Spanish Dialects Research Articles

THE CREATIVE HERITAGE OF THE PROMINENT UKRAINIAN INTERPRETER WORLD CLASSICS MYKOLA LUKASH

The article attempts to introduce readers to the biography of the writer-translator and to highlight the creative and translation legacy of Mykola Oleksiyovych Lukash (1919–1988), a prominent Ukrainian writer-interpreter of world classics, lexicographer, linguist, and polyglot. It sheds light on his life and creative path as an outstanding Ukrainian writer and interpreter of world classics, his schooling, and university education. His work as a primary school teacher in a village school in the Kyiv region, where he taught Ukrainian and German, is outlined. The author of the article focuses on Mykola Lukash’s studies at the Kharkiv Pedagogical University of Foreign Languages and the Agricultural Institute. His translation work on the two parts of Johann Wolfgang Goetheʼs “Faust” is described. The peculiarities of Mykola Lukash’s translations of works such as Goetheʼs “Faust”, Giovanni Boccaccioʼs “Decameron”, Miguel de Cervantesʼ “Don Quixote”, Gustave Flaubertʼs “Madame Bovary” and the poetry of Burns and Heine, among others, are outlined. Emphasis is placed on Mykola Lukashʼs knowledge of twenty foreign languages. Attention is drawn to the fact that he was one of the few translators who could work with the original text, not with intermediate Russian translations.It is noted that Mykola Lukash was one of the first in European literature to translate Federico García Lorca’s poetry, written in the Galician dialect of Spanish, into Ukrainian using the Hutsul dialect. Emphasis is placed on the fact that Mykola Lukash translated over a thousand outstanding works of world literature from a hundred authors in twenty languages. He collected a vast amount of lexicographic material and made translations from English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, and other languages. It is substantiated that certain concepts from Mykola Lukash’s legacy can be used by modern educators and translators.

Code-Mixing in Disney’s Encanto

Code-mixing in movies is used to reflect human life and modernity in today’s bilingual or multilingual context. By studying the code-mixing in the movie, EFL learners can have better understanding on how language is used in different contexts and how it reflects societal norms and values. This qualitative research used content analysis to find out Hoffman’s code mixing within the dialogue of Disney’s Encanto. The result shows that code-mixing involving a change of pronunciation between Spanish and English occurs more than intra-lexical and intra-sentential code mixing. It happens because there are three characters who used Spanish accent in their dialogues. This study shows how language is used and represented in media. It also shows the media’s inclusion strategy to portray a more authentic and relatable cultures and communities.

Language Attitudes in a Historic Latino Community: The Case of Spanish in Northwest Indiana

Despite the burgeoning Latino population in the Midwest, research on language attitudes in this region remains sparse. This study addresses this gap by examining language attitudes and beliefs towards Spanish in the Northwest Indiana region, one of the oldest Latino immigration gateways in the Midwest. Data collected from a 2018–2019 sociolinguistic survey, involving 236 participants representative of the local Latino community, form the basis of the analysis. The study aims to elucidate attitudes towards various Spanish dialects, particularly the local variety. Findings indicate widespread acceptance of the local Spanish variety, with participants viewing its divergence from Mexican or Puerto Rican Spanish as normal and inevitable. Despite perceptions of linguistic mixing with English, the community’s Spanish is valued as an effective communication tool and cultural asset, including in educational settings. This positive attitude towards a stigmatized linguistic variety suggests a preference for any form of Spanish over none, particularly in situations of low Spanish language maintenance. The study of language attitudes shows that speakers will tend to reproduce in their speech new ways of speaking that they find acceptable. This generalized behavior, in turn, leads toward linguistic change.

