Lexical borrowing and deborrowing in Spanish in New York City

Towards a synthesis of the social correlates of lexical use and diffusion in immigrant contexts

Rachel Varra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315408927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langues

Lexical Borrowing and Deborrowing in Spanish in New York City provides a sociodemographic portrait of lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York City.

The volume offers new and important insights into research on lexical borrowing. In particular, it presents empirical data obtained through quantitative analysis to answer the question of who is most likely to use English lexical borrowings while speaking Spanish, to address the impact that English has on Spanish as spoken in the city and to identify the social factors that contribute to language change.

The book also provides an empirical, corpus-based-approach to distinguishing between borrowing and other contact phenomena, such as codeswitching, which will be of interest to scholars of language contact and bilingualism.

1 Introduction

1 Preliminaries

The individual man is everywhere only seeking after a sign […] and he is always ready to take it where he finds it handiest […]; and more or less, according to wholly indeterminable circumstances […] There are few tongues in the world which are not to this extent mixed.

(Whitney 1881: 10)

So it has been with languages and their speakers and so it continues to be. Those who have picked up this volume will be familiar with the linguistic behavior that Whitney describes – the “taking” of signs – both in their own speech and in that of others. Such practices are instantiated in the quotidian and perhaps unremarkable: the learning and use of a new word-form, such as totes to mean ‘totally’ or preggers to mean ‘pregnant’, as in “She was totes preggers!” But readers will also be familiar with practices that give greater pause, such as estuvimos en un baby shower, ‘we were at a baby shower’. The practice of using phrases (like baby shower) from one language in the midst of a sentence or discourse in another are just one way speakers could ‘take of the handiest sign’. And this particular way, the use of ‘other language’ strings in one’s speech, will here be called lexical borrowings.

Lexical borrowing is the focus of the present volume. In what follows the phenomenon will be defined and examined in order to answer three sorts of questions that have occupied sociolinguistic investigations: What can we know about people based on how they use lexical borrowings? What can we know about the process of lexical borrowing itself based who uses them? And how does lexical borrowing behavior inform today’s big questions of social and linguistic inquiry? In particular, this work will report the results of a large-scale, corpus-based study of lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York City. What we will see is that using ‘other language’ strings is not necessarily about being ‘handy’ in any obvious sense (indeed, ‘handy’ needs some definition) and, importantly, that thanks to advances in linguistic methodologies and technology, the circumstances for their occurrence are not “wholly interdeterminable”, as Whitney (and others since!) had early asserted. Despite what may seem numerous tomes ostensibly dedicated to the topic of lexical borrowings, there is still much to be learned about this behavior. And this new knowledge stands to impactfully inform our teaching, our learning, our social policies and, to my mind and most importantly, our relationships.

Lexical borrowing is an especially conspicuous language behavior, particularly for interlocutors that do not share similar language learning experiences as the individuals that use them. It does not often go unnoticed. It is both the target of and itself comprises evidence for ideological assertions by politicians and every day persons making claims about the social class, intelligence, level of education or work ethic of the person using them. Informally, the practice is sometimes referred to as ‘codeswitching’ or, when English is involved, the speaker’s talk may be labeled an ‘-ish’ (e.g. Spanglish, Chinglish, Franglais). Further, lexical borrowing, as just one instantiation of what I here call ‘bilingual mixed speech’, has received serious scholarly attention since at least the 1950s, when some of the most incisive and well-articulated thinking on topic emerged. Early treatments of lexical borrowing catalogued the adoption of other-language neologisms found in languages in situations of contact (e.g. Espinosa 1917; Neumann 1938; Spencer 1947; Trager & Valdez 1937; Tsiapera 1964). Later studies examined the phonological and morphological adaptation of these borrowings to a recipient language (e.g. Acholonu, Penfield & Okezie 1980; Barkin 1980; Bowen 1975; Harshenin 1964a, 1964b; Holden 1976; Novotná 1967; Pfaff 1979). Recent linguistic treatments of lexical borrowing (and other lexical contact phenomena) have investigated the implications for bilingual language processing (e.g. Clyne 2003; Muysken 1995; Toribio 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2004) and explored universal constraints on language mixture (e.g. Berk-Seligson 1986; Myers-Scotton 1997; Poplack 1980).

