Social perceptions of /f/ fortition in Guatemalan Spanish
Research on Guatemalan Spanish has increasingly shown the effects of contact with Mayan languages. However,
whereas most studies have focused on the structural outcomes of Spanish-Mayan contact, fewer studies have analyzed how native
Guatemalans socially perceive these features and, by extension, those who employ them. This study presents an analysis of one
contact feature of Guatemalan Spanish: the fortition of the voiceless labiodental fricative, or /f/ > [p]. Results of a matched
guise of 116 native listeners of Guatemalan Spanish reveal that [p] guises index speakers as Maya and elicit more negative overt
and covert attitudes than [f] guises. Furthermore, participants who self-identified as Maya were more likely to rate [p] guises as
less prestigious than participants who did not identify as Maya, indicating that the Maya participants may display outgroup
favoritism in order to disassociate themselves with the discrimination and racism that often accompanies their racial identity in
Guatemala.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Methods
- 2.1Matched guise preparation
- 2.2Matched guise task: Listening survey
- 2.3Participants
- 3.Results
- 3.1Likert scale results
- 3.2Open-ended questions results
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Baird, Brandon & Stanislav Mulík
2024.
The Phonetics and Phonology of Indigenous Language Bilinguals. In
The Cambridge Handbook of Bilingual Phonetics and Phonology,
► pp. 584 ff.

Baird, Brandon
2023.
Clothing, Gender, and Sociophonetic Perceptions of Mayan-Accented Spanish in Guatemala.
Languages 8:3
► pp. 189 ff.

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