12th International Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics

The fundamental questions behind the study of awareness and control of language are simple – how do people become aware of differences in the way that they (and others) speak, and how do they use this implicit or explicit knowledge in the perception and production of linguistic forms?  More generally, this study addresses the question of how people learn and change over time, and how individual differences as well as large-scale patterns may influence our acquisition of second dialects as adults. 

In this talk, I focus on the case of Bolivian migrants to Spain.  It is estimated that up to 150,000 Bolivian migrants – perhaps more – currently live in Spain, with the largest populations around the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, and Murcia. While linguistic practices in both Bolivia and Spain include the use of Spanish (among other languages), there is maximal linguistic differentiation between Bolivian and central-northern European Spanish dialects, encompassing phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and pragmatics. In Bolivian Spanish, contact features from Quechua, an indigenous language of the Andes, become particularly salient in the context of contact with a European variety of Spanish, which is often framed as more “correct” than Bolivian Spanish, and feed into ethnic and linguistic differentiation driven by Latin American migration to Spain.

I report on data gathered from interviews carried out in 2022 and 2025 with more than a hundred Bolivian migrants, both those who remain in Spain and those who returned to Bolivia.  The interviews included a variety of tasks meant to probe different kinds of awareness of dialectal differences.  These methods provide a model for investigating how transnational migrants become aware of differences between Bolivian and European dialects of Spanish, and for investigating different types and qualities of awareness through responses to a variety of different tasks.  I focus on the linguistic features at the highest level of awareness – firstly, differences in “c, s, and z”. In linguistic terms, these encompass the phonemic difference between /s/ and /θ/, which is characteristic of European but not Latin American varieties of Spanish, as well as the use of laminal (Latin American) vs. apical (European) /s/. Secondly, I discuss the use of differing second person pronouns (Ustedes, Usted , tú, vosotros, and vos) and their respective verbal conjugations.  Because interviewees were very aware of these differences – they discussed them explicitly and often performed them in imitations of Spaniards – we are able to trace differing kinds of awareness across different types of tasks, and also take into account individual variation in awareness and positioning.  

Through this analysis, I lay out a methodological and theoretical framework for the study of awareness in dialect contact situations, and for teasing out the multiple intersecting factors that lead to dialect awareness, differentiation, and (sometimes) convergence across speech communities.

What do a straight male Spanish engineer, a French lesbian philosopher, anarchists, a community of visual artists, and Indigenous and intersex rights groups have in common? Since at least the 1970s, all of these parties have shared a concern about the invisibilization of women in masculine-feminine languages, the logic that later became the basis for creating neutral and nonbinary forms of personal reference in Spanish.

Though disparate in their origins, the gender-inclusive Spanish forms converged upon in the present day were borne in response to the semblance of patriarchy encoded in the structure of the language. In 1976, a socially-conscious engineer declared the Spanish language sexist and proposed the -e morpheme as the basis of an additional person gender (García Meseguer, 1976), citing phenomena that would later be theorized by French philosophers as the linguistic embeddedness of women’s subjugation by men (Irigaray, 1985; Wittig, 1985). Later on, the anti-sexist language revolution would turn to address people of other marginalized genders whose identities could not be adequately expressed at all, including nonbinary and intersex people.

While some of these reform proposals extended the -e gender, for instance by proposing the pronoun elle (Gubb, 2013), others relied on more symbolic representations, like the -x, proposed by an anarchist group as a true neutral gender (Grupo Anarquista Pirexia, 2011), by a visual artist as a transfeminist artistic proposal (Lara Icaza, 2014), and by Indigenous rights activists as a way to decolonize the imperial language (Papadopoulos, 2022). Another symbolic innovation, the asterisk, was proposed by Argentinian intersex activist Mauro Cabral (2009).

All of these ideologies, as well as societal resistance to each of them, convene in the concept of gender-inclusive Spanish, multiplying its polarizing effect on different populations. Yet stable systems of gender-inclusivity themselves (e.g. -e and -x genders) are remarkably consistent and effective, especially when considering that Spanish is among the most gendered languages in the world (Papadopoulos, 2025), making bans on gender-inclusive language all the more revealing of transphobia and other forms of discrimination.

This presentation provides a historiography of gender-inclusive Spanish from the anti-sexist language movement of the 1980s until the present day. It contextualizes the relative success of implementing inclusivity in Spanish as compared to other highly gendered languages of its kind and presents experimental research describing its relative ease of use, even among beginning learners of the language (Papadopoulos, 2024). Finally, resistance to gender-inclusive Spanish by institutional authorities is contextualized, compared across countries, cultures, and generations, and the concept of language as a tool of liberation is theorized.

References

Cabral, M. (2009). Interdicciones: Escrituras de la intersexualidad en castellano. Anarrés Editorial.

García Meseguer, Á. (1976). Sexismo y lenguaje. Cambio, 16, 260.

Grupo Anarquista Pirexia. (2011). Nota al uso del lenguaje.

Gubb, S. (2013). Construyendo un género neutro en español–Para una lengua feminista, igualitaria e inclusiva. Sophia Gubb’s Blog.

Irigaray, L. (1985). The sex which is not one. Cornell University Press.

Lara Icaza, G. (2016). Proposición X: Género y sexo en el lenguaje escrito. [Master’s thesis, Universidad Complutense de Madrid].

Papadopoulos, B. (2022). A brief history of gender-inclusive Spanish/Una breve historia del español no binario. Deportate, esuli, profughe, 48(1), 31-48.

