Spanish Varieties Research Articles

Sociolinguistic Style, Awareness, and Agency among Southern California Latinx Spanish–English Bilinguals

This study examined different degrees of awareness regarding the stigmatization of Southern California (SoCal) Spanish across four groups of Spanish–English bilinguals from Southern California (n = 87). The participants were presented with Spanish sentences and asked to decide which profile of speaker would likely express that sentence, given six options, such as: “someone living in Los Angeles/SoCal who grew up in Mexico” or “a Spanish-English bilingual who grew up in Los Angeles/SoCal”. Experimental stimuli included seven different linguistic categories of stigmatization, including English contact forms. The participants tended to attribute the stigmatized forms to bilinguals who grew up in Southern California. Central Colloquial and Taboo categories were more salient and perceived as forms used by people in Mexico. In contrast, English borrowings and redundancies seemed to be recognized by the participants, particularly for simultaneous bilinguals who grew up in Southern California, as salient forms of an identified Southern California Spanish variety. The results are interpreted within Exemplar Theory, with certain stigmatized forms indexing “Mexican Spanish” exemplars, and English borrowings identified as exemplars of SoCal Spanish. We advocate for usage-based approaches to understanding language perceptions and critical approaches to interrogating academic discourses.

¿Soy de Ribera o Rivera?: Sociolinguistic /b/-/v/ Variation in Rivera Spanish

This study investigates the impact of language contact on three generations of bilingual Spanish and Uruguayan Portuguese speakers in Rivera City, Uruguay, located on the Uruguayan–Brazilian border. Focusing on the confirmed presence of the Portuguese-like/b/and/v/phonemic distinction, and the lower frequency of the Montevideo Spanish-like approximantized stops in Riverense Spanish (RS), the research examines the production of <v> and <b> in 29 female Rivera Spanish bilinguals belonging to different age groups. More specifically, the aim was to see if the previously observed differential use of language-specific phonological variants could be accounted for by using precise measurements of relative intensity, duration, and voicing coupled with a distributional analysis of realizations derived from auditory coding. At the same time, their production is compared to that of 30 monolingual Montevideo Spanish (MS) speakers, who served as the control group, offering a first description of the production of <v> and <b> within this distinct Rioplatense Spanish variety. Riverense’s higher overall relative intensity, duration, and voicing values support auditory coding results, providing evidence of the expected phonological differences between both Uruguayan Spanish varieties. In particular, an exclusive presence of fricative/v/and less approximantization of/b/in RS speech exposed the influence of Portuguese in Rivera bilinguals and their divergence from MS. In addition, as predicted, the findings reveal a higher presence of Portuguese-like productions of [v] and [b] in older bilinguals when compared to younger generations. This illustrates a continuum from Portuguese-like forms to Spanish-like forms, which is confirmed by both acoustic and distributional analyses. Finally, evidence of the existence of innovative forms resulting from mixing Portuguese and Spanish phonological systems in RS are presented. This study’s findings contribute to sociolinguistics and bilingualism by exposing cross-linguistic influence in a border setting with rigorous analytical methods that offer reliable results and go beyond a basic analysis based on auditory identification.

Metalinguistic Concepts and Attitudes toward Mexican Spanish in Oaxaca de Juárez, Mexico

This paper investigates metalinguistic concepts and language attitudes toward Mexican Spanish varieties and Spanish-Amerindian language contact in Oaxaca, Mexico. Theoretical-methodological approaches from Perceptual Dialectology and Metapragmatic Sociolinguistics are used to analyze non-linguists’ views of linguistic variation and their prestige attributions in the multilingual communicative space of southern Mexico. On the data basis of semi-narrative interviews with speakers from the metropolitan region of Oaxaca, we discuss the results of a discourse analysis of these perceptions. The results show a tripartite division of the Oaxacan dialectal space with sporadic mention of salient linguistic features for each conceptualized variational space, an overt prestige for the urban Oaxacan variety and its close link to the Mexico City standard, and a negative attitude toward linguistic interferences coming from Spanish-indigenous language contacts.

