Awareness and salience in language contact The case of Asturian Spanish

Abstract

Awareness of a sociolinguistic variable and linguistic behavior are intricately connected, such that the former can influence speakers’ use of particular linguistic variants. As a result, exploring awareness and salience as part of linguistic variation is crucial to fully understanding the linguistic choices that speakers make in interaction and the social meaning of the variants they employ. In this article, I investigate how patterns in the production and perception of Asturian features might be explained by examining their cognitive and social salience, and the different levels of sociolinguistic awareness observed in the communities in which Spanish and Asturian are in contact. After an analysis of metalinguistic discourse on public social media, the article explores the effect of cognitive salience and explicit awareness on the perceptions of the Asturian gender morphemes /-u/ and /-es/, as well as how the availability of Asturian “ye” to index interactional stances relates to the speakers’ awareness of this sociolinguistic variant, its symbolism, and their control over its use. I show that different dimensions of salience and awareness affect the indexical fields of these contact variants, allowing some features to become markers of Asturian identity and social status, to adopt particular styles, and to be employed as stance-marking units based on the speakers’ interactional needs.