Regional perceptions of the 'ejque'

Abstract

This paper explores the language attitudes of listeners from six different regions of Spain, Asturias, Castile and León, Castile-La Mancha, the Canary Islands, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, towards a nonsibilant variant of coda /s/, the velarized /s/. This velar pronunciation, known by some as the ejque madrileño, has previously been found to index a Madrid identity for Madrileño listeners, though the traits ascribed such a speaker are quite negative. The current paper finds that like Madrileños themselves, participants from Asturias and Castile and León also associate velarized /s/ with Madrid. Participants from Castile-La Mancha, the Canary Islands, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands do not consider the velarized variant to be Madrileño. Furthermore, differing judgments of the nonsibilant /s/ are found among the regions tested, with participants from Catalonia and the Balearic Islands showing the most negative judgments while participants from Castile-La Mancha show no negative variable effect in their judgments. It is found that all of these out-group listeners do not show as severe of judgments as those seen by in-group members (Madrilenos themselves) in previous literature.

The Indeterminacy of Social Meaning Linked to ‘Mexico’ and ‘Texas’ Spanish: Examining Monoglossic Language Ideologies among Heritage and L2 Spanish Listeners

“…As such it is inseparable from the ideological field and can be seen as an embodiment of ideology in linguistic form" (Eckert 2008, p. 464). The multitude of social meanings 8 attached to linguistic variants has been supported by several sociolinguistic perception studies, where the manipulation of a single phonetic variant (Barnes 2015;Campbell-Kibler 2007Chappell 2016Chappell , 2018Chappell , 2019Chappell , 2020Chappell , 2021aRegan 2020Regan , 2022bRegan , 2022cWalker et al 2014;Wright 2021aWright , 2021b or of a single word (Baird et al 2018;Regan 2022a) between guises affects listeners' evaluations. Other sociolinguistic perception studies have examined the indexical fields of language varieties 9 (Callesano and Carter 2019;Carter and Callesano 2018;Chappell and Barnes 2023;Niedzielski and Preston 1999), demonstrating that speech perception research can further our understanding of the social meaning of language varieties as well.…”