Attitudes in progress: Puerto Rican youth’s opinions on monolingual and code-switched language varieties

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis study examines Puerto Rican bilinguals’ attitudes towards five speech varieties (Spanish, English, Spanish with English lexical insertions, inter-sentential code-switching, and intra-sentential code-switching). While previous research on language attitudes in Puerto Rico has exclusively employed direct methods (i.e. interviews, surveys, questionnaires), ours is the first to use the matched-guise test. The participants are students at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras campus, who report code-switching to different degrees. They judged the speech varieties on personality, socio-economic, and ethnicity/identity attributes; their judgements on each of the fifteen attributes were analysed with cumulative link mixed-effects models accounting for the ordinal nature of the ratings. Some findings, such as certain negative attitudes towards English and code-switching and an association between these speech varieties and attributes pertaining to higher socio-economic classes, replicate those from earlier studies in Puerto Rico. However, other results, coinciding with recent studies conducted in Puerto Rico, reflect an attitudinal change in progress, by which participants seem more accepting of lexical insertions and intra-sentential code-switching. New results emerging from this study evidence participants’ sensitivity towards different types of code-switching, hence, their awareness of the types of switching that predominate in different speech communities.