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Winter 12-15-2017 Anglo and Hispanic Vowel Variation in New Mexican English Susan Brumbaugh University of New Mexico - Main Campus
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Recommended Citation Brumbaugh, Susan. "Anglo and Hispanic Vowel Variation in New Mexican English." (2017). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ ling_etds/54
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Susan Brumbaugh Candidate
Linguistics Department
This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication:
Approved by the Dissertation Committee:
Caroline Smith , Chairperson
Chris Koops
Richard File-Muriel
Melissa Axelrod
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ANGLO AND HISPANIC VOWEL VARIATION IN NEW MEXICAN ENGLISH
by
SUSAN BRUMBAUGH
B.A., Spanish, Illinois State University, 2007 M.A., Linguistics, University of New Mexico 2009
DISSERTATION
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy Linguistics
The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico
December, 2017
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DEDICATION
For my partner in crime, Finnegan Lord Batman Squiggle Pants Brumbaugh
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am incredibly grateful to so many people (and one ridiculous Chihuahua). I feel like I’ve won an Oscar, and now I’m about to deliver my speech on stage. It’s about time I put in writing how much you all mean to me!
(Note: I was just informed that the Acknowledgements section doesn’t add to the page count… so I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible.)
I would first like to thank my incredible dissertation committee.
Dr. Caroline Smith, the chair of my dissertation committee, is brilliant, kind, and has always encouraged me to study what is of interest to me. I have learned so much from her throughout the years, in terms of phonetics, phonology, and being a good person. She is also the very first professor I had class with upon moving to Albuquerque ten years ago for the master’s program. Thank you for seeing this through with me until the end! Without Dr. Chris Koops, I would still be making vowel plots with my colored pencils (no, really!). I have learned so much from you, and I am now a much more confident and independent linguist. Writing that book chapter together was the most fun I’ve ever had doing linguistics. Dr. Richard File-Muriel and Dr. Melissa Axelrod gave indispensable feedback and support throughout this entire process, and I truly appreciate all that you have done for me.
There are so many amazing people in the linguistics world at UNM. We have an incredible community of graduate students and professors in the Linguistics department. You guys have made my time in the department so fun and memorable.
I am sincerely thankful for the Global Education Office (GEO), and in particular the Center for English Language and American Culture (CELAC). I spent 8 fantastic years teaching English as a Second Language at CELAC, and I hope to put in another 8 or more in the future! I have developed so many incredible friendships through my time at GEO… you all know who you are!
I never would have ended up in a linguistics graduate program without two incredible professors at Illinois State University: Dr. K Aaron Smith and Dr. Susan Burt. Dr. Smith, also an a graduate from UNM Linguistics, said I would love the program and Albuquerque. How right he was!
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Thank you to my family, in particular my parents, Larry and Diane, and my bizarre little sister, Ronald. I mean, Marie. My entire family has been incredibly supportive of my seemingly never-ending academic endeavors; thank you to Grandma, De, Uncle Phil, Aunt Deedee, and my brother-in-law, Scott.
My very best friends from Illinois, Diane Christine Pueschel and Mallory Blaire Tarter. We have been and continue to be there for each other no matter where any of us is in the world. See you soon!
I was so lucky to join the greatest (read: most hilarious) women’s indoor soccer team not long after moving to Albuquerque in 2007. We are still together today. Lady X is truly the most incredible group of women, and I really can’t imagine my life in Albuquerque without you all. And yes, I know that this will be put in our next highlight reel. On that note, I’m still mad at Crystal for raising her hand and asking a question at my defense. It’s not funny, Milagro. X!
My other “team” is just as fierce: my lady-linguist crew. Laura Hirrel, Brittany Fallon, Keiko Beers, and Corrine Occhino are amazing women without whom there is no way I would have gotten this done. I blame both their peer pressure and their constant support.
I actually can’t figure out what to write about Laura and Phil Hirrel. They are genuinely two of the most incredible people on the planet, and I can’t make light of how much they mean to me and how much they have done for me and Finnegan throughout the years. If I had to sum it up into one word… Melanie!!
My biggest thanks go to Jack and our dogs, Finnegan and Mr. Grumbles. We live such a ridiculously happy life together. And it’s going to be even better, now that I’m done with this!
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ANGLO AND HISPANIC VOWEL VARIATION IN NEW MEXICAN ENGLISH
by
SUSAN BRUMBAUGH
B.A., Spanish, Illinois State University, 2007 M.A., Linguistics, University of New Mexico, 2009 Ph.D., Linguistics, University of New Mexico, 2017
ABSTRACT
This study examines vowel formant differences between English speakers in New Mexico that self-identify as Anglo versus those that self-identify as
Hispanic. Audio recordings were made of 16 New Mexicans reading short stories and carrier phases with embedded target words. F1 and F2 measurements were compared at the 50% point for monophthongs and at the 20% and 80% points for diphthongs. Mixed effects models assessed statistical significance of ethnicity, gender, and interactional effects on vowel formants and trajectory length.
All speakers showed a near-complete overlap of BOT and BOUGHT tokens, supporting a merger. Hispanic men and women patterned together to form a homogenous Hispanic group, and the Hispanic women patterned closer to the Anglo women than did the Hispanic men. The Anglo men and women did not present such a homogenous group. While Anglos shared some commonalities,
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namely the fronting and raising of BAN and the fronting of BOOT and BOAT, there were several cases in which the Anglo men patterned opposite to the Anglo women.
The data were then evaluated in terms of potential participation in the
California Vowel Shift (CVS) (Eckert 2008) and as a Western State (as described in Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006). Findings support New Mexican English as a
Western State as well as advancing in CVS, both of which are Anglo-led shifts across the country and in New Mexico. Anglo women lead the way with advancement of CVS, Anglo men and Hispanic women follow (though in different ways), and Hispanic men do not participate except for the BOT-BOUGHT merger.
The findings from the Hispanic group were additionally compared with other studies on Chicano English from across the United States, primarily on the topics of diphthong trajectory, BAN-raising, and Hispanic participation in local
Anglo-led sound changes. Findings on diphthong trajectories were inconclusive, and it remains a question for further study. The BAT-BAN split, a commonly documented characteristic in Chicano English literature, was pervasive in the
New Mexican data as well. Lastly, the New Mexican Hispanics patterned similarly to other communities where Hispanic participants, primarily the women, participate in the local Anglo-led sound changes, albeit to a less advanced degree than Anglos.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures ...... xiii
List of Tables ...... xvi
Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1
1.0 Overview ...... 1
1.1 Motivation for the current study ...... 2
1.1.1 Lack of research thus far ...... 2
1.1.2 Majority-Minority situation ...... 4
1.1.3 New Mexicans’ interest/awareness of this topic ...... 5
1.2 New Mexico: Past and Present ...... 6
1.2.1 New Mexico History ...... 6
1.2.2 Present Day ...... 9
1.2.2.1 Population ...... 10
1.2.2.2 Current rates of Spanish usage ...... 12
1.3 A few notes on certain stylistic choices made throughout this study ..... 14
1.3.1 Race and Ethnicity Terms ...... 14
1.3.2 Non-standard language variety ...... 15
1.3.3 Vowel description conventions ...... 16
1.3.4 Summary ...... 17
1.4 Literature Review ...... 18
1.4.1 Chicano English ...... 20
1.4.1.1 Pre-1970s ...... 21
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1.4.1.2 1970s-1980s ...... 21
1.4.1.3 1990s ...... 23
1.4.1.4 2000s ...... 24
1.4.2 California Vowel Shift and being a “Western State” ...... 28
1.4.2.1 The West ...... 29
1.4.2.2 California Vowel Shift ...... 30
1.4.3 English in New Mexico ...... 33
1.4.4 Issues of Majority-Minority situations ...... 36
1.4.5 Summary ...... 37
1.5 Research Questions and Hypotheses ...... 38
1.5.1 Question 1: Vowels across Gender and Ethnicity ...... 38
1.5.2 Question 2: New Mexico and the California Vowel Shift ...... 40
1.5.3 Question 3: Comparing Chicano English in New Mexico with
Findings in Other States ...... 42
1.6 Organization of the Dissertation ...... 43
Chapter 2: Methodology ...... 45
2.0 Overview ...... 45
2.1 Speakers ...... 45
2.1.1 Recruitment ...... 45
2.1.2 Background questionnaire and speaker selection ...... 46
2.2 Materials ...... 49
2.2.1 Tokens ...... 49
ix
2.2.2 Participant Speaker activities – short story, carrier phrase, picture . 51
2.3 Recording Procedures ...... 53
2.4 Tokens ...... 53
2.4.1 Correction/Cleanup ...... 54
2.4.2 Excluded Tokens ...... 55
2.4.3 Total numbers ...... 57
2.5 Normalization and Scaling ...... 57
2.5.1 Lobanov method ...... 58
2.6 Statistical Procedures ...... 59
2.7 Plotting techniques ...... 60
Chapter 3: Results ...... 62
3.0 Overview ...... 62
3.1 Monophthongs ...... 63
3.1.1 BEET ...... 63
3.1.2 BIT ...... 65
3.1.3 BET ...... 66
3.1.4 BAT ...... 68
3.1.5 BAN ...... 71
3.1.6 BOT ...... 74
3.1.7 BUT ...... 75
3.1.8 BURT ...... 77
3.1.9 BOOT ...... 78
x
3.1.10 Summary of monophthongal vowel space ...... 80
3.2 Diphthongs ...... 82
3.2.1 BOAT ...... 82
3.2.2 BOY ...... 84
3.2.3 BAIT ...... 88
3.2.4 BITE ...... 89
3.2.5 BOUT ...... 90
3.2.6 Summary of Diphthongs ...... 93
3.3 Conclusions ...... 95
3.3.1 Research Question 1 ...... 95
3.3.2 Hypothesis 1 ...... 96
3.3.3 Hypothesis 2 ...... 97
3.3.4 Hypothesis 3 ...... 98
3.3.5 Hypothesis 4 ...... 98
3.4 Summary ...... 99
Chapter 4: Discussion ...... 100
4.0 Overview ...... 100
4.1 Third Dialect, Western States, and California Vowel Shift ...... 100
4.1.1 Third Dialect ...... 100
4.1.2 Western Vowel Space ...... 101
4.1.3 California Vowel Shift ...... 102
xi
4.1.4 Summary of Third Dialect, Western States, and California Vowel
Shift...... 107
4.2 Chicano English ...... 109
4.2.1 BAT/BAN split ...... 109
4.2.2 Distance of Diphthongs ...... 112
4.2.3 Participation in local non-ethnic sound changes ...... 113
4.3 Chapter Summary ...... 115
Chapter 5: Conclusion ...... 117
5.0 Overview ...... 117
5.1 Summary of study and results ...... 117
5.2 Limitations ...... 119
5.3 Future Work ...... 124
5.4 Closing Comments ...... 127
Appendices ...... 129
Appendix A: Questionnaire ...... 130
Appendix B: Reading passages ...... 134
Appendix C: Carrier phrases ...... 136
Appendix D: Picture description task...... 137
Appendix E: Raw and normalized formant values ...... 138
References ...... 161
xii
List of Figures
Figure 1.1: Ethnic makeup of residents of New Mexico, by percentage ...... 10
