8.1 Introduction

Sociolinguists have focused on linguistic production as one of the most obvious outcomes of migration. Less is known about immigrants’ regard (Preston Reference Preston, Auer and Schmidt2010, Reference Preston2011) for their own variety in the new community and the home region. In this chapter, I discuss the language regard of Cubans in Miami-Dade County, Florida, a large and vibrant diaspora community that has had continuous immigration from Cuba since 1959, which has brought together established and new immigrants in one location. The findings from two perceptual dialectology studies (Alfaraz Reference Alfaraz, Long and Preston2002, Reference Preston2014) are used to examine the link between Cubans’ beliefs about the Cuban variety of Spanish and the political and sociocultural ideologies of the diaspora community. To further examine the groups’ language regard, I present the findings of a matched-guise study that tested the relationship between speech, social information, and perceptions.

Perceptual dialectology studies carried out with Cubans in the United States showed a strong difference in their regard for Cuban Spanish (Alfaraz Reference Alfaraz, Long and Preston2002, Reference Preston2014). The correctness-prestige of the variety hinged on geographic and temporal dimensions. The physical location of the variety influenced perceptions, which varied depending on whether it was in the diaspora or in Cuba. Time, centering on a historical event, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, also influenced perceptions. Physical location and time are related: On the one hand, the diaspora and the pre-revolutionary period before 1959 interact, and on the other, Cuba and the post-revolutionary period after 1959 interact.

Immigration of Cubans to the United States increased sharply after 1959. The largest numbers arrived in two early waves in 1959–1962 and 1965–1974 and in two later waves in 1980 and 1994–1996. Time of arrival is a criterion that differentiates groups of Cuban immigrants. The first immigrants of the first two waves and their descendants form a pre-revolution-diaspora group. Another group is made up of Cubans who arrived in the later waves and those who remained in Cuba who together constitute a post-revolution-Cuba group. With the exception of the arrivals from the first two waves, whose membership in the pre-revolution-diaspora group is unmistakably based on their emigration not long after the revolution, the group membership of arrivals from later waves varies. Given their shared reasons for immigration, later arrivals align themselves with the pre-revolution-diaspora group and this accommodation has given way to convergence with it (Alfaraz Reference Alfaraz, Long and Preston2002, Reference Preston2014).

Regardless of whether it is objectively based on early arrival, a consequence of long-term accommodation, or whether it is subjective and self-ascribed, membership in the pre-revolution-diaspora group is infused with political ideologies that play out in regard for regional varieties of Spanish in general, and Cuban Spanish, specifically. The strength of political ideology on the evaluation of linguistic varieties makes the study of Cubans’ attitudes an interesting contribution to the study of language regard across communities.

8.2 Perceptual Dialectology Studies

The first perceptual dialectology study carried out in the Cuban community in Miami-Dade County (Alfaraz Reference Alfaraz, Long and Preston2002) revealed a robust perceptual divide when Cubans were asked about their own variety. The research involved 148 Cuban participants, with varying lengths of residence in the area. Participants completed a written survey on which they evaluated the correctness, pleasantness, and degree of difference of geographic areas (Preston Reference Preston and Ammon1989, Reference Preston and Schneider1996, Reference Preston1999). Correctness and pleasantness were judged on a 7-point scale (with 7=most correct/pleasant and 1=least correct/pleasant); degree of difference was judged on a 4-point scale (with 4=most different and 1=least different). The survey included 18 Spanish-speaking Latin American countries and Spain, and it also included Cuban Spanish as two options, Cuba 1 and Cuba 2, which captured distinctions made in the community between the speech of the pre-revolution-diaspora and the speech of post-revolution-Cuba. While completing the survey, participants promptly rated the Cuba 1–Cuba 2 options.

The results for the correctness of Cuba 1 reflected Cubans’ high degree of linguistic security and their belief in the status-prestige of the pre-revolution-diaspora variety. Only Spain, widely accepted as the prescriptive standard, had a higher score (6.35) than Cuba 1 (5.98). This high regard for the Cuban variety was documented in an attitude study carried out in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, in which “Cubans consistently assigned higher ratings to all the questions about their own variety. Even when they made a mistake and identified another variety as Cuban, they gave it a higher score” (Castellanos Reference Castellanos1980:77, my translation). Time of arrival from Cuba did not significantly influence the correctness ratings given to Cuba 1, which both established Cubans and new arrivals rated highly.

The high regard for Cuban Spanish did not extend, however, to the variety in Cuba. The correctness evaluations for Cuba 2 were significantly different from those for Cuba 1 (Table 8.1). Cuba 2 received among the lowest correctness scores (4.03) of the varieties in the study. Even though both established Cubans and new arrivals gave lower correctness ratings to Cuba 2, newcomers rated it higher and second-generation Cubans rated it lower (p < 0.001). The degree of difference results showed that Cuba 2 was considered more different than Cuba 1 (p < 0.001).

The second perceptual dialectology study replicated the first in order to examine longitudinally the status of the group’s perceptions toward regional varieties of Spanish, and more specifically, toward Cuba 1 and Cuba 2. Thus, twelve years after the original study, a trend study was carried out. The sample was made up of 84 Cubans who were demographically similar to the population in the original study. As in the earlier study, participants rated the correctness and pleasantness of regional varieties of Spanish on a 7-point scale (with 7=most correct/pleasant and 1=least correct/pleasant). The results for correctness showed that perceptions had remained fairly stable. Of the twenty varieties surveyed, fourteen varieties were within 6 percent of the rating received in the earlier study, and six varieties decreased 6–14 percent – the largest drops were found for Bolivia (11 percent) and Cuba 2 (14 percent).

A sharp difference was again found in the judgments of the correctness of Cuba 1 and Cuba 2 (Table 8.1). As in the earlier study, evaluations of Cuba 1 were highly positive (6.12), nearly as positive as for Spain (6.31), whereas Cuba 2 was judged very negatively (3.14). In fact, in this second study, Cuba 2 was rated more negatively than in the earlier study, receiving the lowest scores of all the varieties in the survey. In contrast to the 14 percent drop in the ratings for Cuba 2, Cuba 1 had a small, favorable increase of 2.4 percent. The high regard Cubans show for Cuban Spanish varies along temporal and spatial dimensions: If the pre-revolution-diaspora (Cuba 1) is evaluated, ratings reflect the very high regard Cubans have for their own variety; on the other hand, if the post-revolution-Cuba (Cuba 2) is evaluated, then correctness ratings reveal the group’s very low regard.

Among the interesting findings to emerge from the two perceptual dialectology studies was that newcomers shared perceptions of Cuban Spanish with the established group. Even though the post-revolution-Cuba (Cuba 2) rather than the pre-revolution-diaspora (Cuba 1), is their variety, newcomers tended to downgrade Cuba 2 and upgrade Cuba 1. When newcomers were compared to established Cubans in the restudy, fewer differences were found in their correctness ratings than in the first study. In fact, in the restudy, the newcomers, who had arrived in 2000–2010, rated Cuba 1 as highly as the established immigrants and downgraded Cuba 2 as harshly as the established group. Evidence of accommodation of the former newcomers (who were new arrivals in 1998) to the language ideology of the established group was found in the restudy; their judgments of Cuba 2 were similar to the established group in 2010 but were significantly different in 1998 (p < .001). Regard for the correctness of Cuba 1 did not vary for the groups between the first and second study: In both, it was high.

It is not known whether newcomers arrived in the United States with a high regard for the diaspora or whether they later converged with the established group of Cubans, whose unyielding political and linguistic ideologies are overtly expressed and permeate the day-to-day lives of community members. Alfaraz (Reference Preston2014:84) suggested, “Newcomers’ attitudes toward Cuba 1 signal their acceptance of the community’s predominant ideology and alignment with the values of established immigrants, not necessarily political, but in terms of the aspirations of immigrants in general, including economic stability, home ownership, access to education for oneself and one’s children, and other indicators of successful adaptation.”

There is some evidence suggesting that newcomers arrived in the community with low regard for the correctness-prestige of speech in Cuba, but high regard for its pleasantness. A perceptual dialectology study carried out in Havana with 400 participants (Sobrino et al. Reference Sobrino Triana, Montero Bernal and Menéndez Pryce2014) found that Cubans described their variety in terms of its vulgarity (vulgaridad); in fact, they considered Cuba by far the most vulgar Spanish-speaking area. At the same time, however, they judged the speech of Cuba as the most warm/loving (cariñoso) and witty (sentido del humor). Cubans on the island patterned similarly to speakers of low-prestige varieties of English in the United States who rated their speech low on correctness but high on pleasantness (Preston Reference Preston and Schneider1996).

8.3 Matched-Guise Study

Perceptions of differences between Cuban Spanish in the pre-revolution diaspora and post-revolution Cuba revealed using the direct methods of perceptual dialectology (Alfaraz Reference Alfaraz, Long and Preston2002, Reference Preston2014) were examined using the indirect methods of the matched-guise technique, albeit with a modified approach (Garrett Reference Garrett2010) described below. This further study of Cuban language regard with voice stimuli relates to what Preston (Reference Preston, Prikhodkine and Preston2015:6) described as “the cycle of production, perception, and regard,” which represents the influence of language regard, whether conscious or subconscious, on both comprehension and production. To examine the negative evaluations of correctness-prestige found when participants rated varieties on a written survey, the matched-guise study tested the association between nonstandard phonetic variants and post-revolution Cuba. The matched-guise study also examined links between perceptions and social information (Niedzielski Reference Niedzielski1999), namely residence in the United States or in Cuba.

In the present study, participants listened to voice stimuli and registered their responses and evaluations (Lambert et al. Reference Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner and Fillenbaum1960). The voice stimuli were those of adults from one of two socioeconomic groups based on occupation, either middle to upper middle class or lower middle to working class. The audio stimuli were extracted from recordings made for sociolinguistic studies in the late 1960s and the late 1990s with recently arrived Cubans. The voices are representative of early immigrants in the pre-revolution-diaspora group who arrived in the second of the early waves beginning in 1965 and of later immigrants in the post-revolution-Cuba group who arrived in the fourth wave beginning in 1995. The study included only male voices to control for gender as a possibly confounding variable. The voices of ten different men were used: Six men were recorded in the 1960s and four in the 1990s. Each audio recording was unique; none was repeated in the survey. Either the pitch or tempo, or both the pitch and tempo, of several voices used more than once were altered using Audacity, so that they were distinctly different.

The audio recordings contained complete sentences with an average length of 2.10 seconds. The audio did not contain information that would situate speakers temporally or deictic expressions that would reveal their geographical orientation. The audio did not contain idiomatic expressions or items that would signal speakers’ socioeconomic status or generation. Praat was used to extract and trim samples as well as to remove long pauses, fillers, and some lexical items. To make the recordings from the two time periods comparable, Audacity was used to remove noise from the 1960s recordings so that the level was the same in the recordings from both time periods. Audacity was also used to amplify the recordings in order to present stimuli with the same volume throughout the study.

