The influence of social factors on the prosody of Spanish in contact with Basque

Abstract

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:The main goal of this paper is to analyse how social factors determine the degree of occurrence of intonational features of Basque in Spanish in the Basque Country (i.e. Basque Spanish).Design/methodology/approach:We concentrate on information-seeking yes/no questions. In Castilian Spanish, these end in a rising contour, whereas in Basque they end in a rising–falling contour. The data were gathered through sociolinguistic interviews with 12 speakers of Basque Spanish with different linguistic profiles: monolingual Spanish; first language Spanish–second language Basque; and L1 Basque–L2 Spanish.Data and analysis:172 information-seeking yes/no interrogatives were obtained from conversational speech. Their final intonational contours were annotated in the Spanish Tone and Break Index model of intonational analysis.Findings/conclusions:79% of all information-seeking yes/no questions had final configurations with a rising–falling circumflex contour. Only 21% had the final rising contour of Castilian Spanish. Speakers differed in their frequency of occurrence of falling contours, but the differences did not correlate with the speakers’ linguistic profile (monolingual vs bilingual). Rather, higher percentages of yes/no questions ending in a falling contour were found among speakers who had (a) a higher degree of contact with the Basque ethnolinguistic group, and (b) more positive attitudes towards the Basque language and the Basque ethnolinguistic group.Originality:Methodologically, this study is original because the intonational analysis is carried out on natural speech rather than on read or elicited speech. This study is also original from a theoretical point of view because it is the first one to underline the role that subjective factors such as linguistic attitudes play in the adoption of features of a language variety from another contact variety.Significance/implications:Our research opens up a path to continue investigating the weight of subjective social factors such as linguistic attitudes in explaining the variation in the influence of one language variety over another.