Although, as we have seen, consideration of the extra-linguistic influences on lexical borrowing is found as early as 1881 in Whitney’s writings and in those of Espinosa (1917) as well, it was the work of Einar Haugen (1950, 1972) and Uriel Weinreich (1953) that emphasized that insight into language change, of which lexical borrowing is just one manifestation, depends as much on identifying the social factors that encourage or inhibit the use of features as on linguistic constraints.¹ Accordingly, several approaches to the study of language in bilingual societies, such as in anthropological linguistics,² the sociology of language³ and discourse analysis,⁴ have examined the discourse significance of and the macrosocial factors conditioning lexical contact phenomena.

In subsequent decades, the insights of Haugen and Weinreich have not only been echoed by other scholars, but made more specific, highlighting the importance of the identity and personal characteristics of language users for a theory of language change. In 1962, Gumperz emphasized that understanding the dynamics of language change required the investigation of variation in the use of language contact phenomena within a speech community (30) – that is, with reference to a concrete group of individuals. In 1995, Silva-Corvalán noted that “in order to assess the stability of the [contact] features identified and the possibility that they may be passed on to new generations” (1995: 4), it is important to know who is using the feature, and in particular to know their proficiency and how they use their languages in daily life. In 2000, Eckert pointed out that the manifestations of personal style legitimize and sanction novel patterns of language use, such that they are reproduced by others and become established in the long run.

Although some inroads into how speaker identity and group membership contribute to lexical borrowing behavior has been made in the last twenty-five years (e.g. see Eslami Rasekh, Ghoorchaei & Shomoossi 2008; Mendieta 1999; Ngom 2002; Poplack 1980; Poplack, Sankoff & Miller 1988; Sullivan 2008; Thomason & Kaufman 1988), the current body of work is relatively small and manifests several shortcomings. First, there is a need for more quantitative work in order to gain a systematic understanding of how borrowings spread through a community and how the permanent adoption of a borrowing into the lexicon of a community is conditioned by the social identity of the individuals that use them. Second, even where quantitative studies exist, they rarely include sufficient numbers of participants so as to allow quantitative probing of the data. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the concept of lexical borrowing, imported from the historical language study, is rarely defined in a way that makes it relevant to languages and speakers in contact situations.

This book reports on an investigation that addresses these problems and seeks to add to an understanding of the social correlates of lexical borrowing. A quantitative sociolinguistic design is marshaled to investigate variation in several aspects of borrowing behavior, such as its frequency in speech and its discourse treatment. It examines data from more than 140 Spanish speakers from six ethnonational Latino groups in New York to answer the following sets of questions:

1. i Which individuals are most susceptible to borrowing? To what extent is borrowing conditioned by language proficiency? What does the constellation of significantly correlating and non-correlating sociodemographic traits reveal about lexical borrowing in Spanish in New York City?
2. ii How do borrowings spread through a community? Who is most responsible for propagating their use? What can be learned about how lexical items are acquired, spread and retained/discarded in immigrant settings?
3. iii What does lexical borrowing behavior indicate about the future of Spanish in New York City? To what extent is Spanish in New York influenced or changed by contact with English?

The results of this study will do three things. Through this study we will first learn who among New York Spanish speakers is most susceptible to borrowing (ojo: it may not be who you think!), making results consistent with research that shows that lexical borrowing can be indexical of speaker identity. While this result is perhaps the most modest theoretically, the specifics of how the data lay out are, to my mind, the most immediately impactful both interpersonally and socially. They directly challenge commonly held perceptions, along with their negative associated value judgments about what using lexical borrowing means about the speaker.

