The question of language status regarding use, attrition, and social dispersion is commonplace in the field of linguistics, and particularly in the study of vernaculars, informal non-standard speech. However, most research concerning substandard lexical phenomena has been dictated by varieties of English, with limited concentration in the Americas beyond its English-speaking regions. This project explores the sociolinguistic relationship of urban language and youth identities through the lens of Lunfardo—a dialectal Spanish variety of the Southern Cone’s largest conurbation of Buenos Aires. Though a term subject to multiple definitions, Lunfardo is commonly considered an Argentinian vernacular that originated in the conventillos (‘shantytowns’) of Buenos Aires during massive European immigration waves at the turn of the 20th century and the golden age of tango. Its circumstantial origins among the lower social classes and its perceived ties to taboo and criminal jargon caused Lunfardo to be heavily stigmatized and even censored in its early conception and evolution. However, as is the case for many vernaculars, Lunfardo is said to have breached social and geographic limits such that it eventually became incorporated and indistinguishable from colloquial Argentinian Spanish. Today, Lunfardo is considered by scholars to be a pillar of Argentinian identity with steadfast associations to its European immigration history, and to emblematic Argentinian cultural manifestations, such as tango. Still, major lacunae lie in research of quotidian Argentinian’s perceptions of Lunfardo, especially among young adults.

With the intent to contribute conceptual innovation to the field of sociolinguistics, this study’s primary objective is to unveil the status and language ideologies in place today of this historically disparaged language of marginalized porteño -resident of Buenos Aires- communities. The dissertation investigates and assesses young adult porteños’ comprehension levels of historical and contemporary Lunfardo tokens, and taps into their language attitudes toward the variety. The project offers a mixed methods approach for the analysis of participants’ knowledge of and attitudes towards Lunfardo, which are empirically tested through comprehension test surveys, language rating surveys, and questionnaires. As the dissertation explores the rich information contained in the quantitative and qualitative data, it argues that the contemporary porteños have extensive comprehension knowledge of the Lunfardo variety; that the concept of Lunfardo may be subdivided into several distinct prototypes that researchers cannot take for granted; and that the social boundaries of who owns the language may be surprising. This variety serves as a lens through which to examine the phenomenon of the young Argentinian generation’s sense of linguistic identity, with the greater goal of casting light on vernacular progressions in historically marginalized speech communities shaped by immigrant groups. By employing a complex mixed methods approach, this study demonstrates the methodological rigor essential to deliver rich, substantive content from the Latin American linguistic milieu to the humanities and social sciences.

In recent decades Mexico has moved to recognize the linguistic rights of its many indigenous languages and cultures. For the first time in the history of Mexico, this was enshrined in a 2001 amendment in the country’s Constitution recognizing the rights of the indigenous communities ‘to preserve and enrich their languages, knowledge, and every element contributing to their culture and identity’, then followed by the more exhaustive General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Communities in 2003, whose article IV sets Spanish on the same level as indigenous languages as ‘national languages’ and having the same validity, specifically regarding the respect of human rights in the transactions with the justice system. These changes in the legal status of indigenous languages marked the end of the one language policy of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) for public schools. As a partial success achieved by the Zapatista movement, bilingual schools and the intercultural universities were established. The intercultural universities are the object of this study and they represent a strategic and structural change in public education policy towards indigenous languages and cultures. The intercultural universities were built to serve indigenous communities that traditionally had their linguistic and even human rights violated. The first one was founded in 2004, the Universidad Intercultural del Estado de México (UIEM), the main site of my fieldwork for this dissertation, and, secondly, the Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural (UVI), founded in 2007. The intent of these universities is to support regional cultural and linguistic diversity and to offer higher education opportunities in underrepresented regional and indigenous communities. But, about 15 years after the founding of the first intercultural university, what impact are they having on the language ideologies of the students, in the family, and in the community? This is the key question investigated in this study. These two intercultural universities were the sites of quantitative and qualitative research into the linguistic attitudes of students and staff and surrounding families and communities and the impact the intercultural universities are having on language ideologies. Keywords: Changing language ideologies, higher education for indigenous communities, reversing language shift, intercultural universities, UIEM, Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural sede Huasteca, Mazahua, Tlahuica, Nahuatl, indigenous languages, minority language educational rights, language policy, SEP, CGEIB, San Felipe del Progreso, Estado de México, Ixhuatlán del Madero, Estado de Veracruz, Mexico, INAH, INALI.

