Anna Babel, Assistant Professor Department of Spanish and Portuguese
“Aspirates and Ejectives: ‘Foreign’ Sounds in Cruceño Valley Spanish, Bolivia”
What makes a sound “exotic”? In some informal varieties of Andean Spanish, speakers use aspirates and ejectives of Quechua origin, despite their dissimilarity to the canonical Spanish sound system. They are most common in the context of Quechua-origin loanwords, but may also be used on native Spanish words. Like Bantu clicks (Irvine and Gal 2000), the auditory salience of these sounds contributes to their role in a symbolic system—they are used not in spite of, but because of their exoticism.
In this talk, Dr. Babel will discuss the social and grammatical status of aspirates and ejectives for Spanish-speakers, using new data collected in December 2013. She frames this discussion within the context of local ideologies constructing belonging and difference in this area of intense contact between Quechua and Spanish language and culture.
Anna Babel is a sociolinguist and a linguistic anthropologist, with specific interests in contact linguistics and Andean Spanish. Her research draws on quantitative and qualitative data from a Quechua-Spanish contact region in central Bolivia. Dr. Babel investigates how linguistic features are linked to social representations, and the way that complex social factors are integrated into language structure. Dr. Babel holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Anthropology from the University of Michigan. A former Peace Corps volunteer, she has conducted field research on Quechua-Spanish language and cultural contact in a community in central Bolivia for more than a decade.
Lunch will be provided. To confirm your attendance please RSVP to wibbelsman.1@osu.edu.
And please reserve the date for our final events of the Spring!
