Abstract
This paper presents new acoustic data on Portuguese central-southern dialects, namely on the stressed vowels of the area. The data show important cues for the history of those dialects, as it can be seen that they are much more similar to one another than is traditionally assumed. Acoustic data on Portuguese central-southern dialects are proven to be of significance, hence, acoustic data on Portuguese dialects are increasingly needed in order to allow for better dialectological characterizations of Portuguese since those characterizations have been based only on auditory data until now.
Highlights
As dialectological and historical studies put it, there are three main topics pertaining to the identity of Portuguese central-southern (CS) dialects: a) they take their origin from the north of the country and developed in a part of the former medieval Islamic empire; b) they are fairly homogeneous, containing two very distinct varieties / subdialects; c) they form the basis of standard Portuguese
The inquiries were conducted for the Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Portugal and Galicia (ALEPG – Atlas Linguístico-Etnográfico de Portugal e da Galiza) project, which is an ongoing project of the Center for Linguistics of the University of Lisbon
We will see further on that the two inquiry points where the most distinct vowel systems would be expected (Alpalhão, as it belongs to CI, and Praia da Salema, belonging to SW) fully match what could be expected; i.e. Alpalhão and Praia da Salema (i) have the most distinct vowel systems of the set of inquiry points used in this study (ii) exactly in the way we would expect those systems to be
Summary
As dialectological and historical studies put it, there are three main topics pertaining to the identity of Portuguese central-southern (CS) dialects: a) they take their origin from the north of the country and developed in a part of the former medieval Islamic empire; b) they are fairly homogeneous, containing two very distinct varieties / subdialects; c) they form the basis of standard Portuguese. In what regards central-southern Portuguese, those varieties are placed in opposite areas, as one is located in the central interior part of the country and the other in the southwest end; see Map 1 (Appendix, section I). The idiosyncrasies of those two varieties pertain to their vowel systems, to stressed vowels The following sections will present new data on the matter
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