October 11, 2021
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Summary: I have some data from sociolinguistic interviews that I conducted in Spain in 2019 that have yet to be analyzed, and it will be useful to investigate while planning for my dissertation. The participants answered a few questions about their opinions of the varieties of Spanish spoken in Spain, and their experiences as speakers when they leave the south and travel to locations with more dialectal prestige, such as central Spain. I am interested in observing the qualitative trends of the data, since not all participants shared the same perspective.
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Data overview: These data are very messy and I will have to first transcribe the interviews, as they are currently just .wav files. Luckily, the sound files are short (between 2-4 minutes), but if transcription takes too long, I will consider ASR options. There are around 20 speakers from Seville, Spain who participated in the interviews. The speakers verbally answered the following five questions, thus there are multiple responses associated with each participant. I have translated the questions to English for this proposal, but all of the data are in Spanish.
- Where are you from? Have you always lived in Spain?
- What is your opinion of the linguistic variety that exists within Andalusia?
- Have you traveled outside of Andalusia, but within Spain? When you leave the region, do you receive any comments about your accent?
- Is there representation of the Andalusian accent in the media, movies, etc.?
- Do you think that stereotypes about accents are changing now, or that they still remain?
I will also have to pull demographic information from other spreadsheets to combine with the utterances.
- Data analysis: I would like to do a keyword/frequency analysis to discover common themes about what is said, and then extract the exact utterances with those words. I'll also be working on this project in a Sociolinguistics class and am looking forward to analyzing the same data with two different perspectives- one looking at stance/identity of the speakers, and the other, helping me best locate and identify said perspectives! I will pay attention for common themes that arise while transcribing the data and will create a list of keywords to search for once the data are organized. Looking at word frequency will also help me identify which terms are most mentioned in the data set.