{"title":"“Oh, I don’t even know how to say this in Spanish”","authors":"Victoria Melgarejo, Mary Bucholtz","doi":"10.1075/SIC.18028.BUC","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"\n In the absence of complex and diverse Latinx characters in entertainment media, film and television representations of\n Latinxs’ culture and language typically embody limiting and harmful stereotypes. However, the highly praised U.S.-based romantic\n comedy-drama “Jane the Virgin” offers a very different representation. With believable characters and complex linguistic dynamics, the show\n provides a positive and relatively realistic representation both of Latinxs across generations and of their linguistic repertoires as\n documented in community studies of Latinx language. Through an analysis of the linguistic practices of Latinx characters in “Jane the\n Virgin,” including patterns of intergenerational language shift, linguistic accommodation, and codeswitching, it is argued that the show\n acknowledges and treats as unmarked the linguistic complexity of Latinx families and communities. At the same time, the show oversimplifies\n this complexity in some ways, creating a representation that may be perceived as authentic despite its divergence from real-world Latinx\n language use.","PeriodicalId":44431,"journal":{"name":"Spanish in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Spanish in Context","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1075/SIC.18028.BUC","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
In the absence of complex and diverse Latinx characters in entertainment media, film and television representations of
Latinxs’ culture and language typically embody limiting and harmful stereotypes. However, the highly praised U.S.-based romantic
comedy-drama “Jane the Virgin” offers a very different representation. With believable characters and complex linguistic dynamics, the show
provides a positive and relatively realistic representation both of Latinxs across generations and of their linguistic repertoires as
documented in community studies of Latinx language. Through an analysis of the linguistic practices of Latinx characters in “Jane the
Virgin,” including patterns of intergenerational language shift, linguistic accommodation, and codeswitching, it is argued that the show
acknowledges and treats as unmarked the linguistic complexity of Latinx families and communities. At the same time, the show oversimplifies
this complexity in some ways, creating a representation that may be perceived as authentic despite its divergence from real-world Latinx
language use.
期刊介绍:
Spanish in Context publishes original theoretical, empirical and methodological studies into pragmatics and sociopragmatics, variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, sociology of language, discourse and conversation analysis, functional contextual analyses, bilingualism, and crosscultural and intercultural communication with the aim of extending our knowledge of Spanish and of these disciplines themselves. This journal is peer reviewed and indexed in: IBR/IBZ, European Reference Index for the Humanities, Sociological abstracts, INIST, Linguistic Bibliography, Scopus