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.

Evaluation of the Impact of the Ripening Stage on the Composition and Antioxidant Properties of Fruits from Organically Grown Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) Spanish Varieties.

Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is a widely cultivated horticultural crop. It belongs to the Solanaceae family and is known for its high concentration of essential nutrients, including vitamins, minerals, and bioactive compounds with antioxidant properties. The Mediterranean countries, including Italy, Spain, and Greece, have a diverse range of tomato landraces. Assessing the nutritional and bioactive composition of different tomato varieties and their ripening stages is crucial to determine their suitability for the market. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the effect of ripening on nutritional composition (including carotenoids and polyphenols content) and antioxidant activities of fruits of three specific tomato varieties grown in Spain: Josefina and Karelya, which are cherry-like tomatoes, and Muchamiel, a type of salad tomato. In addition to evaluating their characteristics and composition (including carotenoids and polyphenol content), the antioxidant activities of these varieties at three different ripening stages were quantified. As expected, the results reveal that, as the tomatoes matured, their antioxidant capacity increased along with higher levels of carotenoids and polyphenols. Interestingly, cherry-like tomatoes showed a higher antioxidant activity than the salad tomatoes. This investigation emphasizes the role of fruit ripening in increasing carotenoid levels, which contribute to the antioxidant activity of three tomato varieties.

Spoken Spanish PoS tagging: gold standard dataset

AbstractThe development of a benchmark for part-of-speech (PoS) tagging of spoken dialectal European Spanish is presented, which will serve as the foundation for a future treebank. The benchmark is constructed using transcriptions of the Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural (COSER;“Audible corpus of spoken rural Spanish”) and follows the Universal Dependencies project guidelines. We describe the methodology used to create a gold standard, which serves to evaluate different state-of-the-art PoS taggers (spaCy, Stanza NLP, and UDPipe), originally trained on written data and to fine-tune and evaluate a model for spoken Spanish. It is shown that the accuracy of these taggers drops from 0.98$$-$$ - 0.99 to 0.94$$-$$ - 0.95 when tested on spoken data. Of these three taggers, the spaCy’s trf (transformers) and Stanza NLP models performed the best. Finally, the spaCy trf model is fine-tuned using our gold standard, which resulted in an accuracy of 0.98 for coarse-grained tags (UPOS) and 0.97 for fine-grained tags (FEATS). Our benchmark will enable the development of more accurate PoS taggers for spoken Spanish and facilitate the construction of a treebank for European Spanish varieties.

Lessons from overtly-headed exclamatives in Spanish varieties

Lessons from overtly-headed exclamatives in Spanish varieties

Variable Contrast in Border Uruguayan Spanish /b/

Abstract This study addresses variation in the realization of intervocalic /b/ in the Spanish of Rivera, Uruguay, a border community that is bilingual in Portuguese and Spanish. While Spanish has one phoneme that corresponds to the graphemes ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, which is normally realized as an approximant or deleted intervocalically, Portuguese contrasts a voiced bilabial stop phoneme /b/ with a voiced labiodental fricative phoneme /v/. Sociolinguistic interviews from 40 native speakers of Riverense Spanish were analyzed acoustically using a consonant-vowel intensity ratio as a correlate of the degree of constriction in the realization of intervocalic /b/. Results indicate that speakers that use more Portuguese are more likely to contrast degree of constriction in words with Portuguese /b/ and /v/ cognates. Speakers that primarily use Spanish, on the other hand, contrast constriction based on orthography, a phenomenon that has been called “pedantic v” and “orthographic loyalty” in other Spanish varieties.

