The Corpus Bilingüe del Valle (CoBiVa) is an online database of sociolinguistic interviews developed by Dr. Katherine O. Christoffersen and Dr. Ryan M. Bessett in collaboration with over 130 undergraduate and graduate students and 85 participants from the Rio Grande Valley.
- Currently, there are 85 interviews that make up the CoBiVa.
- The collection is hosted on the website: www.utrgv.edu/cobiva.
- For information about current events and updates, check out our blog: https://www.utrgv.edu/cobiva/blog.
Our Goal
Our goal is to document the language of the Rio Grande Valley (RGV) in South Texas. However, it is also our goal to contribute to the community through education and advocacy of bilingualism to the public. We want to create a sense of pride and prestige for the local dialect. The distinctive language varieties in the RGV are something to be celebrated, and we are working hard to document it to share it with the world.
Sociolinguistic Interviews
A sociolinguistic interview is a casual conversation in order to draw out the most natural and spontaneous speech. Each interview is at least 1 hour long. The last ten minutes are dedicated towards language related topics, so that this won't affect the interviewee's language during the rest of the interview.
The interviewers also collect information on the participant's language background and experience, demographic information, and they document their own language background.
Transcription
The interview is then transcribed, or written word-for-word, to allow for a close detailed study of the language.
The team uses a special format that connects the transcript to the audio so you that the text is clickable.
After an initial transcription, the audio and transcript files are anonymized, deleting identifying information.
Our Research Team
Since 2017, over 130 undergraduate and graduate students at UTRGV have been a part of the research team through community-engaged scholarship (CES) in several courses. In these courses, students are trained in relevant sociolinguistic methods, such as conducting sociolinguistic interviews, transcribing using transcription software and WEBVTT, revising interviews, and anonymizing audio and transcript files.
The courses participating in the CoBiVa project are:
- ENGL 4370 Intro to Border Languages
- ENGL 4395/ ENGL 6366 Community Language Project
- SPAN 4311 Spanish in Social Context
- SPAN 6318 Intro to Sociolinguistics.
Code-Switching: A Sophisticated Skill
People often look at code-switching, or switching between Spanish and English within a sentence, as a sign of a lack of language ability. But it is really the opposite. Decades of linguistic research have shown that code-switching is a highly sophisticated skill!
A large collection of sociolinguistic corpora like the CoBiVa can help us to better understand the patterns of code-switching, along with many other interesting questions, such as:
- When people code-switch do they use "los keys" or "las keys"? Why?
- How do people use "es" and "está" in casual conversations?
- What borrowings (such as 'troca') are most common in the RGV?
- How often do people code-switch, and how does it relate to topic, age, etc.?
- How can we bring the beautiful local language into the Spanish as a heritage language classroom?
- Among many, many others
Funding
This project was made possible in part by funding from:
Credits:
Photos by José Jiménez.