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While studies of lectal coherence, the extent to which speakers' uses of multiple linguistic variables correlate, have not historically been frequent within sociolinguistics, recent studies have added to our knowledge of co-variation between variables. The present study contributes to this growing body of knowledge by analyzing co-variation of the Spanish voiced obstruent series /bdɡ/ in the bilingual border community of Rivera, Uruguay. On the basis of 5,569 tokens from sociolinguistic interview data from 40 Riverense Spanish speakers, we acoustically analyze mean constriction of /bdɡ/ for each speaker and each phoneme, taking into consideration the influence of Portuguese cognates and Spanish orthography on /b/. Results show positive correlations between constriction of /d/, /ɡ/, and /b/ (when the latter is spelled and has a /b/ cognate), which is expected given the parallel social patterning for these sounds. However, the relationship between these portions of the data and the contrast of /b/ on the basis of orthography and cognates is much weaker. While one factor that could contribute to this empirical observation is methodological in nature, individual lects reflect the unique linguistic histories of their users, including who their interlocutors are, and in a linguistically diverse community, diverse lects can be expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses variation in the realization of intervocalic /b/ in the Spanish of Rivera, Uruguay, a border community that is bilingual in Portuguese and Spanish. While Spanish has one phoneme that corresponds to the graphemes ⟨b⟩ and ⟨v⟩, which is normally realized as an approximant or deleted intervocalically, Portuguese contrasts a voiced bilabial stop phoneme /b/ with a voiced labiodental fricative phoneme /v/. Sociolinguistic interviews from 40 native speakers of Riverense Spanish were analyzed acoustically using a consonant-vowel intensity ratio as a correlate of the degree of constriction in the realization of intervocalic /b/. Results indicate that speakers that use more Portuguese are more likely to contrast degree of constriction in words with Portuguese /b/ and /v/ cognates. Speakers that primarily use Spanish, on the other hand, contrast constriction based on orthography, a phenomenon that has been called "pedantic v" and "orthographic loyalty" in other Spanish varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1800s, the Uruguayan Government has attempted to enforce cultural and linguistic norms along the border with Brazil through the prohibition of Portuguese, especially in schools, despite the fact that this is the heritage language of most border residents. This research focuses on the differential use of Spanish and Portuguese in Rivera, the largest city on the border. Using self-reported data and metalinguistic commentaries extracted from interviews with 63 Spanish-Portuguese bilinguals, the use of both languages in various domains (home, school, work spaces) and with diverse interlocutors (family, friends, co-workers, superiors) is analyzed. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals that Portuguese, which has been marginalized for decades, is more frequently used in the home with relatives and close friends. The use of Portuguese in more formal domains, including schools, is much less frequent. The results from this study corroborate a perception within the community that Portuguese lacks the prestige of Spanish and provide further evidence of its status as a primarily home language. The current research does not show a progressive shift toward Spanish in Rivera nor does it support claims by other researchers that this community is diglossic. (Contains 7 tables and 4 notes.)

There are two main dialects of New Mexican Spanish. According to Bills & Vigil (2008), the Spanish spoken in the northern part of the state (what they refer to as 'Traditional Spanish') is characterized by the use of archaisms and Anglicisms whereas the Spanish spoken in the southern part of the state (what they refer to as 'Border Spanish') is characterized by the use of Mexicanisms. As a result of increased Mexican immigration to the north of the state in the past several decades, however, the use of Mexicanisms has become quite common in the Traditional Spanish of northern New Mexico, which may be leading to the leveling of differences between the two dialects. The current research focuses on the growing use of Mexicanisms in the Spanish of northern New Mexico over the past three decades. The use of Mexicanisms, archaisms, and Anglicisms is compared using two small corpora of informal Spanish as it is spoken in various cities and towns throughout northern New Mexico. The first corpus is comprised of 18 interviews from the New Mexico-Colorado Spanish Survey (NMCOSS) while the second consists of 18 interviews recorded as part of another project from 2001 to 2010 in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Mora. Results indicate that the Spanish of northern New Mexico includes a much greater number of Mexicanisms than either Anglicisms or archaisms and, for this reason, is much more similar to Border Spanish than once thought. Moreover, the introduction of Mexicanisms in the region seems to be driven by younger speakers, perhaps due to peer interaction with the children of Mexican immigrants. Given these findings, a new characterization of Northern New Mexican Spanish should be considered in future studies. Keywords: New Mexico, Spanish in the U.S., Mexican immigration, dialect leveling, 1. NEW MEXICAN SPANISH. Spanish has long been spoken in what is now New Mexico, long before the arrival of the first Anglophones in the mid-1800s. The use of this [...]

The Spanish of northern New Mexico has been researched extensively, from its phonological characteristics to lexical influences from English, but only a handful of studies have focused on the Spanish of southern New Mexico. The authors of the current study have observed in this variety a variable reduction of the multiple trill [r] used in monolingual Mexican Spanish to a tap [r]. Surprisingly, not a single study to date has focused on this phenomenon. Since most speakers of Spanish in southern New Mexico also speak English, the use of this simplified variant may well be due to an indirect influence from this language, in which a trill is not used. The objective of the current study is to determine the linguistic and social conditioning of syllable-initial rhotics in the Spanish of southern New Mexico. The conditioning of rhotic variation (among [r] and [r] as well as variants [r] and [[??]]) is analyzed according to multiple linguistic factors (word position, word stress, orthographic representation, preceding phonological segment, word frequency, and cognate status) and social factors (sex, age, education level, frequency of use of Spanish, and parents' birthplace). It is anticipated that the trill that characterizes monolingual varieties of northern Mexican Spanish will be simplified and replaced by a tap among bilinguals of southern New Mexico due potentially to the influence of English. Keywords; phonological variation, trill, rhotics, sociolinguistics, Spanish, New Mexico, 1. INTRODUCTION. The Spanish language has been spoken in what is modern-day New Mexico since the initial forays into the territory by Spanish colonizers coming north from Mexico at the [...]

ABSTRACT. This article analyzes the process of assigning gender to English-origin nouns. The two prevailing views are that the process is either done by default where masculine gender is simply [...]

The Spanish word frente (O.Sp. fruente < Lat. frōns), meaning 'forehead', has changed gradually over time to be incorporated into a wide variety of modern forms that convey locative meanings and spatial relations as well as personal qualities. The purpose of the current study is to determine approximately when these new forms incorporating frente developed, the mechanisms for these various changes, and the cognitive ramifications of such developments. A total of 725 tokens of frente from works of fiction spanning three time periods (1200-1450; 1451-1750; 1751-2000) are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively according to collocation, meaning, and syntactic phrase. Each of these analyses, when viewed holistically, shows that the original source lexeme has largely decategorialized as a noun and has been abstracted of its locative/spatial characteristics to be gradually incorporated into prepositional and adverbial forms. It is shown that, conceptually, prepositions profile spatial relations between a trajector and a landmark whereas adverbs profile the location of a trajector alone. These grammatical uses of frente as well as other even more abstract uses denoting personal qualities have developed over time due to cognitive processes such as abstraction, synecdoche, metaphor, and inference. Cases such as the evolution of frente from concrete noun to uses in locative/ spatial forms as well as forms with even more abstract meanings give further justification for the need of a linguistic model that is cognitive-based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]