Dialect shifting: Surviving linguistic prestige and status in Barranquilla, Colombia, 25 years later…

John Narvaez

When I finished high school, I moved from my hometown Cartagena to nearby Barranquilla to start my B.Ed in modern languages.  Even though these cities are just two hours away from each other, they have distinctive dialectal and sociocultural features that make the Spanish spoken in them very different and particular.  Cartagena had a long history as a slave port in colonial times, so the influence of the African slaves’ languages created a variety of Spanish that is unique in the context of Colombia.  Elements of African phonology and prosody are evident in the way we speak with consonant duplication being a major feature.  In Cartagena, words like “puerta” /pwerta/ (door), or “carta” /karta/ (letter) are pronounced /pwet`ta/ and /cat`ta/ for example.  Lexical variation also offers distinct ways of naming things and pragmatic elements of the dialect may give the impression that people from Cartagena are rustic and “more rural” than their counterparts from Barranquilla. 

The Barranquillero dialect, in contrast, tends to be a more standardized version of Spanish with a marked emphasis or the trilled /r/ and common features of Caribbean Spanish such as the aspiration of /s/ (/kosta/ = /kohta/).  It also received influence from the waves of European and middle eastern immigrants who settled in the city and who have somehow shaped the city’s identity as a cultural and economic hub of Colombia’s Caribbean region. 

Thousands of young people come to Barranquilla every year to pursue studies in the regions’ best universities.  As part of the initial shock that we experience as newcomers in the big city, we notice a subtle rejection to the way we speak.  I was subject to jokes and ridicule by my peers at the university because of my dialect; they assumed their variety of Spanish as a norm of prestige and those who did not conform to “the standard” faced nicknaming, teasing and mockery.  I remember I was once told by one of my professors that I should “modulate” my accent (reducing my dialect to an accent being a diminishing move) as I was preparing to be a teacher and it just didn’t feel right to speak “that way” if I was supposed to be a model for my students.  Never in my life had I questioned this part of my identity and it bothered me so much that people tried to dictate the way I should speak. 

On a macrostructural level, this behavior showed how linguistic differences spark societal issues regarding inequalities and sociocultural perceptions about language use.  These attitudes also show “how some varieties get to be more prestigious than others simply because the people who speak them are thought to have higher status” (Romaine, 2000, p.20).  Such a status is derived in part, in the case of Barranquillero, from the fact that the city is a main economic power in the country.  This socioeconomic importance has slowly permeated other aspects of the social and cultural dynamics around the city that have positioned language as a distinctive marker of identity and hegemony of Barranquilleros in the context of the Colombian Caribbean region. 

As a consequence of these dynamics, I became very aware of my own audience/speaker design and convergence (Van Herk, 2012) for quickly switching from my own variety of Spanish to that “expected of me” in social and academic settings where Barranquilleros were the majority.  This phenomenon has been researched as “dialect-shifting” and it seems to be a cognitive advantage for those who use it as it “requires some level of linguistic and metalinguistic awareness, as a speaker needs to be aware of the linguistic and sociolinguistic features of different language variations to shift between them appropriately”. (Terry et al. 2015, p.6).  As such, the Barranquillero dialect initially became a register to me as it helped me navigate social life in my new surroundings. 

As time passed and job opportunities emerged, I decided to stay in Barranquilla.  The mental dichotomy of my early years, when speaking like a Barranquillero sounded foreign, made me develop a neutral hybrid that, when heard by my mother and siblings, for example, made me the target of light criticism because I did not sound very Cartagenero anymore.  However, when I spend time in Cartagena, my hometown, I can easily notice how I start shifting to use my original dialect’s phonology as it slips in naturally and spontaneously when I interact with family and friends. However, I have a hard time keeping track of semantic changes and new words and with using non-standard grammatical features of Cartagenero as they cause conflict with more than 20 years of “more standard” use of these forms in my life away from my hometown.  All of these issues make me think of how interesting it would be to research dialect shifting across time and the incidence of this phenomenon in one’s identity as a speaker of a specific variety of a language.

Living so far from my hometown and teaching standard Spanish as a foreign language have strengthened the hybridity of my own Spanish to the point that I have been told I sound Venezuelan, Puerto Rican, Dominican and even Cuban, but not Colombian!  This is certainly interesting as these other dialects I get confused with share common features with my hometown’s dialect.  I guess, in essence, the core and driving force of who I am as a speaker of Spanish keeps feeding from my roots deeply entrenched with the Caribbean and the sound of the drums that light up the fiesta in the old walls of my Cartagena.

References

Romaine, S. (2000). Language in society: An introduction to sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Terry, N. P., Connor, C. M., Johnson, L., Stuckey, A., & Tani, N. (2015). Dialect variation, dialect-shifting, and reading comprehension in second grade. Reading and Writing,29(2), 267-295. doi:10.1007/s11145-015-9593-9

Van Herk, G.  (2012). What is sociolinguistics? Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.