The study, completely in Spanish, was delivered online in Qualtrics to participants recruited through friends and colleagues. The introduction explained that the survey presented different speakers of Cuban Spanish to gather impressions of the way they talked. After the introduction, demographic information was gathered through multiple-choice questions. Participants reported their year of birth, sex, and location of current residence; selection of residence in the United States directed participants to a question about their year of arrival. Participants answered whether their place of birth was Cuba, the United States, or another country; if they selected the United States or another country, they were directed to another question asking whether their parents or grandparents were born in Cuba or not in order to select a sample of Cuban-origin participants. The results reported here are for thirty-six participants, who were born in Cuba or whose parents or grandparents had been born there and who were living in the United States. The survey took approximately six to ten minutes to complete.

The study included three tasks. The voices in the tasks were labeled “Man” and a number (e.g., Hombre 1, Hombre 2). The first task tested the influence of nonstandard variants on the perception of occupation and residence. It included ten audio recordings from six men. Six voices were from recordings from the 1960s – three of men who were professionals and three of men who were either lower middle or working class. Four voices were from recordings made in the 1990s; two of the voices were of men who were professionals and two were of men from the lower middle or working classes. Five of the ten voices were neutral and five contained nonstandard phonetic variants, including deletion of word-internal /s/ and the lateral variant of /r/ in word-final position. Although the voices represented different eras of migration, the survey did not include questions about the possible dating of each voice so as not to draw attention to the age of the recordings. The average length of the audio files in this first section was 1.98 seconds. Each voice stimulus was followed by two multiple-choice questions. The first question – “What type of work do you think the speaker does?” (¿En qué cree que trabaja el hablante?) – had three answer options: professional (profesional), technician (técnico), and worker, laborer, or peasant (trabajador, obrero o campesino). The second question – “Where do you believe he lives?” (¿Dónde cree que reside?) – had two answer choices: Cuba or the United States.

The second task in the survey examined the influence of social information on the rating of six voices. The introduction to the task, shown in Figure 8.1, instructed speakers to listen to the voices of six men, three who lived in Cuba and three who lived in the United States, and move the button on the scale to the right if they found it more correct and to the left if they found it less correct. Each item included a place of residence either Cuba or the United States for the voice (Hombre 3 reside en Cuba). The question “How correct do you find the way (he) talks?” (¿Cuán correcta le parece la forma de hablar?) was above the scale with the button that could be moved from 1 for less correct to 7 for more correct. Six voices were judged; Cuba was given as the residence for three voices and the United States for the other three. The voices were all from six men who were professionals, half were recorded in the 1960s and half in the 1990s. The voice samples were an average length of 2.31 seconds. Three voices contained nonstandard phonetic variants and three standard variants. Cuba was the residence assigned to one nonstandard and two standard samples, and the United States was given as the residence of one standard and two nonstandard samples. The question tested here was whether residence in the United States would trigger more correct ratings despite the presence of nonstandard variants and whether residence in Cuba would trigger lower correctness ratings even for standard speech.

Figure 8.1 Logging correctness instructions: Listen to the audio and indicate how correct the speech of each man seems to you. Move the button on the scale toward 1 if it seems less correct and toward 7 if it seems more correct

The third task tested evaluations of the lateral variant of /r/, a nonstandard variant whose frequency increased in Cuba after the revolution, in the 1960s and 1970s (described above). In the introduction to the task, participants were once again told that they would hear six male voices for whom they would report their impression of correctness by moving a button, along a scale, toward the left for less correct and to right for more correct. The six audio recordings were on average 2.10 seconds long. Four of the recordings were from the 1960s – two from upper-middle-class and two from working-class speakers. The other two recordings were from the 1990s. Three recordings, one from the 1960s and two from the 1990s, contained the nonstandard lateral variant in different phonetic contexts: Two recordings had the lateral in word-final position, and one had two consecutive word-internal laterals. Because of space constraints, the results of this task are discussed elsewhere.

8.4 Conclusion

Language regard in the context of migration can be fundamental to the dynamics of established and new immigrant groups in diaspora communities. Research on language regard in the Cuban diaspora in the United States (Alfaraz Reference Alfaraz, Long and Preston2002, Reference Preston2014) showed that a distinction was made along spatial-temporal lines between the variety that arrived in the diaspora with the early waves of immigrants and the post-revolution variety of later arrivals. High regard for the pre-revolution-diaspora variety and low regard for the post-revolution-Cuba variety was found among both established Cubans and newcomers from Cuba. To examine the findings of this perceptual dialectology research, a matched-guise study was conducted that examined residence in Cuba and the United States in relation to standardness with stimuli derived from voice recordings made in the 1960s and 1990s. The results of the matched-guise experiment showed that participants gave lower correctness ratings to both standard and nonstandard speech when they were told that a speaker lived in Cuba and higher correctness ratings when they believed a speaker’s residence was the United States. The study of language regard using the direct methods of perceptual dialectology and the indirect methods of the matched-guise technique with Cubans in the United States revealed shared beliefs and attitudes in a speech community that has been separated by immigration, but unified through the strength of their social, political, and linguistic ideologies.

9.1 Introduction

Information about users’ perceptions about their language provides insight into how people view themselves within their sociohistorical context and what they think about language use. As we see in this and other chapters in this volume, it is not uncommon for users’ perceptions to differ considerably from linguistic reality. For example, in their work on language use in Mexican-descent families in California and Texas, Schecter and Bayley (Reference Schecter and Bayley2002) found that many speakers of Southwest Spanish accepted the prescriptive notion that their own dialect was sub-standard, “un español quebrado” (broken Spanish), despite the fact that the Spanish spoken in the US Southwest preserves nearly all of the features of standard Spanish grammar. As a result, rather than speak Spanish at home so that their children would acquire the language naturally, a number of parents decided to wait until their children could be taught “proper” Spanish at school. The result, unsurprisingly, was that the children were strongly English dominant and lost the minority language.

In this chapter, we explore how language attitudes and ideologies impact perceptions of language varieties in the American DeafFootnote ¹ community, with a particular focus on Black American Sign Language (ASL), the variety of ASL developed by African Americans in the South during the era of segregation. After briefly discussing work on attitudes toward African American Vernacular English (AAVE),Footnote ² we review studies of language attitudes in the Deaf community. We then draw on the rich body of data from the Black ASL Project (McCaskill et al. Reference McCaskill, Lucas, Bayley and Hill2011) to examine the complex factors that influence the attitudes of users of a minority language variety toward their own language.

9.2 Perception of Language Varieties

Linguists define a dialect as a language variety that is structurally related to another variety in regard to phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic features regardless of its socially defined standard or stigmatized status (Wolfram & Schilling Reference Wolfram and Schilling2016). However, many people in the general population do not accept that definition. Rather, in many cases the term dialect is reserved for language varieties that are viewed as substandard in comparison to socially accepted varieties. Language varieties that contain stigmatized or unfavorable linguistic features are often relegated to substandard status and the stigmatization is always based on social characteristics of marginalized groups. For example, in Illinois, the South Midland dialect is generally regarded as less prestigious than the North Midland dialect because it contains Southern or rural features such as intrusive /r/ (warsh instead of wash) and a vowel /æu/ (Frazer Reference Frazer1987). As Preston (Reference Preston and Schneider1996) reports in a study of language attitudes toward northern and southern dialects, for many outside the South, Southerners are generally perceived to be “informal,” “undereducated,” and “friendly.”

AAVE is another highly stigmatized American dialect. According to linguistic studies, AAVE is a legitimate language variety with certain phonological, morphological, lexical, and semantic features that diverge from other English dialects. It is used by African American speakers in urban and rural communities (Wolfram & Thomas Reference Wolfram and Thomas2002). Not all African Americans use AAVE nor it is exclusive to African Americans. As with any language variety, anyone can acquire it as long as they have access and exposure. Nonetheless, AAVE users are typically African Americans.

Despite the fact that nearly five decades of research, beginning with Labov et al. (Reference Labov, Cohen, Robins and Lewis1968) and Wolfram (Reference Wolfram1969), have shown that AAVE is systematic and fully equal to standard English in expressive power and logical capacity, it is still perceived negatively in social, mass, and entertainment media. For example, many websites feature offensive parodies of AAVE (Ronkin & Karn Reference Ronkin and Karn1999) and AAVE is negatively represented in entertainment, including popular Disney films (Lippi-Green Reference Lippi-Green2012; Rickford & Rickford Reference Rickford and Rickford2000). In education, the Oakland, California School Board’s decision to use AAVE to teach standard English in the 1990s raised intense controversy and even outrage, particularly among people who had never paid the slightest attention to the city’s educational problems (Baugh Reference Baugh2000; Rickford Reference Rickford1999; Vaughn-Cook Reference Vaughn-Cook, Bayley and Lucas2007; Wolfram Reference Wolfram1998). As a result of their students’ dialect, some educators have viewed AAVE-speaking African American children as speech-impaired (Ogbu Reference Ogbu1999) and as verbally deprived (Labov Reference Labov1972). Finally, as Baugh (Reference Baugh and Schneider1996, Reference Baugh2000, Reference Baugh, Bayley and Lucas2007) has shown, people who speak AAVE have been subject to housing discrimination. In the face of the pressure against AAVE, it still exists because it serves as a symbol of cultural solidarity among AAVE speakers. In fact, African Americans’ choice of speaking mainstream English with AAVE speakers may be perceived to be condescending and trying to act “White” (Fordham Reference Fordham1999). A choice of dialect in a particular situation is much more than just speaking differently. It is a manifestation of social identity and cultural association in every community, including Deaf communities.

Deaf signers are also aware of and express attitudes about signing varieties in the American Deaf community (Baer et al. Reference Baer, Okrent, Rose, Byers and Rose1996). Among the signing varieties in the community, there is a perception that a standard ASL exists. The earliest recognition of the standard ASL variety can be traced back to 1834 when schools for the Deaf were opened following the pattern set by the American School for the Deaf (ASD), which had opened in 1817 (Lane et al. Reference Lane, Hoffmeister and Bahan1996). Graduates of the ASD were hired as teachers and were the agents of ASL transmission and dissemination, as were deaf students (Lucas et al. Reference Lucas, Bayley and Valli2001). In Reference Croneberg, Stokoe, Casterline and Croneberg1965, Croneberg explicitly stated, “The body of signs used at Gallaudet, then, must contain the main base of what we call standard ASL” (134).