CLIL teacher online professional development in translanguaging and trans-semiotizing: a pedagogy of multiliteracies

ABSTRACT Theories of translanguaging and trans-semiotizing have gained relevance in the design of learning in CLIL classrooms. However, while many studies have shown the benefits of these pedagogies, scarce research has explored CLIL teacher professional development (PD) in this field. In this paper, I intend to measure the effectiveness of an online pedagogy of multiliteracies, which embraces translanguaging and trans-semiotizing, to enhance CLIL teachers’ semiotic awareness to design learning experiences that improve students’ comprehension. The study was conducted on a multicultural group of 200 CLIL teachers from Spain, Colombia and Ecuador. They worked with primary and secondary students in multilingual contexts where a Spanish dialect, or a co-official, an indigenous or a Creole language was the L1, and English the L2. The data were collected from two sources, an initial survey and a final essay. The content analysis of the dataset revealed that the learning intervention positively influenced teachers’ pre-existing beliefs and PD. They showed a more accurate conceptualisation of translanguaging and trans-semiotizing, were more aware of their multimodal literacy practices to make new content comprehensible in CLIL classrooms, and identified potential improvements in their communication processes related to the two concepts.

Non-modal voice quality in Chilean Spanish

Abstract Since the turn of the 21st century, research on phonation (the production of sound via the vibration of the vocal folds, also known as voice quality) has increased significantly. However, non-modal phonation is highly understudied in Spanish. Therefore, this study comprises a sociophonetic analysis of voice quality in Spanish, examining voice quality categorically from sociolinguistic interview speech conducted with 41 native monolingual Chilean Spanish speakers. The aim of the present paper is to interrogate how phonation varies among residents of Santiago, Chile. Specifically, it asks: what is the sociolinguistic distribution of non-modal voice quality in Chilean Spanish? How does this distribution align with work on voice quality in Spanish and in other languages? Results indicate that non-modal voice quality is used by speakers to mark prosodic boundaries such as phrase finality, aligning with robust cross- linguistic findings. Non-modal phonation is also incorporated when speakers are reporting speech, as well as when they are speaking about emotionally-charged subjects. I draw connections between these findings and those of other dialects of Spanish, and show that utterance-final devoicing, while often associated with “tierras altas” dialects of Spanish, may be more frequent in other dialects than previously indicated. I argue that further examinations of non-modal phonation should also examine third-wave approaches of attitude, emotion, and stance.

Spanish causatives

Spanish, contrary to Catalan, French and Italian, allows causees to appear in pre-infinitival position. This paper takes as initial point of departure the asymmetries between the pre-infinitival position vs. the post-infinitival discussed in Ordóñez and Saab (2017). I provide a cartographic account in which more than one site for causees must be posited. This proposal follows the same reasoning that posits more than one subject position in the clausal spine (see for instance Cardinaletti 2004). I characterize the higher pre-infinitival position as a criterial position in the sense of Rizzi (2006, 2007). Following that proposal, I address the question of the interaction of case in this higher causee projection. I adopt Baker and Vinokurova’s (2010) proposal that UG must allow two ways for case resolution: case via agreement and dependent case. I will show that Spanish spoken in Catalonia is uniform in its case assignment solution of dative case for causees. I propose that the higher causee projection is an applicative head which assigns dative uniformly. However, for Catalan, Italian and French and many other dialects of Spanish, case assignment depends on the transitivity of the infinitival verb. In these varieties I invoke dependent case.

Hispanics’ Perceptions of Participation in Research Studies and Solutions for Improvement in Participation

In 2022, the Hispanic population in the United States reached 63.6 million, accounting for 19% of the total population. Despite this growth, Hispanics are significantly underrepresented in research studies. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to evaluate perceived research burden, explore perceptions towards participation in research studies, and solicit strategies to increase research participation in Hispanics. We recruited 25 Hispanic participants’ ages 18-65 years from the community. Data were collected using a demographic data sheet, the Perceived Research Burden Assessment (PeRBA), and face-to- face interviews. It took about 10 minutes to collect the quantitative data. Interviews lasted 20 to 60 minutes. Audio-recorded interviews were transcribed and translated from Spanish to English by certified translators. Data analyses involved descriptive statistics, the Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test, and thematic analysis. Eighty (n =20) of the participants were female, 80% (n = 20) spoke a Spanish dialect as their primary language, 43.3% (n = 13) had an annual income of less than $20,000, 56% (n = 17) had no health insurance, and 49.9% (n = 15) had less than a 12th-grade education. The PeRBA revealed three main areas of research participation burden: 1) second thoughts about participating, 2) participation regret, and 3) participation costs. Five major themes emerged from the interviews: 1) lack of knowledge, 2) immigration status, 3) social isolation, 4) language and literacy, and 5) transportation. Two additional themes were academic and community partnerships, and community engagement via social media platforms.

