Тетяна Мітроусова
(Кам’янець-Подільський національний університет імені Івана Огієнка)
CHICANO ENGLISH AS A NONSTANDARD VARIETY OF ENGLISH
English has more words than any other language, anywhere from 600,000 to around a million of them, depending on whom you ask. It is well-known so far, as there is cross-linguistic diversity, there is diversity of Englishes (stated by many scholars, e.g. [1; 3; 4; 5]). English is morphing into Englishes at a fantastic rate, through creolization and ‘self-mutation’. There are 1600 languages currently in use on the Internet, where there was only one in the 1980s. If English maintains its hold as the dominant tool of information, as many predict, then we can imagine Englishes endlessly at play, endlessly reproducing, here, Spanglish, Arablish, etc., code-switching elevated to a global discourse.
As Christian Mair [1, p. 254] reminds us, different varieties of English tend to be construed in terms of territorial boundaries, often representing political borders. Such territories may have more than one variety that are in principle distinguishable (e.g., some Indian Englishes). One variety may be used across several territories (e.g. Nigerian Pidgin across West African countries). Standard English is of course that variety, or set of closely related varieties, which enjoys the highest social prestige. It serves as a reference system and target norm in formal situations, in the language used by people taking on a public persona and as a model in the teaching of English worldwide.
One of a distinctive U.S. English dialects is Chicano. 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. As early as 1974, Allan Metcalf (a professor of English at MacMurray College, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society and author of books on language and writing) provides a very reasonable definition of Chicano English, describing it as: a variety of English that is obviously influenced by Spanish and that has low prestige in most circles, but that nevertheless is independent of Spanish and is the first, and often only, language of many hundreds of thousands of residents of California. It is a nonstandard variety of English, influenced by contact with Spanish, and spoken as a native dialect by both bilingual and monolingual speakers. Thus defined, Chicano English is spoken only by native English speakers.
It is alive and well in Los Angeles, among other places. It is a dialect in its own right, separate both from Spanish and from other local varieties of English such as California Anglo English (CAE) or African-American English (AAE). It is changing, as all dialects do, but shows no signs of being abandoned by the community as a whole in favor of more standard varieties of English. The most salient differences between Chicano English and California Anglo English (CAE) are in the phonology, rather than in the grammar, although it is exactly difficult to say what is different about the Chicano English sound system. Its basic inventory of phonemes is very similar to those of other dialects. As it was shown in many linguistic articles the vowels used by Chicano English speakers do not shift uniformly in the direction of the Spanish language equivalents. Many elements of CE phonology do reflect the influence of Spanish, but some may come from contact with other dialects or from other sources.
Santa Ana and Bayley state in their investigation: «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» [2, p.417]. The scholars show that ChcE 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. Here are some characteristic features:
- ChcE is more monophthongal, especially in monosyllabic words, than other AmE dialects.
- ChcE is articulated with greater vowel space overlap of front vowels than other AmE dialects.
III. ChcE may have a different system of vowel reduction than other AmE dialects.
- ChcE has several linguistic variables (that is to say, variably-occurring ethnic dialect features, discourse markers and prosody contours) that signal Chicano community identities.
The ChcE-specific variables are local community variables, including Greater Los Angeles (e), (ʃ/ ʧ merger), and Texas (-ing), California (i) and the Th-Pro discourse marker. ChcE tends to be monophthongal, particularly its high vowels, /i, u/. Whereas unstressed vowels in most dialects of American English typically centralize to a schwa [ə], as in White Chicago English, only some of ChcE unstressed vowels centralize (Santa Ana 1991). Their high vowels, /i/ and /u/, do not reduce, while mid vowels reduce less frequently than AmE mid vowels. Usually, ChcE compounds are stressed on the second word, rather than the first as they would be in most other English dialects.
ChcE is an interesting sphere for investigation, as it is an important cultural marker, a reminder of linguistic history, a fertile field for the study of language contact phenomena and linguistic identity issues.
REFERENCES
- Mair Christian. The World System of Englishes. Accounting for the transnational importance of mobile and mediated vernaculars. English World-Wide 34(3). 2013. 253-278.
- Santa Ana Otto, Robert Bayley. Chicano English: Phonology. A Handbook of Varieties of English / Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W. Schneider. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Vol. 1. 2004. P.417- 435.
- Schneider Edgar. Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge University Press. 2007. 367
- Siemund Peter. Varieties of English. A Typological Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. 328
- Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts: Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond / eds. Filppula Markku, Juhani Klemola, Heli Paulasto. London: Routledge. 2009. 385