UROP Project

Investigating Role of Attitudes and Identity on Contact-Induced Phonetic Variation in Chipileño

phonetics/phonology, language contact, sociolinguistics, Spanish, bilingualism

Research Mentor: Maia Shampo, she/her
Department, College, Affiliation: Modern Languages and Linguistics, Arts and Sciences
Contact Email: mes23h@fsu.edu
Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from mentor):
Research Assistant Supervisor Email:
Faculty Collaborators:
Faculty Collaborators Email:

Looking for Research Assistants: Yes
Number of Research Assistants: 2
Relevant Majors: Open to all majors. Spanish and Linguistics are most relevant
Project Location: On FSU Main Campus
Research Assistant Transportation Required:
Remote or In-person: Partially Remote
Approximate Weekly Hours: 5-10, Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Roundtable Times and Zoom Link:
Not participating in the roundtable

Project Description

This project examines the linguistic outcomes of language contact between Spanish and Chipileño in Chipilo, Puebla, Mexico, with particular attention to phonetic variation. Chipileño is a diasporic language and variant of Veneto, the Italic dialect spoken in Italy’s region of Venezia, that was formed after contact between Veneto and Spanish as Venetian families immigrated to the small town of Chipilo in the 1880s. While there are only about 2,500 native speakers today and Chipileño is therefore considered an endangered language, the community continues to preserve and maintain its unique language and culture.

The present project proposes to investigate Chipileño, specifically how native speakers' language attitudes and identities influence their use of phonetic features, which has yet to be empirically investigated. I aim to provide further insight into the unique features of this understudied variant of Italian Veneto and Mexican Spanish and work towards creating a corpus with more written and spoken data of Chipileño. Furthermore, I am interested in looking at the phonetic contrast in the production of /b/ and /v/ by bilingual speakers of Spanish and Chipileño, as with an increased use of Spanish, younger speakers may not be differentiating between these sounds as it would be pronounced in Standard Veneto.

To answer these questions, this summer I recorded sociolinguistic interviews and experimental tasks of 30 native Chipileño speakers that obtain qualitative data on their attitudes toward Chipileño, Veneto, and Spanish. I will analyze the use of phonetic features of Spanish vs. Veneto, specially how the phonetic pronunciation of /b/ instead of /v/ is used, along with some other phonetic features such as open vowels, rhotics, etc.

I hypothesize that if a speaker identifies more with their Italian heritage, they may maintain Venetian features in their speech. However, speakers may not maintain Venetian features due to the influence of Spanish. Overall, in analyzing data, I hope to find a more concrete overall of which features they do or do not use.

Research Tasks: Research assistant(s) will be working with the PI on data analysis. The research assistant(s) will focus on the analysis of Spanish data and questionnaire data. Their tasks will consist of transcribing data from reading tasks, picture-naming tasks, and sociolinguistic interviews, and segmenting, transcribing, annotating and acoustically analyzing data from all tasks. The research assistants will receive detailed instructions on all aspects of the project and will work closely with me as their mentor. There will be in-person meetings every other week for instructions and for checking work. Their research tasks can be carried out on a computer or laptop, as all the software is freely available.

Skills that research assistant(s) may need: The required skill for this project is (basic) knowledge of Spanish. A background or interest in Linguistics, especially Hispanic Linguistics, and/or Phonetics/Phonology, is a plus.