Title of Submission
A New Majority: Latino English in Liberal, Kansas
Submission Abstract
The Kansas Speaks Project documents language variation and change throughout Kansas through the collection and analysis of oral histories. As part of this project, we examine the speech of adolescents in Liberal, Kansas, where the Latinx community grew from 19.5% to 59.1% since 1990 (US Census). Population movements in the 1990s introduced Latinx[1] immigration to new rural US destinations (Kandel & Parrado 2005), allowing linguists to analyze initial stages of dialect contact (Wolfram et al. 2004). Latinx communities in Kansas contrast with Southern Latinx “New Destinations” as Southern English is more salient than Midwestern English (Preston 1993). We analyze the speech of 16 Latinx youth, comparing them to a sample of European American youth from our corpus of 81 oral histories. We find that Latinx English in Liberal is rapidly aligning with the local variety on a number of quantitative metrics including vowel pronunciation and syllable duration, both of which are correlates of accent. This finding contrasts with sporadic accommodation in the South (Wolfram et al. 2004), but is similar to communities in the upper Midwest (Konopka & Pierrehumbert 2008; Ocumpaugh 2010; Roeder 2010) and California (Holland 2014). These findings emphasize rapid alignment for non-Southern communities, regardless of whether such communities are a minority or majority Latinx. Research in Kansas can illuminate how the structure and salience of regional varieties affects initial accommodation, holding important implications for educators in communities with rapidly changing demographics.
[1] We use “Latinx” as a gender-inclusive form of Latino/a
Keywords
Latino English, Language, Sociolinguistics
Recommended Citation
Kohn, Mary Elizabeth; Hattesohl, Tiffany; and Stithem, Carly (2016). "A New Majority: Latino English in Liberal, Kansas," Institute for Student Learning Assessment.
A New Majority: Latino English in Liberal, Kansas
The Kansas Speaks Project documents language variation and change throughout Kansas through the collection and analysis of oral histories. As part of this project, we examine the speech of adolescents in Liberal, Kansas, where the Latinx community grew from 19.5% to 59.1% since 1990 (US Census). Population movements in the 1990s introduced Latinx[1] immigration to new rural US destinations (Kandel & Parrado 2005), allowing linguists to analyze initial stages of dialect contact (Wolfram et al. 2004). Latinx communities in Kansas contrast with Southern Latinx “New Destinations” as Southern English is more salient than Midwestern English (Preston 1993). We analyze the speech of 16 Latinx youth, comparing them to a sample of European American youth from our corpus of 81 oral histories. We find that Latinx English in Liberal is rapidly aligning with the local variety on a number of quantitative metrics including vowel pronunciation and syllable duration, both of which are correlates of accent. This finding contrasts with sporadic accommodation in the South (Wolfram et al. 2004), but is similar to communities in the upper Midwest (Konopka & Pierrehumbert 2008; Ocumpaugh 2010; Roeder 2010) and California (Holland 2014). These findings emphasize rapid alignment for non-Southern communities, regardless of whether such communities are a minority or majority Latinx. Research in Kansas can illuminate how the structure and salience of regional varieties affects initial accommodation, holding important implications for educators in communities with rapidly changing demographics.
[1] We use “Latinx” as a gender-inclusive form of Latino/a
