Previous research on the impact of gender and class on language change

The abundant research on monolingual settings has shown a strong tendency for language change to be led by working or lower middle class people and by women (Eckert Reference Eckert1989; Labov Reference Labov2001:366, Reference Labov2006:380–403; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Reference Eckert and McConnell-Ginet2003). But for bilingual settings, the leaders of change are likely to be the same as those reported in the vast literature on language shift, namely the people who are most proficient in the majority out-group language and who have the least contact with other speakers of the minority in-group language.Footnote ³ Prior to our work, evidence for such generalizations was scant. In fact, factors other than age and level of bilingualism have been downplayed in accounting for change in bilingual contexts, especially where the entire population is at an advanced stage of language shift (King Reference King and Dorian1989:145).

Still, some previous research supporting the role of social class and gender in changes taking place in bilingual contexts is available. In a study of Spanish spoken by Colombians in NYC, Orozco (Reference Orozco, Holmquist, Lorenzino and Sayahi2007) found that an ongoing change in the expression of futurity is being led by speakers with a high socioeconomic status. In addition, Orozco (Reference Orozco, Holmquist, Lorenzino and Sayahi2007, Reference Orozco2009a, Reference Orozco2009b) found that women are ahead of men in this ongoing change and that they are also leading the way in the increasing use of a periphrastic construction to express possession. Another example of a female-led change in Spanish in a bilingual setting comes from Alfaraz's (Reference Alfaraz2010) study in Lansing, Michigan, where young women lead a change involving the increasing use of copula estar in contexts where the ser copula is expected. There is also evidence that women lead change in bilingual settings involving language pairs other than Spanish/English. In a study of Pennsylvania German spoken in Ohio, Van Ness (Reference Van Ness1995) found that young Amish women were leaders in the increased use of the neuter pronominal form es instead of the feminine form sie.

In the study that serves as foundation for the present investigation, Otheguy & Zentella (Reference Otheguy and Zentella2012) found some evidence for the impact of social class and gender on changes in pronominal use in Spanish in NYC. The authors arranged the 140 speakers in their corpus into two groups based on regional origin, Caribbean and Mainland Latin America. Class did not contribute to variation in pronoun rates among Caribbeans, but did distinguish between working class and middle class Mainlanders. More specifically, working class, less-educated Mainlanders used higher rates of pronouns than did middle class, more-educated Mainlanders. The authors interpret these findings as evidence that dialectal leveling accounts for the higher levels of pronoun use among working class Mainlanders. They show that blue-collar Mainlanders tend to have more contact with the high-pronoun using Caribbeans than do middle class Mainlanders, and that it is this greater contact that triggers the blue-collar Mainlander increase in pronoun use. Similarly, Otheguy & Zentella (Reference Otheguy and Zentella2012:118–24, 138–39) found that, though restricted to Mainlanders of the first generation, gender is an influential variable.

While the division of the Otheguy-Zentella corpus into two regions has revealed important observations regarding change in NYC, such a whole-sample approach leaves us with questions regarding people of various national origins. The current study more precisely pinpoints the Latinos who undergo greater and lesser amounts of change in New York. Once the people undergoing the most change are identified, we investigate whether or not social class and gender impact the move toward more Anglicized patterns of subject pronoun use in New York.

Discussion of national-origin groups and change in pronoun use

The finding that some national-origin groups in NYC undergo more change than others in their use of subject personal pronouns is presented in graphic form in Figure 1. The ≫ symbol, distinguished from the > symbol, is to remind the reader that Dominicans are the only speakers in our sample of Latino New Yorkers who undergo no increase in pronoun rates.

Figure 1.

Ranking of change in pronoun rates among six national-origin groups in NYC.

In an attempt to gain more purchase on the reasons why some groups change more than others, we looked for other factors that distinguish between them, and found that the pronoun-rate ranking of the groups closely mirrors national, as well as city-wide, socioeconomic ranking of Latinos. The innovators in NYC tend to be the most affluent Latinos in the US and, more specifically, in NYC. In contrast, the conservatives tend to be the poorest. Figure 2 below illustrates this parallel. For ease of presentation, Figure 2a repeats the differential impact of exposure on the six national-origin groups presented in Figure 1. Figure 2b illustrates the Pew Hispanic Center's (2009) affluence rankings for Latinos in the US as a whole (Dockterman Reference Dockterman2011), and Figure 2c illustrates the rankings of NYC (adapted from Treschan Reference Treschan2010, Treschan, p.c. 2012).