The influence of Guarani on gender agreement in Paraguayan and Correntino Spanish: A contrastive analysis

In this paper we analyze the influence of Guarani, a genderless language, on patterns of gender agreement in two distinct Spanish varieties, Paraguayan Spanish and Correntino Spanish. Using two unique conversational corpora, we show that, of the two varieties, Paraguayan Spanish more closely resembles Standard Spanish in patterns of gender agreement, but the cases of nonagreement that do occur are found in a wide variety of linguistic contexts, resembling the kinds of transfer effects common in L2 varieties of Spanish in speakers whose L1 is genderless. Correntino Spanish exhibits patterns of nonagreement that are not only more common but are limited in linguistic scope, i.e., only occurring in noun phrases involving feminine nouns with non-article modifiers. We attribute the differences between these two varieties to the differing presence of Guarani in the two regions where they are currently spoken. Paraguayan Spanish, in closer contact with Guarani, is subject to synchronic L2 transfer effects, while Correntino Spanish, a largely monolingual variety in the modern day, is characterized by diachronic L2 transfer effects that have fossilized and come to be found in the speech of monolinguals.

Tap/trill variation and change across generations of Spanish-Creole bilinguals in San Andrés, Colombia

Abstract This work examines the behavior of vibrant (presenting linguo-alveolar contact) tap/trill variation across generations of bilingual Afro-Caribbean speakers of Spanish and an English-Lexifier Creole, known here as Raizal Creole, in the Archipelago of San Andrés, Colombia. In these islands, a bilingual Spanish variety, known here as Raizal Spanish, coexists with a monolingual Spanish variety spoken by Colombian immigrants (Costeño Spanish). Data consists of over 3,300 tokens (867 trills and 2531 taps) compared across three generations of Raizal Spanish speakers with a sample of 528 segments (133 trills and 395 taps) produced in Costeño Spanish. Results show that although the frequency of use of vibrant taps and trills in younger generations increasingly resembles those presented in the monolingual variety, the behavior of rhotic variation is different in both Spanish varieties. In addition, non-vibrant or approximant variants are increasingly prevalent in the first and second generation informants with rates doubling those of the younger generation and monolingual Costeño Spanish. Results of the cross-variety comparison show that Raizal Spanish displays a generational continuity where a restructuring of the constraint ordering starts in the second generation and is completed with younger Raizales. On the contrary, Costeño Spanish behaves differently in terms of the systematic linguistic conditionings. The evidence suggests that rhotic variation has changed internally within both varieties.

Linguistic and cultural properties of the Spanish adaptation of the CAT (SP-CAT): pilot results from neurotypical subjects

ABSTRACT Introduction Aphasia assessments in languages other than English are scarce. In the case of Spanish, this scarcity includes a need for assessments with linguistic and cultural adaptations that consider dialectal varieties and cultural traits across Spanish-speaking populations. Aims of the study This study discusses the linguistic and cultural adaptation of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT) to Spanish (SP-CAT), a version that can be used in Spain and Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, and provide pilot results assessing whether performance is comparable across samples. Methods For the linguistic adaptation, we discuss considerations such as typological differences between English and Spanish, Spanish varieties, gender cues, spelling-sound regularities, transparency, and other syntax-related aspects. For the cultural adaptation, we discuss considerations such as culturally relevant items and images, and covering different Spanish varieties within the SP-CAT. The pre-testing of items for the SP-CAT included controlling variables such as name agreement of visual stimuli (examined in n=237 healthy participants), imageability (examined in n=244 healthy participants), and lexical frequency (from the Corpus of Reference of Current Spanish). We also conducted a pilot study of the SP-CAT with 82 healthy participants from Chile, Colombia, and Spain to assess differences in performance within tasks between the included countries; analysis of such differences was completed within a Bayesian framework. Results The SP-CAT provides a linguistic and cultural adaptation of the original English CAT. Item pre-testing included name agreement, lexical frequency, and imageability tests to ensure comparability with the English original version. Our pilot study confirmed that there are no clinically significant differences in performance within tasks between the included countries in healthy participants, a necessary step towards the final validation of a test for the Spanish-speaking world. Discussion The SP-CAT responds to a need to develop linguistically and culturally sensitive adaptations of assessments for Spanish-speaking people with aphasia to be used in clinical practice. Pilot results indicate that the adaptation meets the criteria to be used across Spanish varieties. In light of promising pilot results, the next phase of this study will assess the validity and reliability of the SP-CAT, providing normative data for its administration.