Figure 1.2: States with the highest percentages of Hispanic inhabitants ... 12
Figure 1.3 Summary of Movements in Northern Cities Vowel Shift ...... 25
Figure 1.4: Summary of movements in California Vowel shift ...... 31
Figure 2.1: Hometowns of participants by number of participants in study 49
Figure 2.2: BAT vowel alignment in Praat ...... 55
Figure 3.1: BEET by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 64
Figure 3.2: F1 BEET by gender ...... 65
Figure 3.3: BIT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 66
Figure 3.4: BET F1 by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 67
Figure 3.5: BET F2 by Ethnicity ...... 67
Figure 3.6: BET by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 68
Figure 3.7: F1 BAT by Gender ...... 69
Figure 3.8: F2 BAT by Gender*Ethnicity ...... 70
Figure 3.9: BAT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 71
Figure 3.10 F1 BAN by ethnicity ...... 72
Figure 3.11: F2 BAN by ethnicity ...... 72
Figure 3.12: BAN by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 74
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Figure 3.13: BOT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 75
Figure 3.14: F1 BUT by Ethnicity ...... 75
Figure 3.15: F2 BUT by Gender ...... 76
Figure 3.16: BUT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 77
Figure 3.17: BURT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 78
Figure 3.18: F2 BOOT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 79
Figure 3.19: BOOT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 79
Figure 3.20: Vowel diagrams for the four speaker groups ...... 81
Figure 3.21: F2 BOAT by Ethnicity ...... 83
Figure 3.22: F1 offglide BOAT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 83
Figure 3.23: BOAT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 84
Figure 3.24: F1 onset of BOY by Gender...... 85
Figure 3.25: F2 onset of BOY by Ethnicity ...... 86
Figure 3.26: F2 offglide BOY by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 86
Figure 3.27: Euclidean Distance of BOY by speaker group ...... 87
Figure 3.28: BOY by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 88
Figure 3.29: BAIT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 89
Figure 3.30: BITE by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 90
Figure 3.31: F1 BOUT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 91
xiv
Figure 3.32: Mean Euclidean Distance for BOUT by speaker group ...... 92
Figure 3.33: BOUT by Ethnicity and Gender ...... 93
Figure 3.12: BAN by Ethnicity and Gender (reprinted) ...... 96
Figure 3.34: Vowel quadrilateral by ethnicity ...... 98
Figure 4.1 BOOT by ethnicity and gender ...... 101
Figure 4.2 BOAT by ethnicity and gender ...... 102
Figure 4.3 F2 means by speaker for BAT and BAN ...... 110
xv
List of Tables
Table 1.1: Largest New Mexican cities, Hispanic & White percentages ...... 11
Table 1.2: Percentage of people 5 years and older who speak Spanish at
home, ranked by percentage of Spanish-speakers that speak English
less than “very well.” ...... 13
Table 1.3: Lexical set used to represent individual vowels in this study .... 17
Table 2.1 Participants and their hometowns ...... 48
Table 2.2: Words used in elicitation activities ...... 51
Table 2.3: Breakdown of final token counts by speaker group ...... 57
Table 3.1: Summary of main effects on BEET normalized F1 ...... 64
Table 3.2 Summary of main effects on BET normalized F1 ...... 66
Table 3.3: Summary of main effects on BET normalized F2 ...... 67
Table 3.4: Summary of main effects on BAT normalized F1 ...... 68
Table 3.5: Summary of main effects on BAT normalized F2 ...... 69
Table 3.6 Summary of main effects on BAN normalized F1 ...... 71
Table 3.7 Summary of main effects on BAN normalized F2 ...... 72
Table 3.8: Summary of main effects on BUT normalized F1 ...... 75
Table 3.9: Summary of main effects on BUT normalized F2 ...... 76
Table 3.10: Summary of main effects on BOOT normalized F2 ...... 78
xvi
Table 3.11: Significant effects for monophthongs ...... 80
Table 3.12: Summary of main effects on BOAT normalized F2 onset ...... 82
Table 3.13: Summary of main effects on BOAT normalized F1 offglide ...... 83
Table 3.14: Summary of main effects on BOY normalized F1 onset ...... 85
Table 3.15: Summary of main effects on BOY normalized F2 onset ...... 85
Table 3.16: Summary of main effects on BOY normalized F2 offglide ...... 86
Table 3.17: Summary of main effects on BOY normalized Euclidean
Distance ...... 87
Table 3.18: Summary of main effects on BOUT normalized F1 onset ...... 90
Table 3.19: Summary of main effects on BOUT normalized Euclidean
Distance ...... 91
Table 3.20: Summary of main effects for diphthongs ...... 94
Table 3.21 Euclidean Distances by group ...... 94
Table 4.1: Participation in 3rd Dialect and Western States Vowel
Characteristics...... 108
Table 4.2: Participation in California Vowel Shift ...... 109
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Chapter 1: Introduction
1.0 Overview
This dissertation examines vowel production in English by university-age
(18 to 28 years old) New Mexicans that self-identify as either Anglo or Hispanic.
It addresses the question of vowel variation based on ethnicity and gender in a historically understudied region of the country. I describe differences between
New Mexico vowel varieties and other varieties that have been labeled as
“Chicano English” throughout the United States, and I show that New Mexican speakers only participate partially in the California Vowel Shift (CVS). Finally, I share some suggestions for future research in both the realm of Chicano English as well as the context of linguistic research on English within the state of New
Mexico. Analysis of linguistic data from a number of Anglo and Hispanic speakers in this work show that English variation in New Mexico is multi-faceted and has not yet been fully described by current works in the literature.
This chapter first discusses the background and motivation for the study.
Next, I give a brief overview of the history of New Mexico, a necessity in order to understand the uniqueness of this state and provide context for the English variation amongst New Mexican speakers. That history will also frame the selection of current census data described in the following section. I then explain the nomenclature of languages varieties, ethnic groups, and vowels utilized throughout the dissertation. The literature review in this work surveys the topics
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of Chicano English, Western States vowels, and the CVS in relation to this study.
Finally, I state my research questions and their corresponding hypotheses.
1.1 Motivation for the current study
The topic of vowel production by English speakers in New Mexico merits research for a number of reasons. This section explains not only why this study is important, but also how it adds to the current body of literature on the topics at hand.
1.1.1 Lack of research thus far
Little linguistic research has been performed on English in New Mexico.
One reason may be due to the fact that English in New Mexico isn’t overtly distinctive, unlike the English found in Boston, New York, or the Great Lakes area. I believe a larger reason is due to the incredible linguistic diversity of the state. New Mexico is home to nearly a dozen other languages, all of which have a longer history in the state than English, and many of which have a shorter projected future.
The Spanish language has hundreds of years of presence in New Mexico, and one variety of Spanish is quite unique: whereas other states have Spanish brought with more recent waves of immigration, the traditional Spanish of northern New Mexico is, by and large, passed down through families with centuries of residence here (see section 1.2.2.2 for current census data pertaining to Spanish use in the home). This dialect includes unique characteristics at all levels of linguistics, from phonetics to morphology to lexical
2
items (see Bills & Vigil 2008). Many aspects of this dialect derive from long ago, dating back to the time of Spanish colonization, while others result from the high rates of bilingualism and extremely close contact between English and Spanish in New Mexican culture. Bills and Vigil (2008) explain that traditional New
Mexican Spanish is not impervious to change. Instead, Mexican Spanish has begun to displace some of the characteristics of New Mexican Spanish in recent years.
In addition to Spanish, much linguistic work within New Mexico also focuses on the rich and diverse indigenous languages throughout the state. New
Mexico is home to individuals of 19 federally recognized pueblos, two Apache tribes, and the Navajo Nation (New Mexico Indian Affairs Department 2017) who speak eight languages that span four distinct language families (New Mexico
Secretary of State 2017). In terms of language endangerment, one of these languages, Jicarilla Apache, is rated as shifting, meaning that children are not learning the language (Simons & Fennig 2017). The rest are rated as threatened, meaning that although all generations can use the language to at least some extent for face-to-face communication, the outlook is still grim (Simons & Fennig
2017).
In sum, it is easy to see how and why relatively little work has been done in regard to English in New Mexico, as there is a plethora of other languages to be studied here, many of which just do not exist outside of this state. Traditional
New Mexican Spanish as well as the indigenous languages of New Mexico are
3
all minority languages in contact with the linguistic powerhouse that is English. It makes sense that the majority of research in the state would be in relation to and in support of these languages and their speakers.
1.1.2 Majority-Minority situation
While the English of New Mexico may not be as saliently distinct as is found in Boston, New York, or the Great Lakes area, nor is it without many distinctive features that set it apart from other varieties of English throughout the country. This is likely due, in large part, to the linguistic and ethnic makeup of the state, both past and present. The unique ethnic composition in New Mexico is such that Hispanics make up the highest proportion of English-speakers within the state (U.S. Census Bureau 2010). Exact population and census figures will be discussed in section 1.2.2.1. While Chicano English has been studied in many locales across the country, very few places have a population that is nearly
50% Hispanic. This puts New Mexico in an unusual position for studies of
Chicano English, as the traditional school of thought in linguistics is that minority ethnic groups either do not adhere to local speech norms, or do so to a lesser extent (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006). These norms are created and maintained by the majority population. In the case of New Mexico, then, this may mean that speakers of Chicano English in the state feel less pressure to assimilate to local
Anglo-based linguistic norms, and Anglo speakers may adopt incoming Anglo-led sound changes more slowly.
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1.1.3 New Mexicans’ interest/awareness of this topic
Finally, I have continually been encouraged by interest in this topic on the part of New Mexican laypersons (i.e. non-linguists). When someone asks me what I study, I simply explain that I compare vowels in White and Hispanic people. (An oversimplification, but to-the-point and understandable). Inevitably, each person has an insight or comment about this topic as it relates to themselves, their family, or their classmates. I find it very heartening that this is a topic that community members are aware of.
