pnasa 2010 pride & prejudice1

Running head: PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH 1

Pride & Prejudice: Spanish Accents and Ethnolinguistic Prejudice Against English-Speaking Hispanic Migrant Students in Central Washington

P. Ailene Kingsley

MA TESOL Graduate Student

Central Washington University

Submitted to the: Pacific Northwest American Studies Association Conference

"Outside In/Inside Out: (Im)Migrant Communities of the Pacific Northwest"

April 12-14 2012

Author Note

P. Ailene Kingsley, Department of English, Central Washington University.

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to P. Ailene Kingsley,

Department of English, Central Washington University, 400 E. University Way,

Ellensburg, WA 98926. Contact: 509-654-9891 or [email protected].

mailto:[email protected]

PRIDE & PREJUDICE: SPANISH ACCENTS IN ENGLISH

Pride & Prejudice: Spanish Accents and Ethnolinguistic Prejudice Against English-Speaking

Hispanic Migrant Students in Central Washington

Abstract

This study examines the basis of ethnolinguistic prejudice against Spanish speakers of English as

a second language, with a discussion of results from a study of Hispanic migrant students at

Central Washington University. It analyzes the politico-linguistic origins of ethnicity and the

phonological transfer of Spanish into English as a Second Language (ESL) as a basis for

prejudice, with corresponding recommendations for ethnolinguistic principles of multicultural

education and bilingualism in the United States.

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Prejudice is an ethnocentric reflection that results from the measurement of minute differences

between the “I” and “You” in language but it cannot escape the dedoism that results when you

point your finger at someone else but have four fingers pointing back at you. Americans endulge

in this kind ethnocentric finger-pointing on a daily basis when they raise the ephemeral standard

of Americanism that says: it’s who you are as an individual that counts. But if you don’t speak

English like I do, then YOU don’t count. As Noam Chomsky so diligently reminds us:

“Questions of language are basically questions of power” (1979, p. 191)

In second language programs throughout the world, as Cummins (2000) describes, there

are examples of empowering education. Certainly those that have evolved from the theory and

praxis of Paulo Freire continue to create meaningful dialogue in the classroom that challenge the

privileges of power and authority (e.g. Freire, 1998, 2000; Shor, 1992; Purcell-Gates, 2000). As

Cummins (2005) observes however, these programs “tend to be small-scale, isolated, and

difficult to sustain over the long-term. . . .[because] the overwhelming trend is in the opposite

direction. Schools succumb to the prevalent societal discourse and focus on direct instruction of

the skills to be assessed by ubiquitous high-stakes standardized tests” (283, 288).

This kind of ethnolinguistic dualism that posits English is “superior” to all other

languages in the world, is a deep reflection of the monolinguistic ignorance that American

ethnocentricism has spawned, and it persists with severe repercussions on Americans’ abilities to

grasp the past, present and future implications of their own heritage. Nowhere in America today

is this ethnolinguistic prejudice more evident—or more destructive—than in the discrimination

against Hispanic speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL). This paper will analyze the

evidence of this ethnolinguistic prejudice as experienced by college migrant students in Central

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Washington. This analysis will be presented in the context of past contributions from Spanish to

American culture, present contrasts between the phonology of Spanish and English, and future

implications for multicultural education and bilingualism in America.

The value of ethnolinguistic enrichment to any culture, and the devastation of

monolinguism is clearly explained by leading American sociolinguist, Joshua Fishman. In his

discussion of the destruction of minority languages and the failure of bilingual education,

Fishman (1991) explains that his “work of the 60s began as a quest for any possibly overlooked

successes, amidst all of the clearly obvious failures, in the efforts to secure minority language

maintenance in the United States” (xi). In comparing ethnolinguistic vitality to medicine in the

United States, Fishman contends that the sociology of language must “develop practices which

address themselves explicitly to ‘wellness’ and which recognize that ethnolinguistic ‘wellness’ is

unattainable without theoretical knowledge and applied efforts that correspond to the

ethnolinguistic and ethnocultural preferences and commitments of specific speech networks and

speech communities” (xii)

