Neutralization of the Tap/Trill Contrast in the Bilingual Creole-Spanish Community of the Archipelago of San Andres, Colombia

Abstract

This study examines the segmental duration of non-vibrant rhotics in a language contact scenario in the Western Caribbean, where an English-based Creole co-exists with Spanish: The Archipelago of San Andres, Colombia. The unexplored phenomenon of the neutralization of the tap/trill contrast merits a thorough analysis to examine the effects of language contact in this Creole-Spanish bilingual population. To do this, the segmental duration of 619 non-vibrant, intervocalic taps and trills were compared in three generations of Raizal Spanish (the bilingual Spanish variety) and contrasted with the duration of Continental Spanish (the monolingual variety spoken by Colombian immigrants from Continental Colombia). While there are language-specific differences in rhotic duration between Creole and Spanish, results show that Raizal Spanish has longer durations that differ from the monolingual Spanish variety. A cross-generational examination revealed that the neutralizations of the tap/trill contrast in older bilinguals, as third-generation speakers, are converging toward the monolingual variety, distancing themselves from the older second and first generations. This phenomenon signals a change in progress resulting from diverging variation patterns of duration in tap/trill segments in generations of bilingual Raizales. These findings suggest a changing sociolinguistic panorama in which stable bilingualism is taking place among younger individuals.

Converging Paths of Variation: Bilingual Rhotics and Language Change in the Archipelago of San Andres, Colombia

“…Previous research has identified several formant frequencies as the best acoustic predictors for distinguishing zero-occlusion rhotic production in the linguistic varieties of the Archipelago of San Andres (Restrepo-Ramos, 2021). Precisely, the manner of articulation of these allophonic variants has been examined in detail in a previous study (Restrepo-Ramos, 2021) and it has been determined to conform to an approximant realization in both taps and trills produced with no lingual closures in Raizal Spanish. Thus, both the bilingual varieties and the contact languages are characterized by approximant rhotics when no lingual closure is present.…”