AbstractThroughout Europe many traditional dialects are converging towards regional or national standards due to large-scale societal changes such as increased education, mobility and dialect contact. In parts of southern Spain, the long-standing mergers of

In line with a growing body of literature suggesting that mergers are reversible given the adequate dialect contact and social context, the present study examines the phonetic split of the Andalusian Spanish merger of ceceo into the Castilian Spanish feature of distinción. Specifically, the study analyzes 19,420 coronal fricatives produced by 80 Western Andalusian speakers from the city of Huelva and the nearby town of Lepe using a reading passage and wordlist. The analyses find that leaders of this change are younger speakers, women, those with more educational attainment, those of service and professional occupations, and those from Huelva. The implications are that large-scale societal changes have allowed for the split of the ceceo merger into distinción in both speech communities, albeit at different rates of change due to their unique socioeconomic histories, demonstrating that a split is possible given the right social context.

This article analyzes the social perceptions of ceceo and distinción in the town of Lepe, Spain using a matched-guise experiment created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve speakers, varying only in realizations of syllable initial coronal fricatives. Based on an analysis of 92 listeners’ evaluations, the speaker guises with distinción are rated as higher status, more educated, more urban, and more formal and are assigned more occupational prestige than those with ceceo. Additionally, listeners with more years lived away from Lepe perceived these differences more so than those with little to no years lived away from Lepe. The implications are three-fold: (i) listeners in Lepe evaluate the national standard feature of distinción as more prestigious than the traditional dialect feature of ceceo; (ii) it can be suggested that time away from Lepe impacts listeners’ social evaluations of ceceo and distinción; and, (iii) even smaller non-urban communities are susceptible to changing language attitudes. Such differences in the perceived social value of these phonetic norms likely contribute to the ongoing dialect convergence of ceceo to distinción in Lepe.

This study examines the social perceptions of the traditional Andalusian feature [ʃ] and the Castilian feature [tʃ] in the city of Huelva and the town of Lepe in Western Andalucía, Spain. A matched-guise experiment was created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve Western Andalusian speakers, varying only in word-medial syllable-initial [tʃ] and [ʃ] for <ch> in disyllabic words. Based on 221 listeners from Huelva and Lepe, mixed effects linear regression models indicate that listeners evaluated speakers with [tʃ] guises as being of higher status, more cosmopolitan, and less friendly than speakers with [ʃ] guises. These findings interacted with speaker and listener gender, listener educational level, and listener origin. The implications are twofold: the traditional Andalusian feature is evaluated as less overtly prestigious than the supra-local Castilian feature; and, that two nearby communities of the same dialect variety may share similar language attitudes, but demonstrate nuanced differences in attitudes due to their unique historical and socioeconomic developments.

This study examines the role of language proficiency and other individual factors (attitudes, input) in the acquisition of language-specific [ð] and dialect-specific [∅] allophones of Spanish intervocalic /d/ in the /ado/ context by L2 and heritage Spanish speakers during a short-term study abroad in Sevilla, Spain. Twenty L2-intermediate, 10 L2-advanced, and 10 Heritage-advanced Spanish speakers completed a reading task at the beginning and the end of the program. Based on an acoustic analysis, a mixed-effects linear regression model found that only L2-advanced and Heritage-advanced groups demonstrated more approximant-like [ð] over time. However, proficiency level interacted with attitudes and input. There were a few [∅] realizations, mostly produced by an L2-advanced speaker who also demonstrated metalinguistic awareness of the dialect-specific allophone. The findings imply that advanced (L2 and heritage) speakers with favorable attitudes toward the local variety are most likely to demonstrate gradient language-specific allophonic changes during a short-term SA program.