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Spanish Phonetics and Phonology in Contact: Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain
Edited by Rajiv Rao
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 28] 2020
► pp. 363–382

Chapter 13
The unstressed vowel system of Asturian Spanish

Language contact and phonetic contrast in word-final position

| Marquette University

Influenced by the minority language of the region, speakers of Asturian Spanish vary in their production of final back vowels in the masculine singular morpheme, with realizations that range from Spanish [-o] (e.g., perro) to Asturian [-u] (e.g., perru). In this study, I compare the acoustic properties of [o] and [u] in unstressed final and non-final position using the Pillai-Barlett Statistic in R. The results show that young speakers and women have significantly lower pillai scores word-finally, indicating a higher degree of merger between the two vowels in that position. I propose that these speakers are producing a “neutral” variant that allows them to minimize the social risk of using a stigmatized form, while being able to index regional identity.

Keywords: language contact, sociophonetics, phonetics, vocalic variation, Asturian Spanish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Participants and data
    • 3.2Acoustic and statistical analyses
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Word-final position versus unstressed word-internal position
    • 4.2Pillai scores, age, and gender
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.28.13bar
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Barnes, Sonia
2019. Chapter 1. The role of social cues in the perception of final vowel contrasts in Asturian Spanish. In Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 21], ► pp. 16 ff. DOI logo

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