This community awareness and appreciation for New Mexican English was brought to the forefront in 2012 when a local acting group put together two highly popular YouTube videos entitled “Shit Burqueños (New Mexicans) Say"
(Blackoutdigital 2012a; Blackoutdigital 2012b). These videos are of an actress portraying Lynette, a fictional Burqueña (person from Albuquerque) who uses local phonetic, phonological, morphological, and syntactic patterns and lexical items. These videos quickly became very popular throughout the state as New
Mexicans recognized and identified with these unique linguistic characteristics.
Lynette went on to achieve a local celebrity status, featuring on the local news multiple times, appearing as spokesperson of the 2012 State Fair, delivering numerous speaking engagements, and continuing to produce videos. The first two “Shit Burqueños (New Mexicans) Say” videos (Blackoutdigital 2012a; 2012b) have at present accumulated 2,031,294 views; just shy of the most current estimated state population of 2.085 million people (US Census American
5
Community Survey 1-year Estimates 2015). Currently, the two videos have a combined “thumbs-up” total of 9,042 and a combined “thumbs-down” total of only
312. For every 29 thumbs-up, there is just one thumbs-down, perhaps a record by YouTube standards! New Mexicans recognize and appreciate the uniqueness of the varieties of English present in the state, and this research has been encouraged by that fact.
1.2 New Mexico: Past and Present
This dissertation focuses on vowel formants, Chicano English, and the question of New Mexico’s participation in regional linguistic characteristics. As suggested above, the characteristics of language in New Mexico are a product of developments over the last several centuries of state history. The next section presents a brief overview of that history to contextualize the current linguistic situation in the state.
1.2.1 New Mexico History
Here I step away from linguistics and attempt to give a brief overview of the last nearly four and a half centuries in the land that is now New Mexico.
In 1598, the conquistador Juan de Oñate established the first Spanish settlement at San Juan Pueblo, today called Ohkay Owingeh (Travis & Villa
2011). Thus began the establishment of several Spanish colonies throughout the upper Rio Grande Valley (Carver 1987). For the next century or so, colonizers continued to focus their settlement efforts on this area; Santa Fe was founded in
1610 and Albuquerque in 1706, for example. It was not until the 1700s that
6
colonizers moved on to develop the second frontier area, Arizona (Nostrand
1970).
By the 1820s, many settlers from the United States were moving to the
Mexican lands that today make up the American Southwest, spanning from
Texas to California. However, they were, interestingly, almost never moving to the areas that would eventually become the state of New Mexico. In 1848, the
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed by Mexico and the United States, ending the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). In this treaty, Mexico ceded the land that would be New Mexico and other nearby states to the US. This led to
New Mexico officially becoming a territory of the United States in 1850. Perhaps surprisingly, this did not have much immediate effect on the ethnic or racial demographics of the new territory. Fernandez-Gilbert (2010) notes that New
Mexico is “the only former Mexican territory that remained overwhelmingly
Hispanic until well into the twentieth century” (p. 44). As an example, Nostrand
(1970) notes that by 1850, Non-Mexicans (i.e. Anglos, meaning those of
European descent) were already the majority in Texas and California. Yet, by that year, there were only 1,778 Non-Mexicans out of a total population of 61,547 people in New Mexico. In fact, New Mexico did not experience much of an increase in Anglo settlers until after the Civil War (1861-1865), particularly not until the railroad system connected New Mexico to the rest of the US in 1879
(Fernandez-Gilbert 2010).
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Until the establishment of the railroad, New Mexico was a rather isolated area. Carver (1987, p. 222) explains that the introduction of the railroad “not only altered the 300-year-old culture, but [it] revolutionized the regional economy…
[this] opened up new commercial possibilities, as well as integrative ties with the nation.” It should be clarified that this does not mean there was an abrupt shift in language use and values of those living in New Mexico. Rather, in the earliest years of the railroad in New Mexico, Moyna (2010) describes how monolingual
English-speaking newcomers learned Spanish (as cited in Travis &Villa, 2011, p.
130), and from 1879 through 1912 almost 100 different newspapers in New
Mexico printed editions in Spanish (Fernandez-Gilbert 2010).
Fernandez-Gilbert (2010) notes that the 1890s started the transition to
English, or as Spanish-speakers referred to it, el idioma nacional. New Mexico became a state on January 6th, 1912, and it is at this point that we see the
“shifted position of Spanish from a dominant role to a subordinate one in the new state” (p. 58). As further evidence, Fernandez-Gilbert (2010) refers to the census data from this time period. As of 1890, 69.9% of people were reported as can’t speak English. By 1900 this figure had lowered to 51.1% and by 1910 it was
32.5%. This is not, however, a case of abrupt language shift to English but is instead due to 1) an enormous influx of Anglo newcomers to the state and 2) the state constitution of 1912 requiring English-only education in schools. Thus, instead of a sudden shift towards English, “the turn of the 20th century merely
8
marked the beginning of a prolonged period of widespread Spanish-English bilingualism” (Brumbaugh and Koops in press).
Fast-forward to today, and we see that New Mexico is still situated in a very unique position both ethnically and linguistically. Nostrand (1970) notes that across the United States “Hispanic percentages tend to decrease with increasing distance from the international border” (p. 651), yet north-central New Mexico into south-central Colorado is one of just two areas in the United States where
“Hispanos had not been engulfed by non-Hispanos” (p. 650) by the 1960s. The other non-engulfed area was south Texas. Although very similar in terms of maintaining a high Hispanic proportion of the population, the New Mexico and
Texas communities are extremely different in terms of historical context. While the northern New Mexico/southern Colorado population is made up of “Spaniards and Mexicans (who) were the descendants of longtime colonists” (p. 650), the
Texas communities considered here have experienced high rates of much more recent migration from Mexico. This example highlights New Mexico’s unique ethnic and linguistic history; as we will see below, these trends continue today.
1.2.2 Present Day
This section describes the current population, ethnicity, and linguistic makeup of New Mexico and aims to situate the state within the larger context of the United States. Note that ethnicity and language use are considered separately; people who identify as Hispanic may or may not use Spanish.
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1.2.2.1 Population
New Mexico has a population of 2,085,109 people. According to the US
Census, 48% are categorized as “Hispanic or Latino” and 38.3% are categorized as “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino”. These are the two largest ethnic groups in the state (Figure 1.1). The “Hispanic or Latino” category also includes those that self-identify as Hispanic/Latino and White.
Two or more Black or African American Indian races, 1.7 American, 2 and Alaska native, 8.5
Asian, 1.3
White, not Hispanic or Latino, 38.3
Hispanic or Latino, 48
Figure 1.1: Ethnic makeup of residents of New Mexico, by percentage Source: US Census Bureau 2015 American Community Survey 1 Year Estimates
These percentages are similar to the demographics at the city level for the four largest cities within the state. See Table 1.1 below. Of the four largest cities in New Mexico, three have a higher percentage of Hispanic residents than non-
Hispanic. Rio Rancho is the only large city listed below that does not, as only
36.7% of its inhabitants are Hispanic, while 53.8% are White non-Hispanics. In
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contrast to the other cities listed in Table 1.1, Rio Rancho is very new: the first homes were built in 1962, and the city was originally marketed to retirees from the Midwestern and Eastern region of the United States (CivicPlus 2017).
Albuquerque, Las Cruces, and Santa Fe, each of which has a higher percentage of Hispanics than non-Hispanics, have much longer histories and are in many ways more representative of the historical demographics of New Mexico.
Albuquerque Las Cruces Rio Rancho Santa Fe New Mexico
Population 546,360* 97,643 87,394 81,153 2,059,198
Hispanic or Latino 46.7% 56.8% 36.7% 48.7% 46.3% White (Not 42.1% 37.5% 53.8% 46.2% 38.4% Hispanic/Latino) Table 1.1: Largest New Mexican cities, Hispanic & White percentages Source: 2010 US Census data, most recent city data available *This is the population for Albuquerque only. Note that the population of the Albuquerque Metropolitan Statistical Area (which includes Rio Rancho, among other locales) is 887,077, or 43% of the entire state population.
On a national level, New Mexico ranks #1 in the proportion of Hispanic people in the state population. While New Mexico is just shy of being half
Hispanic with 48% of the population identifying as Hispanic in 2015, the second- and third- highest ranking states, Texas and California, are just over one-third
Hispanic; 38.8% and 38.5%, respectively (American Community Survey 5-year
Estimates 2015). Put differently, nearly one out of every two people in New
Mexico is Hispanic, while just over one in every three people is Hispanic in
California and Texas (Figure 1.2).
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% of State Population that is Hispanic
60 48 50 38.8 38.5 40 30.7 28.1 30 24.5 21.3 19.7 18.8 16.9 20 10 0
Figure 1.2: States with the highest percentages of Hispanic inhabitants Source: 2015 American Community Survey 5-year Estimates
It is clear that the history and development of New Mexico (as described in
Section 1.3.1) has profoundly shaped the current-day demographics presented here. Most important for this study, New Mexico is nearly 50% Hispanic, and it is the only state in the country to have such a high Hispanic population.
1.2.2.2 Current rates of Spanish usage
Of course, identifying as Hispanic does not equate to speaking Spanish.
While Figure 1.2 above showed that 48% of the population of New Mexico identifies as Hispanic (US Census American Community Survey 5-year
Estimates 2015), the second column of Table 1.3 shows that only 26.8% of the state population speaks Spanish (US Census American Community Survey 1
Year Estimates 2015).
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% state population that % Spanish speakers that speak State speaks Spanish English less than “very well” Nevada 21.8 44.5 California 29 41.3 Texas 29.6 40.3 Colorado 12 36 Arizona 20.6 33.6 New Mexico 26.8 26.4 Table 1.2: Percentage of people 5 years and older who speak Spanish at home, ranked by percentage of Spanish-speakers that speak English less than “very well.” Only states in the West with at least 20% Hispanic population were included. Source: US Census Bureau 2015 American Community Survey 1 Year Estimates
Measuring proportions of Spanish-speakers is relatively straightforward.
