Language, like the people who speak it, moves around. Likewise, self-claimed and group identity changes across time and space, as do community customs, arts, and institutions. Cambia, todo cambia.

Quite a few people in St. Bernard Parish identify today as Isleños, claiming an American identity that goes back to 1778 and Spain’s Canary Islands. Listening to our Isleños friends speaking, we ponder if the Spanish spoken in St. Bernard in the 2020s bears a resemblance to the Spanish spoken by the Isleños who arrived from the Canary Islands in the late 1700s. Being curious as we are, we also wonder if the Spanish spoken by Isleños in the Canary Islands today and the language still heard in some among us in St. Bernard sound alike. On the Isleños linguistic family tree, the same language has evolved on two different continents.

Add to that features of the English spoken by the Isleños of St. Bernard in 2024 and compare certain sounds with the English spoken by non Isleños in the community, and there’s a lot to unpack.

To help put it all in context, Dr. Fabiola Varela-García will present “Isleños in Community: Parishioners in Their Own Voices” Aug. 28 at 6 p.m. in the Nunez Student Testing & Career Counseling Center. The program will be free and open to the public.

Dr. Varela-García, a professor of linguistics, language and Latin studies at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, has traveled and studied extensively in South Louisiana. It was during her first stretch in New Orleans while she taught at Tulane University in the 1990s that she was introduced to the Isleños of St. Bernard Parish, whom she interviewed and studied extensively. She met with elders, their children and grandchildren. She learned the nuances of their language along with the history of their journey across the Atlantic, and the cultural changes occurring within the coastal ecosystem that forced constant adaptation to their chosen environment.

Dr. Varela-García’s career took her to Chicago, then Guatemala. Once she returned to the United States, she tried to reestablish contact with many of her Isleño interview subjects in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It was a challenging endeavor to locate her friends.

A University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Sabbatical Research Grant allowed Dr. Varela-García to further her research on the language, culture and identity of the Isleños. In March 2022 she reconnected with the Los Isleños Heritage & Cultural Society when she attended its annual festival. In summer 2022 she returned to St. Bernard and conducted sociolinguist interviews in the community, meeting with Isleños and non-Isleños.

Dr. Varela-Garcia’s research poses questions such as: Is the Isleño language unfit for the individual to communicate if it is not passed down from parents to their children? Can an Isleño who speaks an 18th century dialect and a 21st century Spanish speaker from Latin America or Spain understand each other?

“I wanted to know from a linguistic standpoint what happened to language in attrition in the St. Bernard community at the individual level.” said Dr. Varela-García. “Is there any pronunciation and linguistic behavior unique to Louisiana Spanish as Lipski and Alvar López, well-known linguists, debated? If so, can Louisiana English be held responsible for this linguistic variance, which departs from its usual course in other Spanish dialects today?”

Dr. Varela-García continues: “Do monolingual English speakers in the community behave alike when pronouncing certain English sounds regardless of family and individual identity?  Could Isleño Spanish have colonized and populated some English sounds and, in doing so, did this 18th century Spanish dialect leave its linguistic mark on St. Bernard English?”

“With two exceptions in time, Isleños have always been bilingual. They were Spanish monolingual when they first arrived in the 18th century, and they have become English monolingual speakers in the last decades,” said Dr. Varela-Garcia. “They are American citizens with a unique identity, and their Spanish cannot be studied apart from their English.”

Even though Isleños Spanish has been disappearing for generations in St. Bernard, it remains strong in small pockets of the community, which means it can still be analyzed. As can the English spoken by the Isleños and non-Isleños of St. Bernard.

Dr. Varela-García will outline all of her findings, from the influences driving linguistic evolution to the literal changes in pronunciation, during her presentation at Nunez. She hopes to leverage her own linguistic skills to make the information accessible to non-academic guests.

“I suspect that if we analyze the English spoken by Isleños in St. Bernard we might find enough features to establish a different dialect of English,” she said. “This is something I think belongs to the community, so although my work is academic, I’m going to try to make it as un-technical as possible because I want to share it with the community.”

About Nunez Community College
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