“That Spanish Twang”

“That Spanish Twang”:Speaker Rhythm and Accommodation in a

Great Plains High School

Mary Kohn, Trevin Garcia, and Addie Dickens

Kansas State University

NWAV Nov 3/2016

“New Destinations”

• Free trade agreements, restructuring of agricultural manufacturing, and anti-immigration policies in the Southwest and Western US have all played a role in establishing new destinations for Latinx immigration in the 1980s and 1990s .

• This set the conditions to fundamentally alter the way Latinx* immigrants moved across and within US borders (Fernandez-Kelly & Massey 2007)

*We use Latinx to promote gender inclusivity

http://www.census.gov/population/hispanic/files/hispanic2006/Internet_Hispanic_in_US_2006.pdf

Demographic characteristics

• “Clustered rural hypergrowth” (Vásquez, et al. 2008)– Growth in rural communities is concentrated.

– 1/3 of rural Latinos live in 109 counties (Kandel & Parrado2005).

• These communities are distinct from traditional Latinxcommunities in the urban Northeast, Florida, and Southwest– Younger

– More international

– More children

Regionalization of Ethnolects

Rapid demographic shifts for Latinxpopulations outside of traditional communities offer the opportunity to observe processes of localization among ethnolects first-hand (Carter 2013), granting insight into patterns observed in long-standing LatinxEnglish communities (ex: Fought 2003, Mendoza-Denton 2008,

Wolfram 1974, Zentella 1997, etc…)

1. What are the linguistic consequences of rapid demographic shifts?2. Do common linguistic features unite Latinx English, despite dramatic differences between long-standing Latinxcommunities in the Northeast and Southwest and new agricultural communities in the Midwest and Southeast?3. Is there evidence for accommodation by Anglx youth in “hypergrowth” communities?

“I think English speakers will start to sound like the Hispanics. It kinda depends on which one’s more widely used. Because you

have all these – have all these Spanish speakers that have that Spanish twang and that whole sound with it and then if people’s that speak normally- normal English are around a lot of that I could imagine that English speaker will start to sound like the Hispanic”

-Anglo participant, 19 years, Liberal, Kansas

Hypothesis

Liberal

• Meat packing spurs Latinximmigration (Kasarda and Johnson 2006)

• Latinx population in 1990: 19.5%

• Latinx population now: 59.1%

Syllable timing

Intermediate timing has been observed in traditional Latinxcommunities including California (Fought and Fought 2002) and Spanish Harlem (Shousterman 2015) and new communities in the Southeast (Carter 2005)

1. How does rhythm in Liberal, Kansas, compare to other varieties in Kansas?

2. How does it compare to other varieties of LatinxEnglish?

3. Is there evidence for accommodation by Anglxyouth?

THE CORPUS

Kansas Speaks

• 5 field sites

• 6 members

• 87 interviews

• 60 + transcribed

• 51 force aligned through FAVE

Contemporary Communities

Population

Tipton: 207

Americus: 879

Abilene: 6,771

Liberal: 20,525

All communities except Liberal are >90% Anglx

Liberal, KS

Tipton, KS

Abilene, KS

Americus, KS

Participantsmale female Total

Liberal(Latino)

7 9 16

Liberal(Anglo)

4 0 4

Other(Anglo)

5 5 10

Total 15 14 30

• Liberal participants were recruited through field worker contacts or with the assistance of the local school district

• Trevin was the primary field worker for Liberal• All participants arrived to their communities by age 5 and

are under age 35

Method

• Pairwise Variability Index (Low, Grabe, & Nolan 2000): Absolute value of difference in duration of vowel pairs meaned over speech

• Boundaries for aligned textgrids were manually adjusted

• We followed methodology outlined in Thomas and Carter (2006), avoiding phrase-final feet/segments before a pause or repair, and focusing on median values

PVI:

• Absolute value

of difference in duration of vowel pairs meaned over speech

• We took the median of the tokens measured (Thomas and Carter 2005)

PVI = (|.5-.5| + |.5-.5| + |.5-.5| + |.5-.5| + |.5-.5| )/5 = 0

V V V V VV

Phrase Phrase

.5 .5 .5 .5 .5 .5

V V VVV

1.5 .5 1 .25 .3

PVI = (|1.5-.5| + |.5- 1| + |1-.25| + |.25.-.3| )/4 PVI = .6375

Measures of vocalic intervals separate out languages traditionally defined as syllable-timed from those traditionally described as stress timed (Low and Grabe 2002)