The U.S. academy has a complicated relationship with the Dominican racial setting. Although scholars from diverse disciplines have examined race in the Dominican Republic for decades, the prevailing frame for analysis has been rooted in perceptions of exceptional negrophobia, xenophobia, and confusion, and essential denial of “true” racial identity. Even as new studies position race in the Dominican Republic in a more complex social and historical context, narratives of Dominican exceptionalism and essentialism persist in academic and popular discourse. The narratives criticize Dominican reticence to identify as negro and audacity to claim to be indio. Some have argued that the country is mulato, certainly not blanco, and only marginally mestizo. Despite the centrality of racial terms to this conversation, few studies have analyzed these terms as a critical intersection of language and race in the Dominican Republic. Nevertheless, as analysis increasingly crosses cultural and linguistic borders, language emerges as a vital paradigm for the study of race.

This dissertation employs linguistics as a lens through which to analyze Dominican race and skin color descriptors. These terms, some uniquely Dominican in usage, index, or ideology, correspond to local, socially-constructed norms and parameters of identity, and have evolved in meaning over nearly six centuries. Through the analysis of archival documents, corpus data, surveys, and interviews in the Dominican Republic, the dissertation investigates the conceptual evolution of raza (≈‘race’) since the colonial period, engages popular understanding of what racial terms represent physically and socially, and explores the interaction between race and dominicanidad (‘Dominicanness’). This project offers a mixed methods approach for the examination of race that first constructs meaning for each term (in lieu of translation), and then empirically tests hypotheses regarding physical and social information via photo description questionnaires. As the dissertation explores the rich information contained in the language of race, it argues that the contemporary Dominican concept of race may be subdivided into several distinct paradigms that researchers cannot take for granted; that informed analyses must account for regional differences within the Dominican Republic; that fluidity in the categorical boundaries of descriptive terms should not be mistaken for confusion; and that the physical boundaries of dominicanidad may be surprising. With language as the lens, this project offers new methodologies for investigating race and proposes new frames for interpreting the results that significantly contribute to ongoing conversations on race in the Dominican Republic, Latin America, and the Western hemisphere.

This dissertation addresses the methodology used in classifying speech rhythms in order to resolve a long-standing linguistic conundrum about whether languages differ rhythmically. There is a widespread perception, both among linguists and the general population, that some languages are stress-timed and others are syllable timed. Stress-timed languages are described as having less-regular rhythms, as syllable durations vary according to the placement of stress in the phrase. Meanwhile, syllable-timed languages are described as displaying less variation in rhythm, which syllable durations being more regular. This dissertation quantitatively evaluates these described rhythmic differences in Spanish,Portuguese, and English. The first chapter introduces speech rhythms and reviews past literature on their perception and production. The second chapter evaluates a widely used metric of speech rhythms, the PVI, and determines that it is not effective in distinguishing between two dialects of Spanish. The third chapter compares the speech rhythms of Mexican and Chicano Spanish. This chapter concludes that Chicano Spanish is more restricted in its vowel duration variability, while Mexican Spanish employs both highly variable durations (i.e. stress-timed) and highly uniform durations (i.e. syllable-timed). The fourth chapter describes a perception study used to compare the speech rhythms of Spanish, English, and Portuguese, and shows that these languages' rhythms do not always group according to language. In the fifth chapter, I describe a study of the production of the same utterances initially used in the perception experiment; this allows an analysis of what prompts the perceptual differences in speech rhythm described in Chapter Four. The sixth and final chapter discusses the implications and applications of these findings and gives direction for further investigation. Although both production and perception studies of speech rhythms have been performed in the past, my dissertation expands these methodologies by combining production and perception data is a single analysis. I use perception data to relatively classify the rhythms of utterances through low-pass speech filtering, then analyze the production of these data computationally to provide a more complete perspective of what prompts differences in speech-rhythms and how Spanish, Portuguese, and English data relate rhythmically. Thus, my dissertation is thorough, while still addressing traditional rhythm metrics and employing current computational methodology. It seeks to challenge linguists' methodologies in quantitatively addressing speech rhythms, and to further clarify the position of Spanish, Portuguese, and English on the speech rhythm continuum.

