Dialect Leveling In Andalusia

Dialect Leveling in Andalusia

With the creation of the Spanish Royal Academy (‘Real Academia de la Lengua Española’) in 1713, the Spanish established the norms of their national language (Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda 182). In 1768, the Spanish king Charles III commanded that the Castilian language ought to be used both in administration and education throughout the Spanish kingdom (Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda 182). However, these language policies did not eliminate the existence of multiple varieties of the Castilian language. The large amount of Castilian varieties reflect the times in Spain before nation building through language policies established Castilian as the national language (Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda

This essay will focus on the Andalusian varieties of Castilian, spoken in the southern community of Andalusia, and on the phenomenon of dialect leveling, a phenomenon “in which the speech of a group of people converges toward a common norm, with extreme differences

Firstly, an important feature is the neutralization of the /θ/ and /s/ phonemic opposition, found in standard Castilian, where speakers “contrast these two sounds for the letters z, c + e, i and s,x respectively”, a phenomenon that is also known as ‘distinción’ (Dalbor 5). Two dialectal features that can be observed in Andalusia are ‘seseo’ and ‘ceceo’ (Dalbor 5). Seseo speakers generally do not contrast these two sounds, and pronounce both z,c + e, i and s, x with /s/ and ceceo speakers with /θ/ (Dalbor 5). In general, seseo speakers can be found in urban areas in Andalusia, whilst ceceo speakers are predominantly present in the Andalusian rural areas (Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda 190). Secondly, there is a deletion of codas, which occurs when the last consonant of a syllable is dropped (Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda 190). For example, los niños son listos (‘the boys are smart’), would be pronounced as: [lo 'niɲo θõ 'lit:o], or [lo 'niɲo sõ 'lit:o] by ceceo and seseo speakers respectively (Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda 190). Thirdly, Andalusians tend to drop the intervocalic /d/, which leads to words like soldado (‘soldier’), to be pronounced as [solðao] (Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda 205). Finally, the variable para (‘for’) is generally abbreviated to [pa] (Hernández-Campoy and Villena-Ponsoda 205). These