1. Linguistic Variation - Spanish
Language, Culture, and Society

2. How familiar does this Spanish sound?

3. What about this Spanish?

4. 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

5. 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.

6. Phonological Differences

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

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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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.

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

13. 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

14. 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)