British English

Spanish

Stress-Timed

Syllable-timed

• Based on preconceived phonemic boundaries

• Difficult to implement

• Measures a lower level structure, rather than the higher level structure that organizes the sound

Steiner 2003, Malisz 2007, Johnson and Tilson 2008)

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~wtsf/Rhythm.html

Rhythm

Phonetic

output

Concerns

BUT PVI studies allow comparisons across English varieties (Carter 2005, Thomas & Carter 2006, Coggshall 2008), including Latino English in other communities (Shousterman 2015, )

Stress-Timed

Syllable-timed

Group comparison

Two-tailed T-Test for Liberal Latinxs and Other Anglos

t = -2.56

df= 26

p = .008

Two-tailed t-test for Liberal and Other

t = -2.88,

df = 23

p = 0.004

“I like that they were in the music industry so that my dad would do this song-leading and the music aspect of church and then my mom would play the piano.” Abilene female, 21, PVI = .48

“But other than that I don’t really have time like after school to go to any practice or anything like that because of the fact that I’m doing that .” Liberal Latino Male, 19, PVI: .29

“I went in there, though, during my visit – like official college visit and it was nice. I don’t know what more they could do to it.” Liberal Anglo Male, 19, PVI: .38

Previous studies

Hypergrowth New Destination

• PVI .30-.43 for Latinxs in Siler City, NC, studied 10 years earlier (Thomas & Carter 2006)

Traditional Community

• PVI .41 (sd .31) for older generation (45-60) in Spanish Harlem (Shousterman 2015)

• PVI .45 (sd .34) for younger English dominant speakers (15-30) in Spanish Harlem

Latino English

Spanish

Thomas and Carter (2006), Latino English from Siler City, NC, a hyper-growth community

Anglxcomparison range falls within Thomas and Carter (2006)

Comparisons

Latino English

Spanish

Thomas and Carter (2006), Latino English from Siler City, NC, a hyper-growth community

Spanish Harlem youth: mean .45 (compared to .44 for Liberal Latinx)

Older Gen. for Spanish Harlem: mean .41

(Shousterman2015)

Comparisons

Liberal youth ARE more syllable-timed than surrounding Anglo varieties.

They are LESS syllable-timed than a study of a hypergrowthcommunity in North Carolina (Thomas & Carter 2006)

But exactly match Puerto Rican English for younger, English-dominant Spanish Harlem speakers (Shousterman 2015)

This includes our four Anglo participants

INITIAL RESULTS

GenderSelf-Reported Peer Group Language Use

SOCIAL FACTORS

Gender

Language Use and Peer Group

While our males who have English-dominant peer groups are more stress timed in comparison to our male who prefers a Spanish-dominant peer group, the females in this study follow the OPPOSITE pattern.

Gender may interact with peer-group language choice in complex ways, with females who favor English-dominant peer groups showing more syllable-timed speech than those who favor Spanish-dominant peer groups.

INITIAL RESULTS

A NEW RHYTHM FOR NEW DESTINATIONS?

Local participants observe a unique Spanish “twang” that may be related to timing.

Among Gen. 1.5, timing is comparable to Puerto Rican youth in Harlem, but less syllable-timed to Older Puerto Rican English speakers in Harlem or New Destinations in North Carolina studied 10 years earlier (Thomas & Carter 2006).



Older, Spanish Harlem Younger, Spanish Harlem

Latinx, Liberal, KS

All report speaking Spanish

Half report speaking Spanish

14/16 use Spanish in the home

Majority grew up in private tenements

Half grew up in high-rises

Majority grew up in the South Side, though segregation mayfunction differently in rural communities (Fernandez-Kelly & Massey, 2007)

Majority list only Latinxsin five closest friends

Majority reportmixed ethnicity friends circles

Friendship circles vary

Code-switching is common

English-dominant Community is largely diglossic


Older, Spanish Harlem Younger, Spanish Harlem

Latinx, Liberal, KS

All report speaking Spanish

Half report speaking Spanish

14/16 use Spanish in the home

Majority grew up in private tenements

Half grew up in high-rises

Majority grew up in the South

Side, though segregation may function differently in rural communities (Fernandez-Kelly & Massey, 2007)

Majority list only Latinxsin five closest friends

Majority reportmixed ethnicity friends circles

Friendship circles vary

Code-switching is common

English-dominant Community is largely diglossic

Surprisingly, the influence of substrate effects on Liberal, KS, is more reminiscent of Spanish Harlem youth than Siler City, a similar hypergrowth community

Substrate features emerge as a location for potential inter-ethnic accommodation, potentially leading to a unique “Liberal” sound


New destinations illustrate how substrate features come to unite ethnolinguistic varieties, even as local demographic and social factors create subtle differences.

