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Running head: PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH 1
Pride & Prejudice: Spanish Accents and Ethnolinguistic Prejudice Against English-Speaking Hispanic Migrant Students in Central Washington
P. Ailene Kingsley
MA TESOL Graduate Student
Central Washington University
Submitted to the: Pacific Northwest American Studies Association Conference
"Outside In/Inside Out: (Im)Migrant Communities of the Pacific Northwest"
April 12-14 2012
Author Note
P. Ailene Kingsley, Department of English, Central Washington University.
Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to P. Ailene Kingsley,
Department of English, Central Washington University, 400 E. University Way,
Ellensburg, WA 98926. Contact: 509-654-9891 or [email protected].
PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
Pride & Prejudice: Spanish Accents and Ethnolinguistic Prejudice Against English-Speaking
Hispanic Migrant Students in Central Washington
Abstract
This study examines the basis of ethnolinguistic prejudice against Spanish speakers of English as
a second language, with a discussion of results from a study of Hispanic migrant students at
Central Washington University. It analyzes the politico-linguistic origins of ethnicity and the
phonological transfer of Spanish into English as a Second Language (ESL) as a basis for
prejudice, with corresponding recommendations for ethnolinguistic principles of multicultural
education and bilingualism in the United States.
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PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
Prejudice is an ethnocentric reflection that results from the measurement of minute differences
between the “I” and “You” in language but it cannot escape the dedoism that results when you
point your finger at someone else but have four fingers pointing back at you. Americans endulge
in this kind ethnocentric finger-pointing on a daily basis when they raise the ephemeral standard
of Americanism that says: it’s who you are as an individual that counts. But if you don’t speak
English like I do, then YOU don’t count. As Noam Chomsky so diligently reminds us:
“Questions of language are basically questions of power” (1979, p. 191)
In second language programs throughout the world, as Cummins (2000) describes, there
are examples of empowering education. Certainly those that have evolved from the theory and
praxis of Paulo Freire continue to create meaningful dialogue in the classroom that challenge the
privileges of power and authority (e.g. Freire, 1998, 2000; Shor, 1992; Purcell-Gates, 2000). As
Cummins (2005) observes however, these programs “tend to be small-scale, isolated, and
difficult to sustain over the long-term. . . .[because] the overwhelming trend is in the opposite
direction. Schools succumb to the prevalent societal discourse and focus on direct instruction of
the skills to be assessed by ubiquitous high-stakes standardized tests” (283, 288).
This kind of ethnolinguistic dualism that posits English is “superior” to all other
languages in the world, is a deep reflection of the monolinguistic ignorance that American
ethnocentricism has spawned, and it persists with severe repercussions on Americans’ abilities to
grasp the past, present and future implications of their own heritage. Nowhere in America today
is this ethnolinguistic prejudice more evident—or more destructive—than in the discrimination
against Hispanic speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL). This paper will analyze the
evidence of this ethnolinguistic prejudice as experienced by college migrant students in Central
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PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
Washington. This analysis will be presented in the context of past contributions from Spanish to
American culture, present contrasts between the phonology of Spanish and English, and future
implications for multicultural education and bilingualism in America.
The value of ethnolinguistic enrichment to any culture, and the devastation of
monolinguism is clearly explained by leading American sociolinguist, Joshua Fishman. In his
discussion of the destruction of minority languages and the failure of bilingual education,
Fishman (1991) explains that his “work of the 60s began as a quest for any possibly overlooked
successes, amidst all of the clearly obvious failures, in the efforts to secure minority language
maintenance in the United States” (xi). In comparing ethnolinguistic vitality to medicine in the
United States, Fishman contends that the sociology of language must “develop practices which
address themselves explicitly to ‘wellness’ and which recognize that ethnolinguistic ‘wellness’ is
unattainable without theoretical knowledge and applied efforts that correspond to the
ethnolinguistic and ethnocultural preferences and commitments of specific speech networks and
speech communities” (xii)
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PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
This study begins with a
Phonological Differences in English and Spanish
A major contrast in the phonological study of languages is a difference in the
suprasegmental, or sentence-level, patterns of rhythm that are called either “syllable-timed” or
“stress-timed,” and these linguistic patterns have implications for speaking and listening in
second languages because they may transmit different kinds of meaning. Since linguistic
anthropologist, Kenneth L. Pike (1945) first developed this contrast between stress-timed and
syllable-timed languages, Spanish has generally been considered to be “syllable-timed,” although
more recent phonological studies contend that this distinction may not be absolute (Hayes, 2009)
As Pointon (1980) suggests, Spanish may be neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed, but has
“some form of segment-timing, in which the number and type of segments in each syllable,
together with the presence or absence of stress determine the duration of a syllable” and its
overall stress pattern (p. 302).
