Language attitude towards speakers with a Mexican accent: Ramifications in the business community of San Diego, California

The issue of language attitude is often very significant in a community where a meaningful percentage of the population is bilingual. This study addresses the obstacles a native speaker of Spanish with accented English encounters when dealing with English speakers. Statistics based on U.S. Census data for the international border city of San Diego, California show that sixty-one percent of the employed white population hold jobs in managerial, professional specialty, technical, sales, and administrative support occupations, while the percentage of employed Hispanics in these same fields is considerably less at thirty-six percent. The present study examines the attitudes of members of the young business community in San Diego to determine if there are predictable patterns in their evaluations of audio recordings of speakers with different levels of Mexican "accentedness.";Using the established sociolinguistic methodologies provided by Lambert and other linguists, a variation on the matched guise technique has been implemented to evaluate the effects of language attitude in a focused way within the San Diego community. This has been accomplished by isolating those characteristics which the business community commonly associates with "hire-ability" and "promote-ability" to determine their relationship to foreign accent attitudes.;This question has been approached in a phonologically focused manner. By having speakers read dialogues, the factors of syntactical and lexical differences have been eliminated. Thus foreign accent attitudes can be observed solely through the presence or absence of native language phonological and intonational interference.;The results of this study have application in three fields. Firstly, this research adds to the field of sociolinguistics; specifically to the area of language attitude. Secondly, this project has pedagogical ramifications. Evidence that a Hispanic accent is stigmatized in this speech community suggests that intonation and phonology should be emphasized more in the second language classroom, where it is often de-emphasized or even ignored. The third field that will benefit from this study is the business community. Language attitudes, once revealed, indicate unfounded prejudices based on underlying feelings or stereotypes associated with a given minority group. This problem is of consequence to both the American business community and the bilingual speech community.