Over the last decade there has been a significant growth in the presence of the Latino community in North Carolina. At NC State in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, two professors, along with their students, are studying the use of the Spanish language in the state.
Jim Michnowicz, an associate professor of Hispanic linguistics in the Department of Foreign Languages, has been researching the linguistic and social factors that determine the outcome of the contact between Spanish and English.
Rebecca Ronquest, a professor of Hispanic linguistics in the Department of Foreign Languages, has been researching the differences in the pronunciation of the consonants ‘p,’ ‘t’ and ‘k’ in different English and Spanish speakers to measure their level of bilingualism.
Michnowicz will be presenting his research in the 8th International Workshop on Spanish Linguistics in San Juan, Puerto Rico April 13-16. Ronquest’s research will be presented during the Current Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese Second Language Phonology conference at Ohio State University April 15-17.
What makes this research particularly unique, according to both Michnowicz and Ronquest, is that this is the first time undergraduates have participated in and conducted linguistic research with them. The undergraduate student contribution of this project originated from two Senior Seminar in Hispanic Studies, Language Variation and Change — FLS 492 — classes.
Michnowicz taught one of the classes in spring 2014 where the class focused on Spanish in the state, including loanwords, language use and code-switches. The following spring, the collective research from Ronquest’s class examined the pronunciation of Spanish in the state with a specific focus on ‘p,’ ‘t’ and ‘k’ consonants.
After the classes, both Michnowicz and Ronquest invited their students to help further research the topics. Three of Michnowicz’s students came on board after the 2014 semester, Alex Hyler, Sonya Trawick and James Shepherd to continue the research, while five students of Ronquest in 2015 decided to join her: Sarah Chetty, Hannah Hunter, Emily Lait, Chelsea Krieger and Emma Cathell.
Ronquest’s Research
Since the fall, Ronquest, with the help of undergraduate students and recent graduates, have been working on the consonants research in addition to interviews conducted by the FLS 492 class which served as a measure for the research.
“Our speakers read a word list, or what’s called a carrier phrase, where they embedded a word within part of a phrase [during the interviews],” Ronquest said. “So a carrier phrase would be like, ‘I say pot for you, I say dog for you.’ That’s an example of a carrier phrase, where you put the target word in the middle or at the end in our case. Our carrier phrase was, ‘the password is …’ but in Spanish.”
To measure the different types of bilingualism, Ronquest explained that the team incorporated three different speaker levels of Spanish. This included second-language learners, heritage speakers and native speakers. According to Ronquest, second-language learners are those who began to learn a second language in high school or college, native or immigrant speakers are those from a Spanish-speaking country who moved to the United States when they were young adults and have had an education in Spanish and heritage speakers are the intermediate group.
Ronquest explained heritage speakers as bilinguals who were usually born in the United States or moved to the U.S. when they were young, growing up in homes where Spanish was their first language.
“A lot of heritage speakers have the ability to carry on a conversation and they are very fluent in Spanish, but they maybe don’t know all the sort of technical, grammatical rules that we teach second-language learners,” Ronquest said. “One of the things about heritage speakers is that most people would say that they sound like native speakers and they produce or pronounce Spanish just like native speakers do, but research has found that is not exactly true; they are very close.”
Sarah Chetty, a senior studying Spanish language and literature, said she finds this research especially interesting because North Carolina is on the verge of a lot of linguistic change.
“It’s interesting to see language change in action because this is a new group of immigrants coming into NC and it’s interesting to see the early stages of language change,” Cheatty said. “Also to see how living in NC with a dominant population of English speakers affects native Spanish speakers.”
With the consonants being the central topic of the study, Ronquest explained that they are used as markers when distinguishing the differences between the three levels of bilingual speakers.
According to Ronquest, the group chose to study the consonants because they are a good measure of how Spanish- or English-sounding a pronunciation is. When looking at English words there is a lot of aspiration, or breath, whereas in Spanish those same sounds are pronounced without any aspiration.
The study also compared North Carolina heritage speakers to those in Chicago. According to Ronquest, Chicago was chosen because of similar interviews and research she conducted.
The team found the Raleigh heritage speakers were similar to the native Spanish speakers. However, the heritage speakers had slightly more aspiration especially when dealing with the ‘k’ sound. They also found that Raleigh heritage speakers produced ‘k’ with more aspiration than those in Chicago.
“It could just be that the bilingual community in Raleigh is still forming, that the speakers are converging on new dialectal norms or there’s new dialect formation going on,” Ronquest said. “Whereas in an urban area like Chicago that has a much longer history of bilingualism and bilingual communities, they are larger and more well-established than they are here in North Carolina.”
