The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics

José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke, José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea, Erin O'Rourke

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118228043
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

Reflecting the growth and increasing global importance of the Spanish language, The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics brings together a team of renowned Spanish linguistics scholars to explore both applied and theoretical work in this field.

• Features 41 newly-written essays contributed by leading language scholars that shed new light on the growth and significance of the Spanish language
• Combines current applied and theoretical research results in the field of Spanish linguistics
• Explores all facets relating to the origins, evolution, and geographical variations of the Spanish language
• Examines topics including second language learning, Spanish in the classroom, immigration, heritage languages, and bilingualism

1

Geographical and Social Varieties of Spanish: An Overview

JOHN M. LIPSKI

1 Introduction

According to Spain’s government-sponsored Cervantes Institute,¹ there are more than 400 million native or near-native speakers of Spanish in the world, distributed across every continent except Antarctica.² Spanish is the official language in twenty-one countries plus Puerto Rico; is the de facto first language for most of Gibraltar (Fierro Cubiella 1997; Kramer 1986); still maintains a small foothold in the Philippines, where it once enjoyed official status (Lipski 1987a); and is known and used on a regular basis by many people in Haiti (Ortiz López forthcoming), Aruba and Curaçao (Vaquero de Ramírez 1986), and Belize (Hagerty 1979). Moreover, in the country that harbors one of the world’s largest native Spanish-speaking populations (effectively tied for second place with Colombia, Argentina, and Spain, and surpassed only by Mexico), the Spanish language has no official status at all. That country is the United States, which has at least 40 million native Spanish speakers, that is, some 10% of the world’s Spanish-speaking population (Lipski 2008c).

All languages change across time and space, and Spanish is no exception. Although the Spanish language was relatively homogeneous in Spain circa 1500 – the time when Spanish first expanded beyond the boundaries of the Iberian Peninsula – it has diversified considerably as it spread over five continents during more than five hundred years. Many factors are responsible for the evolution of Spanish, including the natural drift of languages over time, contact with other languages, internal population migrations, language propagation through missionary activities, the rise of cities, and the consequent rural–urban sociolinguistic divisions, educational systems, community literacy, mass communication media, and official language policies. It is therefore not surprising that although the Spanish language retains a fundamental cohesiveness throughout the world, social and geographical variation is considerable. To explore all varieties of Spanish would require several volumes; the following sections offer an overview of regional and social variation in Spanish by means of a number of representative cases, selected to give a sense of the full range of possibilities.

2 Dialect divisions in Spain

Spain contains a complex array of regional and social dialects, but the most striking division – immediately noticeable by Spaniards and visitors alike – separates north and south. In the popular imagination, this translates to Castile–Andalusia, but to the extent that dialects exhibit geographical boundaries, the north–south distinction only approximately follows the borders between these historically distinct regions, while also encompassing other areas. The primary features used to impressionistically identify regional origins in Peninsular Spanish are phonetic: “southern” traits include aspiration or elision of syllable-and word-final/s/(e.g., vamos pues ['ba.moh.'pu̯e] ‘let’s go, then’), loss of word-final/ɾ/(e.g., por favor [po.fa.'βo] ‘please’), and the pronunciation of preconsonantal/l/as [ɾ] (e.g., soldado [soɾ.'ða.o] ‘soldier’). Traits widely regarded as “northern” include the apico-alveolar pronunciation [s°] of/s/, the strongly uvular pronunciation [χ] of the posterior fricative/x/(e.g., caja ['ka.χa] ‘box’), and the phonological distinction/θ/-/s/(e.g., casa ['ka.s°a] ‘house’ -caza ['ka.θa] ‘hunting’). In reality, the regional distribution of these traits does not conform to a simple north–south distinction, since the traits intersect with one another and with additional regionalized features in fashions that cannot be reduced to a single geographical matrix. Most traditional dialect classification schemes for Peninsular Spanish cluster around historically recognized kingdoms and contemporary autonomous regions, albeit with considerable overlap of defining traits along border areas (e.g., Zamora Vicente 1967 and the studies in Alvar 1996). In contemporary Spain, at least the following geographically delimited varieties of Spanish can be objectively identified by linguists, as shown in (1):

(1) Geographically delimited varieties of Spanish:

• northern Castile, including Salamanca, Valladolid, Burgos, and neighboring provinces;

• northern Extremadura and León, including the province of Cáceres, parts of León, western Salamanca province, and Zamora;

• Galicia, referring to the Spanish spoken both monolingually and in contact with Galician;

• Asturias, especially inland areas such as Oviedo;

• the interior Cantabrian region, to the south of Santander;

• the Basque Country, including Spanish as spoken monolingually and in contact with Basque;

• Catalonia, including Spanish spoken in contact with Catalan;

• southeastern Spain, including much of Valencia, Alicante, Murcia, Albacete, and southeastern La Mancha;

• eastern Andalusia, including Granada, Almería, and surrounding areas;

• western Andalusia, including Seville, Huelva, Cádiz, and the Extremadura province of Badajoz – the Spanish of Gibraltar is also included;

• south-central and southwest Spain, including areas to the south of Madrid such as Toledo and Ciudad Real.

Features specific to this expanded list of regional varieties as well as socially-stratified variables within given areas will be presented in subsequent sections.

3 Dialect divisions in Latin America

There is no consensus on the classification of Latin American Spanish dialects due to the vast territorial expanse in question, the scarcity of accurate data on the speech of many regions, and the high degree of variability due to multiple language contact environments, internal migrations, and significant rural–urban linguistic polarization. In the popular imagination (e.g., as mentioned in casual conversations), Latin American Spanish dialects are defined by national boundaries, thus Mexican Spanish, Argentine Spanish, Peruvian Spanish, etc. Objectively, such a scheme cannot be seriously maintained, except for a few small and linguistically rather homogeneous nations. Rather, Latin American Spanish is roughly divided into geographical dialect zones based on patterns of settlement and colonial administration, contact with indigenous and immigrant languages, and relative proportions of rural and urban speech communities. For pedagogical purposes, the following classification, which combines phonetic, morphological, socio-historical, and language-contact data, provides a reasonable approximation to actually observable dialect variation in Latin America. This classification, shown in (2), is based on Lipski (1994), where the other dialect classifications are also discussed:

(2) Latin American Spanish dialect classifications:

• Mexico (except for coastal areas) and southwestern United States;

• Caribbean region: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Panama, Caribbean coast of Colombia and Venezuela, Caribbean coast of Mexico, and also Mexico’s Pacific coast;

• Guatemala, parts of the Yucatan, and Costa Rica;

• El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua;

• Colombia (interior) and neighboring highland areas of Venezuela;

• Pacific coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru;

• Andean regions of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northwest Argentina, and northeast Chile;

• Chile;

• Paraguay, northeastern Argentina, and eastern Bolivia;

• Argentina (except for extreme northwest and northeast) and Uruguay.

4 Major variation patterns: phonetics and phonology

Overviews of the pronunciation of Spanish in Spain are found in Alvar (1996) and for Latin America in Canfield (1981) and Lipski (1994). Among the most rapidly identifiable features separating regional and social varieties of Spanish are differences in pronunciation, both the realization of particular sounds and combinations of sounds, and the presence or absence of certain phonological oppositions. The following sections outline some of the more sali...