a race, but I didn’t want to go. It was too chilly. And--but this time—it’s gonna be this Saturday—I’m gonna go. It’s, like, you do runs for five mile_, or, one day I did a run for five miles and it’s real hard. (from Kohn 2007)

Nine-year-old, Born in Hickory, NC

Overall vowel systems and ethnolinguistic alignment

14 year-old male (b. 1992), born in Mexico, 7 yrs LOR; heavy gang involvement Durham, North Carolina

An’ nen, we came back the same night, I went outside--I was driving, I-uh, I was driving a car on the freeway, like, sssss, I went, like, past three cops, I was at like 80 (uh huh) speeding a whole lot, I think it was 60 or 70 mile, the speed limit and I was goin’ to 85, 90FW: Wow, did you –did you get caught?I’s about to get caught from a cop, he was like, he was following me

(From Kohn 2007b)

Overall vowel systems and ethnolinguistic alignment

But..it’s just like, the school man’s try-, uh, trying to keep the black man down, just like that, but it’s like, being stupid; he’s got, like, white friends and stuff.

16-year old male, born in Mexico, LOR 8 yrs. Hickory, NC

Phonetic notes: the lowered /æ/ creates an “Anglo” effect, while the monophthongized /i/ and /e/ sound “Latino”

(From Kohn 2007b)

Overall vowel systems and ethnolinguistic perceptions

14-year (b. 1992) old male born in LA. Hickory, NC

Not like in the streets, like that, no ‘cause I don’t want to get caught with the police, I don’t wanna get caught like that but I want a car like, like, for other stuff, yeah.

Phonetic notes: differentiates prenasal /æ/ from /æ/, fronted realizations of back vowels. /e/ and /o/ are not monophthongal. Weakened /ai/ glides make him sound“Southern”

(From Kohn 2007b)

The Relevance of Community Context

While the last two speakers live in the same town as, the neighborhood of the last speaker lives in a section of town that is largely African American, increasing potential accommodation to African American English.

Speaker’s neighborhood, is above 57% African American

The Varied Influence of Southern /ai/ Ungliding

Variation in glide trajectory: Siler City(from Wolfram, Carter, and Moriello 2004)

2400 2200 2000 1800 1600 1400 1200

1000

800

600

400

200

Abby

*** Local African American female

***

Local European American male

ManolitoAntonio

Pam

Omar

AnaKaren

Marina

Noel

Noie

F1

F2

The Varied Influence of Southern /ai/ Ungliding

Variation of /ai/ in lexical items

2600 2400 2200 2000 1800 1600 1400 1200

1400

1200

1000

800

600

400

alive

inside

outside

five

F1

F2

Nucleus-Glide Distribution(e.g. English time; Spanish bailar)

Spanish Non-South English

Southern Anglo English

Siler City Latino

Raleigh Latino

% of Glide to Vowel

76.5 47.0 17.5 42.4 55.5

Mean of Glide (Ms)

.191 .120 .021 .080 .117

The Subtle Influence of Southern English

Mean length of glide (Ms) for different varieties

0

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2Spanish

Non_South.Eng.

Southern Engl

Siler CityLatino

Raleigh Latino

The Subtle Influence of Southern English

Percentage of glide to vowel

0

20

40

60

80

100Spanish

Non_South.Eng.

Southern Engl

Siler CityLatino

Raleigh Latino

On the accommodating status of ungliding

Accommodation of ungliding and glide-to-nucleus ratio can be continuous and intermediate-it is not a discrete accommodation

The incipient stages of ungliding accommodation can be highly variable and show lexical sensitivity

The social and personal context of speakers, including speaker agency and symbolic affiliation, needs to be considered in understanding the accommodation of Southern ungliding

Contrastive Productions of the long i /ai/ Production

Contrastive Productions of the long i /ai/ Production

11-year-old girl, lifetime resident of Piedmont (Durham/Siler City), parents from Mexico

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten

13-year old brother, lifetime resident of Piedmont (Durham/Siler City)

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten

Southern Lexical Infusion in Emerging Latino English

Early adoption of plural y’alle.g. Can I help y’all

Regional address form heye.g. we say hey to each other

quotative be likee.g. She’s like, “Where we goin’

Phonological and Grammatical Accommodation

Social choice and affiliation in /ai/ accommodation

Social significance and habitual beSocial significance and habitual be

e.g. They be talking

She be asking me that and I be like (clicks), “She talked about what he talked about.”