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This study begins with a

Phonological Differences in English and Spanish

A major contrast in the phonological study of languages is a difference in the

suprasegmental, or sentence-level, patterns of rhythm that are called either “syllable-timed” or

“stress-timed,” and these linguistic patterns have implications for speaking and listening in

second languages because they may transmit different kinds of meaning. Since linguistic

anthropologist, Kenneth L. Pike (1945) first developed this contrast between stress-timed and

syllable-timed languages, Spanish has generally been considered to be “syllable-timed,” although

more recent phonological studies contend that this distinction may not be absolute (Hayes, 2009)

As Pointon (1980) suggests, Spanish may be neither stress-timed nor syllable-timed, but has

“some form of segment-timing, in which the number and type of segments in each syllable,

together with the presence or absence of stress determine the duration of a syllable” and its

overall stress pattern (p. 302).

Regardless, as the historical and current research indicates, English is legitimately

considered a “stress-timed” language which employs extensive vowel reduction, linking,

assimilation and cliticization patterns that “squeeze” syllables together between stresses to keep

sentence rhythms fairly isochronic or regular. In contrast to this rhythm, Spanish is definitively

more of a “segmental” and/or “syllable-timed” language because syllables are of more equal

duration and utterance length is extended when more syllables occur.

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The implications of this contrast are that English employs stress-timed patterns for

emphasis and communicates contextual meanings through suprasegmental or prosodic stress. In

contrast, Spanish deploys a “fixed-word accent” pattern of lexical stress with approximately 75%

to 80% of polysyllabic words following a penultimate stress pattern (Harris, 1983). This means

in English that contextual, interpersonal meanings are subtly transmitted by contrasts in tone and

intonation patterns, whereas in Spanish, these contrasts are conveyed in explicit “fixed-word”

differences in grammar, such as the differentiation between tu and usted that exists in Spanish,

but not in the grammatical pronoun use of “you” in English.

Thus, because Spanish has such a prominent penultimate stress pattern and a very

moderate use of intonation to communicate suprasegmental stress patterns, Spanish speakers are

intuitively trained to listen to suprasegmental stress to identify syntactic or lexical cognates and

conjugations, rather than pragmatic meanings. As Chela de Rodriguez (1976) observed, critical

differences in sentence meaning are more clearly distinguished in Spanish by grammatical

differences, instead of the stress-timed intonational patterns used in English. Chela de

Rodriguez relates: a Native speaker of English as a first language (L1) would typically just use

intonation to contrast the meanings in the following two sentences: “That’s not his CAR” and

“That’s not HIS car.” In the first sentence, the inflected meaning would be: “His car is a

DIFferent car,” and the second sentence meaning would be: “that car belongs to SOMEone else.”

In Spanish, these intonational meanings would normally be communicated by clear differences

in grammatical structures, rather than intonation. The first sentence, for example, would be

expressed through the grammar: “Ese no es su choche,” and the second statement would be:

“No es el coche de èl” (1976, p. 8).

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The grammatical structure of Spanish thus communicates distinct pragmatic meanings

that are usually communicated through intonation patterns in English, thus causing significant

cognitive dissonance for Spanish speakers of English as a Second Language (ESL). However,

suprasegmental stress patterns are still very significant in Spanish—only with a significantly

different function. As Cutler, Norris & Sebastiàn-Gallés (2004) observe, Spanish speakers are

very adept at discriminating between suprasegmental stress differences, but their audial attention

is generally focused on lexical distinctions instead of intonational meanings. This is because

Spanish has longer words, fewer phonemes and more derived embedded syllables from Latin

than English, and it is these syntactical distinctions in meaning that are essentially being

communicated by lexical stress (Cutler, Norris & Sebastiàn-Gallés, 2004, pp. 1-4). This means

that while Spanish speakers are focusing on subtle segmental changes in vowels and verb

inflections that signify changes in tense—and expecting English speakers to quite literally “say

what they mean” verbally, as Spanish speakers do—English speakers are expecting Spanish L2

speakers to subtly express and interpret their meanings more nonverbally, as English L1 speakers

are trained to do, and this forms a basis for confusion and distrust in ordinary conversation.

