Spanish in Context - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2014

The question of how and why change occurs is a persistent theme in research on language contact and sociolinguistics. In this article, I investigate the role of social context in producing change and maintenance in a contact variety of Andean Spanish. Two generations of speakers in a Quechua-Spanish contact zone in central Bolivia interpret stress shift on the first person imperfect past tense as a marker of the “reminiscent past.” An emergent but unstable grammatical distinction is entwined with lived experience and speakers’ positioning as social actors. Both stability and change are produced by speakers through practice and are closely related to the iconization of contact features as symbols of social orientation and experience.

Este artículo forma parte de una investigación más extensa que busca desentrañar cómo reconfiguran y negocian sus identidades un grupo de mujeres inmigrantes colombianas residentes en Chicago, particularmente en lo que tiene que ver con la lengua. Para efectos de la investigación se llevaron a cabo 20 entrevistas a profundidad con inmigrantes de diferentes edades, estatus económico y socio-cultural, estado civil y nivel educativo. Mediante el escrutinio minucioso de los datos se logró detectar patrones y temas recurrentes tanto en las narrativas individuales como en todo el corpus. Los resultados arrojados indican que el proceso de reconfiguración de la identidad en una segunda lengua y en una nueva cultura se alza como uno de los mayores retos del proceso migratorio de incorporación en la cultura de acogida para las mujeres colombianas.

Research conducted with monolingual native Spanish speakers has yielded discrepant results concerning the loss or maintenance of the subjunctive, whereas studies conducted with heritage speakers point to a gradual subjunctive loss (Montrul 2009; Mikulski 2010; Silva-Corvalán 1994a, 1994b, 2001). Cross-dialectal studies (Blake 1982; De Sterck 2000; Fernández Ulloa & Portillo Mayorga 2000; Menegotto 2003, 2004, 2008) have mainly focused on past tenses, and scarce are cross-dialectal studies investigating native speakers’ subjunctive use in the present tense. This study examines mood use by means of an acceptability test and a forced choice cloze test conducted by native speakers of two varieties of Spanish. One hundred and four adult monolingual native speakers of Spanish participated in the study — N = 56 from Rosario, Argentina and N = 56 from Toledo, Spain. Results indicate an overall vitality of the subjunctive and also reveal slight differences regarding acceptability based on gender and region.

This study presents linguistic and sociohistorical data on Afro-Peruvian Spanish (APS), an Afro-Hispanic dialect spoken in the province of Chincha (coastal Peru) by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work on sugarcane plantations in the seventeenth century. The present work provides new information on the origin of APS. In so doing, it casts new light on the genesis and evolution of Afro-Hispanic languages in the Americas and shows that, in light of recent works on the nature of Venezuelan, Ecuadorian and Bolivian slavery (Díaz-Campos & Clements 2008; Sessarego 2013a, 2014), colonial coastal Peru did not represent a “canonical breeding ground” (McWhorter 2000,7) for a creole language to form.

Most studies to date on the ability of English speakers to produce the Spanish approximants [β̞,ð̞,ɣ̞] have impressionistically looked at the stop-spirant contrast of English-speaking learners of Spanish (e.g. Zampini 1994, Díaz-Campos 2004, Face & Menke 2009), but no known study has empirically studied the degree to which these learners are able to spirantize when compared to native speakers. The current study looks at two groups of learners: one group composed of learners who had studied four semesters of university Spanish and another group composed of learners who spent 2 years abroad in a Spanish-speaking country. Intervocalic tokens of [β̞,ð̞,ɣ̞] were taken and were measured for degree of oral occlusion using the intensity curve in PRAAT. Additionally, a multiple regression analysis was run to determine the relationship that oral occlusion had with speech task type formality, motivational intensity, level of instruction/time abroad, phoneme type, and phoneme word position.

Some linguistic structures found in Amazonian Spanish tend to be associated by and large with a rural variety spoken by people frequently depicted as indigenous. However, direct observations indicate that most of these features are pervasive among speakers across the social spectrum. What, then, are the parameters of linguistic variation in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish? Is there any social and/or linguistic meaning associated with the attested variation? This paper looks at data from ten monolingual speakers, five born and raised in Iquitos, and five born and raised in Kokama indigenous villages. The linguistic variables examined are: (i) permutation j/f, (ii) possessor/noun number agreement, (iii) double possession, and (iv) genitive fronting. This study concentrates on one social variable, place, which is found to significantly impact language use. City-speakers emphasize or downplay their category membership through the quantitative manipulation of markers; village-speakers show less variability in their language use. In addition, certain possessive constructions seem to be undertaking specialized functions.