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Seseo, ceceo, and distinción in Andalusian Spanish: Free variation or sociolinguistic variation?

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Published/Copyright: August 1, 2017
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 3 Issue 1

Abstract

Dialectal studies have traditionally divided Andalusia in three main areas based on the predominance of seseo, ceceo, or distinción. However, many speakers present a mix of the three phenomena in their speech, which has led to multiple opinions but has not been empirically studied yet. The purpose of this investigation is to demonstrate, by means of a quantitative sociolinguistic study, that the alternating use of seseo, ceceo, and distinción is no free but that it can ben explained by means of linguistic and social factors. The corpus consists of 36 semi-casual interviews with native speakers of Alcalá de Guadaíra (Seville). The results indicate that these Andalusian speakers present a mix of seseo, ceceo, and distinción, but all of them tend to favor distinción in formal contexts. Seseo and distinción were found to be more positively valued in this community than ceceo, as they are more common among young speakers with education, especially women, while ceceo is more characteristic of male speech and less education.

Keywords: phonological variation; sociolinguistic variation; Spanish sibilants; seseo; ceceo; distinción

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Received: 2016-9-13
Accepted: 2016-10-31
Published Online: 2017-8-1

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2016-0075
Keywords for this article
phonological variation; sociolinguistic variation; Spanish sibilants; seseo; ceceo; distinción

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial
  2. Editorial
  3. Phonetics & Phonology
  4. Acoustic correlates of word stress: A cross-linguistic survey
  5. A two-decade-interval variation in vowel insertion after word-final English and French postvocalic plosives in Korean adaptation: A sociolinguistic account
  6. Methodological issues in the study of word stress correlates
  7. Morphology & Syntax
  8. From the past into the present: From case frames to semantic frames
  9. Valency and expectation in Bantu applicatives
  10. Semantics & Pragmatics
  11. Semantic values as latent parameters: Testing a fixed threshold hypothesis for cardinal readings of few & many
  12. The Role of Prosody in the Identification of Persian Sentence Types: Declarative or Wh-question?
  13. Language Acquisition & Language Learning
  14. Individual differences in second language speech perception across tasks and contrasts: The case of English vowel contrasts by Korean learners
  15. Language Documentation & Typology
  16. Topological Relations in Pohnpeian
  17. Psycholinguistics & Neurolinguistics
  18. Incremental parsing in a continuous dynamical system: sentence processing in Gradient Symbolic Computation
  19. Sociolinguistics & Anthropological Linguistics
  20. Frequency effects over the lifespan: a case study of Attenborough’s r’s
  21. Is like like like?: Evaluating the same variant across multiple variables
  22. The linguist’s Drosophila: Experiments in language change
  23. Seseo, ceceo, and distinción in Andalusian Spanish: Free variation or sociolinguistic variation?
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