Research on emerging Latinx communities is thus an important addition to the canon of Latinx English studies from both a theoretical and descriptive perspective.


Selected ReferencesCarter, Phillip Carter, P. Shared spaces, shared structures: Latino social formation and African American English in the U.S. south. Journal of

Sociolinguistics, 17(1), 66–92. http://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12015(2005). Prosodic variation in SLA: Rhythm in an urban NC Hispanic Community. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 11.2.

Coggshall, Elizabeth L. 2008. The prosodic rhythm of two varieties of native American English. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 14.2.Cummins, F. and Port, R. (1998). Rhythmic constraints on stress timing in English. Journal of Phonetics, 26, 145-171.Kandel, W., & Parrado, E. a. (2005). Restructuring of the US Meat Processing Industry and New Hispanic Destinations. Population and

Development Review, 31(3), 447–471. Fernandez-Kelly, P., & Massey, D. S. (2007). Borders for whom? The role of NAFTA in Mexico-U.S. migration. The Annals of the American

Academy of Political and Social Science, 610(March), 98–118.Fought, Carmen. (2003). Chicano English in Context. Palgrave Macmillan.Grabe, E. (2002). Variation adds to prosodic typology. In B. Bel and I. Marlin (Eds), Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2002 Conference. 11-13

April 2002. Aix En Provence, 121-126.Johnson, K. and Tilsen, F. (2008). Low frequency Fourier analysis of speech rhythm. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America. 124 (2): EL34-

EL39.Kandel, W., & Parrado, E. a. (2005). Restructuring of the US Meat Processing Industry and New Hispanic Destinations. Population and

Development Review, 31(3), 447–471. Low E.L, Grabe E and Nolan F. (2000) Quantitative characterizations of speech rhythm: syllable-timing in

Singapore English. Language and Speech 43 (3):229 – 259.(2002). Durational Variability in Speech and the Rhythm Class Hypothesis. Papers in Laboratory Phonology: 7 Ed. By Carlos Gussenhoven & Natashia Warner. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Mendoza-Denton, Norma. (2008). Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practices among Latina Gang Youth. Wiley.Nazzi, T. and Ramus, F. (2003). Perception and acquisition of linguistic rhythm by infants. Speech Communication. 41: 233-243.Pike, K. 1945. The Intonation of American English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Ramus F., Dupoux E., Mehler J., (2003) The psychological reality of rhythm classes: perceptual studies. Proceedings of the 15th ICPhS,

Barcelona.Shousterman, C. (2014). Speaking English in Spanish Harlem: The Role of Rhythm Speaking English in Spanish Harlem: The Role of Rhythm. In

University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (Vol. 202). Steiner, I. (2003) A refined acoustic analysis of speech rhythm. LingColl 2003, Budapest.Thomas, Erik and Phillip Carter (2006). Prosodic Rhythm and African American English. English World Wide. 27:

331-355. Vasquez, Manual; Chad Seales, & Marie Friedmann Marquardt.(2008). “New Latino Destinations. Latinas/os in the United States: Changing

the Face of America. Springer, us. 19-35.

Wolfram, Walt. (1974). Sociolinguistic aspects of assimilation: Puerto Rican English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics

Zentella, Ana Celia. (1997). Growing Up Bilingual: Puerto Rican Children in New York. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences Research Awards, the Developing Scholars Program, the K-State English Department,

and K-State University Faculty Enhancement for financial support of this research

Interval measures (PVI (Lowe and Grabe, 2000)) show social variation in speech rhythm (Carter 2005, Thomas and Carter 2006, Coggshall 2008)

Stress-Timed

Syllable-timed

Latino English

Spanish

Thomas and

Carter (2006)

Rapid switches from minority to majority have not been explored

- Is there evidence of bidirectional accommodation? If so, at what levels?- What is the role of social network structure in accommodation?- Will certain variables, due to the strong presence of Latino English, create a localized dialect specific to Modern Day Liberal?

Documents

“That Spanish Twang”