Investigating the type of Spanish spoken, however, is not as simple. In the case of New Mexico, particularly the northern half of the state, Spanish is likely to be passed from generation to generation through several hundred years, unlike other states where newer immigration accounts for more of the current Spanish language use (Bills and Vigil 2008). While there is not a comprehensive tool in place to determine the variety of Spanish spoken by each Spanish-speaker, some of the US Census data can be interpreted in order to approximate an answer to this question. The third column of Table 1.2 lists the percentage of
Spanish-speakers that speak English less than “very well,” by state. It is likely that the majority of people that speak English less than “very well” in this survey would be newer immigrants who come from a predominantly Spanish-speaking country and have learned English later in life. If that is the case, then the fact that out of this group of states, New Mexico has the lowest percentage (26.4%) of
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less than very well speakers of English supports the idea that a lower proportion of Spanish comes from newer immigration than in other states. Therefore, it can be assumed that more Spanish is passed down generationally in New Mexico than in other states.
1.3 A few notes on certain stylistic choices made throughout this study
In working on this project, I have struggled with the appropriate terms for people, language varieties, and even vowels. Here I explain the terms I use throughout the study.
1.3.1 Race and Ethnicity Terms
Race and ethnicity are extremely complicated and personal subjects. To make matters more complex, race and ethnicity are often delineated for statistical or census-based purposes in one way, but used differently in the
“real world” by the people who are actually being described by such labels
(Zelinsky 2001; Alcoff 2005; Jaimes, Londono, & Halpern 2013; King 2013).
I primarily use the term Hispanic for the non-Anglo group of participants
(i.e. people that often identify as Hispanic/Latino/Mexican-American, and in northern New Mexico, Spanish). I will use the term Anglo to describe the white/Caucasian/“non-ethnic” participants. I acknowledge that this binary set of descriptors (Hispanic, Anglo) is not without its issues, but as other linguists have discussed (Frazer 1996; Gordon 2000; Kendall 2011) there is no perfect set of terms to describe these two groups, or any other ethnic/racial group for that matter. Of the eight non-Anglo participants in my study, all chose “Hispanic” as at
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least one of the race/ethnicity terms with which they self-identify. I have chosen to use the term Anglo over white in order to focus on ethnicity and/or cultural identity rather than phenotype.
1.3.2 Non-standard language variety
I refer to the variety of English used by the Hispanic participants in my study “Chicano English.” For much the same reasons as noted above, I recognize that this term is not accurate today for the population which it aims to describe. While Chicano was originally used in conjunction with Californian
Mexican-American/Latino/Hispanic people who did, in fact, use and self-identify with this term, today it is used rarely, if at all, outside of California. For example, none of the eight Hispanic participants chose “Chicano” as a term they would use to identify themselves. This lack of identification with the term Chicano is not an issue exclusive to New Mexico. Rather, other linguists similarly acknowledge that this is not a label their participants use, and they therefore question its utility within the field of linguistics (Williams 2010, Konopka 2011, as examples).
Nonetheless, Chicano English is the most commonly used and recognized term for this variety of English across linguistics research and literature. Further, many academic institutions today, including the University of New Mexico, have a department called Chicano/a Studies. Therefore, I recognize this norm of using the term Chicano, partly due to its wide use throughout the field, but also because of a lack of a better suggestion for this language variety. While my preference would be the term Hispanic English, there are number of valid
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arguments against it. One such argument is that it is a term created by the United
States government and in that way, it was potentially forced onto the minority by the majority (Taylor, Lopez, Martinez & Velasco 2012). Another issue is that some people that may identify as Hispanic, such as Puerto Ricans and Cuban
Americans, speak a variety of Spanish-influenced English that is distinct from the language variety being studied here (Gramley & Patzold 2004). I hope to expand on this topic in future research.
1.3.3 Vowel description conventions
In terms of vowel description, I will refrain, when possible, from using individual IPA vowel symbols and will instead use a word that includes the vowel sound in question in standard American English. This means that, for example, rather than listing a phoneme between forward slashes, such as /æ/, I will use the word BAT. Table 1.3 includes the complete list.
IPA Symbol Lexical Set Word i BEET ɪ BIT ɛ BET æ BAT æn BAN ɑ BOT/BOUGHT ʌ BUT ɚ BURT ʊ BOOK u BOOT ou BOAT ɑu BOUT ɔɪ BOYD ɑɪ BIDE eɪ BADE
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Table 1.3: Lexical set used to represent individual vowels in this study This practice of using lexical sets over IPA symbols comes with several advantages, particularly for sociophonetic studies that examine regional differences. Lexical sets became widely used starting with Wells (1982) and have continued to be used both in their original form (such as Hall-Lew 2011,
Kennedy and Grama 2012, and Holland 2014) as well as in modified versions. In this study, the lexical set consists of some of the words recorded by participants rather than the standard list from Wells (1982). Kennedy and Grama (2012) highlight two advantages to lexical sets. First, each vowel has “a multitude of regionally dependent realizations but the categorical dimensions of frontness, height, and tenseness are too coarse to capture such fine distinctions in some cases, and simply inaccurate in other cases” (p. 43). Second, the low back vowels BOT, BOUGHT, and even the more central BAT are difficult to specify due to the frequent variation and overlap among these vowels that occurs throughout several varieties of North American English.
1.3.4 Summary
It has now been clearly established that New Mexico has both a unique past and an equally unique present. It should come as no surprise then that New
Mexican English would not simply pattern as just another part of the Western
Dialect Region (see Section 1.4.2.1 for a description of Western Vowel Systems).
Nor does it seem likely that the English spoken by Hispanics, a minority ethnic group in the country as a whole, but almost half of the state’s populace in New
Mexico, would be accurately described by traditional accounts.
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1.4 Literature Review
In this section, I examine the previous research related to the primary topics in my study. First, I review the work on Chicano English, starting with its inception in the middle of the 20th century until the present day. The first few decades of work are understandably less focused than today's work, and the literature review I present for this time frame is wider in scope. The more recent decades of research have become increasingly fine-grained, and it is in these last decades that this literature review will focus on work specifically looking at vowel formants, trajectories, and overall vowel spaces. I then review the concepts of the Third Dialect, Western States, and the California Vowel Shift
(CVS). I consider both findings related to Anglos as well as those related to ethnic minorities and their participation (or lack thereof) in these linguistic phenomena. Next, I examine the previous research on English in New Mexico; much of it is situated within the context of Chicano English or Western Vowel
Space. Then, I present some of the findings and continued questions related to majority-minority situations (where less than 50% of a population is Anglo) including, but not exclusively considering, speakers of Chicano English. This is of interest because most linguistic research on ethnic minorities has taken place in locations where the group of interest is a minority of the population, but that is not the case in New Mexico, where Hispanics are proportionally the largest ethnic group.
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In each of the topics below, the theme of identity is central to understanding the distinctive linguistic features being considered. Humans use language to express membership in the groups with which they align themselves.
Key to the current study are social factors of gender and ethnicity.
Generally, women have been found to simultaneously use fewer stigmatized variants, adopt prestigious forms more quickly, and lead changes in progress (Labov 1990, 2001). At first glance, this combination of linguistic conservatism and linguistic innovation seems contradictory, particularly because new forms are necessarily non-standard early on. However, this can be reconciled by considering whether the variant in question is stable or evolving.
Women use fewer nonstandard forms of stable (e.g. non-changing) variables, and men use more (Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 2004). In terms of innovation, there are two types: change from above, and change from below. Changes from above involve the re-organization of a set of variables in terms of their associated prestige or stigma, and speakers are aware of the social meanings that different variants index (Labov 1990, 2001). In these cases, most of which are changes that originate outside of the community, women adopt the new non-standard variants of prestige more quickly than men. This is similar to changes from below, which also generally come from outside of the community, but importantly they do not index overt prestige, they usually take place below the level of social awareness, and they often impact several parts of a system (such as in a chain shift of vowels) (Labov 1990, 2001). In changes from below, it is again women
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who adopt the new forms first. Cheshire (2004) succinctly notes that changes led by men are both linguistically and geographically isolated.
Equally complicated is the case for ethnicity. The degree of linguistic variation from the local Anglo variety depends on the ethnic group in question.
For example, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (2006) note that Jewish varieties of
English differ from majority varieties in terms of only a few variables, while
African American Vernacular English exhibits much more variation. Although it is often reported that ethnic minority groups do not participate in regional dialects
(Labov 1994), such a blanket statement is not true. Instead, some non-Anglo linguistic communities adopt some or all of the characteristics of their regional dialect, and some do not (Fought 2004).
Of course, the effects of gender and ethnicity are not independent of each other, and it is common to find interactional effects between these two factors
(Labov 2010; Wolfram & Schilling-Estes 2006). The majority of research described in the coming sections will consider both of these factors.
1.4.1 Chicano English
The study of Chicano English is a young but productive one. In just a few short decades, Chicano English has become much better understood, and attitudes towards it have greatly progressed. This literature review is organized by decades to highlight the different steps in the growth and trends of research on Chicano English.
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1.4.1.1 Pre-1970s
During this time, there were few studies on this topic, nearly all of which focused on the “inadequate and/or imperfect acquisition” of English by speakers for whom Spanish was their first language. Most notable are an article by Lynn
(1945) and a dissertation by Sawyer (1959) documenting the deficiencies of
Spanish-English bilinguals in Texas. A quote from one of those texts is not needed; the title of Sawyer’s work, “Aloofness from Spanish Influence in Texas
English” will suffice. Today, it is well-known that monolingual English speakers who have an “ethnic accent” are not, in fact, people who are unable to correctly or completely acquire English, but that was not understood in this era.
Fortunately, linguists would soon begin to address this misconception.
1.4.1.2 1970s-1980s
The 1970s brought with them an opposition and strong reaction to earlier studies, with researchers in defense and support of speakers of Chicano English.
Bills (1977) laments, “Vernacular Chicano English is generally perceived as a proper field of inquiry for Second Language Acquisition scholars, but not dialectologists” (p. 431). Important, too, are the clarifications made during this time that non-native speakers of English are not the same as native-speakers who speak a variety of Chicano English. Metcalf states, “… for a Spanish accent does not always mean a Spanish speaker” (1979, p. 1). Note that Metcalf is one of the first linguists who admits that “Chicano” is an ill-fitting name for this field of
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study, yet he uses the term because that is what others in the field do; an issue which will be discussed below.
Here we also see the beginnings of more systematic research on Chicano
English vowels. Various works by Metcalf note some of the differences between
Chicano English and the more standard English varieties throughout the
Southwest, such as stressed lax vowels becoming higher and more tense (yet still remaining distinct from tense vowels) (1972; 1979), lack of BET-raising pre- nasally (1972), and the “substitution” of BOT/BOUGHT in place of BUT (1979).