At the opposite end of the signing spectrum is Manually Coded English (MCE), which belongs to a category of different English-based signed communication systems (e.g., Seeing Essential English (SEE 1), Signing Exact English (SEE 2), and Linguistics of Visual English (LOVE)). MCE is not a natural language as is ASL, but it is still used in some educational settings for deaf students with the goal of developing better English skills. With written and spoken English and ASL co-existing in the community, a variety called contact signing (Lucas & Valli Reference Lucas and Clayton1992) has emerged with the varying degrees of mixture of features of ASL and English, with some MCE features. With the use of MCE, contact signing, and ASL in the American Deaf community, issues of perception have emerged surrounding the nature of ASL.

One of the issues concerns ethnic differences in perceptions of ASL. For example, in Lucas and Valli’s (Reference Lucas and Clayton1992) study of contact signing, one clip was perceived differently by two racial groups of Deaf participants. Only 37 percent of the white participants identified it as “ASL,” while 82 percent of the black participants identified it as “ASL” (Lucas & Valli Reference Lucas and Clayton1992:70). The discrepancy in judgments between white and black participants could be based on signers’ decisions to focus on different linguistic features. This kind of discrepancy in perceptions between black and white signers has been explored by Hill (Reference Hill2012) in a large study that benefits from the statistical analysis lacking in Lucas and Valli’s study. He examined the linguistic and social factors that influence ASL signers’ perceptions of signing across the full range, from ASL signing to English-like signing. The linguistic factors in Hill’s study include handshape, non-manual signals, morphemic movements, choice of signs, syntax, and prosody in signing. The social factors include age, race, and age of ASL acquisition. Hill suggests that different social groups within the Deaf community might have different standards, although he finds considerable (but not unanimous) agreement among a wide range of signers of different social groups about what constitutes “strong ASL.” He further suggests that ASL is on the way to standardization.

Another issue is the perception of ASL and English (including SEE, lip-reading, written, and spoken) as good or bad language. Kannapell (Reference Kannapell and Lucas1989) conducted a sociolinguistic study on the attitudes of Deaf Gallaudet University students toward ASL and English and examined the social factors contributing to the attitudes. She found that the social factors relating to the Deaf students’ attitudes about ASL and English are the number of years spent at a Deaf school, the age of sign language acquisition, the age of onset of hearing loss, and the hearing status of parents and siblings. She also found that in terms of attitude, the students who were culturally Deaf favored ASL over English, while the subjects who were hard-of-hearing or were deaf but preferred oral communication were more favorably disposed toward English and its signing forms. Students, both deaf and hard of hearing, expressed their opinions about ASL and English. Opinions included the belief that ASL is a language but that it lacks proper grammar like English. Some students also felt that ASL has a bad effect on English skills and that while ASL is important for Deaf children, speech must be taught in order to fit in with mainstream society. Some students believed that ASL is used by less educated Deaf people (Kannapell Reference Kannapell and Lucas1989:203).

From the point of view of the scientific study of language, no language variety is better than any other in terms of linguistic structure or expressive power. It is natural for language varieties to differ from one another on numerous dimensions as a result of geographic and social factors. Social perceptions can influence the prestige of language varieties in a society, as shown in the examples of northern and southern dialects of American English, AAVE, and the spectrum of signing between ASL and MCE. Black ASL is no exception, as the next section will show.

9.3 Black Deaf Signers’ School History and Language Use

The data upon which the current chapter is based come from the Black ASL Project, conducted by the authors between 2007 and 2011 (McCaskill et al. Reference McCaskill, Lucas, Bayley and Hill2011). The project aimed to provide empirical evidence of differences between black and white signing that had been noted anecdotally but never fully examined. Because the conditions for the development of a separate variety of ASL existed in the US South, where African American and white Deaf children attended segregated schools, in some cases well into the 1970s, we collected data from seventy-six African American signers in six southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. An additional twenty participants at the meetings of the National Black Deaf Advocates were involved in the study as well. Most Deaf children are born to hearing parents and residential schools have traditionally served as primary sites for the transmission of ASL. We therefore divided participants into two age groups: the older group of forty-four participants aged fifty-five and above and the younger group of thirty-two participants aged thirty-five and below. The age division was motivated by developments in language policy in deaf education in the early 1970s with the passage of Public Law 94–142 (the Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975) and in the change of communication methods from oral to signed, which may not have included ASL (Lucas et al. Reference Lucas, Bayley and Valli2001:35).

The participants who were fifty-five or older attended segregated residential schools and lived in dormitories. Before the 1960s, the majority of Deaf students, which stood about 80 percent, attended residential schools for the deaf (Lane et al. Reference Lane, Hoffmeister and Bahan1996). Each state had one or a few specialized schools for deaf and hard-of-hearing children and the distance was too far for the children and families to travel daily, thus the reason for the dormitories. The schools played a larger role in the critical years of language, social, and identity development than did the families of the children because the children stayed at the schools through the year except for scheduled school breaks. This educational experience was normal for the older participants as former students at the residential schools but the only difference was that they were segregated by race. For thirty-eight out of forty-four older participants at the segregated schools, the social isolation based on their deafness and their race defined their educational reality and, before desegregation, for many their education ended at the eighth grade. It was much more difficult for them to continue through secondary education. After the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the other older participants were part of the generation when desegregation eventually began to take effect during their primary and secondary education so their experience was, in some ways, different from their older peers based on the extent of contact with white Deaf peers.

The participants who were thirty-five or younger attended school after racial integration and thus had the possibility of contact with White ASL and other forms of communication. After the 1960s, integration had started to become a reality for students of different races, but some schools and communities were still resistant and they engaged in the structural and economic forms of discrimination that maintain the racial disparity in education to this day. Despite the challenges, secondary education was a possibility for many Black Deaf students in the period when racial integration had become the norm. However, mainstreaming laws were also enacted during this period. These laws encouraged the placement of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in regular educational settings, with considerable impact on the students’ communication rights and access and enrollment in deaf residential schools. Since the 1960s, the percentage of Deaf students attending residential schools has steadily declined; as of 2010, it was around 24 percent (Gallaudet Research Institute 2011). Mainstreaming is currently the reality for deaf students who attend schools with students without disability. In the Black ASL study, twenty-seven out of thirty-two younger participants attended racially integrated residential schools. The other participants were mainstreamed. People between the age of thirty-five and fifty-five were not targeted because education and language policies were constantly changing. Hence, their educational reality is not as definable as that of the older and the younger groups.

9.4 Black ASL Data on Language Attitudes, ASL Acquisition, School Language Varieties, and Teachers

Data for the Black ASL project includes sociolinguistic interviews conducted by Deaf African American members of the research team as well as a variety of elicitation tasks. In this chapter, we focus on comments in the interviews and on two phonological variables that show that, in some respects, the signing of Deaf African Americans is closer to the standard language taught in ASL classes than the signing of their white counterparts.

During the interviews, we asked participants specific questions about their use of language such as when they learned to sign, the languages they used in school, the signing skills of the teachers, older signs that were unique to school and region, and their perception of the difference between Black and White signing.Footnote ³ Table 9.1 shows the number of responses to the questions about where and how participants learned to sign.

Most of the signers, regardless of age, learned to sign at school. Eleven older signers reported that they learned directly from their teachers while ten older signers reported that they learned from teachers and classmates. Four older signers said that they learned to sign from other sources such as flashcards and books. Only two signers had Deaf language models to learn from.

Younger signers who learned to sign at school also learned from teachers and classmates. One young signer mentioned an interpreter as a language model. Younger signers who learned at home acquired sign language from Deaf families, but one signer reported that a hearing family member was a language model.

Table 9.2 shows the number of responses to the question about the racial demography of students at school.

As Table 9.2 shows, forty out of forty-one older signers reported that their schools had only or mostly black students. This is expected because the schools were segregated. One older signer, however, attended a white school. In contrast, most younger signers attended racially integrated schools. Four younger signers reported that they were racially segregated at first and then were allowed to be in racially mixed environments with their white peers. Two younger signers reported that they went to school with mostly white students.

Table 9.3 summarizes responses to the questions about racial identity and hearing or Deaf identity of teachers.

Most older signers reported that they had only black teachers or mostly black teachers, but seven older signers had only white or mostly white teachers. Seven signers reported that they had only white teachers and later had both black and white teachers. Also, many participants reported that they had hearing teachers and nine, seven from the older group and two from the younger group, had Deaf teachers.

As expected, some younger signers had black and white teachers while other signers had only white or mostly white teachers. Like the older signers, most had hearing teachers. Seven signers had both hearing and deaf teachers (five reported “both,” two reported “most deaf,” and two reported “most hearing but then moved to school with both”).

Table 9.4 summarizes the comments from participants about their teachers’ signing skills.

A few younger and older signers had teachers who were skillful in ASL, but most signers reported that teachers were not signing ASL. Some signers said that teachers communicated through fingerspelling and some other said that teachers signed in SEE. Also, some signers said that their teachers were not skilled in signing.

In the later part of the interviews, the participants were asked a few questions about the difference between black and white signing. Forty-six signers, divided equally between the two age groups, responded to these questions. Overwhelmingly, signers said that black and white signing differ. Only one signer, from the younger group, said that black and white signing are similar.

9.5 Black Deaf Signers’ Perceptions of Black ASL

During the coding and analysis phases on the interview data, we noticed a number of common themes emerging related to education and race. The themes were based on the general observations during the analyses that focused on the phonological forms including the lowering form and the handedness of the signs, lexical variation, and the discourse practice of Black ASL. Our findings based on comments made by the older and younger participants are summarized below.

9.6 Perceptions and Linguistic Realities

Although many participants in the Black ASL Project expressed negative views toward Black ASL or felt that white signing was more “standard,” a close analysis of the data shows that, in fact, in many respects black signing is closer to the standard variety taught in ASL classes than white signing elicited in a similar manner. Examples of two phonological variables illustrate the point.

The first example concerns the location of signs like KNOW,Footnote ⁴ which in citation (+cf), or dictionary form, is produced at the temple or the forehead, but that can also be produced at a lower location. In addition to KNOW, examples include verbs of perception and thinking such as BELIEVE, DECIDE, FORGET, REMEMBER; nouns such as DEER, FATHER, MOTHER; prepositions such as FOR; and interrogatives such as WHY. Results from the Black ASL Project as well as earlier work (Bayley & Lucas Reference Bayley, Lucas, Picone and Davies2015; Lucas et al. Reference Lucas, Bayley and Valli2001) show that African American signers consistently produce a greater percentage of signs in citation form than do their white counterparts. Table 9.5 summarizes results by age group from four different studies. In the column after the list of signing varieties, the total number of signs that were produced in either citation or lowered form is listed for each variety. In the last three columns, the percentage of the lowered form of signs in a group of signs produced by the respective groups (35–, 55+, and combined) is listed for each variety.