Although no definitive claims about the permanence of particular lexical borrowings in Spanish in New York are made, and neither is an attempt at a comprehensive theory of how individual speech behaviors relate to long-term changes ventured, this study contributes evidence for the building of such a theory. In particular, it supplies consolidated observations, supported by empirical quantitative data, that can be used for constructing an account of the social determinants of lexical change in diverse contact situations. That is, to know what contact features may become part of Spanish in New York, it is important to know who is using them, and what types they are using. This study, in examining the social identity of speakers, provides a critical link between variation observed in speech and what the long-term outcomes of language contact will be (e.g. see Thomason & Kaufman 1988).

Finally, this work contributes answers to the questions that have dominated research on Spanish in the U.S. for the last half-century, such as, What is the linguistic fate of Spanish in the U.S.? An how and to what extent is English influencing Spanish (in New York City)? Results from lexical borrowing behavior in New York challenge not only our everyday assumptions about such matters, but also conclusions posited by academics working on Spanish in the U.S. Before seeing how, some background information is in order.

2 Spanish in New York City

Spanish is the second most-spoken language in the U.S. (Bills 2005; Roca 2000). The number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. is second only to Mexico (Instituto Cervantes 2016: 5–7) and New York City, the most populous in the United States with around eight million people (U.S. Census 2010), is home to more Latinos than any other city in the U.S.⁵ In 2010, more than 2,338,000 Latinos⁶ resided in New York, constituting about 28 percent of the city’s population (U.S. Census Bureau 2012c, Quick Facts New York City). The majority of Latinos in New York are natives to the U.S. (59 percent). The other 41 percent represent all 19 of the officially Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Central and South American countries. In fact, today, no one Latino group makes up the overwhelming of Latinos in the city. Among the most numerous Latino heritages claimed in the city are Puerto Rican (32 percent), Dominican (26 percent), Mexican (13 percent), Ecuadorian (8 percent), Colombian (5 percent), Cuban (2 percent), Honduran (2 percent), Salvadorian (2 percent) and Peruvian (2 percent) (U.S. Census 2010).

Of the more than two million Latinos older than age five in New York City, 85 percent speak a language besides English at home (U.S. Census 2010). For more than 99 percent of those, that language is Spanish. While it was once thought that Spanish among immigrants would give way to English among their children and grandchildren (Fishman 1967; Pedraza 1978 cited by Poplack 1980: 582), Spanish has, unlike the language of previous immigrant vintages to the U.S. (e.g. Italian, German), remained numerically strong on the community level. As might be expected, about 97 percent of Latino first generation immigrants older than age five speak Spanish in the home after migrating to the U.S. What is more remarkable is that of the more than one million U.S.-born Latinos (i.e. the second generation) older than age five, 76 percent also speak Spanish at home, a situation that has been facilitated not only through renewal of native-speaking immigrants to the city (e.g. Pousada & Poplack 1982), but also due to individuals’ desire to continue speaking it.⁷

Many Latino immigrants and their children also speak English. About 93 percent of U.S.-born Latinos in New York speak English ‘well’ or ‘very well’,⁸ while more than half ⁹ of the foreign-born¹⁰ older than a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notations and orthographic conventions
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The lexical borrowing database: classifying lexical contact phenomena
• 3 The corpus and analysis
• 4 An overview of lexical borrowing behavior in Spanish in New York City
• 5 Immigrant generations in focus
• 6 Innovation, reproduction and the dissemination of lexical borrowings in Spanish in New York City
• 7 Deborrowing: flagged lexical borrowings in Spanish in New York City
• 8 Synthesis and application of findings
• Appendix A: stratification of the Otheguy-Zentella Corpus of Spanish in NYC
• Appendix B: excerpts from the Otheguy-Zentella Corpus by referring chapter
• Appendix C: results of the homonymy test
• Appendix D: criteria for lexical borrowing by part of speech category
• Index