According to Ronquest the study is important because it looks at three groups of bilinguals doing the same task and helps answer the question of how native-like heritage speakers pronounce words.
Taking the research a step further, Chelsea Krieger, alumna and team member, said it measures a level of “native-ness” while helping researchers gain a better understanding of the Spanish language in North Carolina.
“I think it’s important to conduct a study like this because it involves people and information that relates directly to our community in Raleigh and it impacts us,” Krieger said. “We hope that this research will be useful to future studies and research in the field of Spanish linguistics or bilingual studies.”
Ronquest explained that her research, as well as Michnowicz’s, not only showcases the linguistic research being done in North Carolina but, in general, undergraduate research. According to the pair, there are not many undergraduate students who conduct linguistic research.
“I intend to stand up at the very beginning of the talk and say, ‘this study is close to my heart for two reasons: one is because it’s new data on an area we know little about,’” Ronquest said. “And the other that especially makes me smile is because I know who worked on it and that they were able to do such a good job.”
Michnowicz’s Research
The basis of Michnowicz’s research is to find how English words are being adapted to Spanish in the state. Unlike cities such as Miami, New York and Los Angeles where the two languages have co-existed for some time, in North Carolina there is an opportunity to study the growing presence of the Hispanic population in the state.
The team, comprised of Michnowicz, Hyler, Trawick and Sheperd, centers on the use of loanwords in North Carolina. Since the spring of 2014, they have conducted more than 700 surveys in the state in order to study the early stages of how languages change once they are in contact.
“We did a large-scale quantitative research project were all of the students had to participate and do research that involved only heritage and native Spanish speakers using surveys and new research resulted in data that we could analyze,” said Sonya Trawick, a graduate student studying Spanish and one of the team members.
Michnowicz said he and his students were interested in conducting this type of research in an effort to gain new insight about the Hispanic population in North Carolina. He found that his students preferred to conduct research this way because they were able to get hands-on experience in the field rather than writing and summarizing previous studies. Because the research was happening in real time the findings were unforeseeable for both Michnowicz and his students.
The creation of loanwords, in this case, occurs when a Spanish speaker borrows a word that is originally part of the English language and adapts it to Spanish. According to Michnowicz, the concept of loanwords can be seen with the word “carpet” in Spanish, which in the class is taught as “alfombra.”
Spanglish is a popular term for this type of action. Although Michnowicz said that linguists tend to not use this term because when people talk about Spanglish, they tend to talk about the use of code switching or loanwords.
“We have found in more extreme examples of loanwords like the word ‘wáchale’ are not generally accepted by Spanish speakers in NC,” Michnowicz said. “Versus the word ‘aplicación’ which is very widely accepted. So we can deduct that the word ‘application’ has expanded to being used in Latin America so it might replace the use of the word ‘solicitud.’”
Michnowicz said he hopes that this research will encourage young Latinos in the US, who primarily speak English, to continue to speak Spanish in their day-to-day lives.
“We are trying to point out the benefits of being bilingual and demonstrate why it is important to preserve Spanish specifically in North Carolina,” Michnowicz said.
Alex Hyler, a graduate student studying Spanish, said she hopes the research will help people see the benefits of being bilingual.
“I had a lot of experience in pre-dental field and volunteering clinics, and a lot of the people that came would be Hispanic and they did not speak English,” Hyler said. “Being able to communicate in a second language is really helpful and it breaks so many barriers”
According to Michnowicz, the research has also led to results that allowed he and his students to better understand the unique identity of bilingual speakers in North Carolina.
“What we are finding is that the use of these loanwords can also be a mark of identity for a lot of people,” Michnowicz said. “For example, someone’s parents might be Mexican but they are not Mexican, they are American. So how do they mark this dual identity and the fact that they have Mexican roots but they grew up in the United States? One way to do this is to mark yourself as being part of a bilingual community.”
This boxplot shows the VOT (Voice Onset Time), or aspiration, for each of the three consonants 'p,' 't' and 'k' as produced by the three different groups of speakers. All three groups show the same pattern (p<t<k), which is expected, but more interesting are the group differences. In looking carefully, one can see that the Native (N) and Heritage (H) tend to have very similar VOT, but the Second Language Learners (L2) produced all of these consonants with longer VOT. The latter result suggests that L2 learners might be more influenced by English, which has a much longer VOT than Spanish.