Acoustic Correlates of Subtypes of Irony in Chilean Spanish

Utterances containing verbal irony display prosodic particularities that distinguish them from non-ironic speech. While some prosodic features of irony have been identified in Spanish, previous studies have not accounted for different subtypes, nor have they examined this phenomenon in Chilean Spanish despite the unique intonation patterns in this dialect. This study examined the acoustic and prosodic correlates of five subtypes of irony (jocularity, rhetorical questions, understatements, hyperbole, and sarcasm) spontaneously occurring in the casual speech of sociolinguistic interviews with fifteen Chilean women. We segmented 3907 syllable nuclei from 197 spontaneously occurring instances of irony and compared the syllables within the ironic utterances to those in the pre-ironic utterances, along seven acoustic and prosodic variables: pitch range, duration, F0, F1, F2, H1*–H2*, and HNR. The results showed that the speakers favored jocularity and did not produce sarcasm or understatements, and that jocularity, hyperbole, and rhetorical questions significantly differed from the baseline utterances along a variety of acoustic and prosodic measures. We argue that these cues contributed to marking the ironic utterances as salient, allowing these women to talk about difficult real-life events with a touch of humor. Our study provides additional evidence for the connection between prosody and pragmatics in Chilean Spanish and lays the groundwork for further examination of irony and prosody in this and other Spanish dialects.

The Spanish Language System from Muti-dimensional Perspectives

This paper generally describes the different parts of the language, Spanish from five perspectives. Geographical and human factors are macroscopic and can decide an overall feature of a culture, which can help people have a preliminary understanding of Spanish. The dialect of Spanish is a result of choice of history and survival of the fittest in the long run. It is also a kind of intuitive composition of a language. The identity of a language reflects the origin of it. Some languages that have similar identities to Spanish can also be good examples to help to explore the rules of Spanish language system. Here Portuguese is chosen to be compared with Spanish from the aspects of morphology and phonology. The above five aspects are the basic directions for people who are not familiar with Spanish to realize it. The purpose of the paper is to provide a reference for the linguistic beginners and give them an effective comprehension of Spanish through systematic integration and elaboration.

Phonological Differences Across Varieties of Latin American Spanish

Latin America is a diverse linguistic landscape, evident in the extensive phonological variations within its dominant language, Spanish. This study explores the phonological diversity across Latin American Spanish dialects, including processes such as lateralization and weakening of the /ɾ/ and /l/ phonemes, elisions and reductions of the /s/ consonant, and changes in nasal sounds (/n/, /m/, and /ɲ/) within specific linguistic contexts. Understanding these linguistic differences fosters a fresh perspective on Latin Americans from diverse backgrounds. The study considers demographic and socioeconomic factors that shape these variations and their connection to shared historical and cultural aspects. Information from online corpora and previous studies on Latin American Spanish phonology identifies repetitive phonological processes, comparing them across dialects to determine commonalities and differences. Understanding these phonological processes is critical for dispelling stigmas and contributing to bilingual education, mainly in regions where Spanish is learned as a second language. Educators exposed to the diversity of Latin American Spanish can create inclusive learning environments that accommodate students from various backgrounds and dialects.