Until this point, vowel studies had been largely impressionistic in nature, until
Godinez and Maddieson (1985) measured F1 and F2 formant frequencies to systematically compare vowel qualities across three groups in the greater Los
Angeles area: Anglo monolinguals, Chicano monolingual speakers of English, and Chicano Spanish-English bilinguals. In terms of similarity across groups, the
BOT/BOUGHT merger was found to be present in all three populations. In addition to several differences between the two Chicano populations, they found that all Chicano speakers shared several features, in comparison to the Anglos:
1) higher BIT, BET, and BAT, 2) a more backed BOOT, and 3) less difference in duration between long and short vowels. They conclude by stating, “Chicano
English represents an autonomous social dialect with distinct characteristics” (p.
57). This study is still cited frequently today.
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1.4.1.3 1990s
The decade leading up to the turn of the century continued the discussion on the legitimacy and value of this variety of English as well as emphasizing
Chicano English as a dialect of American English (see, for example, Santa Ana
1993a and 1993b). Santa Ana proposed a “cross-regional unitary description of
Chicano English” (1993, p. 5), while other researchers tended to emphasize that their study, whichever one it might be, was regarding one group in one location.
In doing so they stress that their findings may not be true for other Chicano
English-using communities across the country. Both of these approaches have their own importance and value for the establishment and acceptance of the
Chicano English dialect as well as its users.
Hernandez (1993) was the first researcher to examine the Chicano
English of northern New Mexico. Through her own auditory perceptual evaluations of the monolingual English-speakers of her study, she finds lowering of BIT and BET before laterals, lowering of BOOT before consonants, and lowering of BUT. Hernandez began important work with her 1993 study of
English in New Mexico, and this appears to be the only published research on
English vocalic phonetics in New Mexico until 2017 (see below).
As the field of Chicano English continued to grow and more studies were conducted, Mendoza-Denton (1999) outlined a number of issues that must be taken into consideration by the sociolinguistic community when examining two dialects in contact, including, among others: the state of changes in progress with
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each contact variety; the historical, socioeconomic, and demographic conditions of the groups; the degree of contact with other ethnic and linguistic groups; language attitudes and local evaluations; and the possibility of local innovation within minority varieties. Studies that address these questions provide valuable and in-depth quantitative phonetic and phonological research. For example,
Fought (1999) discovered that a combination of variables (gender, socioeconomic status, and gang affiliation) affected degree of BOOT-fronting within a group of Hispanic students at a California high school. Further, she found that these social variables differed in importance for male and female students. For the female students, non-gang affiliation was the strongest variable, and social class was not significant. For male students, on the other hand, social class was the most important variable, and lack of gang-affiliation was much less central. These findings highlight the need to take into consideration a multitude of potentially interacting social variables, as Mendoza-
Denton (1999) emphasized.
1.4.1.4 2000s
By this time, both linguistic and educational communities have come to a consensus that Chicano English 1) is a valid dialect of American English, 2) is spoken by many monolingual individuals as well as many bilinguals, and 3) is not uniform across all Hispanic communities nationwide. Thus, studies of Chicano
English have become much more fine-grained across all disciplines of linguistics.
Here I continue to limit the discussion to the studies that focus on vowels. It is in
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these more recent studies that linguists begin to raise important questions about
Hispanic speakers’ potential participation in local Anglo-led changes.
In looking at the extent to which a given Chicano English community does
(or does not) share characteristics of the local language variety of the majority, it is found that Chicano English communities vary along a continuum in this respect. Several researchers have examined Hispanic participation in the
Northern Cities Shift (NCS) (Frazer 1996; Gordon 2000; Konopka &
Pierrehumbert 2008; Roeder 2010; Konopka 2011). The NCS is characterized by: BAT raising Northern(in all contexts, Cities Vowel rather Shift than just before a nasal), BOT fronting,
BOUGHT lowering, BET backing and lowering, BIT backing and lowering, and
BUT backing. These shifts are diagrammed in Figure 1.3.
BIT
BET BUT
BOUGHT
BAT BOT
Figure 1.3 Summary of Movements in Northern Cities Vowel Shift
Roeder (2009) discovered that Hispanics almost fully accommodate to the local variety of the NCS in Lansing, Michigan with regards to all vowel shifts except BAT-raising. As expected for changes that take place below the level of social awareness (Labov 1990, 2001), the younger women show more advanced
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stages of the NCS than do males or older people of either gender. Roeder’s
(2010) in-depth discussion views the lack of movement in the BAT vowel as a salient identity marker for the Hispanic community there, which highlights the significance of participation (or not) in BAT-raising. Konopka and Pierrehumbert
(2008) found variable participation in NCS among Chicano English speakers in
Chicago, Illinois, a location where NCS is also present. One vowel stood out as most differentiated across ethnicities: very little BAT-raising was observed among the Hispanic participants. As an aside, BEET and BOOT (vowels that are not part of NCS) were raised for Hispanic speakers while BIT and BOOK (as part of NCS) were lowered. While the speakers in Konopka and Pierrehumbert’s (2008) study do show the NCS pattern in vowels other than BAT, albeit at less advanced stages, the authors suggest that for this specific Chicano English community, lack of BAT-raising is a marker of ethnic identity, which is similar to the suggestion by Roeder (2010). In addition, they emphasize that there is no singular Chicano English dialect, and that individual communities will adopt different aspects of local non-ethnic sound changes, again similar to the findings from Roeder (2010). More recently, Konopka (2011) observed nearly identical vowel spaces for Anglos and Hispanics, and notes that it is the dynamic features of trajectory and length that differ between the two groups. In sum, there is variable participation in NCS features across communities of Hispanic speakers in the Great Lakes region.
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Fought (2003) also found partial participation by the Hispanic population in her study of the California Vowel Shift (CVS). As in her 1999 study, her 2003 participants show evidence of BOOT-fronting, BAT-backing and raising, but the distribution for each of these vowels differs for different combinations of the social variables of gender, social class, and gang status. The CVS will be discussed in more detail in the following section. In addition to CVS features,
Fought (2003) found that her Chicano English speakers showed a wider distribution of the BEET vowel, shortening of BAIT and BOAT, and variable production of glides.
A number of studies have also investigated Hispanic speakers in Texas, a welcome return to the topic in Texas since the early, and arguably misguided, works by Sawyer (1959) and Lynn (1945) more than 50 years ago. Variable
Hispanic participation in Anglo norms was again reported. Thomas (2001) found that Hispanics did not front BOAT like Anglos in the community did, nor did they produce any of the vowel features that are exclusive to Texas Anglo English.
Hispanics did show increasing BOOT-fronting and the merging of BOT/BOUGHT, features typical of the Anglo speakers. Thomas, Carter, and Cogshall (2006) additionally found a lack of BAN-raising in Hispanic participants, another difference from the behavior of Anglo speakers in Texas. Williams (2010), however, finds BAN-raising and tensing by both the Anglo and Hispanic speakers in his study of El Paso, which will be addressed in more depth in section 1.4.4.
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Of further interest and great importance is the fact that many of the more recent studies discussed above address the issue that the term “Chicano
English” is not necessarily an appropriate one. In fact, even some of the studies from nearly fifty years ago speak to this issue. Chicano is a term that, depending on the location and time frame in question, is used by virtually none of the people that it is purported to describe. Researchers have now started to use other terms more often. For example, Thomas (2001), Thomas, Carter, and Cogshall (2006), and Roeder (2009, 2010) describe “Mexican-American English,” Slomanson and
Newman (2004) use the term “Latino English,” Konopka and Pierrehumbert
(2008) and Konopka (2011) use “Mexican Heritage English.” Though no one term can perfectly capture this language variety or its users, it is heartening to see that researchers recognize this and are attempting to include this issue as part of their work. “When Labels Don’t Fit” (Taylor, Lopez, Martinez, & Velasco 2012) offers a concise yet powerful description of some of the complex factors surrounding appropriate label use to describe Hispanics and, by extension, their language varieties in the United States.
1.4.2 California Vowel Shift and being a “Western State”
Although English in New Mexico has received relatively little linguistic study, all evaluations categorize New Mexico (minus a small area described below) as a western state.
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1.4.2.1 The West
In Carver (1987), all but a sliver of the southeastern part of the state of
New Mexico is described as being part of “The West”. This evaluation came from the lexical choices and isoglosses identified in the speech of four speakers from different locations across the state who took part in the survey for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). Similarly, Labov (1991) found New
Mexico to be part of the Third Dialect region, a region broadly characterized by not participating in either of the two largest shifts occurring throughout the US: the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Shift. More specifically, the Third
Dialect is characterized by the BOT/BOUGHT merger, BAN-raising, and BAT- retraction. Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006) describe the Western Dialect Region, of which New Mexico is a part, to include not only the features listed above, but also BOOT-fronting and slight BOAT-fronting, all of which are supported by the
New Mexican data used in the Atlas of North American English (ANAE).
While these newly added features from the ANAE description were found within the data for New Mexico, it is important to keep in mind that the ANAE includes only very sparse data on the state. In fact, of the six speakers included from New Mexico, the full vowel space was only analyzed for two of them: a
Hispanic female from Albuquerque and an Anglo female from Santa Fe. Both of these speakers showed complete shifts for BET-lowering, BAT-retraction, and
BOT-retraction, three of the vowel shifts that make up the CVS. The Hispanic female from Albuquerque showed no fronting of BOOT or BOAT. This absence of
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fronting is characteristic of Chicano English (Thomas 2001). The Anglo female from Santa Fe, on the other hand, showed BOOT-fronting and slight BOAT- fronting, both of which were newly described characteristics of the Western
Dialect Region in the ANAE (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006) as well as being part of the CVS (Eckert 2008).
As a side note, of the two most significant linguistic studies that include
New Mexico, one utilized just four speakers (Carver 1987), and the other analyzed the full vowel systems for two speakers plus partial data from four other speakers (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006). When considering that New Mexico is the fifth largest state by area in the United States, it seems important to include more than a handful of speakers. If we consider the six speakers from New
Mexico that were included in the ANAE (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006), New
Mexico has been characterized by just 1 speaker per 20,235 square miles of land.
1.4.2.2 California Vowel Shift
Very popular in dialectology work in recent decades, the California Vowel
Shift (CVS) has been heavily studied throughout its namesake state (Hagiwara
1997; Fought 1999; Eckert 2008; Hall-Lew 2009; Kennedy & Grama 2012, among others). This vowel shift includes the lowering and backing of the front lax vowels (BIT, BET, and BAT), the raising of BAT before a nasal (hereafter referred to as BAN-raising), the merging of BOT and BOUGHT into the space represented by /ɔ/ in the IPA, the fronting of BUT, and the fronting of the high and
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mid back vowels BOOT, BOOK, and BOAT (Eckert 2008). These shifts are diagrammed in Figure 1.4.
