Suprasegmentals

While most of the features that we have presented can be associated with the Mexican Spanish substrate, one feature of ChcE has its origins among Euro-American California English speakers. This is creaky voice, or laryngealization, a common phonation effect. In other dialects creaky voice is a paralinguistic marker that signals bored resignation. However, in her recent study, Fought offers tantalizing evidence that ChcE creaky voice, particular among Chicanas, must have other meanings as well (2003: 78).

Finally, Fought mentions the use of palato-alveolar or alveolar clicks in ChcE. Clicks in AmE are egressive airstream stops used as suprasegmentals to signal scolding, disapproval, and other kinds of censure. Fought provides provocative evidence that this paralinguistic marker is far more frequent and signals a wider variety of meanings in ChcE than it does in most other AmE dialects (2003: 79–80).