This study examines the situation of large-scale dialectal and linguistic contact among the Spanish-speaking population of Boston, Massachusetts. The community of Spanish speakers in Boston is a socially and linguistically diverse group that has brought to the city distinct patterns of language use from all over Latin America, Spain and the rest of the United States. Within Boston, the unique language background of each of the city's Spanish speakers alongside the elevated presence of multilingualism and multiculturalism has produced a situation in which a massive amount of regional and social variation in Spanish is concentrated into a densely-populated urban setting. This concentration of variation has produced a highly fluid and dynamic sociolinguistic environment in which speakers constantly adjust and acquire patterns of phonological, syntactic and lexical variation. To examine this linguistic environment, this current project studies the speech of nine Spanish speakers of Salvadoran heritage in Boston with respect to the variables of personal pronoun usage, grammatical subject placement and the production of the /s/ phoneme. The study of each of these variables has been fundamental to understanding patterns of regional and social variation in the hispanophone world and how these patterns have developed over time. By looking at these variables together in speakers, this study aims to examine if and how the amount of time speakers have spent in the U.S. correlates with distinct patterns in their Spanish language use. In particular, this study is interested in the ways that Spanish speakers of Salvadoran heritage in Boston use language variation to perform sociolinguistic identities. Traditionally, it is assumed that only a handful of sociolinguistic variables are used by speakers to linguistically express and perceive social identities, meaning that large swaths of language variation go unnoticed in normal conversation. This study seeks to understand what it means for a variable to be used in sociolinguistic identity formation by examining whether variables that signal social meaning display distinct patterns of language change with respect to \"unnoticed\" variables. Through this approach, this study (1) develops a new regression methodology to examine sociolinguistic data and (2) raises critical questions as to what a sociolinguistic variable is. With respect to methods, the analysis of speaker data according to a regression model that assumes shared linguistic behavior among speakers reveals detailed patterns of language change that are obscured by the traditional method of comparing linguistic data between subgroups. The findings of this methodology suggest that Spanish speakers of Salvadoran heritage in Boston perform sociolinguistic identity through highly simplified linguistic considerations within a larger context of shared linguistic behavior.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Variation","Identity","Linguistics","Boston","Spanish","Language","Sociolinguistics"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24052