Abstract
Dr. Anna Babel (The Ohio State University)
The fundamental questions behind the study of awareness and control of language are simple – how do people become aware of differences in the way that they (and others) speak, and how do they use this implicit or explicit knowledge in the perception and production of linguistic forms? One of the persistent questions around the study of awareness and control of language is the question of how our awareness changes over time and through life experiences. For this reason, studies of how our understanding of language and dialect variation changes through the experience of migration are of interest to the field today.
In this talk, I focus on the case of Bolivian migrants to Spain. It is estimated that up to 150,000 Bolivian migrants live in Spain, principally in the regions surrounding Madrid and Barcelona. While linguistic practices in both Bolivia and Spain include the use of Spanish (among other languages), there is maximal linguistic differentiation between Bolivian and central-northern European Spanish dialects, encompassing phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and pragmatics. In Bolivian Spanish, contact features from Quechua, an indigenous language of the Andes, become particularly salient in the context of contact with a European variety of Spanish, which is often framed as more “correct” than Bolivian Spanish, and feed into ethnic and linguistic differentiation driven by Latin American migration to Spain.
In this paper, I report on data gathered from interviews carried out in 2022 with 35 Bolivian migrants who lived in Spain and subsequently returned to Bolivia. The interviews included a variety of tasks meant to probe different kinds of awareness of dialectal differences. These methods provide a model for investigating how transnational migrants become aware of differences between Bolivian and European dialects of Spanish, and for investigating different types and qualities of awareness through responses to a variety of different tasks. In this talk, I focus on the phonemic difference between /s/ and /θ/, which is characteristic of European but not Latin American varieties of Spanish; the use of laminal (Latin American) vs. apical (European) /s/; and the use of differing second person pronouns (Ustedes, vosotros, and vos) and their respective verbal conjugations. Because interviewees were very aware of these differences – they discussed them explicitly and often performed them in imitations of Spaniards – we are able to trace differing kinds of awareness across different types of tasks, and also take into account individual variation in awareness and positioning. In addition, suprasegmental linguistic features such as prosody, lexicon, and voice quality were prominent in imitations of European Spanish.
Through this analysis, I lay out a methodological and theoretical framework for the study of awareness in dialect contact situations, and for teasing out the multiple intersecting factors that lead to dialect awareness, differentiation, and (sometimes) convergence across speech communities.
Location and Address
Cathedral G8