No abstract

Palabras clave: sociolingüística, variación lingüística, análisis cuantitativo, variedades del español de Andalucía.

ResumenThe research project on Dialect Formation (DIALFOR) focuses on dialect contact between southern varieties of Spanish in urban contexts boosted by migration from the rural Hinterland in Andalusia in the course of the last thirty years. Either loyalty to rural vernacular varieties or convergence towards regional and national standard is constrained by the speakers' degree of integration into the large (urban) speech community. The analysis of the social networks where ordinary people live and communicate allows us to explain the speakers' choices.To carry out this research, two sample surveys (Granada and Malaga) using the same fieldwork methodology and theoretical background have been prepared, where commuters and migrant citizens are separated. A third control group of speakers is studied in each rural community where migrants come from. ¡ Theoretical foundations and empirical bases are taken from contemporary trends of European social dialectology research on dialect convergence and divergence (Auer/ Hinskens, 1996a;Mattheier, 2000), with special reference to studies on dialect formation in new towns (Kerswill, 1994a(Kerswill, , 2002. Long term network research carried out on Malaga and Granada speech communities are taken as a point of depart

Studies on the Andalusian variety carried out in the last decades have allowed us to know, with some precision, the way in which certain factors condition the operation. The objective of this paper is to determine if some of these changes are subject to common behaviour. In our research, we focus on the changes that have some kind of prestige and we left aside the non-prestigious ones. The results have shown us a big difference between changes that operate from the top down to the bottom and those that, on the contrary, operate from the bottom upwards. This first group of changes, in addition to having a wide range of prestige and being in agreement with the national standard, these changes are relatively new. In fact, they were driven by a generation subjected to extremely marked social pressures. Currently, these prestigious processes are common throughout the entire dialect, although the rate in which they arrive on the social strata differs depending on the geographical zone. By contrast, the changes that operate from the bottom upwards are not new, they have local prestige, and they present different solutions in different geographical areas.

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