The PROJECT
The Border Spanish Project is a multi-faculty, interdisciplinary project of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California San Diego to study the sociolinguistic and theoretical issues that arise in the varieties of Spanish spoken in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. The purpose of this two-year project is to begin to document the varieties of Spanish commonly spoken both in San Diego County in proximity to the US-Mexican border and in Tijuana.
GOALS & METHODOLOGY
Our immediate goals consist of collecting data from a pool of subjects, balanced according to generation and gender, and labeled by region of origin. These data (both in audio and video formats) is then transcribed and time-marked in Trasnana. Our analysis focuses on dialect features that differ from Standard Latin American Spanish and how these differences bear on both sociolinguistic and theoretical issues.
Audio Interviews: Subjects provide information about their background and their life histories in a conversational setting. We request that subjects talk about where they come from, what they do and have done for a living, and their education; describe their places of origin and past experiences in the form of a personal narrative, and report on their use of both Spanish and English in their everday lives.
Sample video interview, wave file, and text transcription in Transana
Video Interviews: Subjects are presented with images and photographs that they are asked to describe. Following, they are presented with words to be read aloud individually. We look for differences in pronunciation patterns among speakers from both sides of the border as well as across generation lines. Recording this portion of the interview on video allows for closer analysis of articulation and pronunciation patterns.
We propose this project as part of a larger project that will explore the origins of non-Standard Border Spanish. Both the Latino populations in San Diego County and in Tijuana typically have connections to various parts Mexico, and both communities are influenced by English. Hence, some aspects of Border Spanish are regional Mexican dialect features while others can be attributed to contact with English. A long-term goal is to collect similar data in areas of Mexico where these connections exist. Thus, this proposal is for a pilot project that we hope will facilitate extramural funding for a project that is both larger in scale in the San Diego-Tijuana area and that includes data from elsewhere in Mexico.