Stephen Fafulas (left), University of Mississippi associate professor of Spanish and linguistics, works with Nicholas Henriksen, chair of history of art, professor of Spanish and linguistics and co-director of the Speech Production Lab at the University of Michigan, and Rachel Buchner, a member of Henriksen's lab and s Spanish major, using a spectrogram of vocal waves. Fafulas and Henriksen are studying how bilingual speakers influence both languages they speak in a National Science Foundation-funded project. Submitted photo
EPSCoR-funded project unites linguists in first study of language, culture of Mississippi-born Latinos
by Clara Turnage
For bilingual speakers, including many Mississippi-born Latinos who speak Spanish at home and English at school, one language can often influence another. University of Mississippi researcher Stephen Fafulas is studying how those interactions shape language.
Fafulas, associate professor of Spanish and linguistics, is in Michigan this fall working on a National Science Foundation-funded project to study the phonetic fingerprints of this phenomenon in bilingual Mississippians. He and Nicholas Henriksen, chair of history of art, professor of Spanish and linguistics and co-director of the Speech Production Lab at the University of Michigan, aim to shed light on the experiences of bilingual learners.
“Over the last 20 years, there has been a steady increase of Latinos in Mississippi,” Fafulas said. “Now, there’s a steady increase of Latinos showing up at the doorstep of higher education, like at the University of Mississippi.
“As professors and as linguists, it’s our duty to understand the student body better, and that’s something that we’re going to take away from this study.”
Between 2010 and 2025, the Latino population of Mississippi grew from 2.7% of the total, or about 80,000 people, to 4.6%, or approximately 136,000 residents, according to Census Bureau data.
A person who uses both English and Spanish regularly may roll their r’s differently in Spanish, or aspirate their p’s, t’s and k’s, which is usual of native English speakers. Or, they may do either of these interchangeably.
These subtle changes in speech can be an indicator of the interchange of language happening in the speaker’s mind.
“What we’re doing is trying to understand the nuance and complexity of being bilingual or bicultural in very specific ways,” Henriksen said. “There are languages that are interacting, dialects that are interacting, personalities and identities interacting.
“There’s so much at play. It’s not as simple as ‘You have two sides of you.’ It’s more integrated, and what that integration looks like is what we’re exploring.”
Fafulas has interviewed numerous Mississippi-born bilingual Spanish speakers and Latinos who arrived in the state during their school-age years and have grown up in Mississippi. He also conducted several interviews with non-Latino Mississippians who offer their perspectives on the state’s growing bilingual communities and provide comparison data for the linguistic analysis.
He and Henriksen plan to use survey data and phonetic analysis software to examine speech patterns, acoustics and pronunciation to better understand how Spanish and English interact.
“Linguistics is a window to help us see how languages and cultures interact,” Fafulas said. “What we’re interested in seeing is how these speakers, these Latinos who were born in Mississippi, maintain their ability to speak Spanish. Or does going through the local school system affect their ability to speak Spanish?
“From a higher level, this is an analysis of fluency and proficiency and maintaining languages across cultures.”
The purpose of the NSF’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research is to offer researchers such as Fafulas opportunities to partner with labs like Henriksen’s to gain experience and access technologies that they can bring back to their home state.
“That is the heart of what this award is allowing me to do,” the Ole Miss professor said. “It gives me the time to go where I have different resources and opportunities, and then bring those back to Mississippi, where our students will benefit.”
Although the study focuses on speakers in Mississippi, the interplay of languages in bilingual people is universal, Henriksen said.
“Many humans in the world are bi- or multilingual,” he said. “We’re documenting what is happening in Mississippi, but it’s happening across multiple cultures and regions of the world. It’s a global phenomenon.”
For Mississippians, understanding how bilingual communities use and maintain their languages could help educators better understand the students they serve, Fafulas said.
“Being Mississippian can also mean being Latino,” he said. For instance, being Mississippian can mean speaking English with a little bit of Spanish flavor or speaking Spanish with a little bit of English flavor.
“But we know less about Latinos in Mississippi than we do in other Southern states, and Nick and I are jumping into what is to our knowledge, the first large-scale linguistic analysis of Mississippi-born Latinos.”
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation grant no. 2531682.
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