The Quotative Frame(Kohn 2007, Kohn & Askin 2009)

The syntactic bracketing of directly reported speech, thought, emotions, mimetic expressions, response calls, etc. e.g. My brother says, “You’re so scare-dy cat you should get out”

e.g. Yeah, and I was like, “what are you talking about?” and she’s like “I know the apple laptop cost like nine hundred dollars so don’t tell me this is-” and I was like, “You know how much that purse cost?” and she’s like, “What? Like thirty?” And I was like, “Read the label” And she’s like…(Hickory female LOR category 3 uses 93 quotatives, 89 of which are be like)

Factoids about quotative be like

Rapidly acquired by ESL learners (Ferrara and Bell 1995)

Rapidly diffused in world Englishes (Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999, Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004, Buchstaller 2007)

Sociolinguistically meaningful and symbolic in both incipient and relatively stable varieties of English

Constraints on quotative be like

LOR: Be like favored by those with longer residencies, while say is favored by shorter residencies

Be like favored when the subject is in the 1st person, 2nd person or is “it”

Teens favor be like and it is often used to quote thought

Community site makes a difference; for example, Durham shows more diversity and more ‘invariant be like; Latinos with stronger African American affiliation

(from Kohn 2007)

Quotative Comparison:Hickory vs. Durham

(From Kohn & Askin 2009)

Comparison of Habitual be and Copula Absence for Quotative

(From Kohn & Askin 2009)

On the accommodating quotatives

Quotatives show relatively early accommodation, in keeping with early lexical adoption

The incipient stages of quotative accommodation are not unilateral; it shows structural reconfiguration in terms of quotative options

The social and local regional and ethnic context of the contact situation make a difference, as do LOR and speaker affiliation

Illustrative Example 1 Illustrative Example 1

The little mermaid when, um, she rescue a boy. And then they, they-she, um, help him, then she start singing to him. Then um, cause the boat they were on, they-it started on fire and it go underwater and he couldn’t breathe underwater so she took him over there, and her daddy said to them, ‘Rescue humans or nothing.’ And she don—and then a bird came and he said, ‘He’s dead.’ Then, um, his grandpa came and he wake up the boy and he was, uh, he said a girl was singing. Then she turn into a human.

Nine-year-old girl, born and raised in Siler City

Past tense unmarking

Illustrative Example 2 Illustrative Example 2

Like the other day I went to WaltMar and she was there, and we say hey to each other, and we wanted to spend the night one time at my house but she couldn’t cause she *haded to go with her family. They were gonna go somewhere. But I don’t when she’s (?)gonna spend the night with me. One time I spend the night at her house. Oh, it was, um, a sleepover. We had all kinds of friends we invite all of her friends, I invite mines so she invite hers and we had a sleepover. Whoever—whoever, um, sleeps, whoever wake up late, they were the ones who gotta, who gotta, um cook for them and clean up the room, and paint their face. So, I know I wake up early. I always wake up at five o’clock. So I *didn’t had to clean the room. I *didn’t even had to go in back.

Nine-year-old girl, LOR two years

Past tense marking in English

/t/ or /d/ following non-alveolar stops:

/mIst//laind/

/Id/ following alveolar

stops: /gritId/

Irregular Forms:

• Suppletives (gowent)

• Internal Vowel Change (runran)

• IVC + suffix (keep kept)

• Replacive final C: (have had)

English past tense morphology

Complexity and Accountability in Linguistic Variables:

Past Tense UnmarkingLinguistic Constraints on Usage:

Irregular vs. regular E.g. go/went vs. pass/passed

Long for ([Id]) vs. past tense cluster E.g. started vs. passed

Aspect (imperfect past vs. simple past) E.g. I drove to work all the time (imperfect)

vs. I drove to work yesterday (particular occasion, simple past)

Social Constraints Length of residency, community Language proficiency Generational status Social networks, interactional dynamics

Unmarked Tense: DurhamUnmarked Tense: Durham

The Durham Data (Callahan 200(From Callahan 2007)

0

20

40

60

80

100

1-3y 5-10y 10+y

Length of Residency

Per

cent

age

Irregular Verbs

Pre-vocalicBimorphemic Verbs

Pre-vocalicMonomorphemic

Long past /Id/forms

Unmarked Tense: PearsallUnmarked Tense: Pearsall

The Pearsall Data (Callahan 2007)

0

20

40

60

80

100

G1:

1918

-192

6

G2:

1932

-196

8

G3:

1987

-198

9

Per

cent

age

Irregular Verbs

Pre-vocalicBimorphemic Verbs

Pre-vocalicMonomorphemic

Long past /Id/forms

A significant aspectual markingA significant aspectual marking

(From Callahan 2007)

The strongest factor (favoring .894’ X2 per cell= .672) favoring the unmarked tense is the imperfectivity of the verb, thus showing an aspectual restructuring effect in the use of past unmarking in Latino English interlanguage.

