Gang affiliation and linguistic variation among high school Latina girls

Norma Mendoza-Denton

Fri. 11-12:40 C

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationships among linguistic practice, ethnic identity, and gang affiliation in a population of Latina girls in a Northern California high school. I present a variationist analysis of /^/, coupled with ethnographic fieldwork, to test the hypothesis that patterns of phonological variation in the English of this community are the product of the intersection of Chicana/Mexicana identity and gang affiliation.

While other researchers have studied the linguistic consequences of generational effects and socioeconomic stratification within Chicano English-speaking communities (Galindo 1987, Santa Ana 1991), there are as of yet no micro-sociolinguistic studies that focus on the construction of particular Chicana/o identities through language. Large-scale surveys and demographic studies are useful and necessary to understand the broad picture of linguistic variation in different communities. Nevertheless, we also need to take a magnifying glass, as it were, to understand variation in situ, as it unfolds in the everyday lives of individual speakers.

The corpus for this paper consists of 800 tokens of stressed occurrences of /^/ from eight speakers, four core members from each of two rival gangs, the Norteñas and the Sureñas. Although each one of the eight speakers is of the same gender, ethnicity, age, socioeconomic status, and dialect (Chicano English), gang affiliation emerges as a strong predictor of differential patterning with respect to variation of /^/. Both groups (contrary to popular stereotypes) have distinct /^/ and /i/ phoneme classes, and within those,

1. /^/ is significantly tense before /ng/ for both groups, in contrast with the matrix white California dialect, and

2. /^/ is substantially lowered to /'/ before coronals for Sureñas only.

It is evident that /^/ is doing double duty in this community, serving to distinguish Chicano English speakers from matrix dialect speakers in some environments, and carrying community-internal social meaning in other environments. I will also analyze the interaction of /^/ tensing with /+/ fortition, as well as the possible role of lexical diffusion through the frequent use as discourse markers of specific words that carry these variants.

References

Galindo, Delma Letticia. 1987. Linguistic Influence and Variation of the English of Chicano Adolescents in Austin, Texas. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

Santa Ana, Otto. 1991. Phonetic Simplification Processes in the English of the Barrio. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.