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.
Highlights
Language contact is often discussed as ‘Language A’ in contact with ‘Language B’, which overlooks the conduit by which this contact occurs—the bilingual individual
Recall that for Catalan productions, VOWEL refers to the target vowel in the Catalan word, and for Spanish productions, VOWEL refers to the vowel in the Catalan cognate
Subsequent Tukey post-hoc tests of the interaction between LANGUAGE and VOWEL reveal that these bilingual speakers maintain phonetic contrasts between Catalan /e/ and Spanish /e/ (B= 0.07830, p < 0.01) and between Catalan /E/ and Spanish ‘/E/’ (B= 0.01730, p < 0.01)
Summary
Language contact is often discussed as ‘Language A’ in contact with ‘Language B’, which overlooks the conduit by which this contact occurs—the bilingual individual. The literature on individual bilingualism and its phonological outcomes is extensive, and evidence for bidirectional, or reciprocal, influence between the L1 and L2 is abundant. The analogous literature at the level of the speech community is not as readily apparent, yielding a discussion of contact effects in the speech community that is biased towards unidirectional effects, especially in the case of Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia (see Davidson 2020; Galindo i Sole 2003). Using the bidirectional nature of L1-L2 influence in the phonological repertoire of the individual as a foundation for the analysis of contact effects in a community, a broader methodological scope is required to more accurately assess contact effects in a community with long term bilingualism as the norm.
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