Figure 2.

Comparison of pronoun rate change and affluence rankings.

The figures show a small difference between US and NYC rankings that does not, however, affect our point. Mexicans are poorer than Dominicans in NYC, whereas Dominicans are poorer than Mexicans when the entire US is taken into consideration. The point remains that Mexicans and Dominicans are the poorest of all Latinos, and that they are the two groups that undergo little or no change in pronoun rates in New York. The figures support our contention that affluence rankings can provide an external explanation for the national-origin differences in the increases in pronoun rate that we have documented in Table 3. Our results are further buttressed by Orozco's (Reference Orozco, Holmquist, Lorenzino and Sayahi2007) research on Spanish spoken by Colombians in NYC, in which Colombians of higher socioeconomic status are leading an ongoing change in the expression of futurity.

Why do affluent Latinos in NYC tend to be innovators and why do less affluent ones tend to be conservative in this use of subject pronouns? We propose an explanation that draws from the literature on social networks. People of lower socioeconomic status tend to have denser social networks, which results in greater retention of minority languages (Hudson, Hernández Chávez, & Bills Reference Hudson, Chávez;, Bills and Silva-Corvalán1995; Bills, Hudson, & Hernández Chávez Reference Bills, Hudson and Chávez2000) and, more to our point, more conservative language usage patterns (Milroy Reference Milroy1987; Milroy & Milroy Reference Milroy and Milroy1992). In addition to having denser social networks, poorer Hispanic communities are likelier to have a larger representation of recent immigrants from Latin America. Data from the 2010 US Census for the NYC metropolitan area show that the Dominican community is comprised of more recent immigrants and is, on the whole, more Spanish-speaking than the Colombian and Cuban communities. In communities with many recent newcomers, the usage of the community as a whole will resemble that of its newcomers more than in communities that are on average longer-settled in the City. This community-wide resemblance to the community's newcomers is, in part, what we are detecting in the conservative use of pronouns that we have documented for our New York Dominicans. Moreover, in communities that are more Spanish-speaking, it is likely that there is less English being used, accounting for its lesser influence among the Dominicans in our sample.

In contrast to the poorest Hispanic communities, Latinos who are on average more affluent (i.e. our innovating Colombians and Cubans) are likely to have looser social networks and, therefore, to be more susceptible to external influence and change. In addition, affluence tends to be correlated with more interaction with the dominant Anglophone communities, thereby decreasing connection to the Spanish-speaking communities and very likely increasing bilingualism, resulting in greater susceptibility to change in Spanish usage patterns.

While we have established that the overall affluence of one's community is associated with linguistic change in the bilingual setting, the social class status of individual speakers appears to be less relevant. Our analyses show no relationship between an individual's self-reported social class status and his or her pronoun use (not among the changing Colombians and Cubans, nor among the stable Dominicans). Thus, the overall socioeconomic make-up of a community and the strength of its social network influence the degree to which community members' speech undergoes change, but each individual's place within the community is less relevant.

The connection between affluent communities and language change might also account for some discrepancies in the literature regarding change in Spanish pronoun use in the US. While studies on Spanish in New York City show strong evidence of change in pronoun use, studies of Spanish in other parts of the US have not found as clear a pattern (Travis Reference Travis2007; Torres Cacoullos & Travis Reference Torres Cacoullos and Travis2011). Perhaps the greater change in NYC can be attributed to the weaker social networks of a large, impersonal metropolis, while the denser social networks and greater maintenance of Latin American patterns of pronominal use may be due to the less alienating environments that are perhaps found in smaller settings.

