Socio‐Phonological Variation in Latin American Spanish

The limits of named language varieties and the role of social salience in dialectal contact: The case of Spanish in the United States

“…the familiar prohibition against comerse las eses 'swallowing one's S's') as well as in the sociolinguistic literature: higher rates of weakening are more likely to be observed in informal settings (Alba 2004), in the speech of men compared to women (Fontanella de Weinberg 1974, Cepeda 1995, and among working class speakers (Cepeda 1995, Lynch 2009). Variation in /s/ also tends to be regionally constrained, with higher rates of weakening typically found among speakers in coastal and Caribbean communities than among speakers in mainland Latin America (Canfield 1981, Lipski 1994 Several scholars have investigated /s/ in U.S. settings characterized by dialectal contact. Many of them report evidence of dialectal leveling (or patterns consistent with leveling, broadly construed), typically in the form of decreased rates of /s/ reduction among speakers with regional origins in areas known for relatively high rates of weakening (Parodi 2003, Aaron and Hernandez 2007, Lynch 2009, Erker 2012, Hernández and Maldonado 2012, Raymond 2012, and Villareal 2014, though see Lamboy 2004 and Ramos Pellicia 2012 for alternative results).…”

“…vos hablás 'you speak'). In Latin America, voseante communities are concentrated in Central America, Colombia, and the Rioplatense region of South America (Lipski 1994, Benavides 2003. In the last of these regions, the use of vos is widepspread and typically unstigmatized.…”

“…The variable presence vs. absence of subject pronouns with finite verbs has been extensively investigated in communities throughout the Hispanophone world (Guitart 1982, Silva-Corvalán 1982, Cameron 1993, Bayley and Pease-Alvarez 1997, Flores-Ferrán 2002, Orozco and Guy 2008, Torres Cacoullos and Travis 2010, Claes 2011, Holmquist 2012, Otheguy and Zentella 2012, Shin 2014, Michnowicz 2015, Carvalho et al 2015. Despite widely shared norms in terms of linguistic factors that condition the presence or absence of pronouns, regional differences in overall rates of pronoun use are routinely reported (Lipski 1994:221, Otheguy et al 2007. However, unlike coda /s/ and voseo, which are not only geographically but also socially constrained, pronoun rates tend not to vary systematically in terms of class, sex, age, or style (Otheguy et al 2007:778, though see Orozco and Guy 2008 as an exception).…”

Documenting Feature Pools in Language Expansion Situations: Sibilants in Early Colonial Latin American Spanish

“…In a few varieties, this sibilant has come to contrast with newer sibilants emerging from previous non-sibilant segments. This is the case, for instance, of /S/or /ʒ/ from /ʝ/ in some Southern Cone varieties or /ʒ/ from /ʎ/ in some Ecuadorian varieties (Lipski 1994: Up until about 1300, most varieties of Castilian Spanish featured a fairly complex system of sibilant obstruents, not too different from that of other early Western Romance varieties. This system included at least seven contrastive segments, as shown in Table 1.…”

Variación fonética y el efecto de la audiencia: el debilitamiento de /s/ en dos géneros musicales

“…Finalmente, en un estudio llevado a cabo en Montevideo sobre hablantes de distintos niveles culturales (Barrios, 2002), se verifica que delante de vocal la retención es lo más frecuente (76%) y que la aspiración es la realización En general, los estudios mencionados parecen coincidir en que, en el español delante de vocal, y que en este último contexto lo que predomina es la retención. Esto difiere sustancialmente de lo que ocurre en las llamadas "variedades radicales" del español (Lipski, 2011), como las habladas en el Caribe, las Islas Canarias y una también de modo muy frecuente delante de vocal.…”