Lectal coherence in a border bilingual community

Abstract

Abstract While studies of lectal coherence, the extent to which speakers’ uses of multiple linguistic variables correlate, have not historically been frequent within sociolinguistics, recent studies have added to our knowledge of co-variation between variables. The present study contributes to this growing body of knowledge by analyzing co-variation of the Spanish voiced obstruent series /bdɡ/ in the bilingual border community of Rivera, Uruguay. On the basis of 5,569 tokens from sociolinguistic interview data from 40 Riverense Spanish speakers, we acoustically analyze mean constriction of /bdɡ/ for each speaker and each phoneme, taking into consideration the influence of Portuguese cognates and Spanish orthography on /b/. Results show positive correlations between constriction of /d/, /ɡ/, and /b/ (when the latter is spelled <b> and has a /b/ cognate), which is expected given the parallel social patterning for these sounds. However, the relationship between these portions of the data and the contrast of /b/ on the basis of orthography and cognates is much weaker. While one factor that could contribute to this empirical observation is methodological in nature, individual lects reflect the unique linguistic histories of their users, including who their interlocutors are, and in a linguistically diverse community, diverse lects can be expected.