Juan Thomas
Utica College, Herkimer, US

Queísmo in the Spanish of a small US city: pluricentric variant or common parameter?

Keywords: US Spanish, queísmo, standard, oral versus written standards

The Spanish of the United States has no explicitly coded standard. However, the Spanish language is growing in number of speakers and in use in mass media. The Census of 2010 shows increase in Hispanic population in rural areas and small cities, such as Utica, New York, a city of about 62000 people in central New York State, with an Hispanic population of 10.5 %. The framework of pluricentricity, and non-dominance in particular, is useful for trying to understand how to classify Utica Spanish, and US Spanish, in general. Its distance from the standard is a way to assess attrition or loss of parameters.

On the other hand, studies of pluricentricity and non-dominant varieties shed light on parameters in the standard which are not as firmly followed in dominant varieties as investigators may believe. Interviews of 16 Utica Hispanics in 10.5 hours of speech showed consistency in code-switching behaviour, subject pronoun expression rate, nominal possession and the verbal system with other studies of US Spanish. Those parameters in spoken Utica Spanish were compared to Spanish written in Utica, specifically in 21 columns published in the local newspaper. In order to continue to describe Utica Spanish, its relationship to the prescriptive standard of the Real Academia Española (RAE) and to the Spanish used in the US, the syntactic variable preposition+ (article) + que. was investigated. Elision of the required preposition leads to the phenomenon known as queísmo.  

The objective of this study is to quantify all constructions which have or should have preposition + (article) + que (as described by the RAE), obtain frequencies of queísmo in spoken and written Utica Spanish and compare those rates to studies of queísmo in other varieties of Spanish (Amorós Negre). The oral and written corpora were analyzed for all examples of que, both as a relative pronoun and conjunction. Subsequently, constructions were isolated which had preposition + (article) + que, as well as those missing a required preposition or article, according to the rules established by the RAE.

Also, usages of the relative adjective cuyo/a/os/as and the relatives quien(es) were counted. The oral data show higher rates of queísmo than the written data, the latter showed no queísmo. The oral data with que as a conjunction had a queísmo rate of 100 %. With que as a relative pronoun and implicit antecedents, queísmo reached 60 %. With que as a relative pronoun and explicit antecedents, queísmo was at 68 %. The most frequent elided preposition was en and queísmo affected those constructions with non-human antecedents more than human antecedents. These data are compared with queísmo rates in other cities of the Spanish-speaking world.