Very importantly, as Chela-Flores (1997) reports, typical English intonation patterns also

tend to place greatest prominence on the last content word in a sentence, but typical Spanish

sentence stress patterns tend to retain prominence farther towards the right of the sentence,

regardless of whether the stressed word is a content word or not. Thus the stressed sentence in

English “John asked me to TALK to him” would normally be stressed in Spanish as “John me

pidiò que hablara con ÉL” (Chela-Flores, 1997, p. 4). Also, unlike English in which the nuclear

stress and the highest tonal peak usually coincide, in Spanish the tonal peak occurs on the first

syllable of the unit in which the pitch changes. This means that the final stressed word in

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Spanish is not usually marked by a rise in pitch, and this makes identifying such marks in

English even more difficult for Spanish L1 speakers (1997, p. 4).

As Chela-Flores illustrates in the unmarked English declarative sentence, “He arrived

with his COUsin,” the word cousin also receives the highest pitch in the intonational unit. In the

declarative sentence expressing this meaning in Spanish however, “Llegó con su PRImo,” the

highest intonation would be on the first syllable of the verb llegó, while the prominence would

be on the first syllable PRI in primo or “cousin,” (1997, p. 4) and this further complicates

Spanish speakers’ abilities to learn the intonational stress patterns in English because the

suprasegmental stress patterns in Spanish are differently rule-bound. In addition, research by

Chela-Flores and others (Chela-Flores 1993; Faber 1991; Taylor 1991), also suggests that

syllable length is the most widely encountered difficulty for developing intelligibility among

foreign learners of English, and it is a major obstacle to acquiring near-Native pronunciation

(Adams and Munro 1978). Thus, for Spanish ESL speakers, these difficulties in altering their

intuitive segmental and syllable-timed patterns that are imbedded in the semantic and syntactic

thought patterns of Spanish to acquire the pragmatic speech patterns of intonational, stress-

timed meanings in English are greatly complicated by the syllable-duration in English and the

complicated lexical and grammatical meanings that are imbedded in the more reasonable,

syllable-timed patterns of Spanish.

Finally, these multi-layer segmental and suprasegmental contrasts between word and

sentence stress in English and Spanish are further complicated by phonological rules in Spanish

that are misinterpreted by English Native Speakers (L1) when communicating with Spanish ESL

speakers (L2). Specifically, although phonological processes such as linking, cliticization, and

assimilation occur in Spanish, vowel reduction (which accounts for most of the equally-

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measured durations, or “feet,” in English) is rarely present in Spanish. In fact, besides extending

utterances to maintain relatively equal syllable duration, Spanish also commonly employs

“epenthesis,” through the insertion of an open syllable /el to maintain syllable distinctions. This

process has been employed since Roman times in Iberian Spanish, and the Real Academia

Española enforces this rule even on cognates in Spanish making the insertion of /e/ “the official

orthography once the word is felt to be naturalized” (Whitley, 2002, p. 34).

This epenthesis, or insertion of the phoneme /e/ before words beginning with /s/ in Latin,

occurs in most Romance languages including Spanish, French and Italian, but it also occurs in

other languages throughout the Mediterranean region, including Greek, Armenian, Turkish, and

Persian (Lloyd, 1987). According to Lloyd (1987), these Latin transcriptions were recorded as

early as the second century A.D., and further studies in linguistic anthropology may actually

reveal their phonetic origins in early sixth century B.C. migrations of the Assyrians to Celtic

Iberia or in other Paleohispanic transcriptions during the 400-600 years of Roman occupation

circa 200 B.C. to 400 A.D.. Regardless, this insertion of the phoneme /e/ before the syllable-

initial /s/ has been mandated in Spain by the Real Academia since its foundation in 1713, over

300 years ago.

Again the implications of this phonological rule for Spanish L2 speakers of English, as

Stockwell and Bowen (1965) observe, are significant. Although the phoneme /s/ occurs in both

Spanish and English, its distribution is strikingly different in Spanish because “/s/ can never

occur before a consonant in the same syllable, whereas in English, it can. This is no mere

historical fact or curious detail of observation [because in this location] /s/ is not an optional

choice for the Spanish speaker” (p. 5). Thus, when this conflict occurs, it has consequences for

learning the two languages because the phonological rules that stand behind utterances in any

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language are reflections of the culture in which a Native speaker learns to communicate, and in

which all Native speakers develop a subconscious “muscle memory” in their tongues from

infancy onward.