Our explanation for the apparent lack of change in pronoun use among Dominicans is bolstered by other research showing that Dominicans in the US tend to be more conservative in their use of language than other Hispanics. In her work, Toribio (Reference Toribio2000a, Reference Toribio and Roca2000b:261) characterizes Dominicans as “extremely language-retentive, maintaining and advancing the Dominican Spanish dialect” and resisting influence from other varieties of Spanish.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, studies based on census data show that Dominicans in the US maintain Spanish language use more persistently and longer than other Hispanic groups, as well as other immigrant groups in general (Alba, Logan, Lutz, & Stults Reference Alba, Logan, Lutz; and Stults2002; Johnson, Ríos, Drewery, Ennis, & Kim Reference Johnson, Ríos, Drewery, Ennis and Kim2010:2). This trend appears to continue, as the 2010 census data show that ninety-five percent of Dominicans in NYC speak Spanish.

Why are Dominicans so exceptional in resisting language change, as proposed by Toribio and demonstrated here with regard to pronouns? Above we offered one explanation that connected poverty with greater resistance to change. Another explanation is offered by Toribio (Reference Toribio2000a, Reference Toribio and Roca2000b), who interprets the Dominican tendency towards linguistic and dialectal maintenance as a mechanism for expressing community unity and separation from non-Dominican groups, most notably from African-Americans. As there are many more nonwhites among Dominicans than among other Latino communities, they encounter racism in the US in a virulent form. This experience becomes particularly jarring in light of their own perception of difference from the US African-American community. Thus, Toribio (Reference Toribio and Roca2000b:263ff) argues that maintaining Spanish and Hispanic identity is one way that Dominicans disassociate from African-Americans and, more generally, avoid being perceived as members of a disadvantaged minority.

In addition to the external factors that result in a lack of change among Dominicans, we think that there is also an internal factor at work. We propose that the Spanish grammar has an internal ceiling that disallows pronoun use past a certain occurrence rate. Our speculation is grounded in a functional view of pronoun usage, a view that interprets the presence or absence of pronouns as a mechanism of providing information about whether or not a referent is easy to find. The more accessible a referent is, the more likely it is that the speaker will omit a pronoun instead of including it (Chafe Reference Chafe and Li1976; Givón Reference Givón, Haiman and Munro1983; Ariel Reference Ariel1990; Gundel, Hedberg, & Zacharaski Reference Gundel, Hedberg; and Zacharaski1993). The ceiling effect operates to maintain the reference-tracking mechanism embodied in pronouns, which is likely to become inoperative when pronoun use starts to approach a rate of fifty percent.

Evidence for the ceiling effect comes from the breadth of research on Spanish subject pronoun use. Rarely in the Spanish-speaking world do we find average pronoun rates above forty-five percent. The Dominicans in our study arrive in the City with an average pronoun rate of forty-two percent, which is the highest rate documented in the Otheguy-Zentella corpus, including both newcomers and NYs (see Table 3). Other scholars have confirmed that Dominicans are the highest pronoun users in the Spanish-speaking world (Ortiz López Reference Ortiz López and Díaz-Campos2011). If, starting from such a high base, Dominicans were to undergo significant increases in pronoun rates in NYC, they would be pushing against what we conjecture is the internal restriction on maximum pronoun use. It may well be the case that Dominican Spanish is heading toward a dramatic structural reorganization, as this variety registers types of usages rarely or never attested in other varieties (Jiménez Sabater Reference Jiménez Sabater1977:13–14, Toribio Reference Toribio2000c). But for now, alternation is still current among Dominicans, restricted in the manner just described. This is the restriction, then, that provides another part of the explanation of why Dominicans in NYC appear to be the exception to the otherwise community-wide increase in pronoun rates.

Discussion of gender and language change in a bilingual setting

Among the speakers undergoing change in pronoun rates, we have found that women are ahead of their male counterparts. More specifically, this women effect appears to be strongest among established immigrants, that is, immigrants who had spent more than five years in NYC at the time they were interviewed. We consider three possible explanations. Compared to immigrant men, women might have (i) higher levels of English, (ii) more contact with varieties of Spanish other than their own, or (iii) more extensive contact with US-born bilinguals. We consider each explanation in turn and conclude that the third explanation accounts best for the women effect.

