How do our linguistic and sociocultural findings inform one another? Our team has been holding conversations to understand the mutual relation between the different components of our analysis. Read below to learn about our collective results.
We collected oral narratives for 20 Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals during our 2014 fieldwork trip. We then analyzed the pronunciation patterns of the bilingual speakers' narratives in Praat, an acoustic analysis software.
At the same time, we tagged the content of the bilingual speakers' narratives and found that the most common topic was Language. Community members expressed feeling "foreign" in both languages.
This graph shows that both Spanish monolinguals and the Afrikaans-Spanish bilinguals use the same vowel space in Spanish. This suggests that Afrikaans pronunciation does not influence the bilinguals' pronunciation in Spanish.
Bilinguals | |||
Monolinguals |
Monolingual Afrikaans speakers and monolingual Spanish speakers have fairly different vowel spaces. Afrikaans monolinguals have a particularly high degree of variation in their vowels, in contrast to Spanish monolinguals, whose /e o a/ vowels do not overlap.
Afrikaans | ||||
Spanish |
The bilingual speakers have very similar vowel spaces in Afrikaans and Spanish. In fact, their vowel spaces in both languages are very similar. This suggests that bilinguals use more Spanish-like phonology in their production of vowels.
Afrikaans | ||||
Spanish |
Afrikaans monolinguals have more variation in their vowel production. This is partially an effect of the Afrikaans of the bilinguals lacking allophonic rules that are present in monolingual Afrikaans.
Monolinguals | ||||
Bilinguals |
CONCLUSION
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