Whitney Chappell

Through a series of over 100 bilingual interviews with Hispanic San Antonians, the COVID-19 Oral Historias Project documents the Latino/a/e community’s experiences through the pandemic by sharing individual stories, amplifying local voices, and creating compassion in a fragmented time. The present article documents the project itself, contextualizing its creation, detailing its methodology, highlighting the most common themes across interviews, and pointing out its novel contributions. While the interviewees’ experiences are inarguably diverse, narrative threads were found throughout the corpus, united by the duality of the narrators’ experiences; throughout this period, they simultaneously negotiated community norms and official health directives, local and international anxieties, and hopelessness and hope. The project is unique in (1) its language use, privileging minoritized ways of speaking (Spanish and Spanglish); (2) its size, with over 100 interviews; and (3) its clearly delimited scope, with all respondents living in San Antonio. This massive, unified resource creates a public collection of bilingual stories, highlighting non-hegemonic voices that are of value to the community itself, as well as to the recorded history of the pandemic, filling in historical gaps and providing real, lived accounts of this period that might otherwise be lost over time.

This study examines the effect of language attitudes and stereotypes on vowel perceptions by two groups of listeners from Asturias, Spain that differ in their relationship with the languages present in their communities: Spanish, the national majority language, and Asturian, the regional minority language. The responses of 165 participants from the Nalón Valley (a mining area in the region) were compared with those of 156 listeners from Gijón (the largest urban area) as they categorized words containing synthesized productions of Spanish [o] and Asturian [u] in a task that combined binary forced-choice identification and visual priming. The results of a mixed-effects regression model reveal that, for the Nalón Valley group, positive attitudes toward Asturian result in higher rates of /u/ selection, while, for the Gijón group, positive attitudes toward Asturian intersect with negative stereotypes about urban Asturians who avoid the regional language. We propose that spreading activation and weighting in exemplar-based models can account for these different findings: the greater use of Asturian in the Nalón Valley results in weaker and more varied links between vowel exemplars and social properties, limiting the effect of visual priming. However, a heavier weight exists between stereotypes of urban Asturians and Spanish exemplars in the city, resulting in a priming effect in Gijón that does not emerge in the Nalón Valley. We conclude that individual experience, attitudes, and stereotypes work together to condition speech perception uniquely in light of the local context.

In this paper, I investigate the qualitative evaluations of both Spanish-dominant Mexican and U.S.-born bilingual participants toward Mexican and U.S. Spanish, assessing the influence of lived experiences on how they perceive both varieties. More specifically, I employ the theoretical framework of biographical indexicality (Sharma, 2021) to explain how personal biography influences the way we hear the world. I conclude that the groups use Spanish for distinct contextual and stylistic purposes, and given these biographical differences, the varieties of Spanish come to adopt different social meanings for each group. For Mexicans who speak almost exclusively in Spanish, and for whom Spanish is the language of power, prestige, and social advancement, the language is more likely to be associated with status and institutional hierarchies, while, for U.S.-born speakers who use Spanish at home and English in most other contexts, Spanish is considered a language of interpersonal relationships with high value placed on communicative competence rather than academic perfection. I conclude that the participants’ contextualized use of Spanish (and their exposure to the ideologies embedded in those contexts) conditions the indexical social meanings linked to Spanish varieties. As they perceive and produce different types of Spanish, they recursively reflect and constitute the social world around them, relying on a lifetime of experiences to navigate existing and to create new social meanings specific to their sociolinguistic environments.

In this article, we explore how raciolinguistic parody functions in a society that hegemonically denies racial divisions. Through an analysis of Puerto Rican comedian Natalia Lugo's YouTube portrayals of her character, Francheska the Yal ‘welfare queen,’ we argue that covert racialization operates through a semiotics of respectability, whereby disreputable forms of femininity, class expression, and nonstandard language are co‐indexical with the yal’s failure to normatively “whiten” herself. We contend that US colonial narratives that scapegoat poor women of color for the island's poverty are reconstructed in Lugo's parodies by depicting the yal as provincial and excessive. Lugo's performative choices underscore the interplay of linguistic, material, and discursive elements that marginalize the yal, enabling parody without challenging structural inequalities. Our analysis sheds light on the ways in which semiotic practices reify such social hierarchies where they are systemically denied.