The data from several studies show a similar pattern in the case of variation between signs that can be produced with one or two hands such as DEER. FINISH, HORSE, NOW, PONDER, SICK, TIRED, and WANT. Whether a signer uses one or two hands does not change the meaning of the sign. However, the two-handed variant is considered to be more traditional and standard, which is also a citation form. As the data in Table 9.6 show, in almost every case studied, African American signers are more likely to choose the two-handed variant than are their white counterparts. In the column after the list of signing varieties, the total number of signs that were produced in either one-handed or two-handed form is listed for each variety. In the last three columns, the percentage of the one-handed form of signs in a group of signs produced by the respective groups (35–, 55+, and combined) is listed for each variety.

Examples could be multiplied. However, the data shown in this section illustrate the point that perceptions, even those sometimes held by users of a particular variety, can diverge from linguistic reality. In the cases of the phonological variables discussed here, Black ASL is closer to the commonly perceived standard than the corresponding varieties used by white signers. Note, however, that in nearly every case, younger black signers use a higher percentage of the lowered and one-handed variants than their older black counterparts.

9.7 Conclusion

The comments from participants in the Black ASL Project combined with the detailed analysis of sociolinguistic variables reveal a complex set of attitudes toward this unique language variety. On one hand, comments by older signers, perhaps influenced by the poor educational facilities and opportunities they experienced during the period of segregation, suggest that they associated their own variety with the problems they encountered in inferior schools. In fact, many of the older signers had abandoned the lexical forms they had used when they were younger and adopted the signs used by the white Deaf community. Nevertheless, quantitative analysis of a number of sociolinguistic variables reported in McCaskill et al. (Reference McCaskill, Lucas, Bayley and Hill2011) shows that in some respects older black signers were more likely to choose the standard forms taught in ASL classes than either younger black signers or white signers of any age.

Younger black signers expressed more positive attitudes toward black signing and also showed considerable evidence of the incorporation of AAVE into their signing (Lucas et al. Reference Lucas, Bayley, McCaskill and Hill2015). With respect to several of the sociolinguistic variables examined by McCaskill et al. (Reference McCaskill, Lucas, Bayley and Hill2011), however, the younger black signers used more –cf variants than the older black signers and in that respect were more similar to their white counterparts. Nevertheless, as Hill (Reference Hill2012) notes, differences between black and white signing remained, particularly at the lexical level. Hill notes how expressions borrowed from AAVE such as DANG (“I feel you” or “I know that’s right”) and GIRL PLEASE are regarded as English in the mainstream American Deaf community, although they are acceptable in Black ASL.

We began this chapter with a discussion of how perceptions of language varieties provide a window into how people view themselves and others within their socio-historical context. The attitudes and perceptions expressed by participants in the Black ASL Project are complex and differ considerably by age group. Younger signers, in particular, express pride in black styles of signing and readily incorporate items from AAVE into their signing. Although there is evidence that in some respects black signing is converging with white signing as a result of greater contact, there is also evidence that indicates that younger black signers are continuing to develop a distinct variety that reflects the reality of their own lives.

10.1 Introduction

Matters of diversity within the United States far exceed the binary racial division between African Americans and Americans of European descent; however, many of the debates and controversies about race and racial discrimination in America center on this specific racial dichotomy. The displacement of Native Americans to provide the land where immigrants from throughout the world have flocked since the 1600s has done more than create the world’s largest economy, it also created tremendous linguistic diversity. The resulting combination of regional, cultural, and dialect enclaves were central to Preston’s (Reference Preston1999, Reference Preston2010) formulation of perceptual dialectology. Preston (Reference Preston, Hall, Doane and Ringler1992) also investigated the same linguistic perceptions, in terms of those who are perceived to “talk White” or “talk Black,” long before this author contemplated the identical issue.

Many of the perceptions revealed in studies of perceptual dialectology embody stereotypes, some that are more flattering than others, and those stereotypical opinions in turn undergird impressions pertaining to language regard. For example, does a person’s manner of speech convey that they are intelligent or dim-witted? Does a person’s speech suggest that they are empathic or insensitive? Does a person’s speech belie the region of the country where they were raised? Does their speech convey that they are an urbanite or someone who grew up in a rural community? Other demographic characteristics, such as sex, age, and race are also frequently conveyed through speech. The present discussion devotes primary attention to linguistic perceptions and regard associated with two groups: United States slave descendants of African origin, and Americans of European descent.Footnote ¹

Part of this exploration includes some ethnographic information, because many Americans from diverse racial backgrounds may frequently suggest that someone is “acting White” or “talking White” in contrast to those who are “acting Black” or “talking Black.” Anthropologists and linguists tend not to employ such terminology, largely because such labels are inaccurate, but American ethnographers know well that references of this kind are not only common but also potentially racially divisive. Just beneath the ethnographic surface of these expressions lay matters of personal identity and cultural loyalty (or disloyalty), which contribute to the combination of stereotypes and perceptions that are embedded within individual formulations of language regard. Next, we turn to two relevant psychological dimensions: social power and how it is perceived. The discussion concludes with suggestions for future interdisciplinary research, which have come to light largely thanks to Preston’s (Reference Preston, Hall, Doane and Ringler1992, Reference Preston1999, Reference Preston2010) research and vision regarding folk linguistic beliefs and how they are formulated and evolve.

10.2 Psychological Dimensions of Stereotypes

No child anywhere on earth is born with preexisting stereotypes about people. Stereotypes are both learned and taught, perhaps indirectly, as groups of people who may belong to identifiable subcultures within a society or speech community come to depict one another. There are clear and unequivocal psychological dimensions of stereotypes, and they frequently intersect with perceptions of those who live in a particular society that are perceived to hold power as well as those who lack power.

10.3 Adult African American Linguistic Accommodation

Giles and Powesland (Reference Giles and Powesland1975) were first to describe instances of linguistic accommodation, where speakers of the same language who may not speak the same dialect either converge (i.e., adjust their speech toward that of their interlocutor) or diverge (i.e., adjust their speech in ways that accentuate differences with their interlocutor) during conversation. African Americans engage in linguistic accommodation as do most people; however, Baugh (Reference Baugh1983) demonstrated that Black adults engage in linguistic style shifting based upon the immediate speaking situation in which they find themselves, and the relative formality or informality of the speech that they adopt is influenced greatly by how well they know their interlocutors, as well as whether they share the same cultural background as their interlocutors. Niedzielski and Preston (Reference Niedzielski and Preston2003) also describe similar metalinguistic commentary from an African American man who describes how he changes his speech when speaking with his White boss.

Although we initially hypothesized that racial background would be paramount regarding triggers that influenced convergence (i.e., whenever Blacks were speaking among themselves) and divergence (i.e., whenever Blacks were speaking in groups with others from diverse racial backgrounds), familiarity among interlocutors proved to be far more important (Baugh Reference Baugh1983). That is to say, those interlocutors who knew each other quite well, regardless of their racial background, employed less formal speech than that used when speakers were meeting for the first time.

This type of linguistic elasticity is well known and has been evident to sociolinguists for quite some time (Labov Reference Labov1966; Trudgill Reference Trudgill1986; Milroy & Milroy Reference Milroy and Milroy1992); however, African American linguistic dexterity is less well known than might otherwise be the case because non-African Americans rarely have access to the entire range of speech events where Black speakers exhibit their full range of linguistic convergence or divergence.

It is against this backdrop of linguistic variability and fluctuation that we now seek to pin down some of the linguistic stereotypes about Black and White speech and behavior that underlie perceptions of language regard. Opinions of this kind are not static and vary across age, class, and region to say little of the educational or political orientation of specific individuals. Radio, television, and films have played a role in some of these linguistic perceptions and so too have the day-to-day interactions of people from similar and dissimilar racial backgrounds.

10.4 Depictions of Linguistic and Racial Stereotypes through Social Media

What precisely do people mean when they refer to someone as “acting White,” “sounding White,” or “talking White?” Conversely, what is meant by those who refer to others as “acting Black,” “sounding Black” or “talking Black?” Unfortunately, the answers to these questions elude exactitude from an analytical perspective because these perceptions – all of which are relevant to the concept of linguistic regard – are somewhat amorphous and vague. Americans of either European or African descent constitute populations that are quite diverse, culturally and linguistically. Yet both groups evoke stereotypes to which people frequently refer when they speak about the behavior or language of others whose backgrounds are substantially different from their own and again, when they make comments about people who they believe to be just like themselves.

10.5 Cultural Relevance

The preceding commentaries were devoted to language and primarily different styles of speaking. The discussion to follow is concerned with a combination of behavior and cultural traits that Americans from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds tend to associate with Americans of European descent and/or Americans of African descent. Fordham and Ogbu (Reference Fordham and Ogbu1986) broached this topic from the perspective of African American students who were accused of acting White, and Bucholtz (Reference Bucholtz2010) describes circumstances where affluent White teens strive to adopt mannerisms that they attribute to popular African American musical artists. Other circumstances witness Whites and Blacks who are behaving, dressing, and eating in ways that many Americans would associate with their respective cultures. That is to say, some members of an ethnic or racial group display behaviors that may be associated with their group, others have been observed to comport themselves in ways that are atypical for the racial or ethnic groups to which they belong.

10.6 Language Regard in American Racial Perspective

Preston’s (Reference Preston1999, Reference Preston2010) original research on perceptual dialectology has provided the foundation upon which notions of language regard rest. Such research has shown that to the extent that perceptions about race are either reinforced or defied based upon a person’s speech: They will typically reinforce existing impressions of language regard based on race, or they will defy perceptions of language regard based on race (Preston Reference Preston, Hall, Doane and Ringler1992, Reference Preston2010; Smitherman Reference Smitherman2000; Rickford & Rickford Reference Rickford and Rickford2000). Matters of cultural and linguistic loyalty are quite influential among speakers who do not attempt to control the ways in which their behavior may be interpreted by others whose racial backgrounds are different from their own.

One of the reasons that Preston’s research has proven to be so important is because language regard represents another dimension of linguistic variability; however, that linguistic variability is based on what Hymes (Reference Hymes, Gladwin and Sturtevant1962, Reference Hymes1974) refers to as the variable ways in which receivers interpret the various languages and dialects they encounter as they speak with others who they regard as being either similar or dissimilar from themselves. These are also moving targets, because speakers adjust their speech depending upon their immediate circumstances, and those who are in a position to determine language regard may reflect fluctuating opinions that are malleable.

10.7 Conclusion and Some Implications for Future Research

This discussion has attempted to examine the concept of language regard with primary attention to styles of speech that are attributed to Blacks and Whites who live in the United States. As such we are mindful of the fact that many of these linguistic impressions are based on stereotypes. While the vast majority of stereotypes are grounded in some semblance of fact, they do not capture deviations in behavior that defy stereotypes, and therefore they are likely to miss evidence of changing behaviors or attitudes in progress.

