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!
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
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 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 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 ● 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: 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
Analysis. Language and linguistics compass, 3(1), 359-383. Kiesling, S. F. (2004). Dude. American Speech, 79(3), 281-305. Labov, T. (1992). Social and language boundaries among adolescents. American Speech, 67(4), 339-366. Mendoza‐Denton, N. (1996). ‘Muy Macha’: Gender and ideology in gang‐girls’ discourse about makeup. Ethnos,
61(1-2), 47-63.
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 &
Sons. Nelsen, E. & Rosenbaum, E. (1981). "Language Patterns within the Youth Subculture: Development of Slang
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
Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 18(2), 117-125. Verdone, M. (2013). twitter 1.10.0: An API and command-line toolset for Twitter (twitter.com). Python Package
Index, Python Software Foundation. <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/twitter>
Thanks! ● Acknowledgements: Dr. Jennifer Nycz, David Aguilar,
and our colleagues at Georgetown for feedback! ● Questions?
o Sylvia’s email: [email protected] o Dan’s email: [email protected] o Find us on Twitter: @sociolinguista & @thedansimonson
Top Related