In this thesis, I explore the question of whether participation in a college-level sociocultural linguistics curriculum can change a majority-Latin@ group of California high school students’ attitudes toward marginalized, ethnoracially-associated varieties of English.

I employ a standardized metric, the Speech Evaluation Instrument (Zahn and Hopper 1985), to test students’ language attitudes before and after completion of UC Santa Barbara’s SKILLS program, an innovative college-level sociocultural linguistics course. Language attitudes were indirectly measured using the verbal guise method (Ball and Giles 1982), wherein the same text is recorded by speakers of different speech varieties and played for participants, who then rate the speakers on 7-point semantic differential scales. Students evaluated the local White California English prestige dialect as well as African American English, Chicano English, and the Spanish-dominant English of an adult second language learner. Pre-survey and post-survey data were then subjected to statistical analysis.

Three major findings of the study merited further discussion. First, in the pre-survey data, the speaker of White California English was rated the highest across all four component variables identified by Principal Components Analysis. After completion of the SKILLS program, however, the order of rankings shifted: the speaker of Chicano English became the highest-rated on the Attractiveness component, which includes many solidarity-type items, and the speaker of African American English took first place on the Dynamism component, which measures “speakers’ social power, activity level, and the self-presentational aspects of speech” (Zahn and Hopper 1985: 119). Notably, there were no significant differences in evaluations of speakers of Chicano English and White California English between the pre-survey and post-survey. This finding differs from a well-established pattern in previous studies in which Anglo speakers are evaluated more highly than Latin@ speakers, even by Latin@ raters (e.g., Carranza and Ryan 1975a, b).

Second, students’ attitudes towards African American English improved significantly between the pre-survey and the post-survey on the Linguistic-Intellectual Status and Dynamism components, even rising from last to first rank on the latter variable. As part of the larger project of “sociolinguistic justice” (Bucholtz et al. 2014), the SKILLS program aims to counter language-deficit views of minoritized speech varieties. The positive shift in attitudes toward AAE suggests that this goal was achieved, at least in part. These results demonstrate that language attitudes can indeed be transformed by academic intervention.

Third, my data show that even as attitudes towards the three ethnoracially marginalized varieties of English improved, students’ positive evaluations of the hegemonically powerful variety, White California English, remained relatively stable. Opponents of the tradition of “culturally sustaining pedagogy” (Paris 2012; Paris and Alim 2014) fear that the inclusion of non-dominant cultures in curricula will lead to a zero-sum outcome in which the dominant culture is devalued. My findings, however, indicate that culturally sustaining linguistics pedagogy does not necessarily result in “reverse racist” outcomes.

This dissertation focuses on a setting that is characterized by a markedly high level of linguistic diversity among related languages: a relatively recently settled immigrant community in Ventura County, California, in which over three dozen mutually intelligible varieties of Mixtec (Otomanguean) are in regular contact with one another, as well as with Spanish, English, and other Indigenous Mesoamerican languages. Mixtecs are an Indigenous group whose traditional homelands are located in what are now the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Puebla. Mixtec is also the name of the diverse group of linguistic varieties spoken by the Mixtec people. In this dissertation, I explore the language ideologies and linguistic differentiation practices that Mixtec speakers use to navigate the sea of linguistic diversity they encounter in the diaspora. In particular, I explore the ways that speakers mobilize their existing knowledge of the Mixtec linguistic landscape to talk about, name, and account for variation among Mixtec varieties spoken in Ventura County, via the labels Mixteco Alto and Mixteco Bajo. Although these are geographical classifications and not linguistic ones (referring to ‘Highlands Mixtec’ and ‘Lowlands Mixtec’, respectively), they have been adopted by both linguists and speakers as classificatory labels. Many Mixtecs in Ventura County self-identify as speakers of Mixteco Bajo, but this is a broad umbrella term that comprises numerous distinct village varieties. The vast majority of Mixtec varieties spoken in Ventura County come from the Mixteca Baja region of Mexico, while Mixteca Alta varieties are exceedingly rare in this community. Nevertheless, this dissertation demonstrates that for self-identified speakers of Mixteco Bajo, the label Mixteco Alto has become ideologized as a way to refer any variety which is perceived as distinctly different from their own, regardless of whether that variety’s geographic origin lies in the Mixteca Alta region.

This dissertation presents three interlinked analyses that trace the trajectory of this metalinguistic naming practice throughout the Ventura County Mixtec community. The first analysis excavates the local meaning of this practice and its ideological implications, the second explores what the practice reveals about understandings of sociolinguistic variation and emergent sociolinguistic variables in the diaspora community, and the third analyzes the effects of these labels on one young Mixtec heritage speaker and his relationship to the Mixtec language, ultimately demonstrating a surprising link between the Mixteco Alto label and language shift away from Mixtec. By following the Mixteco Alto and Mixteco Bajo metalinguistic labels across contexts, I demonstrate that it is possible to observe the real-time construction of meaning in this situation of contact between related varieties of Mixtec and lay out several avenues for future research on this subject.