Future research on the topic of language regard could benefit from conceptual alignment with Hymes’ (Reference Hymes, Gladwin and Sturtevant1962, Reference Hymes1974) formulation of the ethnography of speaking. That would allow analysts to take note of various ethnographic characteristics that are relevant to a specific speech event where language regard is being determined. Thus, if a particular speaker, and a specific receiver, are changing roles as they discuss a defined topic during a speech event that takes place at a specific time in an identifiable location, it might be possible to compare and contrast the linguistic behavior of these individuals based on changing ethnographic circumstances during the speech event. These adaptations could then be explored to determine if they result in any difference in their impressions of each other, or not.

Preston (Reference Preston1999, Reference Preston2010) has provided us with important evaluative tools that allow linguists of various theoretical persuasions to gain insights into the ways in which speech is not only produced but also perceived, and perhaps interpreted, when produced by people of similar and dissimilar backgrounds. Moreover, the potential to look at this linguistic behavior, and how it is evaluated, can be viewed through various ethnographic lenses that far exceed the regional dimensions that he first introduced when he created the field of perceptual dialectology. Indeed, if used properly, studies of language regard could have future policy implications, which ideally would be used to help promote greater social harmony among people from linguistically diverse backgrounds.

11.1 Introduction

This chapter differs from others in this volume because it focuses on a lesser-studied Southeast Asian language in the context of immigration and multilingual cross-cultural contact. To gain a full understanding of language regard (Preston Reference Preston, Gilles, Scharloth and Ziegler2010), it will be important for scholars to explore such lesser-studied languages and the complex multilingual sociolinguistic experiences of immigrant communities (Nagy Reference Nagy2015; Nagy & Meyerhoff Reference Nagy, Meyerhoff, Meyerhoff and Nagy2008). Such settings are prime opportunities to observe ongoing changes in language regard as communities undergo contact and cultural shifts. The multidimensional linguistic landscapes of many Asian American communities are ideal for such a study (Bucholtz Reference Bucholtz2004; Chun Reference Chun2004; Hall-Lew Reference Hall-Lew2009; Reyes Reference Reyes2007; Reyes & Lo Reference Reyes and Lo2009; Shankar Reference Shankar2008), and Hmong American communities are undergoing a particularly sharp experience of contact with Western society. Using folk linguistic methods (Preston Reference Preston1993; Niedzielski & Preston Reference Niedzielski and Preston2000), ethnographic observations, and recorded field data, we investigate Hmong American communities to learn how language regard changes. We frame our analysis around the theoretical notion of liminality (Turner Reference Turner1967, Reference Turner, Mahdi, Foster and Little1987; Rampton Reference Rampton1995, Reference Rampton1999), which is a state of transition and “creative in-betweenness” (Hess Reference Hess1996) where social norms and power dynamics can be challenged and changed.

Hmong Americans are well acquainted with “in-betweenness” and cultural transitions, both in their own lives and in their origin stories. Hmong ancestry traces back to rural southern China, which is still home to many large Hmong communities today (Culas & Michaud Reference Culas, Michaud, Tapp, Michaud, Culas and Lee2004). In the eighteenth century, some groups of Hmong people began migrating from China into Southeast Asia. Then a second major stage of migration began in the mid/late twentieth century, as war in Southeast Asia forced many Hmong people to leave the region entirely. A vast Hmong diaspora now stretches across many countries around the world, and the Hmong people continue to experience linguistic and cultural liminality.

11.2 Liminality in Hmong Dialect Contact

We begin our analysis from the perspective of dialect contact. Green Hmong/White Hmong cross-dialectal marriages provide an opportunity to explore sociolinguistic patterns in the liminal Hmong American experience. There are several different “cultural divisions” of Hmong society in the United States (Tapp Reference Tapp2003:99–115), and White Hmong and Green HmongFootnote ¹ are two of the largest. Both groups trace their ancestry back to a shared ethnic origin in China (Tapp Reference Tapp2003:99–115; Thao Reference Thao2006:40). According to elders’ knowledge of Hmong oral tradition (Thao Reference Thao2006), White Hmong and Green Hmong were once a single group, the Green Hmong people. The cultural split between Green and White likely occurred in China before or during the eighteenth century (Ratliff Reference Ratliff2010; Tapp Reference Tapp2003; Thao Reference Thao2006). Nibbs (Reference Nibbs2013, Reference Nibbs2014) finds that modern Green Hmong and White Hmong people maintain these shared notions of ethnic origins regardless of whether they currently live in Southeast Asia or in the Western diaspora.

In addition to the Green/White distinction, the Hmong people divide their society into eighteen clans that are believed to predate the Green/White split. In this way, Hmong society has multiple kinship dimensions: a clan system and the Green/White contrast (Nibbs Reference Nibbs2013). Hmong people report no significant dialect differences between clans, nor do we find any clan dialect contrasts in prior literature (e.g., Burt Reference Burt2009, Reference Burt2010; Lyman Reference Lyman1974; Ratliff Reference Ratliff1992, Reference Ratliff2010; Thoj Reference Thoj2000; Thoj & Xyooj Reference Thoj and Xyooj1984; Xiong Reference Xiong2005) or in our own recorded data. Instead, the dialect differences we find are between White Hmong and Green Hmong.

The modern linguistic reflexes of the ancestral Green/White split can be observed in cross-dialectal marriages. Hmong people strictly practice clan exogamy, but there is no expectation to marry across the Green/White cultural boundary. In the United States, Green/Green or White/White marriages are the most common, but Green/White marriages are acceptable as well. If a marriage crosses the Green/White boundary, the wife is traditionally expected to acquire all the dialect features and cultural patterns of her husband’s family (Keown-Bomar Reference Keown-Bomar2004:46; Thao Reference Thao2006:37–40). White Hmong and Green Hmong share a good amount of lexicon and structure (Ratliff Reference Ratliff1992), but speakers also report significant lexical and phonological differences. The following quote from a Green Hmong woman highlights the learning process that new wives are expected to follow:

In these immigrant homes in the United States, the spouses face a linguistic choice: Which Hmong dialect will be spoken in the home? Will the wives continue to follow the tradition of acquiring the husband’s dialect, or will some women take advantage of this liminal, transitional time in Hmong history to challenge the system? After all, these Green/White linguistic beliefs and attitudes about marriage are closely related to other traditional gender roles in the household. For example, a Hmong daughter-in-law is traditionally expected to primarily work as a homemaker, but many Hmong American women are choosing different career paths and educational opportunities. If a wife challenges the linguistic expectations, she is also challenging other gendered customs and attitudes. As we discuss below, some Hmong American women are in fact resisting the traditional sociolinguistic attitudes and norms from Laos: such Hmong American women no longer believe that they should have to acquire the husband’s dialect (Nibbs Reference Nibbs2013; Stanford Reference Stanford2010b).

11.2.1 An Empirical Study of Green/White Hmong Liminality

In the following, we examine a study of 10 Hmong households in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area (for more detailed results and discussion, see Stanford Reference Stanford2010b and Nibbs Reference Nibbs2013).Footnote ² The research questions were: In Green Hmong/White Hmong mixed marriages, to what extent do exogamous women follow the traditional expectation of acquiring the husband’s dialect? Why or why not? The study combined in-depth ethnographic interviews with quantified analyses of linguistic variables, and the fieldwork included three activities: Married couples were recorded in three styles: (1) telling a story in Hmong from a wordless children’s book (Mayer Reference Mayer1969); (2) reading a printed list of ninety words (a picture list was used for speakers who were not comfortable reading); and (3) answering a set of ethnographic questions in English. In order to record the linguistic data in the natural social setting of the family, the linguistic interviews were recorded in the living room of each home with both husband and wife present.

The word list was designed to elicit a number of phonological and lexical differences between White Hmong and Green Hmong, including six phonetic variables. Table 11.1 provides examples.

Table 11.1 Six phonetic variables with examples of each one (Adapted from Stanford 2010b)

Variable	White Hmong Example Word	Green Hmong Example Word	English
1. d/kɬ	[de]	[kɬe]	Water
2. ɔ/u	[ɔ]	[u]	Duck
3. Voiceless nasal onsets	[n̥u]	[nu]	Day
4. a/aŋ	[ʒa]	[ʒaŋ]	Dragon
5. ia/a	[nia]	[na]	Mother
6. Tone	[nʈua] with high falling/breathy tone	[nʈua] with low-level tone	Drum

11.2.1.1 Results

Among the ten households, there were six marriages where one spouse was Green Hmong and the other spouse was White Hmong. The remaining four households were endogamous (i.e., the husband and wife were either both Green Hmong or both White Hmong) and served for comparison. For the endogamous households, the results showed that both husband and wife used the expected features of Table 11.1 for their variety of Hmong. For the six mixed marriages, however, there was a high degree of variability.

Figures 11.1 and 11.2 show the results for lexical variables and phonetic variables in the mixed marriages. The first two speakers, “Pa” and “Sheng” (pseudonyms), are Green Hmong women who married White Hmong men, whereas “Shoua,” “Xia,” “Nou,” and “Mai” are White Hmong women who married Green Hmong men. In Figure 11.1 note that Pa, Shoua, and Sheng used Green Hmong lexical items but also some White Hmong. By contrast, the other three women used 100 percent White Hmong features. Figure 11.2 shows a comparable pattern in the phonetic features. Similar variability was observed in the storytelling activity as well. The dialect features in the storytelling activity were analyzed impressionistically by a native Hmong speaker (Mai Youa Moua, Macalester College). While listening to each recording, she marked an impressionistic 20-point scale to judge each speaker between “100% White Hmong” and “100% Green Hmong.” In this way, we obtained a single score (percentage) for each speaker (Figure 11.3). Gooskens & Heeringa (Reference Gooskens and Heeringa2004) use a similar scale to rate perceptions of Norwegian dialects. This holistic analysis of the Hmong storytelling activity was designed as a counterbalance to the feature-by-feature analysis that we used for the word list. In the end, both approaches produced comparable outcomes. For the six women in mixed marriages, three were rated as 100 percent White Hmong in their storytelling, while three showed some variability (95 percent Green Hmong, 5 percent White Hmong) (Figure 11.3).

Figure 11.1 Results for lexical variables. Source: Adapted from Stanford (2010b)

Figure 11.2 Results for phonetic variables. Source: Adapted from Stanford (2010b)

Figure 11.3 Results for story-telling. Source: Adapted from Stanford (2010b)

In Figures 11.1, 11.2, and 11.3, the key result is that several of the women produced very little of the husband’s dialect features, unlike the tradition inLaos. In particular, Pa (Green Hmong), Xia (White Hmong), Nou (White Hmong), and Mai (White Hmong) maintained their original dialects at a level of 90 percent or higher in all three measures. Sheng (Green Hmong) and Shoua (White Hmong) showed evidence of acquiring the husband’s dialect features. For example, note that Pa (Green Hmong) continues to use over 90 percent Green features, even though she married into a White Hmong household. But another Green Hmong woman, Sheng, used 60.4 percent White Hmong lexical items, following her husband’s dialect. Shoua is a White Hmong woman who used 95 percent of her husband’s Green Hmong dialect in both phonetic features and in the storytelling score, as well as 79 percent Green Hmong in lexical items.

