Chicano English: phonology

Chicano English displays a remarkable range of language contact phenomena. Speakers of this ethnic dialect enact their social practices with Chicano English, in conjunction with Chicano Spanish and in some cases other varieties of Spanish and English as well. In dynamic urban multicultural and binational settings, these social practices include surprisingly complex identities and roles (Mendoza-Denton 1997; Fought 2003). Sadly, the general public’s awareness of Chicano English (ChcE) commonly involves stigma, a situation that has not changed in the last forty years. Many U.S. public school educators, in particular, falsely attribute to ChcE a general inadequacy for educational and wider social purposes (Valdés 1998; Valencia 2002). The hostility that ChcE arouses is consistent with the general public’s disapproval of other U.S. ethnic dialects, such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE), whose communities seem to resist the national hegemony of English monolingualism and Standard English.

A commonplace often bandied about is that ChcE is merely “Spanish-accented English”. Both lay people and linguists have this reaction, and the statement expresses some truth, as we will illustrate. However, in the context of some institutional settings, an insidious misunderstanding follows. The misconception is that ChcE is not a dialect, but simply the mispronounced English of Spanish speakers who are learning English as a second language. From this mistaken point of view it follows that if adults speak so-called Spanish-accented English, they are fossilized second language learners, while children demonstrate incomplete learning of English. This misconception has serious social consequences in U.S. schools, where an inordinate number of Chicano students do not advance scholastically. Since these schools are charged with teaching children standard English, educators often falsely conclude that Chicano student failure is a result of their inability to master the standard language.

Many teachers witness evidence each day in the classroom that sustains this falsehood. English-monolingual public school teachers come into contact with Mexican immigrant students, including new immigrant students who are learning English. Several articulatory mismatches strike native English-speaking teachers as discordant. But these classrooms are not linguistically homogeneous. At least three dimensions mark this diversity. Newly arrived immigrants and those who have been in public schools for several years mingle with U.S.-born Chicano students. Second, some of the U.S.-born students are monolingual while others are bilingual. Third, some Chicano students speak the English dialects of their Euro-American teachers, while others speak a native English dialect that both Chicano and Spanish-speaking immigrant children acquire in their home communities. This final variety is ChcE, which appears to maintain certain phonological features that are characteristic of Spanish native-speaker, English-as-a-second-language learner interlanguage, or in the current terminology of U.S. public schools, English language learner (ELL) speech. Speakers of ChcE express social solidarity in their native community dialect by way of these features.

Teachers and other observers, however, tend to conflate the heterogeneity. Upon hearing ChcE, some teachers presume it is learner speech. Accordingly, they are likely to believe that U.S.-born Chicanos also speak an incompletely-native, Spanish-accented English. These children’s educational plight, they believe, can only be alleviated when they stop speaking Spanish, which is thought to interfere with their English, and learn English “well”. This notion expands to the absurd to include children who speak no Spanish. How a language that children cannot speak can interfere with a language that they do speak is left unexplained. We attempt to dispel some of the common misconceptions surrounding ChcE by providing a description of ChcE phonology and its relationship to Spanish on the one hand and Euro-American varieties on the other.