GENDER AND COOL SOLIDARITY IN MEXICAN SPANISH SLANG PHRASES

Sylvia Sierra and Dan Simonson, Georgetown @sociolinguista & @thedansimonson NWAV 43 Chicago October 26 2014

Introduction Two slang phrases specific to Mexican Spanish:

How is the distribution of the phrases related to the gender of the speaker and addressee?

Phrase Literal Translation Cultural Translation

No mames Don’t suck No shit!

No manches Don’t stain No way!

Introduction Two part study: ●  Twitter data ●  Anonymous online survey

Previous Research ●  Studies on slang - Nelsen & Rosenbaum (1981); Labov, T.

(1992) ●  Kiesling (2004) “dude” indexes stance of “cool solidarity” ●  Bucholtz (2009) “güey” - marker of interactional alignment &

particular gendered style ●  Mendoza-Denton (1996, 2002, 2008) - gender & ideology in

Latina girl gangs ●  Ochs (1990, 1992) - linguistic forms can index stances & styles

that come to be thought of as gendered ●  Eckert (2008) - indexical field

Previous Research Twitter for linguistics – ●  Computer Mediated Conversation similar to spoken

conversation (Herring, 2011) ●  Haddican & Johnson (2012) - regional & grammatical effects

on English particle verb alternation ●  Schnoebelen (2012) - stylistic variation in emoticons ●  Bamman, Eisenstein, & Schnoebelen (2014)

o  gender and lexical variation o  nuanced approach to gender o  published after our initial study!

Twitter Data ●  Retrieval ● Coding/Filtering ● Analysis

Twitter Data: Retrieval

Used Python script employing API via tweepy o  Advantages

  No tedious copy/paste   Faster than manual retrieval

o  Disadvantages   Results different from main page   Limited number of searches

Twitter Data: Retrieval Basic Process: ●  Retrieve “no mames” tweets. ●  Retrieve “no manches” tweets. ●  Wait. ●  Repeat until 1500 tweets were retrieved. Retrieval took about an hour.

Twitter Data: Retrieval

mames manches

Variant Counts Variant Counts

mames/Mames 376 manches/Manches 194

MAMES 72 MANCHES 4

<reduplicated> 12 <reduplicated> 1

Total 460 Total 199

No variant 12 Mixed variant 0

Twitter Data: Retrieval NO MAMES NO MAMES, DICEN QUE JUSTIN VA A VENIR

A LA PREMIERE DE BELIEVE A MEXICO NO MAMES, ES QUE ME TIRO POR LA VENTANA.

NO SHIT NO SHIT, THEY SAY THAT JUSTIN IS GOING TO COME TO THE PREMIERE OF BELIEVE IN MEXICO NO SHIT, I’M GONNA THROW MYSELF OUT A WINDOW

RT @<removed>: No manches, el América va a perder en la final

(sarcastic?) No way, America is going to lose the final.

Twitter Data: Coding/Filtering Coded a subset for performed gender: ●  API-retrieved tweets could be linked back to

profiles. ●  Used profile pages to approximate binary

performed gender.

Twitter Data: Coding/Filtering Annotation Criteria: ●  Profile picture

o  One person? Celebrity? ●  Splash image

o  Content focus ●  Name Considered as a whole

Twitter Data: Coding/Filtering ●  M -- Man ●  F -- Woman ●  O -- Organization ●  U -- Unknown

Twitter Data: Coding/Filtering Criteria seem vague, but coding was reliable. In

doubly-annotated portion of corpus (Fleiss’ kappa): ●  Raw Agreement: 0.838 ●  Excluding “U”: 1.00 Singly-annotated portions independently for a larger

corpus.

Twitter Data: Coding/Filtering Also coded for location with a similar procedure to

gender ●  Raw Agreement: 0.648 Included anyway, since we had it.

A few tweets had geo-tagged metadata—not enough to employ for our corpus, but enough to do this…

Twitter Data: Coding/Filtering

Twitter Data: Coding/Filtering Author language came with other API metadata. Not

the language of the tweet, but the language the user selected:

●  Spanish: 553 ●  English: 125 ●  German: 1 ●  Italian: 1 Got this one for free, included as well.

