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Variation in Second and Heritage Languages: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Robert Bayley, Dennis R. Preston and Xiaoshi Li
[Studies in Language Variation 28] 2022
► pp. 337–358

Chapter 13
On (not) acquiring a sociolinguistic stereotype

A variationist account of L2-Catalan lateral production by L1-Spanish bilinguals

| University of California, Berkeley

Catalan exhibits a systematic velarization of alveolar lateral /l/ to (dark) [ɫ], somewhat infamously and even pejoratively recognized by speakers as la ela catalana ‘the Catalan l,’ in salient opposition to the non-velarized (or light) realizations of the parallel alveolar lateral Spanish category, realized as [l] (Bibiloni 2006; Davidson 2019; Hualde 2005). In light of an attested negative social stigma afforded to velarized /l/ (Davidson 2019; Pieras 1999; Simonet 2010a), in this study I examine the variable acquisition of Catalan /l/ by L1-Spanish speakers. In so doing, I problematize the assessment of successful second language acquisition for an L1 sociolinguistic stereotype (cf. Labov 2001), ultimately demonstrating how L2-speakers adopt native-like sociolinguistic variation with non-native-like speech variants.

Keywords: sociophonetic variation, Spanish-Catalan contact, second language acquisition, lateral velarization
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • The production and acquisition of Catalan laterals
    • The status of Catalan laterals
    • The acquisition of Catalan laterals
  • Experimental methodology
    • Linguistic factors
    • Social factors and subject population
    • Test instruments
    • Data collection methods
  • Data analysis methods and results
    • Acoustic analysis
    • Total counts of collected lateral production data
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.28.13bav
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