Agreement and Information Structure in Spanish PRO[PL] with-DP

This paper aims to revisit a construction found in some Spanish varieties which refers to a set constituted by a singular referent and an annex introduced by the item con ‘with’: PRO(noun)[PL] with-DP. This construction triggers plural agreement and can be doubled by a plural pronoun, indicating that the annex is included in the set to which verbal agreement and the plural pronoun refer. For example, Nosotros con Juan viajamos ayer (literally, ‘We with Juan travelled.1PL yesterday’) means ‘Juan and I travelled yesterday’. We explore the Spanish PRO[PL] with-DP, taking into account its discursive properties together with the syntactic requirements involved in the agreement patterns. In fact, although the two individuals denoted by this construction are involved as equal participants in the event, they have a different discursive status: one of them introduces new information, while the other refers to the immediate communicative situation. If some notions regarding information structure can be coded by binary features such as [+/−anaphor] and [+/−contrast], it is possible to find plurality triggered by the opposite combination of features within the same syntactic object. PRO[PL] with-DP is a possibility that the lexicons of some languages offer.

Basic Intonation Patterns of Galician Spanish

This paper presents an inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones in Galician Spanish (GS), a variety spoken in Northwestern Spain. Research so far has focused on explaining GS intonation features as transfer phenomena from Galician, the vernacular Romance language in the region. Because of this, previous studies have often included Galician L1 speakers, for whom transfer is expected when speaking Spanish L2. However, GS is the single L1 of half the children in Galicia, and it is spoken almost exclusively by about a quarter of Galicians. Our study focuses on this population and investigates the relative frequency and distribution of tonal units in GS when direct transfer from Galician is unlikely. A corpus of 1706 sentences (statements, questions, imperatives, and vocatives in neutral and biased contexts) was obtained from 28 participants through a discourse completion task. Results showed that patterns previously attributed to direct transfer from Galician L1 (for example, upstepped final accents in neutral declaratives or falling contours in unmarked interrogatives) are widespread in GS as L1. Findings also show commonalities with other L1 Spanish varieties, both in Europe (for example, L* L% as the unmarked declarative ending) and America (for example, the L* + H prenuclear accent of Caribbean varieties).

Volatile profile of breba and fig fruits (peel and pulp) from different Ficus carica L. varieties

BackgroundIt is currently estimated that around 50 % of fig production in Spain is not marketed and it is wasted, increasing the quantity of food loss. It is necessary to highlight that this is the first study comparing peels and pulps of breba and figs fruits to help improve the knowledge of volatile profile in four different Spanish varieties. The aim of this study was to investigate the volatile composition by HS-SPME of breba and figs (peel and pulp) of different varieties selected for their commercial relevance in Spain. ResultsIn this study, 35 compounds have been detected in the different parts of breba and figs fruits. It can be said that the data presented here showed that variety affected the volatile profile in both edible (pulp) and non-edible (peel) Ficus carica L. fruit parts in both brebas and fig fruits, being Colar de Albatera which presented higher content in key volatile compounds. On the other hand, differences have also been observed between pulp and peel fruit part in each fruit: peel was richer in key volatile compounds than pulp, especially in Colar de Albatera variety. ConclusionApart from the high content of phenolic compounds and nutritive properties of the edible and non-edible part of brebas and figs, specially Colar variety, it can be concluded that this material can also increase the olfactory sensory attributes.