Twitter Data: Analysis ●  Step-down regression with Rbrul (Johnson 2009) ●  Three variables were used during regression:

o  location o  gender o  author language

Twitter Data: Analysis

Factor Tokens Manches/Manches+Mames

Centered Factor Weights

F (woman) 265 0.374 0.038

M (man) 331 0.230 0.019

O (organization) 1 1.000 > 0.999

U (unknown) 83 0.277 0.025

p = 6.36×10-4

●  “No mames” was tweeted more often overall by both genders,

o  Women tweeted the non-vulgar “no manches” more frequently (37.4%) than men (23.0%) (p < 0.001).

Online Survey ● Design ●  Results

Online survey: design ● Online survey (cf. Kiesling’s 2004 “Dude” survey) ●  Translated to Spanish, had a Mexican friend review ●  Snowball sampling – friends and their friends ●  18 participants – 13 women, 5 men, mostly young

●  Closed questions about daily usage of the two phrases in conversations with men and women along a continuum of familiarity/formality

● Open questions asking about perception of the phrases

Online survey: design

Online survey: results

Online survey: results ●  Men report using “no mames” the most

o  with women, and especially with women acquaintances o  they use “no manches” most with male friends.

●  Women report using “no manches” more frequently than men o  they report using BOTH phrases the most with male friends

“no mames” “no manches”

Open-response questions in the survey for “no mames”

●  Women answered with references to perceived vulgarity or offensiveness ●  “Nunca la uso porque es ofensiva” (“I never use it because it is offensive”)

– 51 year old woman ●  “No la uso. La frase es demasiado vulgar” (“I don’t use it. The phrase is too

vulgar.”) -21 year old woman ●  “Informal con confianza” - “informal with trust” – 29 year old man (all the

men had similar responses, some women) ●  Who uses this phrase? ●  “con poca educación” - “poorly educated” ●  “naca” - “dumbass” ●  “jovenes” - “youth” ●  “adolescentes” - “teenagers” ●  “los hombres” - “men”

Open-response questions in the survey for “no manches”

●  Answers were generally similar; no mention of vulgarity/offensiveness

●  “es para disfrazar una grosería” - “it is used to avoid using a curse word” -27 year old man

● Who uses this phrase? o  “jovenes” -“youth” o  “adolescentes” - “teenagers” o  “estudiantes”, “alumnos” - “students” o  “universitarios” - “university students” o  “niños” - “children” o  “amigos” - “friends”

Interpretations of survey results ●  Both phrases index stances of informality ●  “No mames” as vulgar cool solidarity - masculinity?

o  explains why men use this phrase to express cool solidarity with other men

o  but also as indexical of masculinity with female acquaintances o  also explains why women use both phrases more with men

●  Women find using “no manches” as more acceptable way to demonstrate solidarity without indexing a stance of vulgarity

Conclusion ●  “No mames” is more common ●  Women are more likely to use “no manches” than

men ●  “No mames” indexes a stance of cool solidarity, but

also vulgarity & possibly masculinity ●  “No manches” is used more by women as a way to

express solidarity with men, sometimes with women

References Bamman, D., Eisenstein, J., & Schnoebelen, T. (2014). Gender identity and lexical variation in social media. Journal

of Sociolinguistics, 18(2), 135-160. Bell, A. (1984). Language style as audience design. Language in society, 13(02), 145-204. Bucholtz, M. (2009). From stance to style: Gender, interaction, and indexicality in Mexican immigrant youth slang. Eckert, P. (2008). Variation and the indexical field1. Journal of sociolinguistics, 12(4), 453-476. Haddican, B., & Johnson, D. E. (2012). Effects on the particle verb alternation across english dialects. University of

Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 18(2), 31-40. Herring, S. C. (2010). Computer-mediated conversation: Introduction and overview. Language@ Internet, 7(2). Johnson, D. E. (2009). Getting off the GoldVarb Standard: Introducing Rbrul for Mixed‐Effects Variable Rule

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References Mendoza‐Denton, N. (2002). Language and identity (pp. 475-499). Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Mendoza-Denton, N. (2008). Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. John Wiley &

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Vocabularies." Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 28: 273-84. Ochs, E. (1990). Indexicality and socialization. Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development,

287-308. Ochs, E. (1992). 14 Indexing gender. Rethinking context: Language as an interactive phenomenon, 11(11), 335. Schnoebelen, T. (2012). Do you smile with your nose? stylistic variation in twitter emoticons. University of

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Thanks! ● Acknowledgements: Dr. Jennifer Nycz, David Aguilar,

and our colleagues at Georgetown for feedback! ● Questions?

o  Sylvia’s email: sas283@georgetown.edu o  Dan’s email: des62@georgetown.edu o  Find us on Twitter: @sociolinguista & @thedansimonson