Regardless, as the historical and current research indicates, English is legitimately
considered a “stress-timed” language which employs extensive vowel reduction, linking,
assimilation and cliticization patterns that “squeeze” syllables together between stresses to keep
sentence rhythms fairly isochronic or regular. In contrast to this rhythm, Spanish is definitively
more of a “segmental” and/or “syllable-timed” language because syllables are of more equal
duration and utterance length is extended when more syllables occur.
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PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
The implications of this contrast are that English employs stress-timed patterns for
emphasis and communicates contextual meanings through suprasegmental or prosodic stress. In
contrast, Spanish deploys a “fixed-word accent” pattern of lexical stress with approximately 75%
to 80% of polysyllabic words following a penultimate stress pattern (Harris, 1983). This means
in English that contextual, interpersonal meanings are subtly transmitted by contrasts in tone and
intonation patterns, whereas in Spanish, these contrasts are conveyed in explicit “fixed-word”
differences in grammar, such as the differentiation between tu and usted that exists in Spanish,
but not in the grammatical pronoun use of “you” in English.
Thus, because Spanish has such a prominent penultimate stress pattern and a very
moderate use of intonation to communicate suprasegmental stress patterns, Spanish speakers are
intuitively trained to listen to suprasegmental stress to identify syntactic or lexical cognates and
conjugations, rather than pragmatic meanings. As Chela de Rodriguez (1976) observed, critical
differences in sentence meaning are more clearly distinguished in Spanish by grammatical
differences, instead of the stress-timed intonational patterns used in English. Chela de
Rodriguez relates: a Native speaker of English as a first language (L1) would typically just use
intonation to contrast the meanings in the following two sentences: “That’s not his CAR” and
“That’s not HIS car.” In the first sentence, the inflected meaning would be: “His car is a
DIFferent car,” and the second sentence meaning would be: “that car belongs to SOMEone else.”
In Spanish, these intonational meanings would normally be communicated by clear differences
in grammatical structures, rather than intonation. The first sentence, for example, would be
expressed through the grammar: “Ese no es su choche,” and the second statement would be:
“No es el coche de èl” (1976, p. 8).
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PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
The grammatical structure of Spanish thus communicates distinct pragmatic meanings
that are usually communicated through intonation patterns in English, thus causing significant
cognitive dissonance for Spanish speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL). However,
suprasegmental stress patterns are still very significant in Spanish—only with a significantly
different function. As Cutler, Norris & Sebastiàn-Gallés (2004) observe, Spanish speakers are
very adept at discriminating between suprasegmental stress differences, but their audial attention
is generally focused on lexical distinctions instead of intonational meanings. This is because
Spanish has longer words, fewer phonemes and more derived embedded syllables from Latin
than English, and it is these syntactical distinctions in meaning that are essentially being
communicated by lexical stress (Cutler, Norris & Sebastiàn-Gallés, 2004, pp. 1-4). This means
that while Spanish speakers are focusing on subtle segmental changes in vowels and verb
inflections that signify changes in tense—and expecting English speakers to quite literally “say
what they mean” verbally, as Spanish speakers do—English speakers are expecting Spanish L2
speakers to subtly express and interpret their meanings more nonverbally, as English L1 speakers
are trained to do, and this forms a basis for confusion and distrust in ordinary conversation.
