Language, contact, and the negotiation of Salvadoran identities in a mixed-Latino community

Abstract

This study looks at the testimonies of Salvadoran-origin participants living in Houston, Texas, and in transit through Brownsville, Texas, a city on the Texas-Mexico border. Salvadoran informants concede that perceptions about language varieties in Houston often target specific features in their speech, and they point to highly marked features at the lexical, grammatical, and phonological levels that seem to stand out as targets of negative evaluations by their Mexican peers. The linguistic awareness that is brought about by contact has important psychological repercussions because linguistic output plays an important role in asserting or rejecting Salvadoran group identities and associations and in challenging collective ascriptions and generalized ideologies in the community. Thus, language use among Salvadorans has social repercussions well beyond the grammatical level because their acceptance or rejection of the phonological and lexical features that are characteristic of Salvadoran speech functions as a way of affirming their association or disassociation with their ethnic group.