A professor emeritus visited UTRGV Tuesday to speak about the impact of Hispanic vernaculars in linguistics and how Dominican Spanish differs from other versions of the language.
The UTRGV Department of Writing and Language Studies presented a B3 Linguistics Series seminar featuring Jacqueline Toribio, a Dominican emeritus professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Thank you for the kind invitation to be here with you to celebrate what is our rich history and cultural heritage, but also to promote the advancement of heritage language bilinguals and heritage language studies,” Toribio told the audience gathered in the Academic Services Building on the Edinburg campus.
The lecture was also livestreamed to the Biomedical Research and Health Building on the Brownsville campus and available via Zoom.
She said the Spanish that she speaks is a racialized variety of the language.
“And the code-switching, which I prefer, is also a stigmatized variety of the language,” Toribio said.
She said as a student, she suffered some indignities because of her language.
“In some of my graduate Spanish linguistics courses, I was not allowed to give judgments about my variety as being valid because they didn’t coincide with what other varieties were presenting,” Toribio said.
She seeks to bring visibility to stigmatized varieties of language and that the takeaway of her positionality is Latino matters in academics and elsewhere.
Toribio said she seeks to observe language and then bring a different orientation to its study.
“So, we can look at the ways in which language is structured, the ways in which they vary,” she said.
The emeritus professor said she looks at individuals because their language patterns are influenced by the societies they inhabit.
Toribio said she has been conducting research along the Dominican-Haitian border, drawing on multiple types of methodologies.
“A lot of it is just ethnographic observation, in part, because the communities that we’re talking about are communities where speakers might not be schooled,” she said.
Toribio said she has surveyed individuals from the Dominican-Haitian border and asked about judgment on different varieties of Spanish. She said researchers need to find ways to elicit data from speakers who oftentimes are not used to being asked questions this way.
“So, we need to find some innovative ways to study these populations,” Toribio said.
She said research points to evidence of the uniqueness of the Dominican variety.
Toribio said Dominican Spanish is held in low esteem in the Dominican Republic.
“I’ve done surveys all over the island and you ask people who speaks the best and the worst Spanish,” she said. “Dominican Spanish never fares well.”
She said Dominicans have a strong attachment to their language because it was part of nation building under the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo.
“[Trujillo] wanted to erase any trace of the Creole speakers–that is the Haitians–from the Dominican Republic, and in particular from the border,” Toribio said. “… Spanish, at the time, really served, and continues today, to unify Dominicans with each other and to separate them from Haitians.”
Katherine Christoffersen, associate professor of Applied Linguistics and director of the B3 Scholarship and Student Connection for the Office for Bilingual Integration, said the seminar is part of the Linguistic Series seminar.
She said the purpose of the Linguistic Series is to promote and enhance the visibility and understanding of linguistics.
“There were a number of reasons why we were very interested in inviting Dr. Jacqueline Toribio,” Christoffersen said. “I have personally been inspired by Jacqueline Toribio and her work for a very long time.”
She said Toribio has studied and created a sociolinguistic corpora called “Spanish in Texas Corpus,” where it has conducted computational linguistic studies of bilingualism.
“She’s also done some studies on phonetics, so the sound systems of language, looking specifically at Dominican Spanish,” Christoffersen said.
She said Toribio has done a wealth of research.
“Spanish vernacular is a term that just means casual speech,” Christoffersen said.
She said it is important to learn about the variation of Spanish and other languages, especially here in the Rio Grande Valley.
“The Linguistic seminar series provides a space for students to explore their languages to learn a bit more about language, to learn about some topics that they’re curious about,” Christoffersen said.
She said the importance lies in providing a space to promote linguistics at UTRGV.
Christoffersen encourages students to attend the Linguistic Series seminars.
“We host it on [the] Brownsville campus, on [the] Edinburg campus and via Zoom every single week,” she said.
