Bidirectionality of language contact: Spanish and Catalan vowels
Abstract
The disproportionate number of studies in Barcelona and the Balearic Islands observing Spanish contact effects in Catalan production, rather than Catalan contact effects in Spanish production, is an oversight of bidirectionality and the probabilistic nature of social factors in situations of language contact. Accordingly, the present study analyzes both Catalan and Spanish mid front vowel production data from Barcelona to investigate whether Catalan contact effects occur in Spanish via a process of dissimilation, and whether such effects are strengthened in younger speakers due to the relatively recent implementation of Catalan linguistic policy in the educational and public spheres. The results are suggestive of dissimilation, where phonetic distinctions are maintained between Spanish /e/ and the two Catalan mid front vowels across both F1 and F2. Additionally, analyses of variance across F1 and F2 reveal that Spanish /e/ productions across F1 are more diffuse in younger speakers and Catalan mid front vowels across F2 are less diffuse, providing evidence of reciprocity in contact effects. These results underscore the bidirectional nature of language contact and advocate for the use of variance of F1 and F2 as a metric of phonological contact effects.
Keywords
language contact; Spanish; Catalan; vowels; phonetic variation; bilingualism
Full Text:
PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v6i1.4956
Copyright (c) 2021 Annie Helms

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Linguistic Society of America
Advancing the Scientific Study of Language since 1924
ISSN (online): 2473-8689
This publication is made available for free to readers and with no charge to authors thanks in part to your continuing LSA membership and your donations to the open access fund.