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Does Boston Spanish Have Its Own Accent?

In an all-new episode of The Brink’s podcast, BU sociolinguist Daniel Erker discusses the forces that cause languages to change—like time, geography, and class

You can also find this episode on Spotify, YouTube, and other podcast platforms.

Does Boston Spanish have its own accent and dialect? In the second episode of The Brink podcast Explain This! coproducer Sophie Yarin chats with Daniel Erker, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of linguistics and Spanish, about linguistic variation—the phenomenon of language evolution. As a sociolinguist, Erker’s scholarship looks at how human factors—such as migration, colonialism, and contact—shape what we say and how we say it. Director of the BU-based Spanish in Boston Project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, his research is invested in understanding the unique ways that local Spanish speakers communicate.

Everybody knows the quintessential Boston accent—“pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd.” Listen now as Erker tells us what effect it might have on the city’s bilingual residents.

Takeaways

• Demographically speaking, the “most typical linguistic innovator” is a working-to middle-class teenage girl.
• It’s possible that the Spanish spoken in Boston is influenced by the Boston accent. While the typical Spanish pronunciation of “Revere” would produce the second “R,” some Spanish-speaking Bostonians have been known to drop it, just as many do in English.
• The movement and interaction of populations can accelerate language change, but linguists don’t have an answer for how we evolved language in the first place.

Transcript

The Brink: You’re listening to Explain This! Our new podcast from The Brink explores big and small pictures of research done at Boston University, from microbiology to art history and everything in between. Join us as we interview on-campus experts who break down areas of study and put their work into real world contexts.

Daniel Erker: The way that English is spoken in Boston is, in and of itself, regionally distinct, so we have New England English, and there are features of New England English that are configured in a particular way in the Greater Boston area. And a question that arises is, is the way that Spanish is being spoken in Boston somehow influenced by the way English is spoken in Boston?

Sophie Yarin: Daniel Erker is a sociolinguist, which means his research is focused on how human factors—like class, migration, and contact—influence the way we communicate with each other. He’s also the director of the Spanish in Boston project, a National Science Foundation-funded linguistic survey of Spanish speakers in the Boston area, which has made a number of discoveries indicating that Boston Spanish is developing its own distinct characteristics. Now he’s sitting down with us to answer the questions: What is language? and How does it evolve? Daniel, thanks so much for joining us today. So what accounts for some of the changes that we see from one language to another, like from French to Chinese? Is it a social thing, a psychological thing? 

DE: One of the most interesting questions about human language, that linguists don’t have an answer to, is how did the language faculty evolve in the human species? How did we get to be linguistic in the first place? What was the first language like? And if it’s the case that we all have the same language faculty, which we do, why are so many different languages so different? So, where does linguistic diversity come from? This is really an interesting question: Why is linguistic diversity a reality? We don’t have a wholly satisfactory answer to this question. But what we do know is that languages change inevitably. It’s the inherent variability in language that sows the seeds for change within a community. The other thing to think about, in terms of this question of why are there different languages and how does thinking about variability relate to it, is thinking about what we actually use language with. What I mean by that is, what parts of our bodies do we use to make language? Well, we use our mouths and our throats, and our lungs and the muscles in between our ribs, to say nothing of all of the underlying brain structures. But what we’ve effectively done, what human beings have done through their evolution, is have coopted the digestive and respiratory tract for another means. The parts of our bodies that we eat and breathe with, we actually use for speech; when we externalize the language faculty, we can’t help but do so in a way that introduces variation. That sows the seeds for change in a community. But other things can accelerate change as well—that has to do with the movement of populations, and then the interaction of populations. So for instance, if you think about the vocabulary of English, you might wonder, for instance, why do we have pairs of words like cow/beef, chicken/poultry, pig/pork? The reason we have those pairs is not because English speakers need one word for the animal mucking about in the field and another for the things that we eat, but that is actually an artifact of interaction between French speaking Normans, and speakers of what we now call English in the late 11th century. So the food based items are all loanwords from French. So languages can change as a result of this internal mechanism, resting on inherent variability and then through the interaction of populations. So all of this, together over time, which is to say the internal drivers of language change and the external drivers of language change, they create linguistic diversity. What the first language was like, we still don’t know. 

SY: How do some of these external factors, like class or migration, change the language? 

DE: Sure—that’s a really nice question. So what we can add to this general description of why languages vary and change over time is a social factor. So you can think of groups of communities being separated by physical boundaries, or frontiers, like oceans or mountain ranges or rivers, but you can also think of groups of individuals within a community being separated by social barriers, things like education, or income—or in a city like Boston, or any other large urban area, you actually have physical distribution across an urban landscape, such that different groups of individuals are more or less likely to interact with each other. What we know is that when languages change in a given community, they tend not to change uniformly across the social hierarchy. It happens to be the case that in most of the linguistic literature on this topic, which is who is driving linguistic change, who are the linguistic innovators, it turns out that the social profile of the most typical linguistic innovator is going to be a teenage woman, teenage female in the middle of the social hierarchy—so upper working class or lower middle class. This generalization has largely been based on work that’s been carried out in the industrialized West, but not exclusively. And it does seem to be the case that there’s something about being a teenage girl that predisposes you to being a linguistic innovator. 