BEET BOOT
BIT BOOK
BAN BOAT
BET BUT
BAT BOT/BOUGHT
Figure 1.4: Summary of movements in California Vowel shift
As with nearly all other linguistic phenomena, CVS is not as simple as it
may initially appear. First, it is debated whether these vowel movements are – as the name suggests – one vowel shift system, or whether they are the product of two smaller shifts working in tandem (Kennedy & Grama 2012). Second, all
California speakers do not show identical patterns for this vowel shift. Rather, there are regional, ethnic, and gender-based differences in CVS participation.
Kennedy and Grama (2010) note that the “English of California is by no means uniform” (p. 40). In terms of geographic differences, for example,
D’onofrio et al. (2016) found variable participation across the field sites in their study of the inland communities of Redding, Bakersfield, and Merced. With regard to variation relating to ethnic minority participation, Hall-Lew (2011) noted that Asian-Americans were not only participating in the CVS, but were sometimes even more advanced in their vowel shifts (especially BOOT-fronting) than
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Anglos. Cardoso et al. (2016) found Chinese-Americans participating in BAT- retraction and BAN-raising, but to a lesser extent than the Anglo population. As for gender, it is commonly found that women lead linguistic change (Labov 2001), and this has also been documented for the CVS: in Cardoso et al. (2016), above, the Chinese-American women led in BAT-retraction over Chinese-American men.
The CVS is, by name alone, a bit misleading, as we see participation in this vowel system in other states throughout the West. Just as within California, there is variable participation among different social groups across different western states. For example, Holland and Brandenburg (in press) found evidence of the CVS in Colorado, especially among women, even though men and women participate rather equally in the vowel shifts characterized by Labov
(1991). In fact, Holland and Brandenburg (in press) documented occurrences of all CVS movements in Colorado except for BUT-fronting. Instead, they found
BUT-retraction.
Of course, the CVS and the Western States Dialect are not the only varieties that occur in the West. There are other regional varieties as well, and participation in any language variety is dependent on a plethora of social variables. For example, Wassink (2016) found that all of the ethnicities (Yakama,
Japanese, Mexican, African American, and Anglo) in her study of Central and
Eastern Washington participated somewhat in at least some of the local features of Pacific North West English, such as pre-velar raising of BAG to BEG. As in
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other studies of shifts from below (Labov 1990, 2001), females were found to lead the change. In addition, Hispanics exhibited the BOT-BOUGHT merger but showed no evidence of widespread BOOT-fronting.
There has been only one study so far that examines the question of New
Mexico’s participation in the CVS (Brumbaugh & Koops, in press), which will be discussed in the coming section.
1.4.3 English in New Mexico
As can be seen from section 1.5.1, the majority of research (particularly the most well-known publications) on Chicano English has been located in just three areas: California, Texas, and a few locales within the Northern Cities Shift region (in and near Chicago, Illinois and Lansing, Michigan). Research on
Chicano English in New Mexico has been sparse in contrast, and the few studies that do exist lack in terms of number of participants. As mentioned earlier, I argue that this is mostly due to the incredible linguistic diversity throughout this state
(languages include New Mexican Spanish, Navajo, Jicarilla Apache, Mescalero
Apache, Zuni, Keres, Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa), in addition to the relative recency of the widespread use of English as compared to other states. The next paragraphs will highlight the fact that the majority of research on English in New
Mexico is situated in terms of its relation to Spanish. Recall that while 48% of the state population is Hispanic (American Community Survey 5-year Estimates
2015), just 26.8% of the state population speaks Spanish (American Community
Survey 1-Year Estimates 2015). Many Hispanics in New Mexico are English
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monolinguals, and this research focus exclusively about bilinguals may unintentionally or indirectly support the common misconception that Chicano
English speakers are always bilingual.
The earliest research on Chicano English in New Mexico followed similar themes to other contemporary investigations across the Southwest. That is, the focus was on the educational ramifications for Spanish-English bilingual children
(Rodrigues 1974), as well as factors and attitudes that influence choosing to use
Spanish or English for a particular interaction within a bilingual community or household (Timm 1975). In more recent decades, the focus on bilingual speakers throughout New Mexico has continued, with much work taking advantage of the
New Mexico Spanish English Bilingual Corpus (NMSEB, Torres Cacoullos &
Travis 2015a). Other studies have focused on lexical borrowing of English into
Spanish (Bills & Vigil 2008; Clegg 2009). In these grammatical and lexical studies, the focus almost exclusively concerns the uniqueness of New Mexican
Spanish, thereby strongly suggesting that the language contact effects involving
Spanish and English are unidirectional.
From a phonetic or phonological viewpoint, considerably less work has looked at English in New Mexico. As mentioned previously, Hernandez (1993) studied Chicano English vowels in Northern New Mexico using impressionistic analysis. She found that the high tense vowels BEET and BOOT lower, BET lowers to BAT before a lateral, and the lowering of BUT. The only study on
English consonants in New Mexico, to the best of my knowledge, is Balukas and
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Koops (2015), who examined Voice Onset Time (VOT) in the code-switching of
Spanish-English bilinguals. They found a clear substratum effect of Spanish on the English for the VOT of these Spanish-English bilinguals, which is in line with the types of effects that would be expected for vowels.
The most thorough study of Chicano English vowels in New Mexico, aside from Hernandez (1993), is Brumbaugh and Koops (in press). By comparing the vowel spaces of Anglo men, Anglo women, Hispanic men, and Hispanic women, a number of observations were made. First, they found Anglo participation in
Western/CVS traits, with women leading the change in the majority of cases.
Specifically, BET-lowering, BAT-retraction, BOOT-fronting, and peripheralization of BAIT are all led by women, while the other two sound changes, BOAT-fronting and BAN-raising, are led by Anglos but do not show a gender difference. On the other hand, Hispanics show little to no participation in Western features, with the exception of the BOT/BOUGHT merger. Lastly, the Hispanic groups show much less difference between genders than the Anglo group, wherein several significant differences between Anglo men and women were documented.
This dissertation is an effort to build on and expand the work of
Brumbaugh and Koops (in press). It is clear from the limitations of the existing literature that there is much potential for linguistic research on English in New
Mexico.
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1.4.4 Issues of Majority-Minority situations
All of the studies addressed so far, with one exception (Williams 2011), concern ethnic minority groups within larger communities of which they are numerically a minority group based on their population size. Yet groups that are minorities in the national context are not always minorities at the local level. For example, the city of El Paso, Texas reports a population that is 80.7% Hispanic and 14.2% White Non-Hispanic/Non-Latino (as reported in Williams 2011).
Similarly, the city of Miami is 70% Hispanic/Latino, while the state of Florida overall is 22.5% Hispanic/Latino (US Census 2010). What happens in communities such as these? In the case of Williams (2011), full participation in
BAN-raising was found across ethnic and gender groups. The issue of BAN- raising is particularly interesting because it is rarely documented in Hispanic communities. As mentioned earlier, Roeder (2010), found full participation on the part of her Hispanic participants across all vowel shifts typical of the Northern
Cities Shift except for BAN-raising. Only women under 25 showed complete raising of BAN, and Roeder believes it to be a change in progress. It may be that
BAN-raising throughout the Hispanic population in El Paso, a vowel quality for which the opposite (lack of BAN-raising) is normally characteristic in communities that speak Chicano English (Thomas 2001), relates to their majority position in their community. In El Paso, Hispanics are clearly the majority. This raises the question of whether New Mexico, where Hispanics and Anglos are much closer in number, exhibits a similar pattern.
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1.4.5 Summary
In the literature reviewed above, the majority of work on Chicano English and the CVS has occurred in their canonical geographical areas, and only recently has research expanded to include other locations and regions. For example, Chicano English has been studied most often in California and Texas, yet there are large Hispanic populations across much of the United States. We therefore have begun to see more work in other locales, such as North Carolina
(Wolfram, Carter & Moriello 2004; Kohn 2008), Chicago, Illinois (Konopka &
Pierrehumbert 2008; Konopka 2011), and Lansing, Michigan (Roeder 2009,
2010). Similarly, the CVS has been studied primarily in California. As more sociophonetic studies are done throughout the West, we see that it is not
Californians alone who are participating in this shift, but residents of other areas such as Colorado (Holland & Brandenburg in press) and Oregon (McLarty,
Kendall, & Farrington 2016).
Section 1.4.3 presented a review of research into English in New Mexico, and was notably short. New Mexico is sorely lacking with regards to linguistic investigations into the local varieties of English. As a western state, a better understanding of New Mexico’s participation (or potential lack thereof) in terms of
Western Vowels (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006), and the CVS (Eckert 2008) is desirable. Further, it is imperative that any work include considerations of ethnicity, specifically, the roles of the two largest ethnic groups in the state,
Anglos and Hispanics. This is particularly true, as addressed in section 1.4.4,
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when a group that is a minority in the nation is actually the majority population in a community.
Throughout this section, I highlighted questions relating to Chicano
English which my research aims to illuminate. Eckert (2016) describes much of this succinctly: “The dialectology of the United States has been a white Anglo dialectology, and interest in other groups has centered on the extent to which they conform to the narrowly defined regional patterns” (p. 3). The work at present aims to address these issues within the context of New Mexican English.
1.5 Research Questions and Hypotheses
Here, I aim to investigate the location of individual vowels, diphthong trajectory, and the overall vowel space of speakers in New Mexico. I specifically address the similarities and differences across gender and ethnic groups within the Albuquerque area, as well as comparing Albuquerque to other communities in the US. It is important to keep in mind that this is one of the first studies of this nature in the state, and thus I am obliged to ask simple research questions in some instances. Future works will, ideally, build upon the foundations established in the current study.
1.5.1 Question 1: Vowels across Gender and Ethnicity
I first address the locations of individual vowels and their trajectories, as well as a speaker’s total vowel space, and compare across the genders (male, female) and ethnicities (Anglo, Hispanic). The term “Anglo” here refers to non-
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Hispanics that identify as White or Anglo. I have four hypotheses related to gender and ethnicity.