Papadopoulos, B. (2024). Identifying gender in gendered languages: The case of Spanish. In K. A. Knisley & E. L. Russell (Eds.), Redoing Linguistic Worlds: Unmaking Gender Binaries, Remaking Gender Pluralities (pp. 196-217). Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/KNISEL5096

Papadopoulos, B. (2025). A humanistic theory of gender in language [Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley]. University of California eScholarship. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4zf9066f

Wittig, M. (1985). The mark of gender. Feminist Issues, 5, 3-12. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02685575

When Lotfi Sayahi organized the first International Workshop of Spanish Sociolinguistics at the University of Albany in 2003, he noted that modern Spanish sociolinguistics has contributed much to sociolinguistics and Spanish linguistics but that a dedicated space was needed both to advance the exploration of Spanish sociolinguistics and to highlight its contributions (Sayahi, 2003). Twenty years on, the field’s contributions are considerable, and a moment of critical reflection is warranted to indicate directions for future growth. I would argue that our work can go further to engage with current issues in the field, namely the multilingual and social justice turns (Ortega, 2013; Mackey et al, 2022; Hudley & Flores, 2022; Hudley, Villarreal, & Clemons, 2023); the influential raciolinguistic paradigm (Rosa & Flores, 2023); and the growing field of heritage language studies (Ortega, 2020). Deepening our engagement in these areas is key not only to Spanish linguistics but to broader linguistic knowledge and understanding of language in society.

This year’s conference location of Washington, DC, capital of the nation, locus of U.S. policies, and symbol of American identity, underscores language’s inherently social nature and its relationship to power. Contentious current debates about immigration and the “real America” center Spanish and English as indexes of ethnoracial and national identity, as they have historically. But Spanish is also a global language that has its own relationship to social power, prestige, and disprivilege all over the world, from Latin America to Europe and beyond.

In this talk I advance a raciomultilingual perspective (Tseng, 2021, 2025a,b) that underscores the importance of race and ethnicity in multilingual studies, and that centers multilingualism itself as a stance object within linguistic racialization, to unpack the complex sociolinguistic interactions and ideologies that affect multilingual speakers and societies. A raciomultilingual perspective proposes a holistic approach to the multilingual repertoire that sheds light into how it functions as a whole (Li & García, 2022). This perspective integrates multisited, multiscalar ideologies (Blommaert, 2010) to understand what languaging means to speakers and their interlocutors as they navigate complex, often transnational social contexts influenced by both contemporary and historical social relations, conflict, and mobility. By so doing it provides new insights into the relationship between language and identity and integrates aspects of socio- and applied linguistics that are often studied in more siloed fashion.

References

Blommaert, J. (2010). The sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge University Press.

Hudley, A. H. C., Villarreal, D., & Clemons, A. M. (2023). 14.(Socio) linguistics—What Is It Good For? A Case for Liberatory Linguistics. Publication of the American Dialect Society, 108(1), 268-288.

Hudley, A. H. C., & Flores, N. (2022). Social justice in applied linguistics: Not a conclusion, but a way forward. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42, 144-154.

Li, W. & García, O. (2022). Not a first language but one repertoire: Translanguaging as a decolonizing project. RELC journal, 53(2), 313-324.

Mackey, A., Fell, E., de Jesus, F., Hall, A., & Ku, Y. Y. (2022). Social justice in applied linguistics: Making space for new approaches and new voices. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 42, 1-10.

Ortega, L. (2020). The study of heritage language development from a bilingualism and social justice perspective. Language Learning, 70, 15-53.

Ortega, L. (2013). Ways forward for a bi/multilingual turn in SLA. In The multilingual turn (pp. 32-53). Routledge.

Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2023). Undoing raciolinguistics, unsettling (socio) linguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 27(5), 483-485.

Sayahi, L. (2003). Introduction: Selected Proceedings of the First Workshop on Spanish Sociolinguistics.

Tseng, A. (2025a). Empanadas, Pupusas, and Greens on the Side: Language and Latinidad in the Nation's Capital. Georgetown University Press.

Tseng, A. (2025b). Playground Learning: African American English in Latinx Linguistic Repertoires. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 24(5), 1093-1109.

Tseng, A. (2021). Raciomultilinguistic perspectives on sociolinguistic variation. Plenary presented at New Ways of Approaching Variation (NWAV) 49. The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX. October 21-23.

This talk explores the intersections of language, race, and power through an examination of how Blackness is heard, named, and represented in Spanish. Drawing on currents in sociolinguistics—including language and identity and language attitudes and ideologies—I analyze discourses surrounding Black Spanish(es): the varieties, practices, and performances of Spanish associated with Black speakers.

In the analysis, I juxtapose the self-affirming linguistic creativity of Black Spanish speakers with the racialized evaluations of non-Black speakers who position varieties of Spanish associated with Blackness as “incorrect” or “deficient.” Through analysis of the translation of racialized language into Spanish, I also trace the invention of “Black Spanish” in media—where exaggerated Afro-Cuban accents often stand in for Blackness in Peninsular Spanish dubbings. Then, engaging cultural works from Black poets and musical artists (such as Victoria Santa Cruz, Shirley Campbell Barr, Melania Luisa Marte, and Patógeno Musa, among others), I consider how Black Spanish speakers name themselves and reframe language as a site of dignity and resistance.

Ultimately, I situate this linguistic analysis within the current global moment—where celebrations of Black identities and cultural productions coexist with enduring structures of anti-Blackness—and argue for the urgency of centering Black voices in Spanish sociolinguistics.