Welker, Craig Zachary (2024). Sociolinguistic Variation and Mentioned Ideology in the Spanish of Juchitán, México. (Thesis). Universität Bern, Bern
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Abstract
Although sociolinguistics points to the importance of ideologies in explaining linguistic variation, relatively little variationist research has attempted to correlate ideology directly with this variation. When ideology or attitude has been treated as a variable, the cognitive aspect of this variable has generally been emphasized; therefore, speakers in the sample have been assigned particular ideologies based on their purported beliefs. In contrast, the discursive element of ideology has been underemphasized as has the fact that the same people typically mention multiple ideologies in discourse. Therefore, in this thesis, I take "mentioned ideology" as a social factor, coded on a tone-group by tone-group basis, and investigate the relationship between this social factor and sociolinguistic variation. More specifically, I use multiple mentioned gender and language ideologies, along with other social factors, to attempt to explain sociolinguistic variation in Juchitán, Mexico, an indigenous Zapotec community with a so-called "third gender", called muxes, and certain women-dominated sectors of society. My results show that certain "mentioned ideologies", along with many other factors, condition variation in the two linguistic variables chosen for this study, namely syllable-final /s/ and grammatical gender assignment for muxe referents. Most notably, "pro-Spanish mentioned ideology" was linked to higher rates of /s/ retention, whereas "machista mentioned ideology" was linked with /s/ retention among feminine Zapotec speakers and, for all speakers, masculine grammatical gender for muxe referents. Since men and Spanish-dominant speakers tended to use these variants more frequently, this shows that people converge towards the speech of Spanish-dominant men when talking about the social dominance of both Spanish and men, even when they disagree with this dominance. This implies that speakers voice those they disagree with and/or accommodate towards an imagined Spanish-dominant male referent when making these statements. Furthermore, the fact that "mentioned ideologies" conditioned patterns of variation suggests that the construct is valid and can be used to uncover previously invisible patterns of intraspeaker variation in other samples, providing a new tool to sociolinguists looking to study intraspeaker variation. The results also showed that feminine grammatical gender for muxe referents is used to mark interpersonal closeness, suggesting a semantic bleaching of the binary gendered meanings of grammatical gender in this community. Furthermore, reduced /s/ is associated most strongly with feminine, Zapotec speakers, suggesting a link between /s/ reduction and other markers of Zapotec identity that motivates women to reduce /s/ more frequently than expected.
| Item Type: | Thesis |
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| Dissertation Type: | Single |
| Date of Defense: | 21 February 2024 |
| Subjects: | 400 Language > 460 Spanish & Portuguese languages 800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 860 Spanish & Portuguese literatures |
| Institute / Center: | 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Spanish Languages and Literature |
| Depositing User: | Hammer Igor |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Dec 2024 13:14 |
| Last Modified: | 06 Dec 2024 13:14 |
| URI: | https://boristheses.unibe.ch/id/eprint/5662 |
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