Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics

Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Janice Carruthers, Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Janice Carruthers

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783110370126
• eBook ISBN: 9783110394337
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Romance languages offer a particularly fertile ground for the exploration of the relationship between language and society in different social contexts and communities. Focusing on a wide range of Romance languages – from national languages to minoritised varieties – this volume explores questions concerning linguistic diversity and multilingualism, language contact, medium and genre, variation and change. It will interest researchers and policy-makers alike.

Language contact

Kim Schulte

22Romance in contact with Romance

Abstract: This chapter examines three contact situations between Romance languages: (a) a long-term contact situation, between Spanish and the Valencian variety of Catalan, that has been ongoing for centuries, (b) a recently established, migration-based contact situation between Romanian on the one hand and Spanish as well as Valencian on the other, and (c) an established contact situation involving Portuguese and Spanish in the New World, on the border between Uruguay and Brazil. In addition to providing relevant sociohistorical and sociolinguistic information, the main focus lies on contact-induced structural changes, given that the structural similarity of (closely) related languages is likely to facilitate such processes.

Keywords: language contact, Romance languages, Spanish, Valencian, Romanian, Uruguayan Portuguese

1Contact between related languages

Contact between related languages has traditionally not been the main focus of studies on language change or the resulting synchronic varieties, mainly due to the fact that the phylogenetic “family tree” model, the very foundation of modern historical linguistics, focuses on diversification from a single ancestor language. While there is no doubt that this model, developed in the nineteenth century and popularized by Schleicher (1853), accurately accounts for the emergence of language families, their branches and sub-branches, it can lead to an oversimplification when it comes to accounting for all the features of a language: as recent studies have shown (cf. e.g. Epps/Huehnergard/Pat-El 2013), contact between related, often closely related, languages or varieties has a significant effect on their structure as well as their phonological, morphological and lexical inventory.

Contact among the Romance languages has existed ever since their emergence as varieties of Vulgar Latin. The types of historical and present-day contact situations are as numerous as they are varied; in this chapter, three different, more or less prototypical cases will be illustrated.

The most common scenario for contact between related languages is one of geographical and cultural proximity between two speech communities (↗23 Language contact between typologically different languages). Within the dialect continuum of which most of the Romance languages form part, neighbouring languages or varieties are generally very similar to begin with, which makes it particularly easy for them to adopt elements and structures from each other. In fact, it can often be problematic to determine whether a particular feature found in contiguous varieties is the result of joint inheritance or the outcome of borrowing, and it may indeed be difficult or impossible to clearly distinguish between the two paths (cf. Schmidt’s 1872 Wave Theory).

Another very frequent type of contact situation is diglossia, i.e. the use of two different languages or varieties for distinct social functions. In cases where both the colloquial and the formal variety are considered to belong to the same language, the distinction between diastratic variation and diglossia is somewhat blurred, but if the formal H-language coincides with, or is similar to, a more prestigious language or variety from a different geographical region, then we are undoubtedly dealing with a case of contact between the colloquial and the prestige language. What is special about diglossic situations is that they do not involve contact between members of different speech communities, but take place within a single speech community and even within individual speakers.

The first contact scenario analysed in this chapter combines these two situation types. In the Valencian Community, situated on the eastern coast of Spain, the local varieties of Catalan have coexisted with Castilian Spanish for many centuries. On the one hand, native Spanish speakers were always close at hand due to geographical proximity and migration from the neighbouring regions, while Spanish has, on the other hand, also served as the official and prestige language for several centuries (cf. ↗17 Linguistic diversity in Spain). In addition to extensive lexical influence, this has led to some significant structural alignment between the two languages, especially in the spoken varieties of the region.

The second contact scenario examined is, in some respects, diametrically opposed to the first, as it involves two Romance languages that have only very recently come into contact after almost two millennia of separation, due to geographical distance as well as political and cultural separation. Romanians have been migrating to Spain in considerable numbers since the beginning of the twenty-first century, forming an increasingly bilingual community in which a new contact variety may be emerging. The data are drawn from a case study carried out in Castellón, where between 15 %and 20% of the population have Romanian as (one of) their native language(s). Further complexity is added to this contact situation by the fact that there are not two, but three languages involved, as both Spanish and Valencian are commonly used in Castellón.