Yet in conversational English spoken by Spanish L2 speakers, this epenthesis has even

more serious consequences because it is often subconsciously misinterpreted by listeners as a

basis for ethnolinguistic prejudice. Because Latin cognates in English beginning with /s/ that

mandate epenthesis in Spanish are so common, the pronunciation of words such as “es-school”

and “es-student” for “school” and “student” are interpreted as reflecting an ethnolinguistic

ignorance of English. Whereas, this pronunciation of the Latin cognates escuela and estudiante

for “school” and “student,” like all /s/ initial consonants in Spanish are strictly required to be

preceded by an /e/, according to the centuries-old rule in Spanish.

So these are some of the bases for ethnolinguistic prejudice against Spanish ESL

speakers. Before considering how

What about Spanglish?

Dr. Ana Zentella, professor emeritus at

Future Implications for Multicultural Education in the United States

As Purcell-Gates forewarns American educators: “if we continue to use the mainstream

experience of reality as the perspective, we fool ourselves into believing that we are looking

through a window when instead we are looking into a mirror. Our explanations threaten to

reflect only ourselves and our world, serving no real explanatory purpose” (1995, p. 6).

As Crawford (2006) informs us, in his discussion of the English Plus movement in the

United States that resulted in bilingual resolutions passed in four states (New Mexico, Oregon,

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Rhode Island and Washington) as a counterforce to the rampant Official English state laws that

were passed throughout the nation in the 1980s and 1990s: “Rather than treating bilingualism as

a nuisance or a threat, we should exploit our diversity to enrich the lives of individuals and foster

the nation’s interests, while encouraging ethnic tolerance and safeguarding civil rights” ((as cited

in Potowski, p. 7).

Krashen (1992) suggests that successful bilingual education programs actually result in faster acquisition of English.

Content matter taught in the native language can be transferred to the second language. In the regular classroom,

confronted with both concepts and language that are not comprehensible to them, limited English speakers learn

neither the content nor the language. Research indicates that language acquisition occurs only when incoming

messages can be understood (Krashen, 1992).

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“si podiera pensar en español e inglés podía serbilingüe.” Marisa 11 year-old bilingual. (

ETHNOLINGUISTIC IDENTITY:THE CHALLENGE OF MAINTAINING SPANISH-ENGLISHBILINGUALISM IN AMERICAN SCHOOLSGuadalupe Valdés

Roosevelt, Theodore, Works, Memorial ed., vol. XXIV. New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons,1926. 554. Print.

Potowski discusses the linguistic counterforce to US monolinguistic

hegemony and the increasing polemic of whether immigration is damaging

American patrioticism and national pride. Powtowski makes quick work of

the prejudicial myths that have founded this ethnocentricism. Contrary to

this popular polemic, she says, the cultural myths that: 1) Today’s

immigrants are not learning English as fast as those in the past, 2) Language

diversity in this country is a recent problem caused by high levels of

immigration and 3) America is at risk because alternative languages threaten

national security” (

English-Only as a Litmus test of American Citizenship:

In 1907, US President Theodore Roosevelt wrote, "We have room for but one

language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to

see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American

16

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_President


nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house" (Roosevelt,

554).

Not surprisingly, this statement was made by President “Teddy” Roosevelt,

who as a Harvard graduate became the youngest member of the New York

legislative at 24, who resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to become

a “rough rider,” in the Spanish-American War, and who after becoming

President in 1901, led the construction of the Panama Canal, founded the US

Forest Service, won the adoption of the Drgo Doctrine which prevented the

use of force in collecting foreign debts,

Contact Information

Joshua Fishman. Since attaining Emeritus University Research Professor standing (in 1988), I am most easily and reliably reached via my home and email address.

"snailmail": 3616 Henry Hudson Parkway, 7B-N, Riverdale, NY 10463. email: [email protected]

“Basques were really ridiculed as not being fully human, animalistic.” Joshua Fishman

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mailto:[email protected]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationality

pnasa 2010 pride & prejudice1

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