Rhotic variation in the Spanish spoken by Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico and Western Massachusetts

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The Spanish trill is known to present a wide range of phonetic variation in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS), attested not only on the island but in the diaspora. Combining auditory and acoustic analysis, this research project studies acoustic data on onset /r/ in Holyoke, MA, the city with the largest per capita population of Puerto Ricans living outside the island. The aim of this dissertation is to analyze whether there is trill variation in the PR community in Holyoke, and, whether it mirrors the variation found in Puerto Rico. Special attention is paid to glottal, velar, or uvular /r/ realizations. Recent work suggests that the phonemes /r/ and /h/ have been contextually neutralized in perception, which would result in the loss of a phonemic contrast. Therefore, this project also investigates whether there is evidence for this production neutralizationusing measurements that had never been acoustically examined for this dialect (center of gravity, skewness, and kurtosis).Three experimental production tasks were designed and employed: a picture description task, a map task and a reading task. Forty-five participants performed the experimental tasks: 21 were recorded on the island and 24 in Holyoke. As a result, a total of 4,393 phonemic /r/ and /h/ were analyzed. Results indicate that there are substantial similarities in rhotic variation as well as some variation between Puerto Rico and Holyoke: (1) the same trill realizations are found and (2) the means of center of gravity, skewness and kurtosis are significantly different between /h/ and /r/ in both locations, suggesting an absence of neutralization. However,different linguistic and sociolinguistic variables affect (1) the use of the backed /r/ and (2) phonemic /h/-/r/ distinction.Findings suggest that the PR community in Holyoke tries to maintain their language, one of the most noticeable signs of immigrants’ origin, to strengthen authenticity in the same way that they keep other PR cultural experiences. The differences found suggest that, although Holyoke maintains a close bond with Puerto Rico due to the back and forth migration waves, diasporas are still changing communities which create sites of super-diversity, with different patterns as a result of these new dialect contact situations.

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Read dissertation here

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Recommended citation:

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Arias Alvarez, Alba, "Rhotic variation in the Spanish spoken by Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico and Western Massachusetts" (2018). Doctoral Dissertations. 1416. 
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1416

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Sociolinguistics

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In addition to sociophonetics, I have done work in other linguistic subfields such as:

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• historical linguistics 

• discourse analysis

• bilingualism

• linguistic landscape

• language contact and identity

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One of those research projects, published in Hispania, deals with Spanish-English code-switching among pragmatic markers in western Massachusetts. Another article, published in the edited volume El español en la red, focuses on the use of code-switching among Facebook users in order to reaffirm the Asturian identity in the language contact situation of Asturias, Spain. Another has been accepted for publication in I-LanD Journal, focuses on diasporic identities in the family setting and the ways that language ideologies impact language practices among different generations of transnational families. My latest paper was recently accepted for publication in the volume Linguistic Landscape in the Spanish-speaking world. The paper examines the role of the Puerto Rican flag in Puerto Rico’s public space by analyzing the perceptions and attitudes of Puerto Rican inhabitants towards their linguistic landscape.

 

I am currently working on an article titled “Diaspora Linguistics: The Puerto Rican Community in Holyoke, MA,”. It will be a paper on Puerto Rican identity that follows the theoretical approach of sociolinguistics of globalization, also known as diaspora linguistics.

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Corpus Linguistics

 

I am also the founder of the Virginia Corpus of Spanish Variation. 

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Spanish is not a foreign language in Virginia. Many Virginia residents speak Spanish on a regular basis at home, at work, and with friends and neighbors. The same happens in Roanoke, where 6.4% of the overall population are Hispanic or Latinx. Spanish, in fact, can be heard through the different Hispanic/Latinx neighborhoods in Roanoke/Salem. Many signs of restaurants, churches, institutions, organizations are in Spanish. Therefore, since Spanish is visible in the public space, the creation of a corpus was necessary in order to document the Spanish spoken in the Roanoke area (and Virginia in general) and to bring visibility to the different varieties spoken. It provides open learning tools that allow teachers, students and the general public to explore Spanish language variation. 

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This work is being done in collaboration with Roanoke College Spanish students.