Hypothesis 1. Anglos, but not Hispanics, will have different distributions for
BAT and BAN. Anglos will raise the BAN vowel to a higher position in the vowel space relative to their BAT vowel. In contrast, Hispanics will not raise BAN, and it will be located in the same (or very similar) space as their BAT vowel. This has been documented in numerous studies across various Chicano English communities (Thomas, Carter & Cogshall 2006; Konopka and Pierrehumbert
2008; Roeder 2009 and Roeder 2010).
Hypothesis 2. Broadly speaking, Hispanic females will pattern more closely to the Anglos than to the Hispanic males. Evidence of the California
Vowel Shift is expected in the Anglo speakers as well as slight participation from
Hispanic females (see Research Question 2, below). As CVS is a set of linguistic changes from below, women usually begin to adopt such new features before men (Labov 1990, 2001). This would support, then, that Hispanic women will produce features of the CVS to a greater extent than Hispanic men. Roeder
(2010) finds that Mexican-American women show more advanced and more complete participation in the local regional variety, the Northern Cities Shift, than do their male counterparts. Therefore, Hispanic females will pattern more closely to Anglo speakers in this study.
Hypothesis 3. There will be less change between the starting and ending points in the short diphthongs of Hispanics as compared to Anglos, similar to
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findings in Fought (2003). That is, there will be more monophthongization in the short diphthongs BADE and BOAT within the Hispanic group as compared to the
Anglo group.
Hypothesis 4. Hispanics will have a larger overall vowel space. Fought
(2003) noted that her Hispanic participants produced BEET and BOOT glides higher in the vowel space than Anglos. Additionally, Santa Ana and Bayley
(2004) and Fought (2003) report variable amounts of BOOT-fronting from none to moderate fronting. Therefore, higher BEET and BOOT vowels, coupled with less
BOOT-fronting, mean that the back of the vowel space for Hispanics may be further back and higher than that of Anglos, which would lead to a larger overall vowel space.
1.5.2 Question 2: New Mexico and the California Vowel Shift
My second research question addresses to what extent New Mexicans participate in the characteristics of Western Vowel Shift and/or the CVS. The first three hypotheses stem from descriptions of the Western Vowel Space (Labov,
Ash, & Boberg 2006).
Hypothesis 1. All participants, regardless of gender or ethnicity, will have a merged BOT-BOUGHT vowel space. This is commonly found across the West, regardless of ethnicity. Wassink (in press) reports Hispanic participation in the
BOT-BOUGHT merger in the state of Washington.
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Hypothesis 2. BAN-raising will only occur in Anglo participants, similar to results found by Thomas, Carter & Cogshall (2006) and Konopka and
Pierrehumbert (2008).
Hypothesis 3. Anglos will participate in BOOT and BOAT fronting,
Hispanic females will front these vowels slightly, and Hispanic males will show no evidence of fronting. Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006) found exclusively Anglo participation in these shifts in New Mexico. Wassink (2016) reports no BOOT- fronting on the part of Hispanic participants.
Hypothesis 4. The lowering and retraction of the front lax vowels (BIT,
BET, and BAT), the possible fronting of BUT, and the fronting of BOOK will only occur in Anglo speakers, slightly in Hispanic females, and not at all in Hispanic males. Further, even the Anglo speakers that show the most advancement of features of the CVS will not be as advanced as is found in California. This is due to the relative recency of the CVS (as opposed to the characteristics of Western
States vowel descriptions), the location of New Mexico (separated from California by the approximately 400-mile-wide state of Arizona), and the small proportion of
Californians living in New Mexico. Of all of the states in the West, New Mexico and Wyoming report the lowest proportions of Californians, with just five percent of each state’s population originating from California (Gregor, Gebeloff, & Quealy
2014). This is in contrast to the states directly adjacent to California that have nearly double and triple the proportions of Californians: Nevada, Oregon, and
Arizona report 19%, 14%, and 9%, respectively. (Gregor, Gebeloff, & Quealy
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2014). Just as it took a great deal longer for language demographics to shift in
New Mexico than elsewhere approximately 100 years ago, I expect that it will take longer for New Mexico to undergo newer linguistic shifts as well. As for ethnicity-based differences in CVS participation, Hispanics have been documented as showing less advanced participation in local Anglo-led sound changes of this type (Eckert 2008; Roeder 2009 and 2010).
In sum, I expect that Anglos will show evidence of the Western Vowel Shift and the CVS, but their participation will be less than what is found in other states in the West, with the exception of BAN-raising and the merging of BOT and
BOUGHT, which will be similar to what has been documented elsewhere. That is, each vowel that has been identified as part of the CVS or Western Vowel Space/
Third dialect will be present in New Mexico, but the movement/location will be less dramatic than is found elsewhere. Further, I hypothesize that Hispanic women will participate only partially at most. Aside from a fully merged BOT-
BOUGHT space, I expect very little to no participation on the part of Hispanic men.
1.5.3 Question 3: Comparing Chicano English in New Mexico with Findings in Other States
Thirdly, I address how the findings for the Hispanic speakers in this study of New Mexico compare to those of other Hispanic communities across the US. I hypothesize that my findings will be similar to what has been observed in other
Chicano English-speaking communities throughout the country.
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Hypothesis 1. Hispanics will not have a pre-nasal BAT/BAN split, consistent with Thomas, Carter and Cogshall (2006), Konopka and
Pierrehumbert (2008), and Roeder (2009).
Hypothesis 2. The short diphthongs BADE and BOAT produced by
Hispanic speakers will be more monophthongal in quality, meaning a smaller trajectory/distance from onset to glide, than those produced by Anglo speakers.
This hypothesis is based on similar findings in Fought (2003).
Hypothesis 3. I expect to find less advanced participation in local Anglo- led sound changes from the Hispanic participants. Similar to findings in other locations (Labov 2001; Roeder 2010), if there is evidence of participation in local non-ethnic sound changes, then: 1) Hispanic participation will be less advanced, and 2) Hispanic women will participate more than Hispanic men.
1.6 Organization of the Dissertation
Chapter 1 has set the framework for this study with an overview of the historical and linguistic situation of New Mexico, motivations for the current research, review of the relevant literature, and research questions and their corresponding hypotheses. Chapter 2 explains the methodology used in this dissertation including experimental design, participant selection, experimental procedure, token selection, data analysis and statistical procedures. Chapter 3 presents the results of the experiment and discusses the answers to Research
Question 1 (Vowels across Gender and Ethnicity). Chapter 4 considers New
Mexico’s participation as a Western State and/or participant in the California
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Vowel Shift (Research Question 2) and compares the findings of the study at present with those of previous studies on Chicano English (Research Question
3). Finally, Chapter 5 includes a summary of results, a discussion of limitations, suggestions for future work, and closing comments.
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Chapter 2: Methodology
2.0 Overview
This chapter describes the experimental design, implementation, and subsequent data analysis for this work. Section 2.1 covers speaker recruitment and selection. Section 2.2 includes materials and elicitation techniques. Section
2.3 addresses the recording procedures. Section 2.4 covers token extraction and evaluation. Section 2.5 explains the normalization and scaling techniques, and section 2.6 describes the statistical procedures used to make comparisons across social factors, individual vowels, and the global vowel system.
2.1 Speakers
2.1.1 Recruitment
Speakers were recruited from Linguistics 101 classes on the main campus of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico as well as by word of mouth. Participants chose the type of compensation they preferred for their involvement: either extra credit in their introductory Linguistics class or a Visa gift card valued at $20.
Recruitment efforts involved explaining to potential speakers that this study focused on individuals that 1) had lived all of their lives in the northern half of New Mexico, 2) self-identify as White/Caucasian/Anglo or
Hispanic/Latino/Latina, and 3) only speak English or both English and Spanish.
Northern New Mexico was defined as the region north of Los Lunas, NM, inclusive. See Table 2.1 and Figure 2.1 in section 2.1.2.
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2.1.2 Background questionnaire and speaker selection
Upon arriving at the Speech and Hearing Sciences laboratory, each participant first filled out a background questionnaire that asked questions regarding their linguistic background (as well as those of their parents and grandparents), where they had lived, and whether they had ever lived outside of
New Mexico for more than six months. This questionnaire was used as verification that the participant met the study background requirements. All speakers completed the questionnaire as well as the recording activities, regardless of their responses on the initial questionnaire. See Appendix A for the complete questionnaire, including listed options for race and ethnicity.
For the purposes of this study, speakers were categorized based on their own self-identification of ethnicity. As mentioned in previous chapters, there is no one agreed-upon term for people commonly referred to as “Hispanic.” Thus, a number of options were available for participants to select, all of which were considered as part of the “Hispanic” category. This included the terms: Hispanic,
Chicano/a, Hispano/a, Latino/a, Mexicano/a, Mexican-American, Afro-Latino,
Spanish, Spanish-American, and Coyotito/a. The last three terms, Spanish,
Spanish-American, and coyotito/a have specific meanings unique to New Mexico
(Gonzales 2005). Spanish and Spanish-American are often used in the northern part of the state as a way to identify someone whose family has resided for centuries in that area, as opposed to having more recently immigrated from
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Mexico. Coyotito refers to someone who is of mixed heritage, generally half
Hispanic and half Anglo.
Twenty-seven people participated in the experiment. Eleven of these were excluded for a variety of reasons. Two participants were excluded from analysis for having lived outside of New Mexico for more than six months, three participants self-identified as both Anglo and Hispanic, and one participant mentioned that his parents had put him in accent reduction classes when he was younger. Five Anglo women were not included in the analysis due to the abundance of Anglo women having participated in this experiment.
Consequently, sixteen speakers were included in the full analysis. This includes eight people who self-identify as Anglo (4 men, 4 women) and eight people who self-identify as Hispanic (4 men, 4 women). None of the 16 chosen participants identified as both Anglo AND Hispanic. Rather, each participant identified as either Anglo or Hispanic. Speaker demographics for those included in the study are listed in Table 2.1.
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Speaker Hometown Anglo female 1 Albuquerque Anglo female 2 Rio Rancho Anglo female 3 Los Alamos Anglo female 4 Los Alamos Anglo male 1 Albuquerque Anglo male 2 Edgewood Anglo male 3 Albuquerque Anglo male 4 Albuquerque Hispanic female 1 Albuquerque Hispanic female 2 Pecos Hispanic female 3 Los Lunas Hispanic female 4 Chama Hispanic male 1 Los Lunas Hispanic male 2 Los Lunas Hispanic male 3 Silver City Hispanic male 4 Los Lunas Table 2.1 Participants and their hometowns
Figure 2.1 shows the location of participant hometowns across the state.
