Variation, contact, and change in Boston Spanish: how social meaning shapes stylistic practice and bilingual optimization
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Daniel Erker
and
Lee-Ann Vidal-Covas
Abstract
This paper examines variation in six features of Spanish, testing the hypothesis that outcomes of language and dialect contact are shaped by the differing social meaning of linguistic variables. Two of the study’s variables are strongly associated with aspects of identity and style. Four others are poorer signals of social meaning, despite constituting sites of crosslinguistic and/or dialectal difference. In the speech of life-long residents of the contact setting (Boston, MA), the weak features have converged with English grammatical norms. In contrast, the strong features show persistence of dialectal and crosslinguistic differences, suggesting that socially weaker variables are more susceptible to reconfiguration by bilingual optimization strategies. The effect of contact on strong variables, by comparison, is to amplify their already powerful links to ideologies of personal and group style. While strong variables are not immune to contact-induced change, modification in their use is primarily social, rather than cognitive, in nature.
Acknowledgment
We wish to acknowledge the enthusiastic research team of the Spanish in Boston Project: Gretchen Anderson, Corey Angers, Yadirys Collado, E. J. Conlon, Gabriela Diaz-Quiñones, Kendra Dickinson, Danielle Dionne, Daniela Estrella, Lily Fawcett, Lauren Gerrish, Morganne Goddard, Karina Hernández, Tommy Piernikowski, Madeline Reffel, Emma Temkin, Meda Sandu, Natalie Swiacki, Deb Waughtal, and Abbey Tolentino-Winter.
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Research funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (BCS-1423840).
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Conflict of Interest: The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Progressive aspect across temporalities: variation between synthetic and analytic forms in L1 and L2 Spanish
- Accounting for effects of monitored speech: vowel nasalization, nasal consonant weakening and /s/ production in Spanish
- Variation, contact, and change in Boston Spanish: how social meaning shapes stylistic practice and bilingual optimization
- First things third? The extension of canonically third-person singular inflections to first-person singular subjects in adult heritage Spanish
- Anti-homophony and rhizotony in the Spanish preterite
- Tenho cantado and venho cantando in Brazilian Portuguese
- Consequences of prosodic variation for spatiotemporal organization in Spanish stop-lateral clusters
- Gender agreement among Russian learners of Spanish in an instructed versus naturalistic learning environment
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Progressive aspect across temporalities: variation between synthetic and analytic forms in L1 and L2 Spanish
- Accounting for effects of monitored speech: vowel nasalization, nasal consonant weakening and /s/ production in Spanish
- Variation, contact, and change in Boston Spanish: how social meaning shapes stylistic practice and bilingual optimization
- First things third? The extension of canonically third-person singular inflections to first-person singular subjects in adult heritage Spanish
- Anti-homophony and rhizotony in the Spanish preterite
- Tenho cantado and venho cantando in Brazilian Portuguese
- Consequences of prosodic variation for spatiotemporal organization in Spanish stop-lateral clusters
- Gender agreement among Russian learners of Spanish in an instructed versus naturalistic learning environment
