Miami-Cuban Spanish vowels in contact

Authors

  • Scott Mark Alvord Brigham Young University Department of Spanish and Portuguese 3162 JFSB Provo, UT 84602 Author
  • Brandon Rogers University of Minnesota Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v8i1.139

Keywords:

Miami-Cuban Spanish, Vowels, Phonetics, Language Contact

Abstract

While traditional studies on Spanish vowels have agreed that it is a stable system with very little variation, Varela (1992) claims to have observed English transfer phenomena in the vowel system of Miami Cuban Spanish (i.e. schwa in unstressed position, diphthongization of mid-vowels, and the use of English vowels in place of Spanish vowels: e.g. [æ] for /o/, [æk.tú.b?e] for octubre). The current study empirically tests Varela’s claims of English transfer in the Spanish vowel system of three generations of Miami Cuban bilinguals. Speech is analyzed acoustically with Praat and vowel formant values (F1 and F2) are normalized with NORM. No evidence of English vowels replacing Spanish vowels is discovered but the existence of vowel centralization of unstressed vowels in Miami Cuban Spanish is confirmed. The current study discusses the stability of the Miami Cuban Spanish vowel system as compared to Spanish in general.

Author Biographies

  • Scott Mark Alvord, Brigham Young University Department of Spanish and Portuguese 3162 JFSB Provo, UT 84602
    Scott M. Alvord, PhD is an associate professor at Brigham Young University. His research interests deal with phonetics and phonology in language contact situations, especially in the Miami-Cuban community, as well as the second language acquisition of Spanish phonology. Some of his recent publications include: ‘On the relationship between L2 pronunciation and culture’ (with R. A. Martinsen, Spanish in Context 9.3, 2012), ‘Factors influencing the acquisition of Spanish voiced stop spirantization during an extended stay abroad’ (with D. Christiansen,Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 5.2, 2012), and ‘Disambiguating declarative and interrogative meaning with intonation in Miami-Cuban Spanish’ (Southwest Journal of Linguistics 28.2, 2010).
  • Brandon Rogers, University of Minnesota
    Brandon M. A. Rogers received his MA in Hispanic Linguistics from Brigham Young University and is currently a second-year Hispanic Linguistics PhD student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His main research interests are sociophonetics, phonology, and prosody with a specific focus on Chilean and Miami-Cuban Spanish. Also, he has started researching the influence of Mapudungun on aspects of the intonational phonology of Chilean Spanish. His most recent publication is entitled ‘The extent of tonal events: intonational hat patterns in Chilean Spanish’ (Estudios de Fonética Experimental 22, 2013), and documents a previously unreported intonational plateau pattern that frequently manifests itself within Chilean Spanish.

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Published

2014-07-21

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 1 (2014): The Influence of English on U.S. Spanish

Section

Articles

License

© Equinox Publishing Ltd.

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How to Cite

Alvord, S. M., & Rogers, B. (2014). Miami-Cuban Spanish vowels in contact. Sociolinguistic Studies, 8(1), 139-170. https://doi.org/10.1558/sols.v8i1.139