The size of the diamond-shaped marker is proportional to the number of participants from that city. The capital, Santa Fe, is marked with a star; no participants are from there.
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Figure 2.1: Hometowns of participants by number of participants in study
All participants except for the one from Silver City originate from the northern half of the state. The speaker from Silver City was included in order to maintain an equal number of participants in each category.
2.2 Materials
2.2.1 Tokens
A total of 14 lexical classes were chosen for analysis in order to develop a complete picture of each speaker’s vowel space. This includes the monophthongs BEET, BIT, BET, BAT, BAN, BOT/BOUGHT, BURT, BUT, and
BOOT. Note that BAT and BAN were separated due to the expectation that these two phonetic environments will pattern differently between the two ethnic groups.
By preemptively separating BAT and BAN tokens, these expected differences can be taken into account in the process of normalizing the data. Previous
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studies having examined the potential merging of BOT/BOUGHT in New Mexico identify New Mexico as within the region of the COT-CAUGHT merger (Labov,
Ash, & Boberg, 2006; Brumbaugh & Koops, in press). This study builds off of those findings. Therefore, the BOT and BOUGHT vowels are collapsed together into one category, here referred to as BOT. This coincides with impressionistic evidence from New Mexico students’ difficulty in learning how to distinguish the vowels of BOT and BOUGHT as they occur in dialects of English where they have not merged. Diphthongs include BITE, BAIT, BOY, BOUT and BOAT.
BOOK was unintentionally omitted from this study. Target words were then chosen for each of the 14 vowels listed above.
All target words follow one of three syllable structures: bVt, bVd, or bVn.
For each vowel, there is a minimal triplet whenever possible across bVt, bVd, and bVn. For example, beat, bead, and bean are the three lexical items for the
BEET vowel. Within each following phonetic environment category, all words are minimal pairs as well to the extent possible within the English lexicon. For example, in the bVt word list, the words are beat, bit, Bert, bet, bat, ban, bought, boat, bite, bait, boytalk, boot, and butt. Additionally, all words are content words
(i.e. butt instead of but). All words are one-syllable words when possible within the confines of a standard American English lexicon. As mentioned previously, speakers in this dialect area have merged the vowels [ɔ] and [ɑ], so that
BOUGHT and BOTTLE have the same vowel, unlike some areas of the eastern
US.
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beat bead bean bit bid bin Burt bird burned bet bed Ben bat bad ban butt bud bun bought bottle bonfire boot boo'ed* Boone bite bide binders (no word) bowed bounced bait bade bane boytalk* Boyde boint* boat bode bone *denotes words and fake words that were eliminated from the study (see section 2.4.2 Excluded Tokens) Table 2.2: Words used in elicitation activities
2.2.2 Participant Speaker activities – short story, carrier phrase, picture
All recordings for any given speaker took place in one appointment. Each person completed the three activities outlined below twice.
First, speakers were asked to read several short children's stories out loud. They were instructed to read these stories in a slower pace, in the manner that children's stories are typically read aloud. Additionally, some words were bolded in the text, and the speakers were told to emphasize those words, as if they were the most important words in each sentence. All of the target words from Table 2.2 above were bolded throughout the passages. A variety of non- target words were also bolded, so that the speakers would not become aware of the similarities among the words of interest to the study. Bolding and emphasizing the target words was intended to cause the participants to produce
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longer, clearer vowels that would then be easier to analyze. Participants read a total of five passages. The first passage was simply a practice activity to ensure that the speakers were following the guidelines and becoming accustomed to the task. The target words were divided across the four remaining reading passages.
See Appendix B for the complete short stories.
The second activity was reading aloud the target words of the bVd group in the carrier phrase X. I’m saying X again. See Appendix C for full list of carrier phrases.
The last activity was for a speaker to look at a drawing and tell the researcher all of the things that they could see. This drawing was created to elicit approximately one-third of the list of target words; the data from this activity could then be evaluated as a more natural form of speech and be compared against the data produced from the reading activities. This activity was ultimately not used in the analysis at present due to variable participant behavior and production. See appendix D for the drawing activity.
After completing each of the three activities once, the participant was offered a short break. Then they repeated each activity an additional time. The order of activities remained constant for each speaker.
It should be mentioned here that there are both advantages as well as some possible disadvantages with regard to using a reading passage or reading- based activities to elicit data. First, a reading passage guarantees that all speakers are performing the same task and, therefore, giving very similar data in
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terms of the words that they read and their surrounding contexts. Activities such as reading passages do, though, create the possibility that participants will see this as a more formal activity and therefore speak in a more formal register (here formal meaning more standard, which may erase some non-standard vocalic features). Reading words in a carrier phrase is even more likely to elicit citation forms that reflect the participants’ notion of “correct” speech. However, this activity was included in the study in order to provide data comparable to other studies that elicited citation style productions. In addition, some participants may be more or less comfortable with reading activities, which could also affect their vowel production.
2.3 Recording Procedures
All recordings took place in a soundproof room in the Speech and Hearing
Sciences building on the main campus of the University of New Mexico. Audio files were recorded into .wav format onto a compact flash drive using a Marantz solid state recorder and Shure head-mounted microphone. These recordings were digitized at a 44.1Khz sampling rate and 16-bit resolution. Files were then transferred to a personal computer as well as an online storage cloud, with all files password-protected for confidentiality.
2.4 Tokens
Target words were marked onto a Praat Textgrid (Boersma & Weenink
2017). The total number of tokens varied across participants for several reasons.
First, some of the earliest speakers participated in the experiment before the
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creation and implementation of the second and third activities (the word list and picture description). Additionally, these earliest speakers read from a previous version of the short stories that included 9 vowels, rather than the full 14. It should be noted, however, that this reduced vowel set for the first four speakers in this study still contained BEET, BOOT, BAT, and BOT/BOUGHT. These four vowels are the extremes of F1 and F2 measurements, and are the most important when normalizing data (see section 2.5 below for more information on normalization). Secondly, several audio files were unusable due to technical issues. This affected the data for just three speakers: one Anglo woman and two
Anglo men.
2.4.1 Correction/Cleanup
The .wav file and its corresponding text grid were processed through
FAVE-align (Rosenfelder, Fruehwald, Evanini, & Yuan 2011), an online interface to the Penn Forced Aligner (Yuan and Liberman 2008), which automates phonetic alignment for American English. FAVE-align adds boundaries to a Praat
TextGrid that delimit each consonant and vowel within a word or phrase that has previously been identified. The resulting output from the program was hand- checked and adjusted when necessary in order to insure accurate delineation of the onset and endpoint of each target vowel. This procedure is illustrated in
Figure 2.2. Next, the .wav file and the corrected text grid were fed through FAVE- extract (Rosenfelder, Fruehwald, Evanini, & Yuan 2011), an online interface that
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uses Praat to extract a variety of measurements for each vowel. Default configurations were used.
Figure 2.2: BAT vowel alignment in Praat
Figure 2.2 shows a token of the word BAT visually represented within
Praat. The word was marked by hand in Praat and individual sounds were labeled using FAVE-align. The alignment was then checked by hand and adjusted when necessary. The sound file and text grid were then processed by
FAVE-extract, which automatically extracted values for F1 and F2. This process resulted in 1,745 total transcribed tokens.
2.4.2 Excluded Tokens
Tokens were excluded for a number of reasons. As previously mentioned, the recordings from the third activity, the picture description, were not used because of variable speaker production. The data from those recordings is not reflected in any of the raw data or analysis in this dissertation. All other causes for exclusion occurred after the FAVE-align and FAVE-extract process.
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The F1 and F2 formant measurements for each of the 1,745 vowels were extracted at 20%, 50%, and 80% of the duration of the vowel and plotted in order to identify any outliers or other issues.
First, participants often hesitated or stumbled over the word BOO’ED and the made-up words BOYTALK and BOINT. All tokens of these words were excluded from analysis for all speakers. This totaled to 132 omitted tokens.
Measurements for other target words were, for the most part, distributed into compact clusters. Questionable tokens were reexamined in Praat and either corrected or omitted. These potential outliers were hand-measured and corrected appropriately if the automated procedure had erred. Tokens were excluded when obtaining clear formant measurements across the three time points was impossible or when the formant measurements were far outside the canonical vowel space of that specific vowel (that is, when an outlier was simply an outlier, and no correction was necessary or appropriate). A total of 19 tokens were excluded for these reasons.
Finally, all words that included a diphthong followed by a nasal were excluded. Plotting the formant measurements revealed that the following nasal consonant changed the trajectory of the diphthong too much for those tokens to be grouped with other tokens whose vowel did not precede a nasal consonant.
This resulted in the exclusion of 106 total tokens of BANE, BINDER, BONE, and
BOUNCED. The tokens of the fake word BOINT had already been removed. For monophthongs, words including a coda nasal were retained.
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2.4.3 Total numbers
A total of 1,488 tokens were analyzed out of 1,745 tokens that were processed with Fave-align and Fave-extract, meaning that 257 tokens were excluded from statistical analysis. See Table 2.3 for a breakdown of final token numbers by speaker group.
Speaker group Final token count Hispanic female 421 Hispanic male 426 Anglo female 331 Anglo male 310 Total: 1488 Table 2.3: Breakdown of final token counts by speaker group
The grey column in Table 2.3 shows the final number of tokens that were used from each participant category, which sums to 1,488 tokens. Anglo speakers had fewer tokens, as there were more speakers from the Anglo groups in the earliest stages of this experiment, which included fewer vowels. F1 and F2 measurements of the 1,488 tokens are included in Appendix E.
2.5 Normalization and Scaling
Normalization has become standard procedure in sociophonetic studies
(Fabricius, Kendall, & Watt 2011). Among other reasons, normalization of the data was necessary in this study due to having multiple male and female participants. Without such a procedure, it is impossible to make appropriate vowel formant comparisons across speakers for a variety of factors, such as the variability that comes from size differences among vocal tracts. There are a
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number of common methods by which normalization can be achieved. This section details the choices and procedures followed throughout this study.
2.5.1 Lobanov method
After extraction and cleanup, the resulting F1 and F2 measurements at
20%, 50% and 80% of a vowel’s duration were normalized using Lobanov (1971) methods through the online normalization suite, Norm (Kendall & Thomas 2010).
The Lobanov (1971) method calculates z-scores for the F1 and F2 of each speaker. This standardization uses Eqn. (1) where n is an F1 or F2 formant of vowel V, N is the normalized value or z-score, � is the average value of all formants of all vowels in the same dimension (F1 or F2), and � is the standard deviation for formant n.