Abstract
The present study analyzes the prosodic characteristics of the variety of Spanish in contact with Basque (in the Basque Country, Spain). We focus on information-seeking yes/no questions, which present different intonation contours in Spanish and Basque. In Castilian Spanish, these sentences end in a rising contour, whereas in Basque, they end in a falling or rising–falling circumflex contour. In our previous work, this topic was investigated among the urban populations of Bilbao and San Sebastian. The results were that 79% of information-seeking yes/no questions had final falling intonational configurations. All the speakers presented a substantial presence of final falls regardless of their linguistic profile, but there were differences among speakers in the degree of presence of such features. A correlation was observed between the dependent variable of ‘frequency of occurrence of final falls in absolute interrogatives’ and social factors, such as ‘degree of contact with Basque’ and ‘attitudes towards Basque and the Basque ethnolinguistic group’. The correlation was that the higher the degree of contact with Basque and the more positive the attitudes towards Basque and the Basque ethnolinguistic group, the greater the frequency of occurrence of final falling intonational contours in information-seeking absolute interrogatives. The interpretation of this correlation was that the adoption of the characteristic Basque prosody allows speakers to be recognized as members of the Basque community. In the present study, we focused on rural areas. Falling intonational contours at the end of information-seeking absolute interrogatives were even more common than in urban areas (93.4%), and no correlation was found with degree of contact with Basque and with attitudes towards Basque. Our interpretation is that in rural areas the presence of Basque in daily life is stronger, and that there is a consolidated variety of Spanish used by all speakers regardless of their attitudes. Thus, the adoption of intonating features of this language is not the only indicator belonging to the Basque ethnolinguistic group. Our study reveals the great relevance of subjective social factors, such as language attitudes, in the degree of convergence between two languages.
Highlights
Within the growing field of research on phonetic and phonological issues of language contact and bilingualism, aspects of suprasegmental phonology have started receiving more attention, especially in prosody and intonation (a comprehensive list of references is provided in Elordieta and Romera (2020a)).A interesting issue is that the presence of features of a language variety (LV-A) in another language variety (LV-B) is variable within the contact population
In Elordieta and Romera (2020a), we found that an average of 79% of information-seeking absolute interrogatives ended in circumflexfalling intonational configurations in the varieties of Spanish spoken in the Basque cities of Bilbao and San Sebastian in northern Spain
A correlation was revealed between the frequency of occurrence of final falling contours and two social factors: degree of contact with Basque and the attitudes towards this language and the Basque ethnolinguistic group
Summary
Within the growing field of research on phonetic and phonological issues of language contact and bilingualism, aspects of suprasegmental phonology have started receiving more attention, especially in prosody and intonation (a comprehensive list of references is provided in Elordieta and Romera (2020a)).A interesting issue is that the presence of features of a language variety (LV-A) in another language variety (LV-B) is variable within the contact population. Sociolinguistic studies commonly explain linguistic variation in contact situations as the result of two types of factors: internal tendencies of the languages that favor a linguistic change, and the external influence that one language exerts on another in contact situations (Winford 2005, 2014; Poplack and Levey 2010, among others). Aspects such as the extent of contact, the density of speakers of each language, the relative prestige of each language, or the knowledge and relative use of each language by the speakers are usually invoked to explain transfer of features or convergence. Work along these lines includes that of Romera and Elordieta (2013)
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