Linguistic Variation - Spanish Language, Culture, and Society

How familiar does this Spanish sound?

What about this Spanish?

How do dialects vary? Phonologically (at the level of sounds) Example: [izi] vs. [isi] Lexically (at the level of words) Example: soda vs. pop vs. coke Morphologically Intermediate level between sounds and words Morphemes: smallest meaningful units of language Example: dog vs. dogS run vs. runS Pat vs Pat’S Explain that morphemes -have meaning (like words) -but can’t stand on their own (unlike words, but like sounds, which need to be combined) So we can think of morphemes as being intermediate between sounds and words – an intermediate level of variation

Phonology Exercise Answer the following questions in your groups: What word is being said? (write in regular spelling and translate) How is this word being pronounced? (use IPA to transcribe it) Group 1: Mexican Group 2: Salvadoran Group 3: Mexican Group 4: Salvadoran Students work in groups Then have groups 1 and 2 (pronunciation of /n/) and groups 3 and 4 (pronunciation of /s/) come together, see if they can describe a phonological difference between these two dialects of Spanish based on their words.

Phonological Differences

Lexical Variation Have Mayra read Salvadoran words Ask for student volunteer for Mexican words

What does “chucho” mean? Dog (El Salvador & Guatemala) Nickname for Jesús (Honduras) Freeway (Argentina) Prison (Chile) Smart person (Mexico)

More Differences Sometimes the difference between tu and vos is lexical (as in the table here) But sometimes we need to look at differences below the word level – look for pieces of words that have meaning (morphemes) Mexican and Salvadoran Spanish have different ways of expressing the ‘informal you’ Mexican: tu Salvadoran: vos

Tu vs. Vos Ask: What is different about the mexican and salvadoran versions of these commands? (Eventually they should figure out that there is a difference between the stress patterns). Create a table on the board of the two words and their stress patterns (write stressed syllable in CAPS so they can see it move around) Mexican a.PU.ra.te Salvi a.pu.RA.te So, clearly, there are pieces of these words that are meaningful – these are called morphemes because they can’t stand by themselves (unlike words) but they have meaning (like words). They are an intermediate step between the sounds of the language and the words of a language.   ASK: With these two forms, what are the different pieces that we can pick out that mean something? (students should be able to pick out the stem and object pronoun easily enough, it may take more work to get them to see the accent differences). --Once they’ve got most of the meaningful units, switch to next slide with table for review

Meaningful Units: Morphemes Spanish English Translation -te ‘you’ apur(ar) ‘to hurry up’ -á speaking to ‘vos’ (familiar you) -a speaking to ‘tu’ (familiar you) We managed to connect up specific meanings to each of these pieces of the words – and some of these pieces are really small. So we can see that the tiniest differences can make a big difference in terms of meaning. In the slang unit, we talked a lot about the meaning of words and worked on creating a dictionary to capture those meanings.   But this activity has shown us that words aren’t the only part of language that have meaning. We have seen that little tiny pieces of language, called morphemes, can have meaning. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units in a language, and often, in order to understand what is being said, we have to pay really careful attention to these little pieces.

Summary of differences Phonological: Different ways of producing /s/ and /n/ Lexical: Different words Morphological: Use of different ‘tu’ and ‘vos’ forms

Linguistic Prestige In California, which dialect of Spanish has more prestige? Mexican Spanish Salvadoran Spanish Which language has more prestige? Spanish English Ask students what it is – get them to remember definitions from the previous day There are different levels of prestige associated with dialects within a language But across languages that are used in the same context, there are also differing levels of prestige

Shifting Prestige Can you imagine a situation in California where speaking Spanish might be more prestigious than English? Can you imagine a situation in California where speaking Salvadoran Spanish might be more prestigious than speaking Mexican Spanish? Ask: what is it called when a language or dialect that generally has lower prestige becomes more prestigious in a certain context? (Covert Prestige – from yesterday)