On the status of tense unmarking

Some dimensions of variation in tense unmarking seem related to general SLA and interlanguage strategies; e.g. irregular verbs, long forms, etc. (Wolfram 1985; Wolfram & Hatfield (1986)

Some dimensions of cluster reduction, including bimorphemic verbs, may become a stabilized part of the emerging ethnic variety of Latino/a English

Reconfiguration of tense unmarking may include the transfer of or innovation of an aspectual marking dimension

On Persistent Substrate Influence: Syllable Timing

0.0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

Mea

n of

Med

ian

PV

Is, w

ith 9

5% C

Is

Demographic Group

African American European American Pre-1860 Eur. Am. Ex-Slave Jamaican Hispanic English Spanish

Measurement of Syllable Rhythm Duration (in ms) of adjacent syllable (σ) nuclei measured and compared using the PVI (Low and Grabe 1995) Pairwise Variability Index (PVI)

(PVI) = |σ1 – σ 2| / mean of σ1 & σ 2

High PVI score = more stress-timedLow PVI score = more syllable-timed

(From Thomas and Carter 2006)

Persistent Substrate?: Syllable Timing

PVI Score (lower is more syllabic-timed rhythm)

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6 NC AfricanAm

NC Anglo

Raleigh MexAm

Pearsall MexAm

Spanish

(Adapted from Carter 2007)

Converging Timing in Spanish and Latino English: The Case of Pearsall

(from Wolford and Carter 2007)

1st speaker: 29 year-old female, middle-class high school teacher. Post-grad.education, from the north of Mexico

2nd speaker: what do you think?

Syllable Timing: Social class matters?

PVI Score (lower is more syllabic-timed rhythm)(Callahan 2007)

Conclusions about Incipient Latino Varieties

The emergence of new varieties may involve aspects of fossilized transfer, interlanguage, and accommodation in complex interactions

Accommodation is not necessarily a discrete process; it may be incremental, partial, or interdialectal; for sure, it is highly variable on an intra- and interspeaker level

The role of the lexicon is significant in the development of incipient varieties, including both the acquisition process and symbolic social marking

Conclusions about Incipient Latino Varieties

There is some evidence from the comparison of longstanding communities (e.g. Pearsall) that there may be a shared, persistent substrate effect that co-exists with highly regionalized varieties of Latino English

There is evidence that new dialect formation may include the productive use of interdialectalisms and innovation

Dividends from Recognizing Dialect Diversity in ESL

Appreciating the symbolic role of dialects in teaching ESL

Understanding patterns of regional and ethnic dialects in emerging Latino English

Dividends from Recognizing Dialect Diversity

Integrating knowledge of dialect diversity into educational practice

Teaching tolerance for language diversity on a local and global level

Celebrating the southern heritage of ESL

References

Buchstaller, I. (2007). Localized globalization: A multi-local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like. Paper presented at NWAV 36, University of Pennsylvania.

Callahan, E. (2007) The old and new: It’s past tense marking in Pearsall, Texas, and Durham, North Carolina.Ferrara, K., & Bell, B. (1995). Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue

introducers: The case of Be +Like. American Speech, 73: 265-297. Kasarda, J. D., & Johnson, J. H. Jr. (2006). The economic impact of the Hispanic population on the state of

North Carolina. University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill.Kohn, M. E. (2007a). Latino English and the quotative system: How Latino kids in North Carolina talk about

what other kids talk about. Ms. North Carolina State University--- (2007b) Not in California anymore: Latino vowel space in North Carolina. Ms. North Carolina State

UniversityKohn, M. E. & Askin, H. (2009) American SpeechTagliamonte, S., & D’Arcy, A. (2004). ‘He’s like, she’s like’: The quotative system in Canadian youth. Journal of

Sociolinguistics, 8: 493-514.Tagliamonte, S., & Hudson, R. (1999). Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and

Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3: 147-172. Thomas, E. R. and Carter, P. M. ( 2006) Prosodic rhythm and African American English. English

World Wide 27.3. 331-355.Wolford, T. E. and Carter, P. M. (2007) Spanish-as-threat ideology & the sociocultural context of Spanish in

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Wolfram, Walt, Carter, P. M. and Moriello, R. (2004) New dialect formation in the American South: Emerging Hispanic English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(3):339-358.