Bay Area Spanish: regional sound change in contact languages

Annie Helms

doi:10.5565/rev/isogloss.116

Abstract

Compression of the vowel space area and reduced vowel dispersion have been observed as features of the California Vowel Shift (CVS, D’Onofrio, Pratt, and Van Hofwegen 2019). The present research provides empirical data to address the gap in the literature regarding the influence of regional sound change on contact languages, namely the influence of CVS on Bay Area Spanish. Analysis of word list tasks given to bilingual speakers of Bay Area Spanish and monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish reveals a more compressed vowel space in Bay Area Spanish and patterns that mirror changes in progress in California English. These results suggest that regional sound changes can influence production within contact languages and may provide evidence for perceptual category assimilation among Spanish-English bilinguals in the Bay Area. These results additionally broaden the scope of regional sound change studies by removing the historically Anglo-centric focus and expanding the consideration of what may constitute a regional feature.

Highlights

The compression of the vowel space area and reduction of vowel dispersion have been posited as features of California white Anglo English1 (D’Onofrio, Pratt, and Van Hofwegen 2019) and are identified as changes in progress associated with the California Vowel Shift (CVS)
The Bay Area Spanish data come from the Corpus of Bay Area Spanish (CBAS, Davidson 2016) and the Mexican Spanish data are a dummy set generated by the author for the present study from the means and standard deviations of Mexican Spanish vowels reported in Grijalva, Piccinini, and Arvaniti (2013)
The results of this study indicate that the size of the Bay Area Spanish vowel space is reduced compared to that of Mexican Spanish in terms of vowel dispersion

Summary

Introduction

The compression of the vowel space area and reduction of vowel dispersion have been posited as features of California white Anglo English (D’Onofrio, Pratt, and Van Hofwegen 2019) and are identified as changes in progress associated with the California Vowel Shift (CVS). Though several studies have examined the relationship between ethnicity and participation in CVS This study focuses on the Bay Area of California and investigates whether changes in progress in CVS, namely compression of vowel space area and reduced vowel dispersion, are present in the vowel space of Spanish in the Bay Area (Bay Area Spanish)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion