32.3437, Review: Romance; Sociolinguistics: Bugel, Montes-Alcalá (2020)

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Subject: 32.3437, Review: Romance; Sociolinguistics: Bugel, Montes-Alcalá (2020)

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Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:21:50
From: Claudia Sanchez [csanch4 at ilstu.edu]
Subject: New Approaches to Language Attitudes in the Hispanic and Lusophone World

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1868.html

EDITOR: Talia  Bugel
EDITOR: Cecilia  Montes-Alcalá
TITLE: New Approaches to Language Attitudes in the Hispanic and Lusophone World
SERIES TITLE: Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 25
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Claudia Sanchez, Illinois State University

SUMMARY

In the Preface by Ana Maria Carvalho and Anna María Escobar, language
attitudes are presented as a key element in language maintenance and change.
Carvalho and Escobar claim that analyzing language attitudes is crucial since
they affect real life concerns and ultimately are a matter of human rights.
The present volume fills a void in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics by
offering different sociolinguistic scenarios, focusing on different social
factors, and on attitudes towards minoritized varieties of Spanish or
Portuguese through a plethora of methodological approaches. The authors
conclude that while a lot has been studied about language attitudes, there is
still much to be done about linguistic discrimination.

In the introduction titled “Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of
Language Attitudes Towards Spanish and Portuguese Around the World”, Cecilia
Montes-Alcalá and Talia Bugel explain that the study of language attitudes
emerged in the United States with Joshua Fishman’s work in the 1970s, but that
it is still relevant in order to understand phenomena currently affecting
societies and their languages. The present volume is offered as a means of
providing the latest production in the field. It is divided into the three
main thematic areas stated by Fishman: language integration through education,
language policy, and language maintenance (p. 2). An overview of each chapter
is offered before the authors conclude that the goal of the collection is to
help future researchers and to inform their study of language attitudes.

The first part of the book titled “Language Integration Through Education”
begins with Jennifer Lang-Rigal’s  article “Prosody Perception Meets Language
Attitudes: Vowel Lengthening, Status Judgments, and Stereotypes in Argentina”.
There is an introduction to the region of Córdoba (Argentina) and its peculiar
manner of speech, Cordobés; this dialect combines a particular rhythm of
intonation (tonada), which makes it unmistakable against other Argentinian
dialects. One of its most salient characteristics is the lengthening of vowels
in pre-tonic position, so Lang-Rigal focuses on studying the perception of
speaker’s competence in relation to this prosodic production. Through the
study, Lang-Rigal addresses the issue of dialect identification to attitude by
researching if listener assessments of individual speakers’ perceived
competence correlates with the dialect region of the speaker, and if listener
assessments of individual speakers’ perceived competence correlate with the
prosodic production of the speaker. The methodology includes a perception task
with short speech excerpts along with an attitude survey. Speakers include 12
Cordoba speakers balanced for sex, age, and social class, and 4 speakers from
Buenos Aires and Tucuman balanced for sex. Listeners included 63
individuals—21 from Buenos Aires, 14 from Cordoba, and 9 from Tucuman, with
lower numbers of participants from other regions. The variables considered for
the analysis include perceived intelligence, perceived occupation, vowel
lengthening, and dialect identification. The study concludes that a pre-tonic
vowel duration that exceeds the duration of the tonic vowel associated with
Cordoba dialect correlates with a perception of decreased intelligence.

In “Perceptual Attitudes Towards Spanish in the Panhandle of West Virginia”,
Eva-María Suárez Büdenbender focuses on the perception and attitudes of
Spanish and its speakers by white students in Shepherdstown, WV, who have had
little to no contact with Spanish speakers. Büdenbender uses the term
Eurocentrism to explain the linguistic ideologies associating European
history, values, and languages as superior to other indigenous/black cultures,
and to therefore explain how this plays a role in the development of negative
perceptions and stereotypes about minority populations in the U.S. The study
is based on Orozco and Dorado’s article examining students’ attitudes towards
Spanish and its speakers in communities with a higher percentage of Hispanics
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (2014), but Büdenbender’s study includes 445 native
English-speaking students that completed a questionnaire adopted from Orozco
and Dorado (2014); the questionnaire included 1) demographic information and
2) a language opinion survey. Büdenbender found that Spanish from Spain was
rated as the most prestigious, agreeing with results from Orozco and Dorado
(2014) and showing that these perceptions extend to the larger U.S.; the
author concludes that positive perceptions towards Spain and its predominantly
ethnically white inhabitants, and less interest in Spanish spoken by Latinos
living in the U.S. that are phenotypically darker peoples, is due to an
ideological framework being transferred from English onto Spanish, as the
language influenced by dominant ideas of standardized language and social
evaluations.

In “Differing Attitudes Toward Spanish Sign Languages in Three Galician pre-
and Primary Schools” by Maria C. Bao Fente, Inmaculada C. Báez Montero, and
Nancy Vázquez Veiga, linguistic attitudes in relation to sign languages (SL)
are analyzed. The authors note that no study has focused so far on the
attitudes to SLs and SL speakers in schools, or on the attitudes toward SLs in
schools with no deaf students. The authors focused on three Galician pre- and
primary schools to determine if the inclusion of SL curriculum in a school for
deaf children changed the linguistic attitudes of the school community. To
that end, the authors created a version of the European Language portfolio
using a mentalist approach, to collect data through a matched-guise technique
from 351 participants (students, teachers, and family members of students).
The results show that attitudes towards SLs were less favorable in the school
with deaf pupils than in schools with no deaf pupils. The results also support
previous studies in that participants do not discriminate between languages
unless they are familiar with them, and that the increase in programs using
both spoken and signed languages have a positive effect on the attitudes
towards the use of SLs in the education of deaf children. The study concludes
that the development and implementation of proposals such as the European
Language Portfolio to teach SLs to deaf students has a positive effect on the
linguistic attitudes towards SLs in the school communities involved.

In “The Role of Attitudes in the Management of Multilingualism in Brazilian
Schools Located in the Brazil-Paraguay Border Region”, Isis Ribeiro Berger
researches how educators manage multilingualism in schools located along the
Brazil-Paraguay border, and to what extent the border influences their
management practices. The study took place in two public schools managed by
the Brazilian Ponta Pora government, and fieldwork included participant
observations, teachers observing other teachers’ lessons, and a questionnaire
to learn about the teachers’ linguistic backgrounds. Twin cities like the ones
in the study have become part of the agenda for regional development since a
big part of their residents cross the border daily for different purposes.
While Paraguay has developed some bilingualism, multilingualism has never been
encouraged in Brazil, so Berger states that schools are not prepared to deal
with a multilingual student population. Most of the student population in both
schools is of Paraguayan descent, three teachers were raised in Paraguayan
homes, and three others developed Spanish knowledge from social interactions
and media. Results suggest that languages other than Portuguese were submitted
to the teachers’ approval, and that when students notice teachers watching
their language practices, they tend to silence themselves, suggesting that
language vigilance is a common practice. Berger concludes that language as a
problem is still part of the school practices regarding multilingualism and
advises that mutual respect for the communities of border regions must be
promoted by valuing the linguistic and cultural identities involved.

Part 2 begins with the article “In Attitudes Toward Portuguese in Uruguay in
the Nineteenth Century”, by Virginia Bertolotti and Magdalena Coll, in which
attitudes toward Portuguese in the Uruguay-Brazil border area are researched
diachronically. The authors used legislative, judicial, government documents,
pieces published in the press, and literary writings. The authors note that
the main struggle in the border area for the Portuguese and Spanish empires
was settlers living in proximity, so the Uruguayan government took a series of
actions to counter the advance of Brazilian presence. Among these, a decree to
regulate public education that implied children would be taught in Spanish.
This study concludes that in the 19th century there were both negative and
neutral attitudes towards Portuguese; negative attitudes developed in the
south, while neutral attitudes developed in the border areas where Portuguese
was more common. Portuguese speaking and writing at the border in the 19th
century were common, and stigma was not developed until the 20th century when
Spanish was declared the language of education.

In “Patterns of Linguistic Vitality: Intergenerational Transmission in
Indigenous and Immigrant Bilingual Communities”, Lenka Zajícová investigates
the intergenerational transmission of language in indigenous and immigrant
communities through self-reported data. The author recognizes that although
self-reported data can be questioned for validity and accuracy, it is the
method of choice when collecting data from a large sample of speakers because
it makes possible an evaluation of diachronic variation. The data collected
show there is an intergenerational decrease of Guarani language use that
drastically falls in the generation of children; the extreme fall of minority
language use in the last generation, Zajícová states, could be an indication
of accelerated displacement and of intergenerational transmission being
threatened. Zajícová explains that these patterns may reveal that language
ideologies and attitudes are not an accurate depiction of language
displacement, since the data reflect mostly linguistic beliefs and attitudes
and not how the languages are used among family members. Zajícová concludes
that for social bilingualism to be stable there must be a differentiation in
function of each language. Moreover, the author concludes that language
attitudes can affect communication habits between parents and their children,
and that parents may communicate with their children using the minority
language more than they expressed in the data; these inconsistencies were
acknowledged in the data collection, given that both positive and negative
attitudes toward the language were found.

In “Language Use, Language Attitudes and Identity in Curaçao” by Ellen-Petra
Kester, Papiamentu is researched through surveys that took place in 2012 in
Curaçao. Although the origins of Papiamentu are argued to be Spanish or
Portuguese, this creole has existed in the territory dominated by the Dutch
since 1816. Kester presents a quantitative study of Papiamentu that includes a
statistical analysis to uncover possible relations between attitudes and
language use, and the effect that age groups and parental birthplaces may have
on attitudes and language use. While Dutch still holds power for having been
the official language for so long, the fact that it is the official language
of instruction is blamed as one of the causes of the high failure rate among
students. Kester states that studies like these can help transfer the debate
of education’s language use and delivery from the political sphere to more
scientifically grounded terms. Kester concludes that while there were no
differences in use of Papiamentu between age groups, young informants
considered Papiamentu more important for activities related to achievements,
reading, and writing, and that speakers with native-born parent speakers of
Papiamentu shared more positive attitudes towards their language and identity,
compared to informants with foreign-born parents. Kester also uncovered an
interaction between age and descent, where participants of older age groups
with at least one foreign-born parent considered Papiamentu less important in
terms of reading and writing, contrary to what informants from older age
groups of local descent showed. Kester observes that this interaction may be a
result of informants’ upbringing in a diglossic community. 

Part 3 begins with Mineko Shirakawa’s “In Parental Language Attitudes and
Language Use Among Brazilian Families in Japan”, in which Brazilian families
living in Japan are surveyed and interviewed to explore language attitudes
towards bilingualism in these communities. The study focuses on identifying
language use patterns at home between parents and children, Japanese-Brazilian
parents’ bilingualism expectations from their children, and the possible
effects of parental language use patterns and expectations for their
children’s home language use. Children in these homes use Japanese more
frequently than Portuguese because they are immersed in social spaces, while
parents who are not fluent in Japanese must rely on Portuguese to communicate
with them. Shirakawa explains that while parents wish for their children to
acclimate to Japanese, they also aspire to transmit their heritage language.
Data were collected through questionnaires and participants were asked about
demographic information, languages spoken inside and outside the home, and
their views about Portuguese and Japanese. The results demonstrate that most
parents expect their children to acquire high levels of oral and literacy
skills in both languages, and that parents’ positive attitude toward
children’s language maintenance stemmed from an anticipated return to Brazil.
Shirakawa concludes that parents believed Japanese to be important for their
children’s future careers, and that parental language use patterns at home had
a great effect on children’s heritage language use, but that parents’ use of
heritage language did not necessarily prompt children to use the language as
much as their parents.

In “Portuguese in Massachusetts: Linguistic Attitudes, Social Networks and
Language Maintenance”, Patricia Gubitosi and Judy de Olivieira investigate
attitudes towards Portuguese as a minority language in Massachusetts in a
group of twenty Portuguese speakers (eleven first-generation speakers and nine
second-generation speakers) in the cities of Fall River and New Bedford,
Massachusetts, and the weight that social networks have with regard to
language maintenance. Specifically, the authors examine attitudes and use
associated with English and Portuguese, the effects of social networks in
promoting positive attitudes towards Portuguese, and what impact those
networks may have in maintaining Portuguese’s use. In New Bedford and Fall
River there are also several businesses that support a Portuguese social
network, so the authors consider these elements as reinforcing ethnic identity
and group membership, while also considering influential factors such as the
role of Catholic churches and the availability of Portuguese in both private
and public schools. The authors point out that these ethnic social networks
are vital in maintaining language use and conclude that language use among
family members plays a big role in forming positive language attitudes towards
Portuguese, while social networks have contributed to language maintenance
among the Portuguese community.

In “Spanish-Speaking Immigrants in Indiana: A Quantitative Exploration of
their Attitudes Towards Spanish”, Mara Barbosa investigates Spanish-speaking
immigrants’ language attitudes towards Spanish in the U.S. through a
sociodemographic questionnaire and a language attitude questionnaire. The
study is unique in that it unites the categories of attitudes towards the
language in general, attitudes towards the language in the U.S., attitudes
towards language maintenance in the U.S., and attitudes towards
Spanish/English bilingualism, and studies them jointly. Data were analyzed
through ANOVA, and Barbosa found attitudes towards Spanish to be positive when
not tied to a specific context, but no correlation was shown between age and
Spanish speaking immigrants’ attitudes towards Spanish. Participants were
divided into age groups, but no significant age effect was found, nor did the
length of stay in the U.S. for any of the four attitude components studied
show any effect. However, Barbosa found education to be a predictor of
positive attitudes; among the three groups in the study, positive attitudes
towards Spanish were found in the groups with speakers who had completed
higher education. Education levels also shaped attitudes towards Spanish in
the U.S., as participants with higher levels of education possessed more
negative attitudes towards Spanish in the U.S. but displayed positive
attitudes towards Spanish maintenance in the U.S. Education also plays a role
as a predictor of positive attitudes towards Spanish/English bilingualism
since the three groups displayed positive attitudes. Barbosa concludes that
these results correlate with previous studies but contrast with Lynch and Klee
(2005) in regard to attitudes towards Spanish in the U.S.; Barbosa
hypothesizes this could be due to first-generation Spanish speakers attending
school not being taught to think of English as more legitimate than Spanish.
Barbosa acknowledges that education has been shown to correlate with positive
racial attitudes and other minority groups (“educational enlightenment”). The
results support this view, since speakers with higher education show more
positive attitudes towards Spanish language maintenance and bilingualism.

The closing reflections of the book are introduced through “The Study of
Language Attitudes: our Foundation, our Future” by Patricia MacGregor-Mendoza.
She explains that Fishman was a key figure in the field because he extended
Ferguson’s notion of diglossia to bilingual communities, but also implemented
the use of different data collection methods. MacGregor-Mendoza then
introduces the definition of language attitudes as predispositions which
speakers have to react to positively or negatively  (Sarnoff, 1970, as cited
in Bradac, Castelan Cargile, & Hallet, 2001, p. 147), while also implementing
Fishbein and Ajzen’s (2010) conceptualization of attitudes as evaluative in
reflection of such predispositions. After that, MacGregor-Mendoza introduces
Fishman’s idea of how the fact of coexisting languages in a community does not
imply that they hold equal value, but rather that the vitality of some of
those languages may be threatened by forces originating inside or outside the
minority language communities (Fishman, 1991), in order to explore language
attitude studies in a U.S. context. Several studies that focused on border
communities between the U.S. and Mexico found evidence of differing attitudes
regarding Spanish and English, either finding Spanish associated with
affective attitudes (Adorno, 1973) or as an integrative factor (Ayer, 1969).
In contrast, studies conducted during the 1970-80s found English to be
associated with an instrumental value, while results of studies in the 1990s
illustrated conflicted feelings about Spanish and English among Spanish
speaker communities (Galindo, 1995). For MacGregor-Mendoza, her motivations
for the study of language attitudes, first in Illinois and then in New Mexico,
were the different sociolinguistic environments, as well as the emigration
policies and procedures that have served as variables in determining language
use and attitudes by Spanish speaking immigrants in border areas. In her
closing remarks, MacGregor-Mendoza suggests work in the classroom with
heritage language speakers, using service-learning components in classes to
challenge preconceived notions which heritage language speakers may have of
their language being inferior. This is especially important because, as
MacGregor-Mendoza points out, language discrimination has not yet disappeared
but is instead disguised as standardized testing and the disappearance of
bilingual programs. Additionally, the author points out that we must encourage
others to understand that the coexistence of diverse languages in the U.S. is
not incompatible with an American identity but rather can be a positive asset
for the future.

EVALUATION

The introduction by Ana Maria Carvalho and Anna Maria Escobar does an
excellent job of laying down the topics addressed by the articles in the
volume. In addition, careful thought has been put into the progression of
these articles, with three recurring main themes: language integration through
education, language policy, and language maintenance. Some closing remarks are
offered by Patricia MacGregor-Mendoza, who presents a well-rounded view of the
sociolinguistics field and the major observations that have been made over the
past few decades, both in border areas and with multilingual audiences and
spaces.

Moreover, the book should be a valuable asset for those interested in
perceptual attitudes towards Spanish or Portuguese in education, Spanish and
Portuguese as minority languages in contexts where these are not the main
language for communication, language policy, issues related to linguistic
vitality in bilingual communities, and language maintenance as it relates to
either Spanish or Portuguese. Additionally, the topics in this volume may
interest those researching linguistic phenomena present in border areas, such
as the U.S. with Mexico, Brazil with Paraguay and Uruguay, or other contexts
where cross-linguistic influences between either Spanish or Portuguese and
other languages are present. Some of the articles in this volume may also be
of interest to those researching perceptual attitudes towards Spanish in
different contexts such as West Virginia, Indiana, or Argentina, as well as
those interested in or researching attitudes towards Brazilian Portuguese in
Massachusetts or Japan.

This volume also draws specific attention to studies involving language
attitudes in border areas, and to contexts that had never been explored
before, such as Mara Barbosa’s joint study of four different categories of
attitudes towards Spanish. It also presents materials related to studies that
are recreated in new contexts in order to understand how phenomena spread,
such as Eva-María Suárez Büdenbender’s study in West Virginia that takes as a
model Orozco and Dorado (2014). Moreover, MacGregor-Mendoza opens up a new
dimension to our understanding of language perception and attitudes in
heritage language speakers by suggesting that, as researchers and teachers, we
must take a step further into the study of language attitudes in the classroom
by promoting community service activities through which students can learn how
valuable an asset bilingualism can be. Nonetheless, some of these studies took
place a few years ago, so it would be interesting to see, for example, how
Ellen-Petra Kester’s study of language use, attitudes, and identity in
relation to Papiamentu in Curaçao may or may have not changed a decade after
the original study took place. 

The appearance of this volume is timely in that the investigation of
cross-linguistic influences and contexts have become more relevant;
multicultural societies and communities also call for studies that take into
account how both external and internal factors can have an effect on
individuals’ language use and attitudes, as well as on how these factors may
have a different impact on bilingual or even multilingual individuals, and the
contexts which they navigate on a daily basis. Finally, this volume appears at
a time when language has been put forward as a means of  expression of
personal identity, in spaces where minority languages may have been regarded
as irrelevant, unimportant, or even illegitimate.

REFERENCES

Adorno, W. (1973). The attitudes of selected Mexican and Mexican-American
parents in regards to bilingual/bicultural attitudes. Unpublished doctoral
dissertation, US International University. San Diego, CA.

Ayer, G. W. (1969). Language and attitudes of the Spanish-speaking youth of
the Southwestern United States. In G. E. Perren & J. L. M. Trim (Eds.),
Application of linguistics: Selected papers of the Second International
Congress of Applied Linguistics (pp. 115-120). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Bradac, J. J., Cargile, A. C., & Hallett, J. S. (2001). Language attitudes:
Retrospect, conspect, and prospect. The new handbook of language and social
psychology, 3.

Bugel, T., & Montes-Alcalà, C. (2020). New approaches to language attitudes
in the Hispanic and Lusophone world. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.

Fishbein, M., & Ajzen, I. (2011). Predicting and changing behavior: The
reasoned action approach. New York, NY: Psychology Press.

Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical
foundations of assistance to threatened languages (Vol. 76). Multilingual
matters.

Galindo, D. L. (1995). Language attitudes toward Spanish and English
varieties: A Chicano perspective. Hispanic journal of behavioral sciences,
17(1), 77-99.

Giles, H., Bourhis, R., & Davies, A. (1979). Prestige speech styles: the
imposed norm and inherent value hypotheses. Language and society:
Anthropological issues, 589-596.

Lynch, A., & Klee, C. (2005). Estudio comparativo de actitudes hacia el
español en los Estados Unidos: Educación, política y entorno social.
Lingüística española actual, 27(2), 273-300.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Claudia Sánchez is a PhD candidate in Sociolinguistics and TESOL at Illinois
State University. Her research interests include perceptual dialectology,
language ideologies, minority language documentation and preservation, and
attitudes toward language.





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