Finally, moving to the Americas, Fronteiriço, a New World Romance variety resulting from contact between Spanish and Portuguese, spoken near the Brazilian-Uruguayan border, will be examined. Perhaps best classified as a sister language of present-day Brazilian Portuguese, Fronteiriço has incorporated a considerable number of features from Spanish. What makes this variety particularly interesting here is that it is under the influence of two competing prestige languages: Uruguayan Spanish, the official language used in administration and education on the one hand, and urban Brazilian Portuguese, the cultural prestige variety to which Fronteiriço speakers have access via the media, primarily television, on the other.

It must be emphasized that the three contact situations presented in this chapter are in no way exceptional; on the contrary, they merely illustrate common processes of contact-induced change in a large number of settings in which speakers of two or more Romance languages communicate with each other on a regular basis.

2Contact between Valencian and Spanish

Valencian is a cover term for a number of Catalan varieties spoken in the Valencian Community, i.e. along much of the south-eastern Spanish Mediterranean coast and in the mountainous hinterland. According to the traditional classification (Milá y Fontanals 1861, 462), Valencian belongs to the Western Catalan dialect group; it differs markedly, both in terms of phonology and morphosyntax, from Eastern Catalan as spoken in most of Catalonia.

It is important to distinguish standard Valencian from the vernacular varieties spoken in the Valencia region; many widespread vernacular features of Valencian are considered non-standard and are thus stigmatized, occasionally causing speakers to feel self-conscious about the use of their native language. Whilst some of these non-standard, vernacular elements are features that have disappeared from other varieties of Catalan but which have been preserved in Valencian and others are the result of more recent language-internal innovation, the continuing close contact with Spanish over the centuries has also had a considerable influence on the lexical inventory, phonology and morphosyntactic structure of vernacular Valencian.295 It is these elements that this section will focus on.

2.1A very brief external history of the linguistic situation in the Valencian community

The history of Valencian can be said to begin with the conquest of the region from the Almohads, the Moorish rulers of the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula, in the first half of the thirteenth century and the subsequent repopulation of the area by a mix of settlers from Catalonia and Aragon (cf. Guinot 2002); Old Valencian thus had input from two closely related Romance languages. There is also a highly controversial theory regarding the contribution of Mozarabic, the Romance language spoken under Moorish rule until the thirteenth century, which in its extreme form claims that Valencian is not a dialect of Catalan, but a continuation of the local variety of Mozarabic (Peñarroja Torrejón 1990).

Contact between Valencian and Spanish is multidimensional, with different types of contact scenarios coexisting. Spanish is both an adstrate, the prestige or H-language in a diglossic situation and, through a reversal of attitudes in recent years in some sectors of society, the less prestigious or L-language in certain contexts.

2.1.1Spanish as adstrate

The expulsion of the Arabic-speaking Moriscos in 1609, who made up around one third of the population, triggered large-scale immigration of Castilian Spanish speakers, especially agricultural labourers. This partial population replacement presumably contributed to the shift to Spanish in many inland areas of the Kingdom of Valencia, in which varieties closer to Aragonese (and thus also more similar to Spanish) had previously been spoken. In coastal areas, the varieties that were closer to Catalan were not under threat of language shift, but were nevertheless influenced by the influx of Spanish speakers, particularly since there was (and still is) a high degree of mutual comprehensibility between the two languages, which means that bilingual conversations, with each speaker communicating in their respective native language, are likely to have been the norm rather than the exception.

Another wave of immigration of Spanish speakers, though far less extreme in terms of the proportion of the population, took place in the twentieth century, due to internal migration from economically disadvantaged areas of Spain such as Andalusia, at a time when speaking Valencian was stigmatized and the majority of Valencian speakers were at least partially bilingual. In this sociolinguistic context, the influx of monolingual Spanish speakers almost certainly contributed to an increase in the use of Spanish in everyday situations outside the closest circle of family and friends. While the use of Valencian, or of Spanish with obvious Valencian features, was not socially accepted in formal settings and among speakers with a high degree of formal education (see section 2.1.2 below), the frequent switch to Spanish in everyday ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Manuals of Romance Linguistics
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Methodological issues
• Variation and change
• Medium, register, text type, genre
• Linguae minores / Minoritized languages: status, norms, policy and revitalization
• Language contact
• Contributors
• Index of concepts
• Index of names