Cognitive underpinnings of the meaning of Spanish estar

Abstract The Spanish copula verb estar is currently taking part in two of the most well-known paths of semantic change across different dialectal varieties of Spanish: (a) as a main copula verb, in its encroachment on the domain of ser, and (b) as the auxiliary in the Present Progressive marker, as it encroaches in the domain of the Simple Present form (i.e., Sánchez-Alonso 2018; Fuchs 2020). Here we argue for the hypothesis that estar’s participation in both paths of change is not coincidental. Focusing on the copular use, we present arguments for the proposal that estar’s encroachment is connected to its lexico-conceptual structure, which, under specific communicative pressures, is afforded greater conversational informativity, thus systematically expanding its licensing contexts and, as a result, bolstering its use. Evidence consistent with this analysis emerges from use variation for estar across several dialects of Spanish, both in its copular and auxiliary uses.

A Fork in the Road: Grammatical Gender Assignment to Nouns in Spanish Dialects

Spanish nouns are classified as either feminine or masculine. Although some nouns vary depending on their denotation (such as niño ‘male child’ vs. niña ‘female child’), in most cases a fixed gender is assigned. When lacking an inflectional cue, nouns could variably admit both genders. While alternating gender may be present in standard Spanish (e.g., azúcar moreno ‘brown.m sugar’ vs. azúcar blanquilla ‘white.f sugar’), it predominantly depends on social or geographical factors (e.g., la vinagre ‘the.f vinegar’, el sal ‘the.m salt’ unlike standard el vinagre ‘the.m vinegar’, la sal ‘the.f salt’). Thus, Spanish binary system represents a fork in the road of gender assignment to nouns. Focused on European Spanish, the present study addresses the sociogeographical influences conditioning gender values in Spanish nouns. To the best of my knowledge, no previous research has been systematically conducted on gender assignment in modern Spanish dialects, so my findings shall shed light on how gender values are determined and diffused across rural and urban varieties. Data are retrieved mainly from the Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural and the Proyecto para el estudio sociolingüístico del español de España y América), as well as other bibliographical and dialectal sources.

H - 52 Impact of Spanish Dialect on Artificial Intelligence in Assessing Expressive Language.

AcceXible is a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that identifies speech biomarkers for cognitive impairment that was developed in Spain. Good sensitivity (85.7%) and specificity (92.8%) in distinguishing patients with mild cognitive impairment from individuals with normal functioning have been established with populations in Spain, and preliminary data are similar in the United States and the United Kingdom. In this study, we assessed transcription accuracy for Spanish speakers in the US originating from Latin American countries (LAC) and the effect it may have on the performance of Accexible's AI model. AcceXible involves participants completing several verbal tasks via computer interface, including Animal Naming (AN). Transcription accuracy for 16 Spanish-speaking patients from LAC in Texas was assessed by comparing data obtained from hand scoring of AcceXible AN to data from different customized expressive language transcription tools used in AcceXible's platform. The transcription tool was updated based on inconsistencies found. AcceXible's customized transcription tool was initially found to miss 34% of total items on AN due to differences in vocabulary and pronunciation between LAC and Spain. The transcription tool was modified to recognize the LAC vocabulary and pronunciations, which resulted in 25.84% increased accuracy for an overall transcription accuracy of 91%. AcceXible is a useful tool for efficiently assessing expressive language, and the current findings highlight the need to consider not just language, but also nationality when adapting tests across cultures.

A description of the acoustic properties of rhotics in Costa Rican Spanish

Studies into the rhotic variation in Costa Rican Spanish have previously utilized perceptive methodologies and focused primarily on phonetic/phonological descriptions of the phenomenon. More recent studies such as Dearstyne (2021) have utilized modern acoustic methodology and have found a system that includes trills, taps, assibilated fricatives and approximants. This study focuses on the latter, seeking to acoustically describe the variant rhotics in this dialect. The methodology is centered on audio-recordings of native speakers from Costa Rica performing a sentence-reading task. The sentences were created to contain rhotics in the contexts in which rhotic variation has been previously documented by Vásquez Carranza (2006). Dependent variables are predicated on the manner of articulation; formants are recorded for approximants while spectral peaks and the center of gravity is taken for assibilated fricatives. Preliminary results for three participants show acoustic values for both qualities that are consistent with the alveolar place of articulation, yet different to other languages and dialects (Quilis 1981, Edwards 1992). (Spectral peak [ř] = 1,408 Hz, center of gravity [ř] = 240 Hz, F2 [ɹ] = 1,755 Hz). It is expected that these data will contribute to a better understanding of the rhotic system in this dialect of Spanish.

