Even the most devout followers of the Abrahamic religions probably aren’t familiar with the story of the Ephraimites and Gileadites described in the Hebrew bible, but if you’re a linguist, there’s no doubt that you’ve heard it before. It goes something like this: After a crushing military defeat by the Gileadites, the surviving Ephraimites attempted to return home, unaware that their enemies had blocked their way. While the Ephraimites didn’t look different from the Gileadites, their distinct dialect — marked by a tendency to pronounce “sh” as “s” — clearly identified them as outsiders. As Gileadites came across potential Ephraimites, they demanded that they say the word “shibboleth.” Anyone who said “sibboleth” instead was outed as an Ephraimite and promptly executed.
Today, the phrase “shibboleth” has come to refer to any word that clearly identifies which group you belong to. While dropping a shibboleth in casual conversation doesn’t (usually) result in death by sword anymore, it’s still often a reliable signal of where you’re from — for example, anyone who says “pop” is most likely from the Midwest, while someone who says “y’all” is typically a Southerner. In the Bay Area, there are multiple shibboleths: “hella,” “hyphy,” calling San Francisco “SF” or “the City” instead of its full name (or, God forbid, “San Fran”). But one of the more curious shibboleths that’s emerged over time is the pronunciation of cities with Spanish names.
If you follow traditional Spanish pronunciation and say “Vallejo” as “vah-YAY-ho” instead of “vuh-LAY-ho,” “San Rafael” as “sahn rah-fye-EL” instead of “san ruh-FAIL,” or “Tiburon” as “tee-boo-RONE” instead of “TIH-buh-rahn” in a group setting, you’re bound to be called out by someone who was born and raised in the area who smugly informs you of the “correct” way to say it. But in a state where 38% of residents speak Spanish, how have these Anglicized pronunciations become the norm?
“English is not the native language of this country, nor the only language in this country.”
While there’s no doubt that language evolves over time — just look to the original texts of The Canterbury Tales or Beowulf as proof, or even your seventh-grade AIM conversations — how and why these changes occur is complex and often unclear. One way to arrive at an explanation is to simply consider which groups have historically driven linguistic changes.
Decades of academic research in linguistics have shown that “speaker gender, socioeconomic status, and age are all reliable indicators of linguistic changes in progress,” says Justin Davidson, assistant professor of Spanish and romance linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Female, younger, and middle-class speakers have largely been at the forefront of advancing linguistic change, i.e., adopting particular speech features before their male, older, and lower-/upper-class counterparts.”
Davidson, the creator of a project called the Corpus of Bay Area Spanish, which aims to document and legitimize the Spanish spoken in California, also notes that the dominant language of these speakers impacts the changes they drive.
“Spanish-English bilinguals, more dominant in Spanish, act as leaders in adopting Spanish-like features into English, or vice-versa,” Davidson says.
By this logic, it would make sense to speculate that young, middle-class, bilingual, Spanish-dominant women led this shift in pronunciation. But Davidson cautions that you can’t confidently state this without first quantitatively comparing pronunciation across different demographic groups.
Regardless of who initiates the change, though, there are two primary factors that explain why it occurs: linguistic and social.
“Linguistic factors are ones that involve strictly linguistic motivations, such as physiological/anatomical constraints on individual and strings of sounds in human speech,” Davidson explains. For example, the fact that most English speakers — and even some Spanish speakers — have trouble rolling their Rs may explain why the Anglicized pronunciation of El Cerrito has dropped the trilled “r.” On the other hand, “social factors are motivations grounded in human interaction and identity, such as language ideologies or linguistic accommodation”—the tendency to change your speech to either sound more or less like the speech of the person you’re communicating with.
While linguistic accommodation can happen for any number of reasons, it would be ignorant to disregard the United States’ historical track record of silencing those who speak a language other than English. Between California’s 18-year-long ban on bilingual education, a rising number of racist tirades and violent attacks, profiling by the U.S. Border Patrol and ICE, and even a history of lynchings and segregation, Spanish speakers in the U.S. have long faced intense pressure to assimilate.
“Standard American English… has long been the exclusive and de facto language of power, to the explicit and discriminatory detriment of non-English speakers,” Davidson says. “Even in California, the state with the greatest number of Spanish speakers in the country, minority languages are consistently lost within three speaker generations (commonly known as the three-generation rule).”
But some Californian Spanish speakers today are attempting to reclaim the authentic Spanish pronunciation of city names.
“I use the Spanish pronunciation of words and correct those around me who say [them] Anglicized,” says Oakland resident Nancy Caro. “By saying any words Anglicized, you are perpetuating that English is the only language that matters in this country. English is not the native language of this country, nor the only language in this country.”
In fact, Caro points out, the Spanish pronunciation of cities isn’t even the “original” pronunciation: “Spanish is not the native language of Mexicans or Latinxs, but of the Spaniard colonizers and their influence in this state and country.”
A certain pronunciation, term, or phrase considered outdated today may very well come back in the future.
Still, some consider using Spanish pronunciations an important way to honor their heritage. While Angel Figueroa of Concord grew up using the “English” names for California cities, he now prefers the Spanish pronunciation.
“Saying the names of California cities in Spanish might seem minor, but for some of us, it’s one of the few Spanish words we use on a daily basis,” Figueroa says. “I’ve grown more Americanized, and using their proper pronunciation keeps me in touch with my native language.”
In light of this reclamation, it’s probably not fair to call the pronunciation of California cities a true shibboleth after all — the way you pronounce a city could just as likely be a reflection of your cultural identity as where you grew up.
Despite these grassroots efforts, there’s not much evidence to suggest that the Bay Area is currently experiencing a mass revival of Spanish pronunciation.
“With greater numbers of speakers of Spanish, there are more opportunities for ‘San Leandro’ and ‘San Francisco’ to be produced, in entirely English discourse, with authentic Spanish pronunciation,” Davidson says. “However, with respect to any indications of change in progress, my research—still ongoing, of course!—doesn’t strongly suggest that youth English-dominant speakers are actively adopting this.”
But language, as any expert will tell you, is impossible to predict. It is malleable, constantly changing, and sometimes even cyclical. A certain pronunciation, term, or phrase considered outdated today may very well come back in the future; just think of how the word “rad” became cool again years after its debut in the late 1970s.
Whether the majority of Bay Area speakers embrace a return to authentic Spanish pronunciation or not remains to be seen — for now, the only certainty is change.
