Edited by Whitney Chappell and Bridget Drinka
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 12] 2021
► pp. 185–204
This study analyzes historical and contemporary data of Spanish produced by Catalan-dominant bilinguals in Majorca to explore the origin and historical evolution of a contact feature of Majorcan Spanish: the preposition en to express direction of movement. The transgenerational survival of this feature of Majorcan Spanish for over three centuries points to a scenario of intra-community recycling of a structure that emerged as the result of incomplete grammatical competence in Spanish and was then perpetuated by limited contact with monolingual Spanish speakers. The changing linguistic ecology of Majorca, however, with wider access to canonical varieties of Spanish in the last half century, has facilitated the demise of this trait among younger urban generations.