Centering stances, positionalities, and style, the third wave of sociolinguistic study positions individuals at the heart of its analysis

The present study explores how two symbolic boundaries—linguistic variety and race—intersect, influencing how Latin American immigrants are perceived in Spain. To this end, 217 Spaniards participated in an experiment in which they evaluated three men along a series of social properties, but they were presented with different combinations of linguistic variety (Argentinian, Colombian, or Spanish) and race (a White or Mestizo photograph). The results of mixed-effects regression models found that linguistic variety conditioned participants’ evaluations of status, occupational prestige, solidarity, and trustworthiness, and both variety and race conditioned evaluations of religiousness. We contend that linguistic features become associated with a specific group of people through rhematization (Gal, 2005; Irvine & Gal, 2000) and, by extension, ideologies link those people with stereotypical characteristics. We conclude that the “ideological twinning” (Rosa & Flores, 2017) of race and linguistic variety can enhance stereotypes toward immigrants and impact their experiences in the receiving country.

The present study explores the sociophonetic perception of second-generation Mexican Americans in the United States to determine (a) whether heritage Spanish speakers associate coda /s/ aspiration with social meaning, (b) if their perceptions align with those of monolingual Mexican Spanish speakers, and (c) how coda /s/ variation is perceived in in-group (Mexican) and out-group (Puerto Rican) voices. To answer these questions, 75 listeners participated in a matched-guise study in which they rated Mexican and Puerto Rican male voices presented with coda [s] and coda [h] along a matrix of social properties (e.g., niceness and intelligence). Mixed-effects linear and multinomial regression models fitted to 7,500 evaluations showed that heritage Spanish speakers perceive coda [h] as a marker of lower status and confidence, older age, and a Caribbean identity (p < 0.01), similar to the social evaluations held bymonolingual Mexicans in a previous study (Chappell, 2019a), but speaker origin played a pivotal role in heritage listener evaluations. In-group Mexican voices received nuanced evaluations based on phonetic variant, while social evaluations of the Puerto Rican voices were less variable. Additionally, the listeners’ written comments, which often made use of local relationships or community knowledge, support the notion that heritage listeners perceive new voices in light of their own lived experiences and expectations of their family’s variety of Spanish. Through its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this article highlights the sociolinguistic competence of second-generation speakers, repudiating deficit perspectives toward heritage Spanish.

Argentine Spanish is well known for its prepalatal grooved fricative pronunciation of and , which has been undergoing a devoicing process in Buenos Aires since the mid-20th century. Given this diachronic shift toward voicelessness, the present study seeks to determine how porteño ‘from Buenos Aires’ five Argentine speakers sounded to 96 listeners when presented with [ʃ] or [ʒ] in a matched-guise test. A statistical analysis of 480 listener ratings found that older listeners (>37) perceived both [ʒ] and [ʃ] as equally porteño, while younger listeners (≤37) evaluated [ʃ] to be significantly more porteño than [ʒ] (p < 0.02). This finding suggests that listeners’ social perception of the fricatives parallels the diachronic change in production; as use of the voiceless variant supplants [ʒ] over time, the exemplar associated with porteñidad shifts as well, specifically in the minds of younger generations with more limited exposure to voicing.

Learners must develop the ability to perceive linguistic and social meaning in their second language (L2) to interact effectively, but relatively little is known about how learners link social meaning to a single phonetic variable. Using a matched-guise test targeting coda /s/ (realized as [s] or debuccalized [h]), we explore whether L2 Spanish learners identify native speakers’ social characteristics based on phonetic variants. Our results indicate that advanced learners were more sensitive to sociophonetic information; advanced listeners who had completed a phonetics course were significantly more likely to categorize /s/ reducers as Caribbean and those who had studied abroad in aspirating regions recognized a relationship between coda /s/ and status. To account for the complex interplay among proficiency, explicit instruction, and dialectal exposure in the development of L2 sociophonetic perception, we suggest the union of the L2 Linguistic Perception Model with exemplar models of phonological representation and indexical meaning.