Very importantly, as Chela-Flores (1997) reports, typical English intonation patterns also
tend to place greatest prominence on the last content word in a sentence, but typical Spanish
sentence stress patterns tend to retain prominence farther towards the right of the sentence,
regardless of whether the stressed word is a content word or not. Thus the stressed sentence in
English “John asked me to TALK to him” would normally be stressed in Spanish as “John me
pidiò que hablara con ÉL” (Chela-Flores, 1997, p. 4). Also, unlike English in which the nuclear
stress and the highest tonal peak usually coincide, in Spanish the tonal peak occurs on the first
syllable of the unit in which the pitch changes. This means that the final stressed word in
7
PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
Spanish is not usually marked by a rise in pitch, and this makes identifying such marks in
English even more difficult for Spanish L1 speakers (1997, p. 4).
As Chela-Flores illustrates in the unmarked English declarative sentence, “He arrived
with his COUsin,” the word cousin also receives the highest pitch in the intonational unit. In the
declarative sentence expressing this meaning in Spanish however, “Llegó con su PRImo,” the
highest intonation would be on the first syllable of the verb llegó, while the prominence would
be on the first syllable PRI in primo or “cousin,” (1997, p. 4) and this further complicates
Spanish speakers’ abilities to learn the intonational stress patterns in English because the
suprasegmental stress patterns in Spanish are differently rule-bound. In addition, research by
Chela-Flores and others (Chela-Flores 1993; Faber 1991; Taylor 1991), also suggests that
syllable length is the most widely encountered difficulty for developing intelligibility among
foreign learners of English, and it is a major obstacle to acquiring near-Native pronunciation
(Adams and Munro 1978). Thus, for Spanish ESL speakers, these difficulties in altering their
intuitive segmental and syllable-timed patterns that are imbedded in the semantic and syntactic
thought patterns of Spanish to acquire the pragmatic speech patterns of intonational, stress-
timed meanings in English are greatly complicated by the syllable-duration in English and the
complicated lexical and grammatical meanings that are imbedded in the more reasonable,
syllable-timed patterns of Spanish.
Finally, these multi-layer segmental and suprasegmental contrasts between word and
sentence stress in English and Spanish are further complicated by phonological rules in Spanish
that are misinterpreted by English Native Speakers (L1) when communicating with Spanish ESL
speakers (L2). Specifically, although phonological processes such as linking, cliticization, and
assimilation occur in Spanish, vowel reduction (which accounts for most of the equally-
8
PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
measured durations, or “feet,” in English) is rarely present in Spanish. In fact, besides extending
utterances to maintain relatively equal syllable duration, Spanish also commonly employs
“epenthesis,” through the insertion of an open syllable /el to maintain syllable distinctions. This
process has been employed since Roman times in Iberian Spanish, and the Real Academia
Española enforces this rule even on cognates in Spanish making the insertion of /e/ “the official
orthography once the word is felt to be naturalized” (Whitley, 2002, p. 34).
This epenthesis, or insertion of the phoneme /e/ before words beginning with /s/ in Latin,
occurs in most Romance languages including Spanish, French and Italian, but it also occurs in
other languages throughout the Mediterranean region, including Greek, Armenian, Turkish, and
Persian (Lloyd, 1987). According to Lloyd (1987), these Latin transcriptions were recorded as
early as the second century A.D., and further studies in linguistic anthropology may actually
reveal their phonetic origins in early sixth century B.C. migrations of the Assyrians to Celtic
Iberia or in other Paleohispanic transcriptions during the 400-600 years of Roman occupation
circa 200 B.C. to 400 A.D.. Regardless, this insertion of the phoneme /e/ before the syllable-
initial /s/ has been mandated in Spain by the Real Academia since its foundation in 1713, over
300 years ago.
Again the implications of this phonological rule for Spanish L2 speakers of English, as
Stockwell and Bowen (1965) observe, are significant. Although the phoneme /s/ occurs in both
Spanish and English, its distribution is strikingly different in Spanish because “/s/ can never
occur before a consonant in the same syllable, whereas in English, it can. This is no mere
historical fact or curious detail of observation [because in this location] /s/ is not an optional
choice for the Spanish speaker” (p. 5). Thus, when this conflict occurs, it has consequences for
learning the two languages because the phonological rules that stand behind utterances in any
9
PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
language are reflections of the culture in which a Native speaker learns to communicate, and in
which all Native speakers develop a subconscious “muscle memory” in their tongues from
infancy onward.
