Asymmetry and Directionality in Catalan–Spanish Contact: Intervocalic Fricatives in Barcelona and Valencia

Justin Davidson

doi:10.3390/languages5040060

Abstract

Multilingual communities often exhibit asymmetry in directionality by which the majority language exerts greater influence on the minority language. In the case of Spanish in contact with Catalan, the asymmetry of directionality, favoring stronger influence of Spanish as a majority language over Catalan, is complicated by the unique sociolinguistic statuses afforded to different varieties of Catalan. In order to empirically substantiate the social underpinnings of directionality in language contact settings, the present study examines the variable voicing and devoicing of intervocalic alveolar fricatives in Spanish, Barcelonan Catalan, and Valencian Catalan as processes that are historically endogenous and equally linguistically motivated in both languages. Intervocalic fricatives in both languages were elicited using a phrase-list reading task, alongside sociolinguistic interviews for attitudinal data, administered to 96 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals stratified by gender, age, and language dominance in Barcelona and Valencia, Spain. Patterns of sociolinguistic stratification consistent with community-level changes in progress favoring either Catalan-like voicing or Spanish-like devoicing varied by community, with a stronger influence of Catalan on Spanish in Barcelona and Spanish on Catalan in Valencia. These asymmetries, corroborated by attitudinal differences afforded to Catalan and Spanish in Barcelona and Valencia, ultimately reinforce the role of social factors in language contact outcomes.

Highlights

Observations of asymmetry and directionality with regard to language contact effects have long been addressed in linguistics research, applicable both at the level of the individual multilingual speaker, as well as at the broader level of the multilingual speech community
At the level of the multilingual speech community, asymmetry and directionality have been characterized along a probabilistic hierarchy of contact influence whereby a majority language is likely to exert greater linguistic influence on a minority language as resultant from an array of typical social differences
Though the empirical investigation of crosslinguistic or contact influence has traditionally centered on cases of L1 to L2 directionality (or source language agentivity (Van Coetsem 2000)) or majority language to minority language directionality at the levels of the individual speaker and greater speech community, respectively, evidence of L2 to L1 directionality (or recipient language agentivity (Van Coetsem 2000)) and minority language to majority language directionality is robust

Summary

Introduction

Observations of asymmetry and directionality with regard to language contact effects have long been addressed in linguistics research, applicable both at the level of the individual multilingual speaker, as well as at the broader level of the multilingual speech community. At the level of the multilingual speech community, asymmetry and directionality have been characterized along a probabilistic hierarchy of contact influence whereby a majority language is likely to exert greater linguistic influence on a minority language as resultant from an array of typical social differences. Though the empirical investigation of crosslinguistic or contact influence has traditionally centered on cases of L1 to L2 directionality (or source language agentivity (Van Coetsem 2000)) or majority language to minority language directionality at the levels of the individual speaker and greater speech community, respectively, evidence of L2 to L1 directionality (or recipient language agentivity (Van Coetsem 2000)) and minority language to majority language directionality is robust. At the level of the individual speaker, for example, Flege (1987) found that French–English and English–French bilinguals developed a merged L1–L2 category with respect to the voiced onset time (

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