Item Details

A matched-guise study on L2, heritage, and native Spanish speakers’ attitudes to Spanish in the State of Washington

Issue: Vol 11 No. 1 (2017)

Subject Areas: Gender Studies Linguistics

Abstract:

By means of a matched-guise study, this paper examines the attitudes of L2, heritage, and native Spanish speakers in the state of Washington toward Mexican-accented and English-accented Spanish. We interpret our findings in the wake of previous research on language attitudes and ideologies related to Spanish in the United States which shows that Spanish and those who speak it as a first or heritage language are thought to have a lower socioeconomic status than English and Anglophones. 97 Spanish-speaking participants residing in Washington (N=95) and the Pacific Northwest (N=2) rated 4 voices along six-point semantic differential scales falling into the dimensions of superiority, solidarity, language competence, and physical characteristics. We submitted mean scores to a linear mixed-effects model. Contrary to our expectations, all groups rated the Mexican-accented guises higher than the English-accented guises in the dimension of superiority. Also unforeseen, the L2 speakers rated the Mexican-accented voices higher in the dimension of solidarity. We consider the high level of education of the respondents and, for the L2 subjects, their experience as advanced Spanish language speakers, as likely explanations for the observed attenuation of well-documented prevailing stereotypes directed at Latinos from the monolingual community at large.

Author: Víctor Fernández-Mallat, Max Carey

View Original Web Page

References :

Anderson, T. K. and Souza, B. J. (2012) English-Spanish bilinguals’ attitudes toward L2 pronunciation: Do they identify with native Spanish speakers? In J. Levis and K. LeVelle (eds) Proceedings of the 3rd Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference 27–38. Ames: Iowa State University.

Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B. and Walker, S.(2015) Package ‘lme4’. Retrieved on 18 November 2015 from: https://github.com/lme4/lme4/.

Bayard, D., Weatherall, A., Gallois, C. and Pittam, J. (2001) Pax Americana? Accent attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand, Australia and America. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5(1): 22–49. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00136.

Beckstead, K. and Toribio, A. (2003) Minority perspectives of language: Mexican and Mexican-American adolescents’ attitudes toward Spanish and English. In A. Roca and M. C. Colombi (eds) Mi lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States: Research and practice 154–169.Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Bills, G. and Vigil, N. (2008) The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: A linguistic Atlas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Bouchard Ryan, E., Carranza, M. A. and Mofﬁe, R. W. (1977) Reactions toward varying degrees of accentedness in the speech of Spanish-English bilinguals. Language and Speech 20(3): 267–273.

Brennan, E. M. and Brennan, J. (1981) Accent scaling and language attitudes: Reactions to Mexican-American English speech. Language and Speech 24(3): 207–221.

Byers-Heinlein, K. and Garcia, B. (2014) Bilingualism changes children’s beliefs about what is innate. Developmental Science 18(2): 344–350. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12248.

Carranza, M. A. and Bouchard Ryan, E. (1975) Evaluative reactions of bilingual Anglo and Mexican American adolescents toward speakers of English and Spanish. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 13(166): 83–104.

Díaz-Campos, M. and Killam, J. (2012) Assessing language attitudes through a matched-guise experiment: the case of consonantal deletion in Venezuelan Spanish. Hispania 95(1): 83–102.

Ducar, C. M. (2012) SHL learners’ attitudes and motivations: Reconciling opposing forces. In S. M. Beaudrie and M. Fairclough (eds) Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States: The state of the ﬁeld 161–178.Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Escobar, A. M. and Potowski, K. (2015) El español de los Estados Unidos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fuller, J. M. (2013) Spanish speakers in the USA. Bristol, Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters.

García, O. (2011) Planning Spanish: Nationalizing, minoritizing, and globalizing performances. In M. Díaz-Campos (ed.) The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics 667–685. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Garrett, P. (2010) Attitudes to language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511844713.

Gort, M. (2008) ‘You give me idea!’: Collaborative strides toward bilingualism biliteracy, and cross-cultural understanding in a two-way partial immersion program. Multicultural Perspectives 10(4): 192–200. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/15210960802526086.

Guitart, J. (2004) Sonido y sentido: teoría y práctica de la pronunciación del español contemporáneo. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Gynan, S. (1985) The inﬂuence of language background on attitudes toward native and nonnative Spanish. The Bilingual Review 12(1): 33–42.

Hill, J. H. (1995) Mock Spanish: A site for the indexical reproduction of racism in American English. Retrieved on 25 October 2015 from: http://language-culture.binghamton.edu/symposia/2/part1/

Hill, J. H. (2008) The everyday language of white racism. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444304732.

Hosoda, M., Nguyen, L. T. and Stone-Romero, E. F. (2012) The effect of Hispanic accents on employment decisions. Journal of Managerial Psychology 27(4): 347–364. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/02683941211220162.

Hudson, A., Hernández-Chávez, E. and Bills, G. (1995) The many faces of language maintenance: Spanish language claiming in ﬁve southwestern states. In C. Silva-Corvalán (ed.) Spanish in four continents 165–183. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

Labov, W. (1972) Sociolinguistics patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Lambert, W. E., Hodgson, R. C., Gardner, R. C. and Fillenbaum, S. (1960) Evaluational reactions to spoken languages. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 60(1): 44–51. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1037/h0044430.

Lynch, A. and Klee, C. (2005) Estudio comparativo de actitudes hacia el español en los Estados Unidos: educación, política y entorno social. Lingüística Española Actual 27(2): 273–300.

McCullough, R. E. and Jenkins, D. L. (2005) Out with the old, in with the new? Recent trends in Spanish language use in Colorado. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 24(1–2): 91–110.

Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1998) Authority in language: Investigating standard English. New York: Routledge.

Porcel, J. (2011) Language maintenance and language shift among U.S. Latinos. In M. Díaz-Campos (ed.) The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics 623–645. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Potowski, K. and Carreira, M. (2010) Spanish in the USA. In K. Potowski (ed.) Language diversity in the United States 66–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511779855.005.

R Core Team (2016) R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. http://www.R-project.org/

Schwartz, A. (2011) Mockery and appropriation of Spanish in White spaces: Perceptions of Latinos in the United States. In M. Díaz-Campos (ed.) The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics 646–663. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Trudgill, P. (1974) The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

US Census Bureau (2010) American FactFinder. Retrieved on 10 September 2015 from: http://factﬁnder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml

Villa, D. J., Lapidus Shin, N. and Robles Nagata, E. (2014) La nueva frontera: Spanish-speaking populations in central Washington. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 7(1): 149–172. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2014-1161.

Zahn, C. J. and Hopper, R. (1985) Measuring language attitudes: The speech evaluation instrument. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 4(2): 113–123. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X8500400203.