Yet in conversational English spoken by Spanish L2 speakers, this epenthesis has even
more serious consequences because it is often subconsciously misinterpreted by listeners as a
basis for ethnolinguistic prejudice. Because Latin cognates in English beginning with /s/ that
mandate epenthesis in Spanish are so common, the pronunciation of words such as “es-school”
and “es-student” for “school” and “student” are interpreted as reflecting an ethnolinguistic
ignorance of English. Whereas, this pronunciation of the Latin cognates escuela and estudiante
for “school” and “student,” like all /s/ initial consonants in Spanish are strictly required to be
preceded by an /e/, according to the centuries-old rule in Spanish.
So these are some of the bases for ethnolinguistic prejudice against Spanish ESL
speakers. Before considering how
What about Spanglish?
Dr. Ana Zentella, professor emeritus at
Future Implications for Multicultural Education in the United States
As Purcell-Gates forewarns American educators: “if we continue to use the mainstream
experience of reality as the perspective, we fool ourselves into believing that we are looking
through a window when instead we are looking into a mirror. Our explanations threaten to
reflect only ourselves and our world, serving no real explanatory purpose” (1995, p. 6).
As Crawford (2006) informs us, in his discussion of the English Plus movement in the
United States that resulted in bilingual resolutions passed in four states (New Mexico, Oregon,
10
PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
Rhode Island and Washington) as a counterforce to the rampant Official English state laws that
were passed throughout the nation in the 1980s and 1990s: “Rather than treating bilingualism as
a nuisance or a threat, we should exploit our diversity to enrich the lives of individuals and foster
the nation’s interests, while encouraging ethnic tolerance and safeguarding civil rights” ((as cited
in Potowski, p. 7).
Krashen (1992) suggests that successful bilingual education programs actually result in faster acquisition of English.
Content matter taught in the native language can be transferred to the second language. In the regular classroom,
confronted with both concepts and language that are not comprehensible to them, limited English speakers learn
neither the content nor the language. Research indicates that language acquisition occurs only when incoming
messages can be understood (Krashen, 1992).
11
PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
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Taylor, D. (1991). Non-native speakers and the rhythm of English. In A. Brown (Ed.) pp. 235-
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Valdés, G. (2011). Ethnolinguistic identity The challenge of maintaining Spanish-English
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Zentella, A.C. (1997). Latino youth at home, in their communities, and in school. Education &
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------------------------------------------
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PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
“si podiera pensar en español e inglés podía serbilingüe.” Marisa 11 year-old bilingual. (
ETHNOLINGUISTIC IDENTITY:THE CHALLENGE OF MAINTAINING SPANISH-ENGLISHBILINGUALISM IN AMERICAN SCHOOLSGuadalupe Valdés
Roosevelt, Theodore, Works, Memorial ed., vol. XXIV. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons,1926. 554. Print.
Potowski discusses the linguistic counterforce to US monolinguistic
hegemony and the increasing polemic of whether immigration is damaging
American patrioticism and national pride. Powtowski makes quick work of
the prejudicial myths that have founded this ethnocentricism. Contrary to
this popular polemic, she says, the cultural myths that: 1) Today’s
immigrants are not learning English as fast as those in the past, 2) Language
diversity in this country is a recent problem caused by high levels of
immigration and 3) America is at risk because alternative languages threaten
national security” (
English-Only as a Litmus test of American Citizenship:
In 1907, US President Theodore Roosevelt wrote, "We have room for but one
language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to
see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American
16
PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH
nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house" (Roosevelt,
554).
Not surprisingly, this statement was made by President “Teddy” Roosevelt,
who as a Harvard graduate became the youngest member of the New York
legislative at 24, who resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to become
a “rough rider,” in the Spanish-American War, and who after becoming
President in 1901, led the construction of the Panama Canal, founded the US
Forest Service, won the adoption of the Drgo Doctrine which prevented the
use of force in collecting foreign debts,
Contact Information
Joshua Fishman. Since attaining Emeritus University Research Professor standing (in 1988), I am most easily and reliably reached via my home and email address.
"snailmail": 3616 Henry Hudson Parkway, 7B-N, Riverdale, NY 10463. email: [email protected]
“Basques were really ridiculed as not being fully human, animalistic.” Joshua Fishman
17