Los pronombres interrogativos complejos del españolel quéylo qué

AbstractThe neuter interrogative pronounsel quéandlo quéalternate withqué‘what’ in conversational Spanish in certain contexts and types of wh-questions (e.g., –No me lo puedo creer – ¿No te puedes creer qué/el qué/lo qué?). This paper describes geographical, register and social variation in the use ofel quéandlo quéand analyses the interpretive and distributional properties of these complex forms. Building on corpus data and speakers’ judgements, it is shown that the formel quéis common to all Spanish dialects and is used in all registers and at all social levels, whereaslo quéis only found in Spain, Argentina and Uruguay: in Spain and Argentina, this form belongs to lower class people with little education and speakers in rural areas; in Uruguay, it does not have a social bias and occurs in both formal and informal situations. It is also argued thatel quéandlo quéare used to indicate that the target of the question is identifiable in the context of utterance, and it is thus claimed thatelandloinel quéandlo quéare overt definiteness markers.

Incomplete Resyllabification and Ambisyllabic Gestural Coupling in Spanish

In the generative literature, the pattern of coronal fricative lenition found in the traditional Chinato Spanish dialect is commonly cited as a phonological argument that the resyllabification of word-final prevocalic consonants is complete, in the sense that onsets derived by resyllabification are structurally identical to canonical (word-level) onsets. However, recent acoustic studies of Northern-Central Peninsular Spanish have problematized the completeness of resyllabification with experimental evidence that /s̺/ is shorter and more voiced as a derived onset than as a canonical onset. Using a split-gesture, competitive, coupled oscillator model of the syllable in Articulatory Phonology, which divides consonants into a separate constriction and release gesture, we propose a novel representation of ambisyllabicity that predicts the phonetic behavior of derived onset /s̺/ in Northern-Central Peninsular Spanish. We then show that ambisyllabic coupling permits a simpler phonological analysis of coronal fricative lenition in Chinato Spanish as compared to alternative accounts. Our analysis makes typological predictions that are confirmed by patterns from other contemporary Spanish varieties. Lastly, we examine the consequences of ambisyllabicity for the analysis of Spanish rhotic consonants, which have also been argued to support complete resyllabification. We offer an analysis of rhotics that is entirely compatible with an ambisyllabic representation of incomplete resyllabification.

Assessing Public Interpretation of Original and Linguist-Suggested SPC Risk Categories in Spanish

Abstract Recent work has shown that the words used in the Storm Prediction Center’s convective outlook are not easily understood by members of the public. Furthermore, Spanish translations of the outlook information have also been shown to have interpretation challenges. This study uses survey data collected from the Severe Weather and Society Spanish Survey, a survey of Spanish speakers across the United States, to evaluate how U.S. residents receive, understand, and respond to weather forecasts and warnings. For this experiment, respondents were tasked with ranking the words and colors used in the SPC’s convective outlook. They were randomly assigned either 1) the words originally used by the SPC for Spanish translations or 2) a set of words suggested by linguistic experts familiar with Spanish dialects in the United States. We find Spanish speakers have similar challenges to English speakers when ordering the words the SPC uses. When using the translations proposed by the linguistic experts, we find the majority of Spanish speakers ranked the words in the intended order of associated risk. Spanish speakers also displayed similar ranking distributions for the colors in the outlook as English speakers, where both groups ranked red as the highest level of risk. These findings suggest the original translations used by the SPC convective outlook create barriers for Spanish speakers and that the expert translations more effectively communicate severe weather hazards to Spanish-speaking members of the public. Significance Statement The SPC’s convective outlook provides important information about the risk posed by severe storms to members of the public. While the SPC had official Spanish translations for the categorical labels used in the outlook, it was believed anecdotally that there was a disconnect between the words the SPC was using and the way the translated outlook was being interpreted by Spanish-speaking members of the public. This work verifies previous beliefs about the original translation set and confirms the reliability of a new set of translations developed by linguistic experts among Spanish-speaking members of the public.