Nominal Possession in Contact Spanish Spoken by Mapudungun/Spanish Bilinguals

Possession has been scarcely studied in the variety of Spanish in contact with Mapudungun and in Chilean Spanish. In this contribution, we analyze the nominal possessive constructions found in a corpus of interviews with speakers from five communities: three Mapudungun–Spanish bilingual communities from the Araucanía Region, one Spanish monolingual rural community from the Bío Bío Region, and one Spanish monolingual urban community from the Araucanía Region. The possessive constructions found in the contact Spanish, rural Spanish, and urban Spanish varieties are analyzed and compared to describe the domain of possession and to propose some possible explanations from the perspective of language contact theory for the case of the Spanish spoken by bilinguals. From the corpus of transcribed interviews, nominal possessive constructions were selected, classified, described, and compared. Double possession with restrictive relative clauses, and unstressed possessive pronouns plus a prepositional phrase with genitive/specific value, showed a limited frequency of occurrence. These constructions are analyzed using the Code-Copying framework. This perspective accounts for the observed equivalencies between both languages in contact and the constructions emerging in the bilinguals’ speech. This work contributes to the documentation of the variety and, more generally, to the description of the expression of possession in the Latin American contact varieties of Spanish.

Diverging Grammaticalization Patterns across Spanish Varieties: The Case of perdón in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish

This study investigates the contemporary grammaticalized uses of perdón (‘sorry’) in two varieties of Spanish, namely Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. Methodologically, the investigation is based on a taxonomy of offenses, organized around the concept of ‘face’ and based on spoken data of Spanish from Mexico and Spain. This taxonomy turns out to be a fruitful methodological tool for the analysis of apologetic markers: it does not only offer usage-based evidence for previous theorizing concerning the grammaticalization process of apologetic markers, but also leads to a refinement of these previous results from a contrastive point of view. Evidence from both corpora suggests a more advanced stage in the grammaticalization process of perdón in Mexican Spanish, where it can be used not only as a self-face-saving device geared towards the positive face of the speaker, but also in turn-taking contexts oriented towards the negative face of the interlocutor. Peninsular Spanish, on the other hand, resorts to a more varied gamut of apologetic markers in these contexts.

In the Echoes of Guarani: Exploring the Intonation of Statements in Paraguayan Spanish

This explorative study examines intonation contours in neutral and non-neutral statements of Paraguayan Spanish, a variety shaped by extensive contact with Guarani, a co-official language of Paraguay. Paraguayan Spanish displays both lexical and syntactic borrowings from Guarani, along with innovative intonation patterns not found in other Spanish varieties. Previous but still limited research on yes/no and wh-questions in this variety suggests the emergence of a unique intonational system, possibly of a hybrid nature, in both Spanish monolinguals and Spanish–Guarani bilinguals. To date, no comprehensive description of intonation patterns in Paraguayan Spanish statements exists. The present study addresses this gap by analyzing data obtained through a Discourse Completion Task, covering broad-focus statements, contrastive focus, exclamatives, and statements of the obvious. Data were collected in 2014 from two monolingual speakers, eleven bilingual Spanish-dominant speakers, and eight bilingual Guarani-dominant speakers. The intonation is formalized using the Autosegmental–Metrical model of intonational phonology and the Spanish Tones and Break Indices labeling system. The findings reveal three main realizations of nuclear accents (L+H*, H+L*, and innovative >H+L*) in neutral and non-neutral declarative sentences, lengthening of syllables, diverse syntactical strategies, and lexical borrowings. The study contributes to the understanding of a lesser-studied Spanish variety and offers insights into theoretical aspects of contact linguistics.