Why then are some of the women resisting the traditional expectation of acquiring their husband’s dialect? Individuals’ speech patterns can be influenced by a wide range of possible factors, many of which go beyond the scope of this study. But taking a language regard perspective, we find that the ethnographic interviews provide valuable insights into this question. One interest of scholars is how women use language to foster more equitable relations and free themselves from social inequalities in other parts of their lives (Nibbs Reference Nibbs, Vang, Nibbs and Vang2016). We find this theme in our study as well. First, consider Excerpt (1), where a Hmong woman and her sister show evidence of an attitude of acceptance toward the tradition of acquiring the dialect of their in-laws.

(1)

[My sister’s husband’s family] is very, very traditional! ... My little sister was thrown into a world and household with totally different rules ... she speaks all White [Hmong] now ... Even though my generation is Americanized, we are still expected to know the Hmong culture and still follow it.

(Stanford Reference Stanford2010b:106)

By contrast, Excerpt (2) shows an example of a wife who has chosen to resist the customary expectations of acquiring her husband’s dialect. Notice the way she expresses her attitudes about her relationships and dialects in the in-laws’ home, where she lives.

(2)

They tell me to [switch dialects]. But I don’t want to change my identity to something I’m not, so I don’t <laughs> ... They [in-laws] tell me that I am “their people” now, and that I have to speak their language ... To me, I’m brought up in a White [Hmong] family, and it makes me happy to speak in my language, so I don’t feel like I have to change myself to make them happy.

(Stanford Reference Stanford2010b:106)

Notably, many of the women invoked the notion of “American freedom of speech” as the reason for their stance against the tradition of acquiring the husband’s dialect (Excerpt 3).

(3)

They understand that here in America, we have freedom of speech ... it doesn’t mean that you have to speak only [Green Hmong] in order to be a good wife or a good daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, or a good person. It’s in your heart and how you carry yourself.

(Stanford Reference Stanford2010b:107)

For the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the notion of freedom of speech is typically interpreted as a matter of speech content, not speech form. But these Hmong women are creatively appropriating this notion in terms of speech form, i.e., speaking Green Hmong or White Hmong (Stanford Reference Stanford2010b; Stanford & Pan Reference Stanford and Pan2013). Such women are using this liminal moment – the transitional phase of Hmong/US contact – to challenge the traditional sociolinguistic expectations as well as their social position within society. Kandiyoti (Reference Kandiyoti1988:289) suggests that women engage in “patriarchal bargaining” in response to new locations and globalized forces, where they contest, redefine, and renegotiate their position in the face of male domination.

Citing “American freedom of speech,” some Hmong American women are choosing to sociolinguistically challenge the traditional gendered patterns of their community, and to challenge the gendered forms of hierarchies enmeshed within tradition. These dialect choices reflect and construct a significant change in language regard, including changes in beliefs and attitudes about which dialect is the appropriate one to use in the in-laws’ household. In our interviews, Hmong people described the wife’s dialect acquisition in terms of an attitude of “respect” for the in-laws and their traditions. However, as we find, some Hmong American women are now questioning these traditional beliefs and attitudes toward language. Their stance of resistance to the husband’s dialect resonates with other changes in gender roles in Hmong households. In this way, this study adds to a growing body of literature on the many ways Hmong women “claim space” through agentic and empowering acts that challenge the social practices that restrict their lives (Vang, Nibbs & Vang Reference Vang, Nibbs and Vang2016).

11.3 Liminality in Language Contact: Hmong and English

Dialect contact is only half of the story. Hmong people are also undergoing a state of liminality as they encounter English. As with Green/White Hmong dialect contact, Hmong/English language contact is a liminal setting where changes in language regard are occurring (Lee Reference Lee1999). In this section, we examine Hmong English in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, which has the largest metropolitan population of Hmong people in the United States (Pfeifer et al. Reference Pfeifer, Sullivan, Yang and Yang2012:8). First, we briefly summarize two recent sociophonetic studies of Hmong English speakers in Minnesota (Ito Reference Ito2010; Kaiser Reference Kaiser2011). We then take a language regard approach, in this case folk linguistics and ethnography, to probe a set of recorded ethnographic interviews. Focusing on the comments and personal stories of two particular speakers, we explore how these speakers are positioning themselves in this liminal period of cultural and linguistic contact, both in terms of language and power relations.

11.4 Conclusions

When and why does language regard change? And how does it relate to other changes and strategies of empowerment by people who are disadvantaged or subordinate, either in terms of gender or ethnicity? This study suggests that answers to these questions can be found in liminal settings where “social relations may be discontinued, former rights and obligations are suspended, the social order may seem to have been turned upside down” (Turner Reference Turner1974:57, Reference Turner1982:24, 27). Language attitudes and beliefs may change in other situations as well, but our study suggests that liminal settings are key situations to explore these changes.

This is certainly the case for Hmong Americans, where current generations have undergone dramatic displacement and cross-cultural contact. In the study of contact between two Hmong dialects (White Hmong and Green Hmong), we observed that traditional sociolinguistic attitudes toward dialects are changing; some of the wives are challenging the gendered sociolinguistic norms. Likewise, in the study of Hmong language contact with English, the liminal situation is leading to change as the speakers showed generational shifts in their beliefs and attitudes toward English and Hmong.

For multilingual, multidialectal immigrant communities, language regard plays an important role, both reflecting and constructing society. While different aspects of language regard may be traced to a number of factors in different societies, these Hmong American case studies support our point that liminal situations are especially favorable environments for changes in language regard to occur. Language regard research will therefore benefit from an increasing focus on liminal situations and diverse, linguistically complex societies.

12.1 Introduction

Although the gap in the number of production and regard studies within the general field of sociolinguistics is being reduced, it still exists within second language acquisition (SLA) research focusing on the sociolinguistic competence of non-native speakers (NNS). Therefore, Preston’s remark (Reference Preston1989:52) made twenty-five years ago about the modest interest of SLA researchers in the study of attitudes to language varieties is still relevant today. Indeed, in their state-of-the art chapter on the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence by NNS, Howard et al. (Reference Howard, Mougeon, Dewaele, Bayley, Cameron and Lucas2013:354–355) calls for more research on “meta-awareness” of NNS and admit that the knowledge of sociolinguistic norms by NNS is an issue that remains unanswered.

Curiously, then, socio-geographical variation, a term I use to highlight the fact that linguistic variables may be both geographically (regionally) and socially stratified (within a region), has received relatively little attention in SLA research. In fact, SLA research on linguistic variation has been primarily focused on register or stylistic variation, i.e., the use of linguistic variables tied to situation and to degrees of formality. Yet, at least two important issues support taking socio-geographical variation into account within the study of the sociolinguistic competence of NNS. The first concerns the choice of the language variety and teaching material in regular classroom instruction. An explicit definition of the language model and its appropriateness to learners’ communication needs (e.g., what variety of French should be taught to a European speaker migrating to French-speaking Canada?) would certainly lead to a better development of NNS’ conversational proficiency (Detey & Racine Reference Detey and Racine2012). Second, in an environment where the learnt language is dominant (like French in French-speaking Switzerland or English in the United States), responses to the questions of who the learners’ speech models are and whether they are different from that of native speakers (NS) would shed light on what language practice counts as standard by NNS, as well as on the recent trend concerning the increasing variability within the limits of the European standard languages (e.g., Kristiansen & Coupland Reference Kristiansen and Coupland2011).

The study presented in this chapter aims to answer these questions and investigates the attitudes of NNS in French-speaking Switzerland to several socio-geographical varieties of French.

12.2 Sociolinguistic Competence of NNS

Drawing on Hymes’ (Reference Hymes, Pride and Holmes1972) work on communicative competence, Canale and Swain (Reference Canale and Swain1980) proposed a theoretical framework, which distinguished sociolinguistic competence as one of the core components of second language learners’ competence. Further developments integrated sociolinguistic competence within more or less large sets. For Bachman (Reference Bachman1990:87), for instance, sociolinguistic competence is a part of pragmatic competence and includes, in particular, manipulation by NNS of dialects’ and varieties’ social meaning. This theoretical research was applied in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFRL) (European Council 2000), in which socio-geographical variation (“dialect and accent” in the framework) is part of sociolinguistic competence next to situational or sociopragmatic variation (“differences in register”).

Despite the importance attached to the handling of socio-geographical variation by NNS, SLA research has generally focused on the differences in register. The main outcome of these studies suggests that NNS underuse informal variants and overuse formal variants compared to NS (e.g., Mougeon et al. Reference Mougeon, Nadasdi and Rehner2010; Howard et al. Reference Howard, Mougeon, Dewaele, Bayley, Cameron and Lucas2013). This outcome is mainly explained by the role of learning context, where long-term naturalistic exposure (for example, within study abroad programs) is more efficient for the acquisition of sociolinguistic competence than classroom exposure. The focus on situational and sociopragmatic variation (e.g., address forms, the negative particle ne in French) is characteristic not only of the variationist studies I just mentioned, but also of more ethnographic, “identity construction,” approaches (e.g., Kinginger Reference Kinginger2008).

Despite the general focus on the use of linguistic variables tied to situation and to degrees of formality, several scholars have addressed socio-geographical variation through the study of attitudes towards language varieties. Most of these studies are concerned with English and aim to identify which variety of English serves as a model in a non-English speaking environment (e.g., in the French context, Edensor Reference Edensor2010; in the Danish context, Ladegaard Reference Ladegaard1998 and Ladegaard & Sachdev Reference Ladegaard and Itesh2006; in the Japanese context, Evans & Imai Reference Evans and Imai2011). Similar concerns are addressed by Pettorino et al. (Reference Pettorino, Meo, Vitale, Girard and Falkert2013), who studied perceptions of varieties of French in the Italian context. To my knowledge, only one study has addressed NNS’ attitudes to socio-geographical variation in a community (US) where the speakers’ second language is a dominant one (Eisenstein Reference Eisenstein1982).

