Foregrounding the Social Meanings Derived From Lived Experience Perceptions of Mexican and U.S. Spanish Through the Lens of Biographical Indexicality

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the qualitative evaluations of both Spanish-dominant Mexican and U.S.-born bilingual participants toward Mexican and U.S. Spanish, assessing the influence of lived experiences on how they perceive both varieties. More specifically, I employ the theoretical framework of biographical indexicality (Sharma, 2021) to explain how personal biography influences the way we hear the world. I conclude that the groups use Spanish for distinct contextual and stylistic purposes, and given these biographical differences, the varieties of Spanish come to adopt different social meanings for each group. For Mexicans who speak almost exclusively in Spanish, and for whom Spanish is the language of power, prestige, and social advancement, the language is more likely to be associated with status and institutional hierarchies, while, for U.S.-born speakers who use Spanish at home and English in most other contexts, Spanish is considered a language of interpersonal relationships with high value placed on communicative competence rather than academic perfection. I conclude that the participants’ contextualized use of Spanish (and their exposure to the ideologies embedded in those contexts) conditions the indexical social meanings linked to Spanish varieties. As they perceive and produce different types of Spanish, they recursively reflect and constitute the social world around them, relying on a lifetime of experiences to navigate existing and to create new social meanings specific to their sociolinguistic environments.