Actividad 1: Antes de leer

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Actividad 2: ¡A leer!

Lee el siguiente texto en inglés que expone una investigación de la Dra. Mary Kohn sobre el contacto entre español e inglés en la ciudad de Liberal, que se encuentra en el suroeste de Kansas.

Spanish-English Contact in Kansas

By Mary Kohn, Associate Professor and Director of the Chapman Center for Rural Studies, KSU.

Even though Kansas multilingualism is frequently overlooked, Kansas has always been a location where different peoples and cultures brought their languages together, first among Indigenous nations, and later through European settlement (Carman 1962; West 1998).[1] Spanish was the first European language to arrive in Kansas as 16^th century Spanish conquistadores wandered through the Great Plains in search of treasure (West 1998). Such expeditions have been memorialized in Kansas place names including De Soto, Penalosa, and Coronado Heights (Van Meter McCoy & Hults 1989). In contrast to later French contact during the 18^th and 19^th centuries, early Spanish cultural influence was minimal, however, as Spaniards passed through the territory without establishing trade or settlements (DuVal 2006).

While all European languages are relative newcomers to the Great Plains, English is one of the last to make an appearance. It wasn’t until the opening of the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, a trade route linking the US and Mexico, that English speakers ventured to settle in the region in sizable numbers. In a sense, Spanish and English became inextricably intertwined in the 19^th century as Kansas served as a site of connection, trade, and migration between the US and Mexico. The construction of railroads reinforced these ties, keeping English and Spanish in close contact within the region (Oppenheimer 1985).

As the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 ushered in unprecedented migration, more than 100,000 people moved to Kansas between 1854 and 1860 (Shortridge 1995). Notably, when Kansas received statehood in 1861, its constitution did not include an official language. While many settlers in this period spoke English, entire communities preferred German, Russian, Swedish, among other languages. These groups often preserved heritage languages for generations through institutions including churches, newspapers, and schools (Carman 1962). The first generation of Mexican immigrants to permanently settle in Kansas arrived about fifty years later. Economic depressions and war in Mexico drove this early 20^th century migration. The Santa Fe Railroad Company contributed as well, recruiting Mexican workers to Kansas rail hubs. Other Mexican immigrants arrived to work in agriculture, following in the footsteps of German, Russian, and other international immigrants from the century before. Historic Mexican American neighborhoods in Kansas, like Kansas City’s Argentine Barrio, date back to this period. By 1915, several such communities were large enough to support their own Spanish language newspapers. World War One reinforced these migration patterns as Mexican immigration filled labor gaps caused by the war: “By 1930 the Mexican and Mexican-American population of Kansas was the seventh largest Mexican ancestral group in the United States, and this group comprised the second largest immigrant population in the state, after Germans” (Oppenheimer 1985: 431). Kansas clearly has deep historical connections to Spanish-English contact, a connection that continues today (Showstack & Guzman 2020).

As of 2019, 214,225 Kansans reported speaking Spanish at home, with 61% of these speakers also reporting that they speak English “very well” (2019 American Community Survey). Language contact like this often results in borrowed words, codeswitching, and can even influence grammar and pronunciation. Romance languages, including Spanish, already feature heavily in English. [2] In locations like Kansas that have a history of Spanish-English contact, such borrowings are even more prevalent. For example, many topographic terms in the Great Plains have Spanish origins, and English terminology for cowboy culture and cattle production contains a hefty percentage of Spanish borrowings. If you wear boots or a ten-gallon hat to the Country Stampede, you’ve already used three words that came to English through Spanish’s influence on western culture. These trends reflect the imprint of continuous ties that bring English and Spanish together in the region.

Beyond vocabulary, there is also evidence that Spanish-English bilingualism has begun to influence English phonology in certain parts of the state. K-State alumni Trevin Garcia (‘18) and Addison Dickens (‘17) conducted research in Liberal, Kansas, a town where 62% of the population identifies as Hispanic (US Census 2020). They showed that Liberal, KS, high schoolers have speech patterns found in other Spanish-English bilingual communities around the US. These features include syllable timing (a pattern in which vowel duration is more evenly distributed across syllables resulting in a tempo that some describe as rapid or staccato), increased use of clear /l/ (an /l/ produced with the tip of the tongue typical of Spanish pronunciation), and /ae/ vowels produced with a more open mouth position in pre-nasal environments as found in words like sand and pan. Figure 1 shows a striking display in which Latinx and Anglo youth from Liberal, Kansas, tend to have lower productions of pre-nasal /ae/ compared to youth from majority-Anglo communities. This pattern matches many Latinx communities throughout the US (Thomas 2019). Such patterns are known as substrate features, a term that describes patterns that can be attributed to heritage language influences in a broader community language. Substrate patterns can be found throughout US English varieties. For example, monophthongal /e/ and /o/ production in the Northern Great Plains (stereotyped in place names like MinnesOOOta), can be traced to waves of Northern European migration from the late 19^th century and still characterizes the speech of many, including monolingual English speakers (Wolfram and Schilling 2016).

