Costa Rica’s second-person singular (2PS) address system is known for both its changing nature and its incorporation of tuteo, ustedeo, and voseo forms. While the latter are generalized across communicative contexts, tuteo use has oscillated over time, being consistently associated with foreignness, effeminacy and homosexuality, with one study (Marín Esquivel, Rebeca. 2012. El pronombre ‘tú’ en los grupos homosexual y heterosexual heredianos. Revista Comunicación 21(2). 31–40) suggesting that homosexual men report using tuteo at levels significantly higher than heterosexuals. In this study, we revisit this finding using new data from a survey that elicited stated preferences for address forms and attitudes towards tuteo across different communicative contexts. Multinomial logistic regressions compared the address choices of homosexual men with those of heterosexual men and women, and attitudes were gauged by means of a thematic analysis. Results indicate that currently, with few exceptions, what best characterizes the distribution of address forms are similarities, regardless of sexuality or gender, with all participants reporting low rates of tuteo use across communicative settings. While these results suggest continued change in tuteo use, linguistic attitudes reveal a persistent perceived ideological connection between tuteo, foreignness, effeminacy and homosexuality.

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The study of service encounters in bilingual communities offers opportunities to gain insight into the factors that influence language choice and accommodation in these interactions and the ways that language may be used to build community. Previous work on bilingual service encounters has found that age, gender, speech turn, and customer ethnicity may all contribute to service providers’ choice of one language over another. This study reexamines language choice and accommodation in Spanish-English service encounters by observing the language use of 96 service providers in 35 Latino-owned restaurants of the Washington metropolitan area. Using data from service encounters between bilingual service providers and Latino and white customers, we explore the extent to which the factors identified in previous studies are relevant in this region. Additionally, we explore whether the increasingly polarized political climate in the United States has impacted language use. We argue that while customer ethnicity is the main deciding factor to start an interaction, service providers always accommodate to customer language subsequently. This demonstrates the importance of both language as a community builder – even in the face of social pressures that sanction the use of Spanish in public spaces – and the power differential that exists between workers and customers in determining language use.

The class of sounds classified under the umbrella term “rhotic” demonstrate considerable variability across, languages, dialects, and speech styles. This is no exception in Spanish, where rhotics have received considerable attention. Among dialects of Spanish, the pronunciation of rhotics in Costa Rican Spanish is a highly salient feature of this variety, where the standard trill /r/ and tap /ɾ/ are often assibilated or realized as fricatives. A number of studies have examined Costa Rican rhotics from both phonological and phonetic perspectives, yet the results of these studies have been inconclusive. Notably absent from these studies are acoustic analyses of rhotic production, instead relying on impressionistic transcriptions which risk glossing over phonetic detail. This pilot study revisits the question of rhotic variation in Costa Rican Spanish by analyzing five sociolinguistic interviews with native speakers of Costa Rican Spanish. Using acoustic analyses of rhotic tokens, I propose a rhotic inventory for this variety which includes approximant and fricative variants in addition to the standard tap and trill. Additionally, I propose a potential explanation for the distribution of rhotic variants through an Articulatory Phonology framework, suggesting that rhotic variation can be explained as a result of gestural weakening and co-articulation. The study presents preliminary conclusions regarding socioeconomic factors, suggesting areas for future research, including the effect of age and gender on rhotic variation. Overall this work contributes to the understanding of the Costa Rican variety of Spanish, considering both linguistic and extralinguistic factors as potential predictors of variation.