Adult language and dialect learning as simultaneous environmental triggers for language change in Spanish

Abstract

Grammatical restructuring in contact situations is customarily analyzed under the lens of either language contact or dialect contact. In this study we argue that both processes may operate jointly in social settings where dialectal accommodation and adult L2 learning favor the same linguistic outcomes. From an evolutionary perspective, this overlap between both forms of contact may be conceptualized as a function of a common underlying process, with speakers selecting features of heterogeneous provenance, acquired at various life stages. We exemplify this joint effect by focusing on two changes in the history of Spanish: the rearrangement of the 3rd person object clitic system in medieval southern Iberian Castilian and the merging of the medieval sibilants in early colonial Spanish.