UC Berkeley

The present dissertation research examines potential language attitude changes in progress towards language varieties and groups of people who have socioeconomically been framed as possessing deficits by neocolonial standards. I seek to reveal if younger generations are diverging from older ones in their perception of either US Spanish or the ‘Italian native speaker’. The dissertation is divided into two experiments that each use multiple models of social cognition to determine if language attitudes are stable or if they are involved in a change in progress. Each experiment contains three research components: 1) the matched guise technique (MGT; Lambert et al. 1960), an indirect method that garners explicit attitudes; 2) the implicit association test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998) to elicit automatic associations; and 3) quantitative direct questioning (see Kircher, 2022) to collect explicit attitudes. The results from a three-point continuum of attitudes—explicit (directly via direct questioning) to semi-implicit/explicit (indirectly via the MGT) to implicit (indirectly via IAT)— allow researchers to test the implicit–explicit attitudinal discrepancy (IED) hypothesis (Karpen et al. 2012) to determine the following: 1) which social groups demonstrate significant differences in evaluations—i.e., bias divergence—and are leading attitude changes in progress; and 2) which social groups demonstrate insignificant difference in evaluations, i.e., bias convergence, or attitude stability. Because attitude changes in progress are being assessed, participant groups will be stratified in age, and the differences in attitude changes among age groups will demonstrate if younger generations in the given speech community are diverging from their predecessors in their perceptions of stigmatized language.

The first line of experiments assesses a possible attitude change in progress towards standardized Spanish (SS) and US Spanish (USS) repertoires (colloquially, Spanglish), a variety that has been historically discriminated against, often described as a hybrid whose speakers demonstrate a lack of competency in Spanish and/or English (Poplack, 1980). Earlier attitude research (Galindo, 1996; Hidalgo, 1986) found the presence of Spanglish and codeswitching to indicate ‘broken’ or ‘incomplete’ Spanish acquisition. More recently, Rangel et al. (2015) used the MGT to collect language attitudes of bilinguals towards Spanish, English and Spanglish. They found that listeners rated Spanglish least favorably, with female listeners awarding more positive speech evaluations to standardized Spanish speakers. Experiment one employs the MGT to explore how both younger and older US Spanish language users react to a SS and a USS repertoire with typical lexical features often categorized as Spanglish. Both groups rated SS more favorably on prestige and solidarity, however the younger group evaluated USS more positively in terms of the perceived acquisition of the speaker. The IAT demonstrated that both groups had more positive associations between Spanish + Good than Spanglish + Good, though the older groups association was significantly stronger than the younger group. Data collected via direct questioning demonstrate that the younger group overall had more positive explicit attitudes towards US Spanish than the older group.

The second line of experiments assesses native speaker status in Italy, where citizenship and family roots are seemingly tied to the notion of being a ‘native speaker’ of Italian. This experiment also examines reverse linguistic stereotyping (Kang & Rubin, 2009), or when nonlinguistic information affects listener judgements of a person’s linguistic repertoire before they even begin speaking, by presenting listeners with photos of people representing different races and backgrounds (white, Black, East Asian). As immigrants and refugees continue to arrive in large number in Europe, the examination of raciolinguistic ideologies and the pathologization of ‘foreignized’ Italians and Italian language users is vital to dismantling more covertly enacted oppression, such as monolingual Italian policies in schools (Chini, 2011; Migliarini & Cioè-Peña, 2022). As nationalism and populism continues to become more normalized in public ways, anti-Black, anti-Asian, and xenophobia in general will need to be examined closely in linguistic study. These ideologies go back to the state building process that promulgated a national language as intrinsic to an idealized national identity (Robustelli, 2018). Findings from the MGT demonstrate that younger and older participants alike evaluate the white female Roman voice paired with the photo of the East Asian woman unfavorably on the social qualities of authentic native speaker status and public prestige, while no differences presented among the same voice paired with the photos of white and Black women nor the male study subjects of any race. Relatedly, the two IATs paired Italian or East Asian/African descendance with Good/Bad revealed that both age groups have faster reaction times (i.e., stronger associations) when associated Italian descendance with Good in both tests. Dissimilarly, direct questioning data demonstrates more positive explicit attitudes towards an expanded notion of the ‘Italian native speaker’.

In testing the IED hypothesis, Case Study #1 demonstrates that younger participants are generally diverging from older in their evaluations of US Spanish speakers, moving in a positive direction that is more accepting of USS, particularly in relation to acquisition (shown in the MGT and direct questioning) and solidarity (via direct questioning). These generational differences shed light on the changing indexical field of US Spanish(es) and the potential for further validation and valorization of innovative languaging. Case Study #2 does not demonstrate any generational differences; that is, both the younger and older groups demonstrated similar bias towards the notion of a ‘native speaker’, highlighting how the white native or Italian speaker defines italianità (hereby Italianness), or conformity to the specificities of Italians or their ethnicity, language, or culture. As nonethnic Italians continue to integrate into Italian society, interdisciplinary research that examines raciolinguistic ideologies, among others, is vital to disseminating systemic barriers of exclusion.