First let us consider the English contact explanation. As the change in pronoun use is, in part, due to English influence, we must consider the possibility that immigrant women experience more contact with English than do immigrant men. While this idea might seem counterintuitive, there is some evidence that the related phenomenon of shift from Spanish to English in the US is led by women (Solé Reference Solé1978). Nevertheless, among the speakers undergoing change in the Otheguy-Zentella corpus, established immigrant men and women do not differ significantly with respect to English proficiency levels (X ² (1) = .02, p = .90). We thus rule out the possibility that the women effect is simply due to higher levels of English proficiency among the women.

The second explanation we must consider for the women effect is that the immigrant women experience more extensive dialect leveling than their male counterparts do. Recall that pronoun rates tend to be higher in the Caribbean than in the Latin American Mainland. In New York City there are more Hispanics of Caribbean origin than of Mainland origin, making the high-pronoun using Caribbean variety the dominant one. Indeed, Otheguy & Zentella (Reference Otheguy and Zentella2012:99–102,117–22,135–45) find evidence that Caribbeans exert an influence on Mainlanders that is greater than that of Mainlanders on Caribbeans. Could the Caribbean influence on Mainlanders account for the women effect? Such a dialect-leveling account would make sense if it could it be shown that contact between Mainlanders and Caribbeans is gender specific, that is, if Mainlander women have more contact with Caribbean speakers than Mainlander men do. If this were the case, this Mainlander-Caribbean Women contact could explain the female lead in rising pronoun rates among Mainlander immigrants in particular.Footnote ¹¹ But such an account cannot entirely explain the findings in this study, since evidence for the women effect is found not only among Mainlanders, but also among Caribbeans; our innovators included are not only Colombians, but also Cubans. As Cuban newcomers arrive in NYC with a relatively high pronoun rate (thirty-three percent, as shown in Table 3)—a rate that is very similar to that of Puerto Rican newcomers, and is only surpassed by that of Dominican newcomers—it seems unlikely that contact with other varieties of Spanish is a trigger for the notable increase in pronoun rates among Cuban NYs. In other words, since dialect leveling does not adequately account for the Cubans' increase in pronoun rates in NYC, it cannot explain why Cuban immigrant women in particular experience a greater increase than Cuban men.Footnote ¹² Therefore, in order to explain the women effect, we consider yet another explanation beyond the impacts of English and dialect leveling.

We suggest that, in addition to the role of English and, in the case of Mainlanders, that of Caribbean influence, Latino immigrants are exposed to yet another high-pronoun form of Spanish, namely that of US-born Latino bilinguals. Seen this way, the women effect suggests that changes in immigrant women's Spanish are, in part, due to contact with US-born friends and family members, including their own children. This type of contact can be characterized as intergenerational contact, as it is contact between the immigrant generation and the US-born generation. Figure 3 below illustrates the change in progress, as well as the sources for the change experienced by both immigrant and US-born Latinos, highlighting the women effect in the top arrow. We leave aside dialectal leveling as the graphic attempts to capture change in both Mainlander and Caribbean immigrants.

Figure 3.

Sources of change in pronoun rates in Spanish in NYC.

As shown in Figure 3, the proposal is that there are several sources for the change, including English and intergenerational contact. Still, the proposal highlights the interactions between members of different generations as the source of the women effect specifically, as neither English influence nor dialect leveling would sufficiently explain it. The intergenerational contact explanation also accounts for Van Ness's (Reference Van Ness1995:77) finding that older, monolingual German-speaking Amish women in Ohio employ innovative features, not because of their own contact with English, but because of extensive contact with their bilingual daughters. The women effect in bilingual settings in NYC and Ohio suggests a more general pattern captured by the top arrow in Figure 3, whereby changes arising among bilinguals can be transmitted in a backwards trajectory to immigrant or monolingual female relatives.