Effect of Shade Regimes and Plant Extracts on the Vegetative Growth and Yield of the Natural Sweetener Plant Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana Bertoni)

A field experiment was conducted in the fields of the College of Agricultural Engineering Sciences / University of Baghdad in the spring of 2021-2022. Stevia (sugar leaf) seedlings propagated from tissue culture method of the Spanish variety Spanti were planted in the field on the mid of March, which were previously acclimated and 6 weeks old, with the aim of studying the role of shading and spraying some plant extracts on growth and leaf yield in sugar leaf (stevia) plant. Randomized Complete Bock Design (RCBD) with three replications was used, using split plot arrangement. The experiment included two factors, the main factor includes two levels of shading, the first without shading (exposed) and the second 50% shading and they are denoted S1, S2 respectively, and the secondary factor is spraying with aqueous plant extracts of Moringa at a rate (10%) and (15%), denoted M1 and M2 respectively, and licorice extract at a rate (3%) and (6%), denoted G1 and G2 in addition to the M0G0 control treatment which was sprayed with distilled water on three dates, 15 days after establishing, 30 and 45 days from planting and measurements are taken after each spray. The results showed that S2 was significantly superior to S1 in terms of plant height (68.87 cm), and in the number of leaves branches-1 at (232.72 leaves branch-1), while S1 was significantly superior to S2 in number of branches (8.53 branches plant-1) and number of leaves (1674.80 leaves plant-1) and in leaf area (246.84 dm2 plant-1) as well as in dry weight of leaves (41.49 g plant-1). While M2 was significantly superior in plant height (65.51 cm), followed by G2 (64.55 cm) and also excelled in the number of leaves branches-1 (234.20 leaves branch-1) followed by G2 (225.65 leaves branch-1). The G2 extract also outperformed significantly in number of leaves (1358 leaves plant-1) followed by M2 (1317.50 leaves plant-1) and M1 (1309 leaves plant-1) and in dry weight of leaves (38.21 g plant-1), followed by G2 (36.30 gm plant-1), which was significantly superior in leaf area (217.30 dm2 plant-1), while in terms of number of branches, G1 treatment was superior with 6.42 branches plant-1. As for the interaction between the study factors, it showed that spraying M2 extract on exposed plants S1 gave the largest leaf area and highest dry weight for stevia plant, and also showed the same concentration M2 highest plant height and highest percentage of number of leaves branche-1 for stevia plant when sprayed on shaded plants S2 under the conditions of the central region of the country.

Cº realizations along the left edge across English and Spanish

This paper investigates the lexicalization of the complementizer that/que in English and Spanish varieties in different contexts along the left edge of the clause. This is performed through discussion of a range of constructions traditionally attributed to the CP domain/left periphery, primarily (but not only) in certain embedded clauses. The ubiquity of that/que, that is, the lexical realization of that/que in subordinating environments, exclamative clauses, interrogative contexts, and subjunctive clauses, amongst others, sheds light not only on the characterization of the relevant constructions but also on the make-up of the left edge of the clause. The fact that such realizations can be obligatory, optional, or, on occasion, impossible, sometimes depending on the variety in question, furthers our understanding of head lexicalizations while contributing to macro and microvariation studies in syntactic theory. In so doing, this paper paves the way for holistic investigations devoted to complementizer realization in the head position of different left-edge-related constructions and in different linguistic varieties.

First person singular subject pronoun expression of young Spanish speakers from Quito, Ecuador

Abstract This variationist study analyzes the first-person subject pronoun expression (SPE) of speakers from Quito, Ecuador. To date, this morphosyntactic variable has not been explored in this Andean variety of Spanish. The data consists of 20 sociolinguistic interviews. Results reveal an SPE rate of 17%, comparable to other Andean Spanish varieties. As per Rbrul’s quantitative analysis, the predictors that promote the presence of the ‘yo’ in this variety of Spanish are co-referential Priming, switch reference, ambiguous TMA endings and main clauses. In addition, following Orozco and Hurtado (2021), lexical effects of the verb were observed by analyzing the verb lemma. This predictor revealed similarly opposing tendencies between verbs in the same lexical category. This study adds to the growing body of SPE research by examining which linguistic variables influence the use of ‘yo’ in this Ecuadorian Andean Spanish (EAS) variety and comparing these results to those of other Andean Spanish varieties.