SY: In the case of Spanish, which you study, why is Mexican and Peruvian Spanish different from Argentine Spanish? 

DE: Sure, yeah. Terrific question. So, Spanish is a global language; the estimates depend on what you count as a speaker and how you define the not-easy-to-define term “native speaker,” but generally speaking, there are at least a half billion Spanish speakers on Earth. And that’s a lot of people. Related to what we were talking about before, when you have that many people speaking a language, it’s going to vary considerably in terms of the different communities that speak it. One of the obvious reasons has to do with well, physical distance, right? So you mentioned Mexico and Peru—those are faraway places from each other. Interestingly, Mexico and Peru get to the other issue: not just distance, but time, and the historical relationship to the presumed geographic source of the Spanish language, which is the northern central part of the Iberian Peninsula. But in any case, the relationship that Mexico and Peru had with the Spanish Empire during the period of colonial expansion was really rather different than the relationship that, say, what we now call Argentina had with Spain and what Nicaragua had with Spain. A lot of the variability that we see in say, Mexico and Peru, in relation to the Iberian Peninsula varieties of Spanish, in contrast with say, Argentine Spanish, has to do with the fact that Mexico and Peru are really intimately connected with the Spanish Empire during colonial expansion. So they set up in these two places what they called the vice-royalties. They were effectively imperial outposts in the quote-unquote new world. But Argentina was a backwater, really hard to get to. So [over] 500 years, when there were linguistic changes in the way Spanish was being spoken in Spain, those changes made their way to Mexico and Peru, but not to Argentina, and not to Nicaragua, or El Salvador. One of the clearest examples of this is there is a way of referring to the word “you”, the second person singular pronoun, that used to be used in Spain, but no longer is: it’s vos, or what Spanish speakers called voseo. So if you are someone who uses vos, you are voseante, and in Spain, this way of saying “you” was actually in competition with a few other ways of saying “you”, at least so the story goes, and vos lost in Spain. So vos stopped being used, and there was enough regular communication between the speakers of peninsular varieties of Spanish and those Spanish speakers who were in the so-called New World in these vice-royalties, in these Imperial outposts, that the loss of vos in Spain made its way over to Mexico and Peru, but not down to Argentina. So vos still gets used today in Argentina, and in parts of Central America. So you have physical distance, and things as material as jungles and mountains and oceans, being the drivers of this diversification. Another really important reason for why there are different varieties of Spanish is that Spanish is not an indigenous language to the Americas; it is a colonial export. And the individuals who spoke it, who brought it to the Americas, interacted with existing populations who had their own ways of speaking. There are many languages that are indigenous to the Americas, and they’re rather diverse. So if you have Nahuatl-speaking individuals in Mexico, and, say, Quechua-speaking individuals in South America, and Ecuador and Bolivia, what you’re going to find is remnants of the contact between Spanish speakers and those indigenous languages. 

SY: So, tell me a little bit about your research methodology, you and the Spanish and Boston team. 

DE: So the way most sociolinguists like me do our work is we have conversations with people, and we record those conversations. And then, it’s not that we don’t care about what they’re saying—we do care about the content of their speech, we care about their ideas and their attitudes—but on another level, we’re also very interested in the microlinguistic details. So we take conversations, they last maybe 90 minutes or so, and they are just like this; it’s just two people talking. We have a similar type of format, where we’ll ask folks some of the same starter questions like What’s it like to be a Spanish speaker in Boston?, and, What’s Boston like compared to other places you’ve lived?, and we just get them going and have a conversation, while recording them using a very high-fidelity microphone at a very needlessly high sampling rate, so that we can then subject the audio to acoustic analysis. We take the conversation, we transcribe it, and then we use acoustic phonetic software to measure various aspects of the individual speech. We also annotate their speech to look at these above-sound-level phenomena like words, which are themselves decomposable into sound. We’re interested in sounds, but also words and structures. We build a quantitative model of each person’s speech for a range of features: so we look at how they produce their Ss, how they fill their pauses, how they use pronouns, whether they put subjects before or after verbs. We basically create a linguistic profile for them. 

SY: So, you found that Spanish speakers in Boston have their own unique linguistic elements and idiosyncrasies. 

DE: There is a large contribution of Spanish speakers from many parts of the world here in Boston, so there’s extensive dialect diversity here in Boston—but with this interesting differentiating feature that there’s more voseantes here in Boston than you get in New York.

