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Article published In:
Spanish in Context
Vol. 17:3 (2020) ► pp.464–487

Spanish mid vowels as sociolinguistic variables in Galicia

| University of Texas at Arlington
| University of St. Thomas - Minnesota

This paper analyzes the acoustic properties of Spanish stressed mid vowels from a corpus of over 2,800 tokens produced by Galician-dominant bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals. Following principles of bilingual speech production theory, we explore whether these vowels present lexically conditioned open variants [ɛ] and [ɔ] not present in monolingual Spanish. In combination with linguistic factors, we also examine whether bilingual mid-vowel production in our corpus is related to social variables. Assuming a linguistic repertoires perspective that links variation to identity performance, we argue that Spanish /e/ and /o/ are sociolinguistic variables in Galicia and that the distribution of their variants can be exploited to perform social meaning.

Keywords: mid vowels, Galician Spanish, cross-linguistic phonetic transfer
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Hypotheses and theoretical background
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants and community profile
    • 3.2Data collection instruments
      • 3.2.1Sociolinguistic data
      • 3.2.2Acoustic data
    • 3.3Data analysis
      • 3.3.1Acoustic procedure
      • 3.3.2Statistical procedure
  • 4.Results
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Phonetic variation of GS mid vowels
    • 5.2Social factors conditioning GS mid-vowel variation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 January 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.18027.igl
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