The main results of these studies suggest that NNS are generally less able to identify regional varieties than NS, but that this ability increases with proficiency and exposure to variation. However, even in non-natural settings, NNS recognize the difference between the variety presented as a model by teachers, and other dialects. Another important outcome of these studies is that despite potential differences in dialect recognition, NNS’ evaluative reactions to regional variation are similar to the judgments made by NS. In particular, speakers generally uphold one standard variety in opposition to a set of nonstandard dialects, which is not surprising given that the idea of one best variety is prominent in most standard language cultures (Milroy Reference Milroy2001). The main limitation of most of these studies is that the varieties presented to the speakers tend to be underspecified, insofar as each variety is generally represented by one voice, which raises the issues of the authenticity of such recordings (Garrett et al. Reference Garrett, Coupland and Williams2003:51–61) and that of the uniformity of standard variety.

Thus, previous second language learner research has mostly focused on attitudes towards language varieties in the context of the NNS’ learning environments outside of the regions where the language is used as a first language (e.g., French learned in a non-French-speaking environment). However, it is also worth studying NNS’ attitudes in an environment where the learnt language is dominant (like French in French-speaking Switzerland or English in the United States). Such research can help to address important issues raised by migration, insofar as it now constitutes a major contribution in new speakers of European languagesFootnote ¹. Capturing NNS’ language regard with respect to socio-geographical variation in such an environment becomes essential in order to understand new speakers’ impact on language variation within the host community. It can, in particular, provide a better understanding of new speakers’ impact on the recent trend concerning the increasing variability within the limits of the European standard languages. There is indeed evidence that European standard languages are currently undergoing important changes (e.g., Kristiansen & Coupland Reference Kristiansen and Coupland2011), leading, in particular, to including in the standard more regional varieties recognized as legitimate by lay speakers. Grondelaers et al. (Reference Grondelaers, Gent and Hout2015) suggest three main causes of such stretching of standard varieties: (1) the progressive informalization of the Western societies, (2) immigration, and (3) the loss of dialects, which requires other linguistic resources for the expression of regional and national identity.

Given the above, I aim to evaluate what language practice counts today as standard by NNS in French-speaking Switzerland and whether there are differences between NS and NNS in defining the standard variety. Prior to presenting my study, the next section provides some background on the sociolinguistic situation in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

12.3 French-speaking Switzerland: A Sociolinguistic Background

French-speaking Switzerland (Suisse romande in French) consists of four officially monolingual cantons (Geneva, Vaud, Neuchâtel, and Jura) and the Francophone parts of three bilingual cantons (Fribourg, Bern, and Valais). One of the most important aspects of the current linguistic landscape in Suisse romande is the lack of contact between French and indigenous Romance (mainly Francoprovençal) languages or patois, which is a folk term for these languages (Francard Reference Francard2001). This is the outcome of a long process of linguistic unification, which saw the number of patois speakers decrease relatively quickly in favor of French, mainly because of the spread of public education in the first half of the twentieth century. This promotion of French was accompanied by a strong purist discourse, which tended to condemn most marks of local variation (see Thibault Reference Thibault1998 for an overview). However, stigmatization focused more on linguistic features resulting from contact with indigenous languages (dialectalisms) and German (germanisms), than on archaisms (i.e., items which are still in use in Suisse romande, but which are no longer used in the Standard French of France) and local innovations (i.e., items of French origin which do not exist in the Standard French of France).

In the second half of the twentieth century, a great number of dialectological studies emerged that continued to share not only a focus on dialectal lexical features but also a prescriptive point of view on them. In fact, these linguistic features were considered not French and, therefore, treated as violations of the norm (e.g., Voillat Reference Voillat and Marzys1971:217). These elements have contributed, to a large extent, to the prominence of dialectal features within the global concept of the local variety of French.Footnote ²

After years of convergence toward the French of France, recent studies point to the emergence of a Swiss Standard (Prikhodkine Reference Prikhodkine2011; Racine et al. Reference Racine, Schwab, Detey and Falkert2013), which is supported by a number of nondialectal features, such as “innovations” – items of French origin that do not exist in the Standard French of France (Prikhodkine Reference Prikhodkine, Prikhodkine and Preston2015). Although these features enjoy overt prestige, their social acceptance does not challenge the standard language ideology, insofar as ideological support given to Swiss features is still based on the idea of the superiority of one language variety over others (see Kristiansen & Coupland Reference Kristiansen and Coupland2011 on the standard language ideology’s role within the process of destandardization).

However, within the standard variety, we can note a broadening of socially acceptable linguistic variation. The study of Moreau et al. (Reference Moreau, Bouchard, Demartin, Gadet, Guerin, Harmegnies, Huet, Laroussi, Prikhodkine, Singy, Thiam and Tyne2007) suggests that Swiss listeners attribute prestige to regional and socially determined varieties. In particular, native regionally flavored speech (Swiss, French, Belgian, and, to some extent, Canadian speakers) tends to be considered as standard, provided that it falls within the upper middle class. At the same time, the speech of non-native as well as native lower middle-class speakers is excluded from the standard language. Given the above, one could argue that the increasing variability of the standard language is also characteristic of French in Suisse romande.

In the next sections, I consider to what extent such a broadened view on the limits of the standard variety is shared by NNS living in French-speaking Switzerland.

12.4 Methods

Ninety-one non-native listeners studying in French-speaking Switzerland were asked to fill out a questionnaire in which they had to judge forty recorded NS describing a picture from a comic book. All speakers spent most of their lives in one of six French-speaking countries (Belgium, France, Canada-Quebec, Senegal, Switzerland, and Tunisia). During the first listening, the respondents had to judge the suitability of the speakers for a job as an instructor of French as Second Language in a University situated in French-speaking Switzerland and were also asked to judge them on comprehensibility and correctness scales. During the second listening, participants were asked to identify the country of origin of each speaker.

12.5 Results

12.5.1 Job Suitability

The results were analyzed to assess the relationship between participants’ responses and two independent variables: country of origin and educational level of speakers. A one-way ANOVA showed a significant effect of the speakers’ country (F=6.515, p=.000). Quebecois and Senegalese are judged as less suitable for the job as a French as a second language lecturer than Europeans (Belgian, French, and Swiss) and Tunisians. Fisher’s LSD post hoc testFootnote ⁶ indicates that differences are significant between European and Quebecois/Senegalese speakers, but not between Europeans and Tunisians.

The effect of the NS’ educational level is also significant (F=9.684, p=.004), academics being perceived as more suitable for the job than speakers with vocational training. However, the interaction between the variables country and educational level is not significant (F=0.243, p=.865). In fact, within each national group, we find the same pattern: NS are judged more suitable for the job when they are academics (see Figure 12.1).

Note, in Figure 12.1 and in the following figures/tables, the first component of each abbreviation refers to the speakers’ country (e.g., BEL=Belgians), the second concerns the NS’ educational level (e.g., Long=speakers with a university degreeFootnote ⁷). That is, the abbreviation BEL_Long should be read as “Belgian speakers with a university degree.” Remember that NNS are not stratified according to the educational level, so their abbreviation only consists of the country (e.g., TUN=Tunisians).

Figure 12.1 Speakers’ suitability for the job as a lecturer of French as a second language: Participants’ responses (on a 6-point scale) by speakers’ country and level of education

Analyses of variance provide results related to a priori constructed groups. To check how far the groups actually identified by respondents are consistent with those of the researcher, a hierarchical cluster analysis (using the Ward method) was performed. This analysis aims to identify “groups of individuals or objects that are similar to each other but different from individuals in other groups” (Norušis Reference Norušis2008:359). Results displayed in Figure 12.2, where three main clusters can be distinguished, seem to confirm the earlier observed pattern. The cluster at the top of the dendrogram (cluster A) consists of speakers who are most similar in terms of evaluation of their job suitability and which have the highest scores. As it turns out, this cluster aggregates only European speakers with a university degree, the majority of whom are Swiss speakers. Cluster B combines mainly French and Belgian speakers of both levels of education, as well as Tunisians and Swiss with vocational training. However, it is worth noting that, within this cluster, academics, which get higher ratings, tend to be grouped in a separate subgroup from speakers with vocational training. Let’s have a look now at the cluster at the bottom of the dendrogram, cluster C, which brings together the lowest-valued speech samples and which is fairly dissimilar to clusters A and B (i.e., they are combined at the maximum distance). For the majority of the aggregated recordings, cluster C consists of Quebecois (of both levels of education) and Senegalese speakers. In other words, non-native listeners tend to stigmatize varieties, which are phonetically divergent from the French spoken in western Switzerland and, more generally, in Europe (Côté Reference Côté, Gess and Meisenburg2011; Akissi Boutin et al. Reference Akissi Boutin, Gess and Gabriel2011).

Figure 12.2 Speakers’ suitability for the job as a lecturer of French as a second language: Hierarchical cluster analysis (Ward method)

Let’s now see to what extent there are differences between native (found in Moreau et al. Reference Moreau, Bouchard, Demartin, Gadet, Guerin, Harmegnies, Huet, Laroussi, Prikhodkine, Singy, Thiam and Tyne2007) and non-native participants towards socio-geographical variation. Table 12.2 presents speaker categories ranked according to their mean on the job suitability scale. The non-native participants’ ranking is at the top of the table and the native participants’ ranking, taken from Moreau et al. (Reference Moreau, Bouchard, Demartin, Gadet, Guerin, Harmegnies, Huet, Laroussi, Prikhodkine, Singy, Thiam and Tyne2007), is at the bottom. The comparison shows that the first three positions coincide: Both native and non-native listeners prefer European speakers with a university degree. One of the biggest differences between the rankings is the position of Quebecois speakers. Indeed, native listeners also attribute prestige to Quebecois academics (QUE Long), which occupy the fourth position ahead of NS with vocational training, both European and Quebecois. This is quite different from the non-native listeners’ ranking, where Quebecois academics are downgraded to the eighth position, together with Senegalese speakers. Another difference concerns the ranking of Swiss speakers with vocational training (SWI Short), who are upgraded to the fourth position by non-native listeners. However, such upgrading does not challenge the general pattern of evaluation, in which the preference is given to persons with a university degree. Finally, it is also worth noting the better evaluation of Tunisian speakers by non-natives, which we address in Section 12.5.3.

Table 12.2 Native and non-native rankings for job suitability (1= highest suitability, 10= lowest suitability)

Non-native ranking	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
	SWI Long	FRA Long	BEL Long	SWI Short	TUN	BEL Short	FRA Short	QUE Long	SEN	QUE Short
Native ranking (Moreau et al. Reference Moreau, Bouchard, Demartin, Gadet, Guerin, Harmegnies, Huet, Laroussi, Prikhodkine, Singy, Thiam and Tyne2007)	1	2	3	8	9	5	6	4	7	10

12.5.2 Comprehensibility

To what extent do the evaluative reactions described above correlate with subjective judgments of comprehension? In other words, do non-native listeners prefer the speakers they understand better? Such a link between social evaluation and comprehensibility is often expressed through the notion of familiarity or “strangeness.” For instance, Bezooijen (Reference Bezooijen1994:261) argues that “the differences in aesthetic appreciation could be explained in terms of ‘strangeness’, familiar objects tending to evoke more pleasant feelings than unfamiliar objects.” To provide some answers on the possible link between evaluation and comprehension, participants of this study were invited to indicate their comprehension of the same forty speakers they had to assess for job suitability and the results are shown in Figure 12.3.