This account raises the question whether immigrant women actually interact more with US-born bilinguals, or whether it is simply the case that they are more susceptible to direct external influences. A conclusive answer to this question is beyond the scope of the current article, but we suggest that both accounts are possible. First, it is likely that women have more contact than men with US-born friends and family members, primarily due to their role as mothers of US-born bilingual children. Research on US Latinos whose parents speak different varieties of Spanish has shown that children tend to speak the dialect of their mothers, not their fathers (Potowski Reference Potowski, Niño-Murcia and Rothman2008; Potowski & Matts Reference Potowski and Matts2008). This mother-to-child dialect transmission is a strong indicator that US-born Latinos have more conversations in Spanish with their mothers than with their fathers. Second, there is reason to believe that women tend to adapt and change their use of language more readily. There is research that suggests that women more than men use language to establish interpersonal sensitivity (Leaper & Friedman Reference Leaper, Friedman, Grusec and Hastings2007; Hall & Mast Reference Hall and Mast2008; Leaper & Robnett Reference Leaper and Robnett2011), a tendency that might well translate into an increased susceptibility to change. Furthermore, there is evidence that women more than men use language to demarcate social differences among themselves (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Reference Eckert and McConnell-Ginet2003:302), indicating that women have a heightened sensitivity to linguistic form and a tendency to change their own speech. We suspect that both considerations—women having more contact with US-born bilinguals and being more susceptible to change—may play a role in explaining the women effect in bilingual settings.

In light of our findings regarding a women effect in bilingual settings, following on those by Orozco (Reference Orozco, Holmquist, Lorenzino and Sayahi2007, Reference Orozco2009b) and Alfaraz (Reference Alfaraz2010), we propose that existing explanations for the role of women in language change need to be expanded. Both Labov (Reference Labov2001) and Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (Reference Eckert and McConnell-Ginet2003) explain women's innovative use of language in monolingual settings as a way of indexing nonconformity. But projecting a nonconformist social identity is not a likely explanation in bilingual settings, where language contact itself is a primary source of change. To gain a better understanding of why women are so important in advancing language change in both monolingual and bilingual settings, future research should examine women's roles in various social networks, as well as the possibility that women are more susceptible than men to external influences on speech patterns.

Summary and conclusion

Building on previous findings regarding language contact as a shaper of the increased use of Spanish subject personal pronouns in New York City, the current study presents new findings that specific immigrant national origin, socioeconomic status, and gender are important variables for understanding this ongoing change. By examining changes in the use of pronouns among six different Latino national-origin groups, we have discovered that not all groups change in the same way. And we have discovered a strong link between affluence and susceptibility to change. The most affluent Hispanic communities in NYC (Colombians and Cubans) are also those who undergo the most change, while the poorest (Mexicans and Dominicans) undergo the least or no change. Our explanation for these patterns relies on the well-documented relationship between poverty and density of social networks, which results in greater resistance to linguistic change.

Expanding existing findings regarding differences between men and women in New York, we have found evidence that immigrant women are ahead of immigrant men in the ongoing change in pronominal usage in Spanish in NYC. We suggest that this women effect is due to extensive contact between US-born bilinguals and immigrant women. In other words, we incorporate the already established fact that Latin American immigrants in NYC experience significant increases in pronoun usage as a result of increasing knowledge of English (and, among Mainlanders, contact with Caribbean speakers), and add the proposition that this change is also the result of contact with US-born Hispanics whose Spanish tends toward very high rates of pronominal use. And we propose that immigrant women change more than immigrant men because they have more contact with US-born Latino friends and family members, including their children, and because women's speech patterns are, in general, more susceptible to external influences.

We have learned from our study of an ongoing change in Spanish in New York that external factors play an important role in linguistic change not only in monolingual settings, but also in bilingual ones. In the past, generalizations regarding external factors on the trajectory of linguistic change have been based entirely on change among monolinguals. But since bilingual contexts are the worldwide norm (de Groot & Kroll Reference de Groot, Kroll, de Groot and Kroll1997:1–2; Li Wei Reference Wei2000:5), these statistically more prevalent settings need to be considered when proposing broad generalizations about language change. It appears now that, with respect to social class, patterns of change in bilingual communities diverge from those in monolingual ones. Whereas linguistic change in monolingual settings is often initiated and spread by working class people, our study shows that in the bilingual setting more affluent communities undergo the most change. By contrast, with respect to gender, we see a similar pattern in monolingual and bilingual settings, as women are at the vanguard of change in both. Thus the existing explanations of the women effect, which have focused on the relationship between language change and the projection of social nonconformity (Labov Reference Labov2001; Eckert & McConnell-Ginet Reference Eckert and McConnell-Ginet2003), need to incorporate the finding here. We suggest that women's roles in various social networks, as well as women's heightened sensitivity to interlocutors, may increase their linguistic susceptibility to external influences.