Doctoral Dissertation Research: The effect of dialect contact and social identity on fricative demerger

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Societal changes across the world, particularly in Europe, are altering long-standing traditional dialects. Many such dialects are converging towards national or regional standards. Varieties of Andalusian Spanish present an intriguing case study where two sounds that had been merged are now splitting (or demerging) back into two separate categories, a process known as demerger. In this case, ceceo, or the neutralization of orthographic s and z, c(i/e) to the voiceless predorso-dental fricative [s¦È], in existence since medieval Spanish, is currently demerging into two separate sounds, [s] and [¦È], respectively, converging with the Castilian standard known as distinci¨®n. Ceceo and distinci¨®n each carry social value and the social identities of speakers are judged depending upon which norm they follow. The present research documents the demerger in the Andalusian province of Huelva. It compares two speech communities: (i) the capital city of Huelva, which reflects the new, more cosmopolitan Europe of expanding social networks; and (ii) Lepe, an agricultural town of the province, reflecting an older, more provincial, Europe, but one with stronger social networks. This study seeks to answer the following: (1) which factors contribute most to the probability that a speaker will manifest a split rather than a merger (age, sex, local networks, education, profession, etc.); (2) what are the acoustic profiles of the coronal fricative consonants corresponding to various orthographic representations produced by speakers of each region; and (3) does this demerger impact certain words more than others? The research questions will be investigated through interview data, drawing on the methods and interpretive frameworks of variationist sociolinguistics, laboratory phonology, sociophonetics, social dialectology, and linguistic anthropology. The demerger of ceceo exemplifies the social pressures placed on speakers of local traditional dialects to converge towards more standard features, even if contrary to natural processes of language change.