In that sense, there’s similarities and differences between these big urban cities in the Northeast, in terms of how Spanish is spoken, and the history of Spanish in this area is also importantly different from Spanish in the southwest of the United States and in urban areas in the Midwest, and even in the rural southeast of the United States, where there’s been very substantial growth in Spanish speakers. So one of the things that is also interesting and kind of fun is that the way that English is spoken in Boston is, in and of itself, regionally distinct, so we have New England English, and there are features of New England English that are configured in a particular way in the greater Boston area. And a question that arises is, is the way that Spanish is being spoken in Boston somehow influenced by the way English is spoken in Boston? And it’s a tough question to answer. There are a few data points in the interviews that constitute the primary data for my study that suggest that the R-lessness of American English as it is spoken by some fraction of Bostonians has had some impact on at least some of the vocabulary of Spanish in Boston. I was listening to this interview with this participant in the Spanish in Boston project and she and the interviewer were talking about their favorite beaches to go to; so they were talking about a bunch of beaches in the Caribbean, and they got to talking about the beaches in Boston, which they’re like, These are not real beaches, but in any case, they were talking about Revere Beach, which, in my Midwestern American English, I say, “Revere”. I produce my post-vocalic Rs. A lot of people in Boston don’t. They would not say, “Revere”, but they say, “Reve-ah”, right? This individual speaking in Spanish, talking about the various beaches in Boston, mentioned that her favorite beach in Boston was, “la playa Re-vee-a”. If you were to read that word using Spanish phonology, you would produce something like “Re-vé-ré”. So her model for producing Revere Beach is not someone saying “Revere Beach” like me, it’s someone saying “Reve-ah Beach”. So there are these small little details that indicate that there’s some local Boston English features that might, in somewhat small ways, impact the way Spanish is spoken here. On a much more general level, though, the way that Spanish is spoken in Boston, the way that it has been affected by English, if you will, is much more general in nature, and not so restricted to the English of Boston. 

SY: Oh, that’s interesting. So what would be an example?

DE: So when you are having a conversation in English, and you don’t know what it is that you’re going to say next, but you don’t want to give your turn up yet, usually you’ll use a pause—a filled pause. You’ll use something like “uh,” or “um”. “Uh” and “um” are, in many ways, the characteristic filled pauses of English, and each language community has its own specific filled pauses, which is to say the way language users fill their pauses is language specific; they draw from their inventory of sounds and use those sounds. Most Spanish speakers who are not regularly in contact with speakers of English, which is to say people who are not bilingual or who regularly only interact with other Spanish speakers, they tend not to use “uh” or “um.” They use “a” or “aim”. They sometimes will use “eh” or “ehm”. One thing that the Spanish in Boston project has shown is that if you are a person who grew up speaking Spanish in Boston, you do not prefer “eh” as your filled pause in Spanish. What you actually prefer is “ah”—that’s your most frequently used filled pause when you’re having a conversation in Spanish. What these individuals have done is they have, compared to their parents and grandparents, reconfigured this part of their sound system such that when they’re drawing from their sounds to fill a pause, they’re not like their mom and dad who would prefer “eh” or “em”. These are people born and raised in Boston. These are native Bostonians who speak Spanish; what they’re doing is saying, “Ah”, or, “ahm”—why is that the case? Well, it happens to be the case that language users are actually pretty resistant to radical reconfiguration of their mental user manual. What they tend to accept are more minor modifications. So “ah” is the sound that already exists in their speech, and it has the beautiful economic utility of being among the only vowel sounds that English and Spanish have in common. So what these bilinguals are doing without anybody teaching them, and without having explicit conversation, is they’re reconfiguring the way they fill their pauses, exploiting a minor sound in this domain, and making it a major sound in this domain. And what it’s allowing them to do is fill a pause using a more frequent sound that they use, and that they can use in either of their languages without having to overthink it. So they settle on a new way of filling pauses in what you might think of as a strategy of bilingual optimization. 

SY: I’m sort of curious, when I listened to you, about where the “why” comes into the work you do. So how often are you able to pinpoint the cause of a linguistic variation, and how often do you just have to say, we don’t know?

DE: I often joke to my students, What does the sociolinguist do? And I said, Well, we’re in the business of empirically demonstrating the obvious. And it’s true, right? So it’s like, well, I know that—-yeah, but you don’t have the data. So we’re out collecting the data to demonstrate the obvious, in many cases. But when we’re doing something more than that, what we’re doing is trying to make a case for why might a language be used by a particular individual in a particular community in the way that it is, for reasons that draw on their cognition, their physical body, and also their social place in the world. So it is a story that we’ll try to tell based in evidence, but it can’t be a certainty when trying to understand why a particular change occurred. It’s at best a plausible account, and that’s the nature of the field. 

SY: That makes a lot of sense, and it’s illuminating, so thank you for that. And thank you for coming in and talking with us today. We really appreciate it. 

DE: It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

The Brink: Explain This! is a podcast produced by The Brink at Boston University. This episode was mixed by Andrew Hallock and edited by Sophie Yarin. To learn more about us go to bu.edu/brink. Stay curious out there, folks. We’ll see you next time.

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