Please join us for this CLAS Lunch & Learn featuring Dr. Anna Babel, Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Dr. Babel will share about the research she conducted during her research under U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad (FRA) Fellowship.
Lunch will be served. Open to all, registration required.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics.
Abstract
The fundamental questions behind the study of awareness and control of language are simple – how do people become aware of differences in the way that they (and others) speak, and how do they use this implicit or explicit knowledge in the perception and production of linguistic forms? More generally, this study addresses the question of how people learn and change over time, and how individual differences as well as large-scale patterns may influence our acquisition of second dialects as adults.
In this talk, I focus on the case of Bolivian migrants to Spain. It is estimated that up to 150,000 Bolivian migrants – perhaps more – currently live in Spain, with the largest populations around the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, and Murcia. While linguistic practices in both Bolivia and Spain include the use of Spanish (among other languages), there is maximal linguistic differentiation between Bolivian and central-northern European Spanish dialects, encompassing phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and pragmatics. In Bolivian Spanish, contact features from Quechua, an indigenous language of the Andes, become particularly salient in the context of contact with a European variety of Spanish, which is often framed as more “correct” than Bolivian Spanish, and feed into ethnic and linguistic differentiation driven by Latin American migration to Spain.
In this paper, I report on data gathered from interviews carried out in 2022 and 2025 with more than a hundred Bolivian migrants, both those who remain in Spain and those who returned to Bolivia. The interviews included a variety of tasks meant to probe different kinds of awareness of dialectal differences. These methods provide a model for investigating how transnational migrants become aware of differences between Bolivian and European dialects of Spanish, and for investigating different types and qualities of awareness through responses to a variety of different tasks. In this talk, I focus on the linguistic features at the highest level of awareness – firstly, differences in “c, s, and z”. In linguistic terms, these encompass the phonemic difference between /s/ and /θ/, which is characteristic of European but not Latin American varieties of Spanish, as well as the use of laminal (Latin American) vs. apical (European) /s/. Secondly, I discuss the use of differing second person pronouns (Ustedes, Usetd , tú, vosotros, and vos) and their respective verbal conjugations. Because interviewees were very aware of these differences – they discussed them explicitly and often performed them in imitations of Spaniards – we are able to trace differing kinds of awareness across different types of tasks, and also take into account individual variation in awareness and positioning.
Through this analysis, I lay out a methodological and theoretical framework for the study of awareness in dialect contact situations, and for teasing out the multiple intersecting factors that lead to dialect awareness, differentiation, and (sometimes) convergence across speech communities.