Figure 12.3 Speakers’ comprehensibility: Participants’ responses (on a 4-point scale) by speakers’ country and level of education

A one-way ANOVA showed a significant effect of the speakers’ country (F=8.210, p=.000). As expected, Swiss speakers are found to be the most comprehensible, although the difference between Swiss and other European speakers (Belgian and French) is not significant. Fisher’s LSD post hoc test also shows that Quebecois, Senegalese, and Tunisian speakers are significantly perceived as less comprehensible than Swiss speakers.

Although the level of education has less impact on the subjective judgment of comprehension (F=3.853, p=.059), one can note the same trend that was found in the results for job suitability: Academics tend to be perceived as more comprehensible than speakers with vocational training. As we find the same pattern within each national group, the interaction between country and level of education is expectedly not significant (F=0.984, p=.417). Therefore, the subjective judgments of comprehension generally tend to coincide with evaluative reactions on job suitability. There is, however, one striking difference, which concerns the position of Tunisian speakers. Indeed, the participants say they do not understand Tunisian speakers well, but they still evaluate them quite well in terms of job suitability. Native participants in Moreau et al. (Reference Moreau, Bouchard, Demartin, Gadet, Guerin, Harmegnies, Huet, Laroussi, Prikhodkine, Singy, Thiam and Tyne2007) also demonstrate a discrepancy between evaluation in terms of job suitability and comprehensibility scores. This discrepancy in native data concerns Quebecois speakers with a university degree, which seem to enjoy a certain prestige even if they are perceived as poorly comprehensible.

Such discrepancies suggest that comprehension ability and social evaluation refer partly to two different dimensions and could function independently (see also Schüppert et al. Reference Schüppert, Hilton and Gooskens2015). Several studies also suggest that comprehension does not result from neutral cognitive processing, but that it can be influenced by language regard-based interference (Preston Reference Preston, Prikhodkine and Preston2015). All this evidence should invite scholars to be more careful when seeking to explain the social evaluation of language varieties only by their comprehensibility.

12.5.3 Identification

To identify the country of origin of each speaker, participants were presented with six possible choices: Belgium, France, Quebec, Senegal, Switzerland, and Tunisia. This task aimed first to determine if non-native listeners are able to identify speakers of different origins to the same extent as natives.Footnote ⁸ A second purpose of this task was to explain the job suitability ratings, as the social evaluation of speech samples is related to their connection to particular social groups (Preston Reference Preston, Prikhodkine and Preston2015).

Results displayed in Figure 12.4 show that participants in this study have a rather good knowledge of different varieties of French and their responses pattern similarly to native listeners’ data (Moreau et al. Reference Moreau, Bouchard, Demartin, Gadet, Guerin, Harmegnies, Huet, Laroussi, Prikhodkine, Singy, Thiam and Tyne2007). Indeed, the correct identifications generally have the highest scores (e.g., Swiss speakers are most often identified as Swiss, Senegalese speakers as Senegalese, etc.), except for Belgian and Tunisian speakers. One-way ANOVA showed a significant effect of the speakers’ country (F=10.272, p=.000). However, the level of education does not have an impact on the identification (F=0.391, p=.537), nor does the interaction between country and level of education (F=0.796, p=.381). This result suggests that although the best-educated speakers tend to show a greater loss of regional features (e.g., Armstrong & Pooley Reference Armstrong and Pooley2010), they still use enough regional variation to be perceived as speakers of their national variety.

Figure 12.4 Speaker identification by non-native listeners. On the X axis, abbreviations refer to speakers (e.g. BEL – Belgian speakers). The Y axis displays percentages of responses given by listeners. At the right, abbreviations define the type of response (e.g. “Bel” means that a speaker was identified as a Belgian)

Fisher’s LSD post hoc test confirms that Belgian and Tunisian speakers are significantly less well identified than speakers from other countries. Participants were probably unfamiliar with such speakers and, in doubt, they attributed French or Swiss origins to them. Arguably, this identification is responsible for the rather good rating of Tunisians in the job suitability task (see Table 12.2). In comparison with Tunisians, other non-European speakers, Quebecois and Senegalese, were rather well identified as such. If we aggregate the responses, Quebec, Senegal, Tunisia, Quebecois, and Senegalese speakers obtain nearly 80 percent of correct identifications. Thus, learners have a good idea of a non-European variety and clearly perceive the phonetic distance.

As regards European speakers, they are mainly perceived as French or Swiss. Two trends already observed in the Moreau et al. (Reference Moreau, Bouchard, Demartin, Gadet, Guerin, Harmegnies, Huet, Laroussi, Prikhodkine, Singy, Thiam and Tyne2007) study could explain these results. First, what might be called the attraction of the prototype (one chooses “France” as French speakers are the most representative group of French-speaking people) and second, the annexationist trend (listeners tend to include or “annex” speakers in their own group; this means that Swiss listeners favor “Swiss” identifications). As these trends are expressed more strongly in non-native data, it is possible that our participants confuse, to a certain extent, Swiss and French samples. If so, would it be possible that Swiss speakers have high ratings for job suitability because they are perceived in fact as French? A one-way ANOVA showed that whatever the identification, participants’ responses for these speakers on the job suitability scale do not vary in a significant way.

12.6 Discussion and Conclusion

This chapter has reported a survey focused on learners of French as a second language (FSL) in Switzerland and their attitudes to socio-geographical variation in French. In particular, it aimed to determine what language practice counts as standard by NNS and to investigate whether there are differences between NS and NNS in defining the standard variety.

Data analyzed in this article show that like NS of French, FSL learners base their ranking of language varieties on social and national criteria. Thus, they attribute prestige to European speakers with a university degree (with a slight preference for Swiss speakers), at the expense of speakers with vocational training. This indicates that FSL learners have well integrated the social meaning of language variation within French-speaking Switzerland. The salience of the social criteria in their responses is hardly surprising in itself, insofar as the tendency to associate prestige and spoken language of the upper middle class is characteristic of the standard language cultures (Lippi-Green Reference Lippi-Green2012; Milroy Reference Milroy2001).

The basic finding concerns the differences in natives’ and non-natives’ rankings of language varieties. In fact, native and non-native participants do not share the same representation of what is acceptable within the limits of the standard variety. Contrary to NS, FSL learners tend to stigmatize Canadian (Quebecois) speakers with a university degree, and they are more severe with NNS identified as such (Senegalese). Therefore, the limits of the standard variety are more restrictive for FSL learners, who exclude non-European variation from the definition of the standard language. The fact that FSL learners set up a hierarchy of different varieties and tend to stigmatize NNS is not specific to French. Indeed, we can observe a similar pattern in studies exploring attitudes of learners of English as second language (e.g., Evans & Imai Reference Evans and Imai2011; Ladegaard & Sachdev Reference Ladegaard and Itesh2006). What is new, however, is the fact that NNS’ regard for language variation is less tolerant than that of NS.

How could we explain such a restrictive view on the acceptable variation in French? Two related factors could account for the FSL learners’ attitudes. First, material illustrating socio-geographical variation in French is rarely used in classroom teaching (Detey & Racine Reference Detey and Racine2012) and when used, it is not generally accompanied by a reflection on the social meaning of the variation (Mougeon et al. Reference Mougeon, Nadasdi and Rehner2010). Since the models that learners are exposed to in the classroom and through the media are Swiss and French, it is not surprising that speech samples perceived as phonetically distant from them are downgraded. In this regard, Ladegaard and Sachdev (Reference Ladegaard and Itesh2006) emphasize the importance of assessing the impact of teacher attitudes toward variation, while Kubota (Reference Kubota1998) calls for the inclusion of non-native varieties in second language curriculums.

Another explanation concerns an ideological reinterpretation by FSL learners of what language practice is considered as standard by NS. Remember that for them, like for the speakers from many other countries where “one nation, one language” ideology is dominant (Lippi-Green Reference Lippi-Green2012), the non-native speech is excluded from the definition of the standard language. Since the variety spoken by our participants is excluded from the standard space, and since classroom teaching lacks illustrations of variation, they tend to project this opposition (native vs non-native) to another level: native European (or local) vs non-European. Therefore, FSL learners reinterpret sociolinguistic variation in the way Irvine and Gal (Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000:38) call “fractal recursivity” (a semiotic process “which involves the projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level”). As long as the factors underlying such an ideological reinterpretation (e.g., stigmatization of non-native speech, restricted views on variation in classroom) do not undergo changes, there would not be any sign of change in FSL learners’ attitudes. This seems to be confirmed in our data by the absence of any effect of the variables “duration of study of French” and “length of stay in Switzerland” on the varieties’ ranking.

At least two important issues can be outlined from these results. The first one concerns destandardization processes and an increasing variability within the limits of the European standard languages. As discussed, NNS’ regard for language variation seems less tolerant than that of NS. Therefore, since migration provides a major contribution of new speakers of European languages, the general tendency of more tolerance toward variation in Western societies (see Section 12.2) could be reversed, considering the more prescriptivist attitudes of NNS reported in this chapter. The second issue is related to the consequences for NNS of such a restricted view on what language practice counts as standard. Indeed, by excluding any difference from native European-flavored speech, de facto advanced FSL learners stigmatize their own speech and do not consider themselves as legitimate French speakers. Yet, there is ample evidence that such beliefs may lead NNS not only to lower their linguistic proficiency (see Steele & Aronson Reference Steele and Aronson1995 on stereotype threat), but also to feel less belonging to the local community (e.g., Gluszek & Dovidio Reference Gluszek and Dovidio2010). Since national language courses and testing are increasingly becoming compulsory for migrants in Western countries (e.g., Hogan-Brun et al. Reference Hogan-Brun, Mar-Molinero and Stevenson2009), both issues mentioned above advocate for a greater integration of socio-geographical variation in national language teaching. Importantly, if one wants the migrants to achieve a more open view on language variation, pedagogical material illustrating variation should be accompanied by a critical reflection on the dominant ideologies involved in the definition of the national language legitimate speaker.

The study presented in this chapter suggests that the work on non-natives’ language regard to socio-geographical variation could be a fruitful research field not only, as in previous research, for concerns about the language variety being learnt and the future of a language around the world. It can also help us understand the impact NNS’ regard may have on language variation in a community where the language learnt is a dominant one (e.g., English in the United States, French in French-speaking Switzerland, etc.). This perspective, which means considering the NNS not as learners but as members of the community alongside the NS, would also bring into focus potential conflicts arising around the definitions of what language practice should be considered as standard and who should be considered as a legitimate speaker.