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Variation in Second and Heritage Languages: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Robert Bayley, Dennis R. Preston and Xiaoshi Li
[Studies in Language Variation 28] 2022
► pp. 199–222

Chapter 8
Acquiring sociolinguistic competence during study abroad

U.S. students in Buenos Aires

ORCID logo | California State University, Monterey Bay

Recent research suggests that students make gains in the acquisition of dialectal features during study abroad; however, much of the research conducted on this topic in Spanish-speaking contexts has focused on features characteristic of Spain. This chapter examines the acquisition of three features of Buenos Aires Spanish by 23 North American students studying in Buenos Aires: (1) sheísmo/zheísmo, the realization of /ʝ/ as either the voiceless palatal fricative [ʃ] or the voiced palatal fricative [ʒ]; (2) /s/-weakening; and (3) voseo, the use of the informal second person pronoun vos and its corresponding conjugations. By the end of the semester, learner rates of use of [ʃ] or [ʒ] are over 90% and their rates of use of vos are over 70%. However, /s/-weakening rates remain low throughout the semester. These results suggest that students seek to adopt the features of the local variety to which they are exposed while abroad, particularly when they are highly salient and/or prestigious.

Keywords: second language development, sociolinguistic variation, phonological features, morphosyntactic features
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Previous research
  • Methods
    • Speakers
    • Data collection
    • Transcription
      • Sheísmo/zheísmo
      • /s/-weakening
      • Vos
    • Coding and analysis
  • Results
    • Feature 1: sheísmo/zheísmo
    • Feature 2: /s/-weakening
    • Feature 3: Vos
  • Discussion
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.28.08poz
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