Language, Migration, and Identity: Covid 19 and Transitions in Ecuadorian Andean Spanish
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When Christian Puma Ninacuri moved from the small town of Ambato, located in the central highlands of Ecuador, to Quito, the capital city, he experienced two things that subsequently led him to his PhD research at UMass Amherst. First, he spoke a noticeably different dialect of Ecuadorian Andean Spanish than the one spoken in Quito. Second, this difference was a cause for linguistic racism, or racism based on the characteristics of language use.
Most inhabitants of Ambato are bilingual. The Ecuadorian Andean Spanish spoken in Ambato and other parts of the Ecuadorian highlands reflects influences from the indigenous language Kichwa. As Puma Ninacuri came to realize, racism against indigenous populations led to the racialization and stigmatization of this variety because it had taken on features of the indigenous Kichwa language and was not considered “correct” Spanish. According to many speakers of Ecuadorian Andean Spanish, the “correct” or ideal version of Spanish remained Castillian, the standard form of the language as spoken in Spain.
As a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Puma Ninacuri continued to follow his interest in sociolinguistics focusing on language contact. In 2018, he began to study the features of Ambateño-Ecuadorian Andean Spanish in New York City. He was initially interested in examining the variations in language use between first generation and second generation migrants. Although he found that the Ecuadorian migrants continued to idolize Castilian, they were also influenced by the linguistic richness and variety of other Latin American Spanish dialects spoken in the city. This type of linguistic research is known as “synchronic linguistics:” i.e., it studies the features of a language at a particular moment, such as the differences between two or more groups’ use of language within the same time period. In contrast, “diachronic linguistics'' examines the historical development of a language over a period of time.
Puma Ninacuri's research was abruptly interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Once he returned to fieldwork in 2022, he encountered two major changes in the Ambateño-Ecuadorian community in New York City that compelled him to rethink his initial research focus. First, the composition of the Ambateño-Ecuadorian community in New York City had changed with a new wave of migration. This new group of migrants included many multi-generational families and Kichwa-Spanish bilingual speakers.
Second, the communication practices of the earlier generation of migrants had changed. With the sudden popularization of Zoom globally and increased usage of Whatsapp and Facebook in Ambato, migrants in NYC and their relatives in Ambato had begun to frequently use video calling to keep in touch. With transnational communication becoming an almost daily occurrence and the new wave of migrants bringing Kichwa and re-introducing the distinctly Ambateño dialect of Ecuadorian Spanish to NYC, as some of Ninacuri’s interlocutors informed him, the older migrants began to remember how they used to speak. One example of such an Ambateño characteristic was the addition of the discourse marker “ve” such as in "¿dónde estás, ve?" (where are you, ve?) which had been dropped in the process of assimilating to NYC.
Puma Ninacuri asserts that understanding the use of language at a particular moment requires a knowledge of what has happened historically. As Puma Ninacuri points out, the changes that had occurred in the Ambateño-Ecuadorian community within the span of three years is evidence that synchronic and diachronic variations in language need to be considered together.
For example, Puma Ninacuri's ongoing research has revealed that the language patterns of second-generation migrant Ecuadorian children in NYC have changed through their interactions with the children who have recently arrived from Ecuador. Most obviously, the preferred language of the playground has switched from English to Spanish because the newly-arrived children are more competent in the latter. Moreover, the children who have grown up in NYC are now taking on the accents of the children who migrated recently. Puma Ninacuri found that many older migrants notice and comment on these changing features.
Puma Ninacuri mainly focuses on word order variation, and the purpose of such word order choices. One example of a uniquely Ambateño Ecuadorian word order choice is the use of an object-verb-subject order in response to a question as opposed to the more general subject-verb-object order. For instance, Ambateño Ecuadorian Andean Spanish speakers might say “Potatoes bought Lupita” in response to the question “What did Lupita buy?” The object “potatoes” is placed first because of its importance in relation to the question.
The significance of uncovering these linguistic features and their wider contexts go back to the idea of linguistic racism and language-based ideologies. Puma Ninacurii found that many first generation migrants do not approve of object-verb-subject order sentences. They consider such “scrambling” to be an “incorrect” use of Spanish that is being brought back by the more recent migrants. Ideas of standardization have colonial roots, with Castilian Spanish continuing to be idealized and disseminated through school education. Correspondingly, non-standard dialects such as Ambateño-Ecuadorian Andean Spanish continue to be associated with lower socioeconomic status and education, and rural (as opposed to urban) backgrounds.
Nevertheless, there is another side to this story. While migrants to NYC aspire to assimilate by dropping the unique features of their dialect, their relatives in Ambato see these changes as a loss of regional identity. Second generation speakers in NYC are also plagued by anxieties of identity-loss and belonging. Some go to the extreme of avoiding the use of Spanish altogether in social situations after years of being told that they speak it incorrectly at school and being laughed at by other Spanish speakers.
Puma Ninacuri's research has implications for not only better understanding the changing nature of language use and its connections to migration and identity, it also has implications for engaging with linguistic ideologies and research. His fieldwork was funded by a post-covid Return to Research Grant and a Fieldwork Grant, both provided by the Graduate School. Puma Ninacuri's research story not only reveals the interruption of research by the Covid 19 pandemic, but also its influence on changing the subject and therefore the focus of his research. Therefore, it also compels us to rethink what might be the wider implications of the pandemic.
Written by Thakshala Tissera, PhD candidate in English, as part of the Graduate School's Public Writing Fellows Program.