Language contact in Majorca: An experimental sociophonetic approach

This dissertation investigates the potential role of societal and individual bilingualism on sound change in both Catalan and Spanish, as spoken in the Western Mediterranean island of Majorca. A panel of 60 speakers-listeners, 30 Catalan-dominant bilinguals and 30 Spanish-dominant bilinguals were recruited for participation in a series of perception and production experiments aimed at gathering information on the effect of bilingualism on sound variation and change. The speakers-listeners were classified in further subgroups according to their age and gender.;Three phonetic features were analyzed in depth: (1) the shape of utterance-final pitch accents in broad-focus declaratives (Chapter 4), (2) the shape of terminal tunes in absolute interrogatives (Chapter 5), and (3) the degree of velarization of alveolar laterals (Chapter 6). These three features were selected because they were thought to be different in the two languages under consideration. Alveolar laterals, in particular, had been previously reported to be involved in a potential contact-induced change in progress. A contrastive acoustic study of Catalan and Spanish intonation was conducted prior to the other studies in order to find some of the differences and similarities between their intonational systems (Chapter 2).;The results show evidence of contact-induced change in progress in the intonation of Spanish in particular. That is, the results suggest that Spanish-dominant Majorcan bilinguals are progressively borrowing Catalan-like intonation into their Spanish. This was true for both the intonation of declaratives and absolute interrogatives. On the other hand, the intonation of Catalan seems to remain mostly unaffected. Regarding segmental phonetics, on the other hand, there seems to be a tendency for some speakers towards develarizing alveolar laterals in Catalan, which were traditionally very velarized. This means that there is some evidence suggesting that Catalan-dominant females, but not males, borrow Spanish-like laterals into their Catalan. We propose that the difference in the direction of cross-linguistic transfer is partially motivated by the relative degree of social salience and/or stigmatization of each individual phonetic feature. The relevance of these findings for language contact research is discussed.