Hearing political affiliation: A perceptual analysis of political speech in Malaga, Spain
Author ORCID Identifier
0000-0002-5350-5147
Document Type
Paper Presentation
Presenter Language
English
Research Area
Phonetics, Phonology, Perception, and Sociolinguistics
Location
MBSC Gallery Room 308
Start Date
17-10-2024 4:30 PM
End Date
17-10-2024 5:00 PM
Abstract
Spanish politics has experienced a series of major transitions since 2010. The moderate-right Partido Popular (PP) gained control of the national government in 2011, lost national control in mid-2018, and then watched the alt-right populist VOX party, which spun off it in 2013, surge in popularity in the 2019 elections (Rama et al., 2021). Meanwhile, at the regional level, the socialist PSOE party lost its 40-year control of the Andalusian government. This study examines ties between regional linguistic markers of Andalusian Spanish including /s/ elision, seseo, and intervocalic /d/ elision and attitudes toward political voices. It explores how listeners in the province of Malaga, Spain, perceive southern regional variants used in the speech of politicians.
All speakers engage in style-shifting between prestige and non-prestige variants as a part of their identity construction process (Coupland, 2001); however, politicians also use language to reflect social position and appeal to voters. This study used an online survey in Qualtrics to gather perceptual and attitudinal data from a socially stratified group of over 30 Malaga listeners. Informants rated tokens identified as coming (1) from the Andalusian community, (2) from specific politicians, and (3) from two separate politicians. Likert scales were used to identify tokens by contrasting adjectives (e.g., AndalusianàNot Andalusian, UrbanàRural). All tokens were collected from political speech and included either normatively or regionally identified variants.
The perceptual results show that listeners are better able to identify as Andalusian variants frequently associated with it in linguistic literature. However, informants from Malaga also applied differing rating criteria to community and political speech, classifying speakers identified as politicians more negatively overall. The use of regional tokens generally was viewed more positively and was associated with both female voices identified as left-leaning and male voices identified as right-leaning. When compared to previous linguistic analyses of political speech (e.g., Hernández-Campoy & Cutillas-Espinosa, 2013), these results suggest that norms in the political speech of southern Spain are in a state of flux, potentially the result of the emergence of this wave of alt-right populism embodied by VOX.
Hearing political affiliation: A perceptual analysis of political speech in Malaga, Spain
MBSC Gallery Room 308
Spanish politics has experienced a series of major transitions since 2010. The moderate-right Partido Popular (PP) gained control of the national government in 2011, lost national control in mid-2018, and then watched the alt-right populist VOX party, which spun off it in 2013, surge in popularity in the 2019 elections (Rama et al., 2021). Meanwhile, at the regional level, the socialist PSOE party lost its 40-year control of the Andalusian government. This study examines ties between regional linguistic markers of Andalusian Spanish including /s/ elision, seseo, and intervocalic /d/ elision and attitudes toward political voices. It explores how listeners in the province of Malaga, Spain, perceive southern regional variants used in the speech of politicians.
All speakers engage in style-shifting between prestige and non-prestige variants as a part of their identity construction process (Coupland, 2001); however, politicians also use language to reflect social position and appeal to voters. This study used an online survey in Qualtrics to gather perceptual and attitudinal data from a socially stratified group of over 30 Malaga listeners. Informants rated tokens identified as coming (1) from the Andalusian community, (2) from specific politicians, and (3) from two separate politicians. Likert scales were used to identify tokens by contrasting adjectives (e.g., AndalusianàNot Andalusian, UrbanàRural). All tokens were collected from political speech and included either normatively or regionally identified variants.
The perceptual results show that listeners are better able to identify as Andalusian variants frequently associated with it in linguistic literature. However, informants from Malaga also applied differing rating criteria to community and political speech, classifying speakers identified as politicians more negatively overall. The use of regional tokens generally was viewed more positively and was associated with both female voices identified as left-leaning and male voices identified as right-leaning. When compared to previous linguistic analyses of political speech (e.g., Hernández-Campoy & Cutillas-Espinosa, 2013), these results suggest that norms in the political speech of southern Spain are in a state of flux, potentially the result of the emergence of this wave of alt-right populism embodied by VOX.