Emerging Hispanic English: New dialect formation in the American South

Abstract

Although stable Hispanic populations have existed in some regions of the United States for centuries, other regions, including the mid‐Atlantic South, are just experiencing the emergence of permanent Hispanic communities. This situation offers an ideal opportunity to examine the dynamics of new dialect formation in progress, and the extent to which speakers acquire local dialect traits as they learn English as a second language. We focus on the production of the /ai/ diphthong among adolescents in two emerging Hispanic communities, one in an urban and one in a rural context. Though both English and Spanish have the diphthong /ai/, the Southern regional variant of the benchmark local dialect norm is unglided, thus providing a local dialect alternative. The instrumental analysis of /ai/ shows that there is not pervasive accommodation to the local norm by Hispanic speakers learning English. There is, however, gradient, incremental adjustment of the /ai/, and individual speakers who adopt local cultural values may accommodate to the local dialect pattern.

Children’s Deviation in the Acquisition of Variable Linguistic Gender Patterns

“…It has also been observed that children can adjust their linguistic behavior according to the social setting and situation (Patterson, 1992;Roberts, 1994Roberts, , 1997bDí az-Campos, 2005;Smith et al 2007;Khattab, 2013). Very young children can, for example, change their speech based on the identity they identify with (Wolfram, Carter & Moriello, 2004) and can be sensitive to the social meanings of variants (Andersen, Brizuela, DuPuy & Gonnerman, 1999), associating certain variants with certain social groups or categories (Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1997).…”

/fɑɪs/, /fes/ or /feɪs/? Teachers’ phonetic accommodation of diphthongs in an L2 classroom setting

“…Speakers' motivation, therefore, is not phonological since it is individual words and not the phonological system that are subject to modifications. 1 Studies on phonetic accommodation have been primarily concerned with first language acquisition (Chambers 1992;Payne 1980), dialect acquisition and dialect change (Evans & Iverson 2007;Munro et al 1999), or heritage speakers (Roeder 2009;Wolfram, Carter & Moriello 2004). Teachers' phonetic accommodation in the classroom context has received little attention in literature.…”

RP English and Castilian Spanish Diphthongs Revisited from the Beats-and-Binding Perspective

“…Analyzing in particular the production of English diphthongs by Polish native speakers, she arrived at interesting juxtaposition of formant dynamics and vector length (the same reference for the exhaustive bibliography on the topic). Wolfram et al (2004) provide a sociophonetic contrastive study of English and Spanish /ai/, Donegan (1985) is the reference for the analysis of vowel quality in Natural Linguistics. The idea of marking the most prominent element of a diphthong [+peak] and the less prominent element [−peak] which I use in the paper is taken from Awedyk (1974b).…”