Object Person Marking in two under-represented Spanish dialects of Mexico

This paper is about a clitic-like form lo that appears in two under-studied dialects of Mexico in the context of transitive clauses. The distribution of this clitic-like form in these dialects is at odds with Standard Mexican Spanish which does not allow it in the same context. This clitic-like form resembles the singular, masculine, accusative object clitic of Standard Spanish, but it differs in that it does not show the agreement pattern expected for object clitics. In this paper we argue that this clitic-like form is better understood as an object marker that is triggered by the lack of a positive [Participant] feature in the direct object as part of the extended projection of the Object-DP. We also propose that this marking strategy is not the result of linguistic transfer or interaction with a different language, but rather a possible development within the grammar of Spanish. This marking strategy is, in fact, an inherent strategy of Spanish, but it gets blocked by normative pressure. The fact that this strategy flourishes in dialects apart from normative/academic contexts could be an indicator that the explanation we offer is on the right track.

KONTRASTIVNA ANALIZA SOMATSKIH FRAZEOLOGIZAMA SA KOMPONENTOM „OKO” U ITALIJANSKOM, ŠPANSKOM I SRPSKOM JEZIKU (SEMANTIČKO POLjE PAŽNjA/OPREZ)

This paper deals with the analysis of idioms containing the lexeme “eye” in the Italian, Spanish and Serbian languages. Since somatic idioms, especially those with the lexeme “eye”, represent a large part of the phraseological fund of three languages, only those idioms that express attention/caution were analyzed. Italian was the source language, whereas Spanish and Serbian are the target languages. The initial hypothesis was that two typologically related languages (Italian and Spanish) would share more common phraseological characteristics in comparison to typologi- cally unrelated language (Serbian). In order to prove the hypothesis from general and phraseological dictionaries, as well as from electronic sources, a research corpus was excerpted. Using the method of contrastive analysis, similarities and differences were identified from lexical, semantic and morphosyntactic aspects in order to establish the type of equivalence between the idioms at the interlingual level. The type of equivalence was determined for 22 idioms containing the lexeme “eye” in Italian, 19 in Spanish and 17 in Serbian. By contrasting the Italian and Spanish idioms, it can be concluded that there is absolute equivalence between 10 idioms, 5 of them form a relationship of partial equivalence with morphosyntactic differences, 2 a relationship of partial equivalence with lexical differences, 1 a relationship of partial equivalence with morphosyntactic and lexi- cal differences, zero equivalence is established between 3 idioms, and 1 false friend isidentified. On the other hand, the comparison of Italian and Serbian idioms gave the following results: 7 absolute equivalents, 4 partial equivalents with morphosyn- tactic differences, 5 partial equivalents with lexical differences, 1 partial equivalent with morphosyntactic and lexical differences, while zero equivalence was recorded in 5 cases, and there were no false friends. It can be seen that in both Spanish and Serbian, the highest percentage of idioms are absolute equivalents with their Italian correspondent, although that percentage is lower in Serbian than in Spanish. Therefore, it can be concluded that the initial hypothesis has been proven, ie. that typologically related languages share more common phraseological characteristics. However, the number of partial equivalents between Italian and Serbian is very high. This can be explained by the fact that somatic idioms, due to the universality of bod- ily experience, reveal similarities between languages that do not belong to the same language family. The existence of universal human knowledge and associations about body parts explains the existence of somatisms that have the same or similar structure and meaning in different languages. On the other hand, although the human body has the same functions in all languages, their symbolism is culturally determined (Kovačević, 2012: 16-17), and that could explain the existence of zero equivalence and false friends at the interlingual level.

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices

From Divided to Diasporic: Re-envisioning Italian American Texts through Transformative Translingual Practices