While Spanish substrate patterns in Kansas English may seem surprising to some, it is unlikely that this is the first-time language contact has influenced English in the Free State. One trait that characterizes Kansas English is a variant known as the COT-CAUGHT merger. This change reduced the vowel inventory of Kansas English by merging the /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ vowels into a single class. Notably, the well-known chant of our rivals to the east, Rock Chalk Jayhawk, is not nearly as striking in dialects without the merger as it disrupts the assonance that creates the structural coherence in the chant. Some have speculated that this merger is a pattern that emerged from multilingual and multidialectal communities in which dialect mixing simplified the complexity of the English vowel space (Fridland and Kendall 2017). This pattern has led to a vowel shift called the Low Back Merger Shift that is found in locations with similar migratory histories as Kansas, including Ohio and Oregon (Becker 2019). Latinx communities in Kansas tend follow this pattern as well, possibly because this accent has become associated with upward mobility and other desirable traits (Villareal and Kohn 2021). Ultimately, Kansas English is a reflection of the people who have moved through and settled in this state, and Spanish continues to be an important part of this story.

Notas de pie

[1] Prior to European settlement, languages in the region included Kaáⁿze Íe (Kaw Language and linguistic source of the state’s name), Gáuigú (Kiowa language), 𐓏𐒰𐓓𐒰𐓓𐒷 𐒼𐓂𐓊𐒻 𐓆𐒻𐒿𐒷 𐓀𐒰^𐓓𐒰^ (Osage language), Nʉmʉnʉʉ Sookobitʉ (Comanche), Pâri (Pawnee) (native-land.ca), among others, many of which have active ongoing revitalization projects.

[2] The English language is notorious for its borrowings, with over half of all English usage coming from non-Germanic sources. See this fun interactive map from the Oxford English Dictionary for an illustration of borrowings over time: https://public.oed.com/media/twominuteoed/public.html.

References

Becker, Kara. 2019. The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, The California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Shifts across North America. Publication of the American Dialect Society, Duke University Press.

Carman, Neal. 1962. Foreign Languages of Kansas. Available through University of Kansas Archives.

Oppenheimer, Robert. (1985). Acculturation or assimilation: Mexican Immigrants in Kansas, 1900 to World War II. Western Historical Quarterly, vol 16: 429-448.

DuVal, Kathleen, 2006. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Fridland, Valerie, and Tyler Kendall. 2017. “The Western States” In Listening to the Past: Audio Records of Accents of English, ed. by R. Hickey. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Kohn, Mary, Addison Dickens, and Trevin García. 2016. A new majority: Latino English and the Third Vowel Shift in Liberal, Kansas. Paper presented at NWAV 45. Vancouver, CA. November 5.

Showstack, Rachel, and Kelly Guzman. (2020). Heritage speakers, monolingual policies, and Spanish-language maintenance in Kansas. In Spanish in the United States (pp. 187-205). Routledge.

Thomas, Erik. 2019. Mexican American English: Substrate Influences and the Birth of an Ethnolect. Cambridge University Press.

Van Meter McCoy, Sondra, and Jan Hults. 1989. 1001 Kansas Place Names. University Press of Kansas: Lawrence.

Villareal, Dan, and Mary Kohn. 2021. Local meanings for supra-local change: A perception study of TRAP backing. American Speech. 51 pp. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-8186897

West, Elliott. 1998. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado. University Press of Kansas: Lawrence.

Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling. 2016. American English: Dialects and Variation. John Wiley and Sons.

Actividad 3: ¡A escuchar!

Para escuchar ejemplos de los fenómenos fonéticos y sociales mencionados en el texto, haz clic en los siguientes audios.

Syllable-timed speech

The following audio sample comes from a young Anglo speaker in Liberal, Kansas exhibiting syllable-timed speech (syllables are roughly equal in duration, as in Spanish).

Lowered prenasal / æ /

The audio below offers examples of a lowered prenasal / æ / vowel sound (e.g., Hispanic) in an Anglo speaker from Liberal.

Spanish-style /l/

In this speech sample, you can hear an example of a Spanish-style /l/ (e.g., blows glass), a lowered prenasal / æ / vowel sound (e.g., Sandy), and some syllable timing.

Liberal vs. K-State

In this audio clip, a Latina from Liberal reflects on demographics of Liberal, Kansas compared to those at Kansas State University.

¿Te interesa este tema?

If you are interested in questions of language contact, change, and use, consider pursuing a Linguistics Certificate at K-State! We offer a number of Spanish linguistics courses that count toward the certificate as well, making it relatively easy to major or minor in Spanish and obtain a Linguistics Certificate.