Technology-Mediated Task-Based Language Teaching is the combination of technology with Task-Based Language Teaching (González-Lloret & Ortega, 2014) and emphasizes authentic communication and holistic language learning opportunities in Second Language Acquisition. Since its introduction almost thirty-five years ago, Task-Based Language Teaching has received widespread attention from researchers in the fields of Second Language education due to its collaborative nature and the interaction and negotiation of meaning that result from its implementation (Robinson, 2011). Task-Based Language Teaching represents a paradigm shift of mainstream views about language teaching from a focus on ‘knowledge of language’ to a pragmatic and experiential focus on ‘achiev[ing] communicative purposes’ (Scarino & Liddicoat, 2009, p. 45). Still, relatively few studies have addressed grammar acquisition in online courses from a Task-Based perspective. The present study sought to examine the effects of an online Task-Based Language Teaching module on the acquisition of direct and indirect object pronouns in Spanish. These grammatical structures are used very frequently by native Spanish speakers, but are less used by Spanish learners because of their difficulty. The main problem is that object clitics in Spanish normally create a structure that appears to be (Subject)-Object-Verb. This can be especially difficult for native speakers of English since these speakers are accustomed to Subject-Verb-Object. Furthermore, Spanish indirect object pronouns look exactly like direct object pronouns except for the third person singular and plural. Hence, learning how to use and distinguish between the direct object and indirect object pronouns is challenging. The results of this study demonstrate the benefits of using an online Task-Based Language Teaching module specially designed for the acquisition of direct and indirect object pronouns in Spanish. Participants in the experimental group used the target structures on many occasions, and their results exceeded those of the control group—the mean of the experimental group was 7.50, whereas the mean of the control group was 1.23. Similarly, students in the experimental group also produced five times more instances of the target structures than students in the control group in an identical final exam activity that both groups had to complete—3.22 vs 0.64, respectively. Thus, the data obtained in this study manifest that technology-mediated TBLT can be particularly valuable in the acquisition of L2 grammar.

Abstract

Guiding students in the development of their oral communication skills is one of the most important parts of a foreign language course. However, the success in achieving this goal can be impeded or assisted by a student's affective state (i.e. anxiety or confidence) when speaking. One possible way to produce a more positive affective state is to use drama and performative activities (e.g. plays, role-plays, skits, improvisational exercises, etc.). Conflicting views have been presented as to whether drama and performative activities trigger anxiety or reduce it since performance-based activities have been claimed to do both. Yet, the students' affective states traditionally have not been measured in terms of how they changed but rather how they were related or not to course grades and/or linguistic performance, leaving a gap in the previous research on how affect itself shifts over the period of a course, particularly one that requires students to perform in front of one another. This study analyzed the relationship between students' affective states (i.e. speaking-anxiety and speaking-confidence) and doing drama and performative activities in order to address the dearth of evidence-based research on affective change. A mixed-methods approach enabled the analysis of different perspectives of the relationship between both explicit and implicit attitudes towards speaking-anxiety and speaking-confidence and the participation in drama and performative activities over the duration of the course and not just at a singular point. This approach, involving the use of closed- and open-response questionnaires, participant interviews, and classroom observations, allowed for a more complete analysis of the multidimensional affective state construct than a self-report survey alone would permit. Fourteen students, enrolled in a third-year level Advanced Grammar and Composition course of foreign language Spanish at a large public university in the United States, completed surveys on their explicit and implicit feelings about speaking in Spanish and their attitudes towards drama and performative activities. The questionnaires were completed both at the beginning and at the end of the course in order to examine and compare the changes that had occurred. Follow-up interviews were also conducted with volunteer participants. Daily classroom observations were used to further explain and understand the findings. The study revealed that in general participants, despite not being self-selected to choose this type of pedagogy, had a positive affective relationship with drama and performative activities in that both quantitative and qualitative results showed a majority of students citing increased speaking-confidence, decreased speaking-anxiety and increased positive attitudes towards using drama and performative activities. Although two students felt increased speaking-anxiety and decreased implicit speaking-confidence, they also felt increased explicit speaking confidence. This showed that as is to be expected, on an individual level some variation occurred. Speaking and doing drama and performative activities became more connected activities in the minds of the participants as shown in a comparison of a pre and post cluster analysis. These results showed that there was a change in affective state after a drama/PA course and that affective states should be measured on multiple occasions. These positive results seemed to be most closely related to the nature of the course, which gave a direct purpose to group activities and led to closeness between the students. The group bonding and rehearsal/task repetition, facilitated increased comfort and confidence when speaking. The results of the study contribute to an understanding of the dynamic nature of speaking-anxiety, speaking-confidence, and attitudes towards using affectively challenging pedagogical tools in a foreign language class. Practical suggestions for pedagogy and future research were also identified.