Chicano English

Chicano English

Chicano English - Focus on Speakers

Latino Englishes in the U.S.

Preliminaries

Like many “nonstandard” varieties, use of Chicano English is primarily associated with young, urban, nonwhite males, especially in the way that it is stereotypically represented in the popular media.

But lots of different kinds of Chicanos speak it, and they make use a variety of the features associated with Chicano English in a variety of ways.

• If you haven't already read the preliminaries document, do that first!
• Today we'll be talking about race, ethnicity, and language, and we'll be covering some sensitive topics, so be prepared

Lots of different varieties of English in the US that are influenced by their social proximity to different varieties of Spanish:

• NYC Puerto Rican English (studied by Walt Wolfram, Shana Poplack, among others)
• English spoken by Latinos in Miami?
• Features of English as an L2 are affected by which variety of Spanish is your L1

They all have different properties and features. In this course, we’ll focus on Chicano English in the Southwest.

Chicanos and Chicano English

Chicano English - Focus on Speakers

Chicano English in Use

• Chicano: a person born in the US to Mexican parents or of Mexican heritage.
• This is different from Mexican, Latino, or Hispanic.
• Chicano English is a variety of American English learned as a first and native language by some Chicanos.
• It is NOT:
• A foreign accent
• Evidence of being an English language learner
• A sign of recent immigrant status
• Sloppy, bad, broken, illogical, uneducated

• Speakers of Chicano English are often monolingual English speakers (although they probably know more than one variety of English).
• Despite some Spanish lexical items, this is 100% English!
• Like AAVE, it’s better described as a set of related varieties that fall under a larger umbrella term.
• Tejano English might be different from Chicano English in Tucson, which might be different from Chicano English in LA, but they all share several properties overall which we’ll discuss in brief here.

• Like all “nonstandard” varieties of English, especially those associated with racial and ethnic groups, discrimination on the basis of a Chicano English accent is often used as a proxy for racial discrimination.
• Read Fought (2003) for common stereotypes of Chicano English speakers – how are they connected to ideologies about the speakers of this variety?

Demographic Data

Chicano English - Focus on Structure

• 64% of the nation’s Hispanics are US born, 36% are foreign born.
• Two-thirds (65%) of the US Hispanic population is of Mexican origin.
• Nearly half of the US Hispanic population live in California or Texas.
• 25% of all US Hispanics age 5 and up speak only English at home

• Stress and intonation changes
• (Spanish is a syllable-timed language and English is a stress-timed language)
• Count and mass nouns used differently
• “Next week we have vacations”
• “barely” used to mean “recently”
• “Don’t leave, you barely got here!”
• Use of (some) Spanish lexicon

• The influence of Spanish is seen most strongly in the phonology of Chicano English.
• /t/ and /d/ realized as dental stops (instead of alveolar stops)
• Devoicing of /z/ in all environments: [wʌs] for ‘was’
• Devoicing of /v/ in word-final position:  [hɛf] for ‘have’
• /b/ or /β/ instead of /v/: [inbait] for ‘invite’
• /tʃ/ merges with /ʃ/: ‘sheep’ sounds like ‘cheap’
• Loss of distinction between /j/ and /dʒ/: ‘job’ sounds like ‘yob’
• Merger of [æ] and [ɛ] vowels in certain environments
• /ɪ/ and/i/ merge to [i]: ‘ship’ and ‘sheep’ both sound like ‘sheep’
• Word-final consonant cluster reduction

• Not a lot of research (so far as I know) on syntactic and discourse pragmatic properties of Chicano English.
• But there is a lot of research on how the phonological properties of Chicano English vary sociolinguistically.

• (Source: http://www.cog.jhu.edu/courses/205/presentations/10-31b.ppt)

(From http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/02/15/hispanic-population-trends/ph_13-01-23_ss_hispanics1/)

(Source: http://www.cog.jhu.edu/courses/205/presentations/10-31b.ppt)