¿Soy de Ribera o Rivera?: Sociolinguistic /b/-/v/ Variation in Rivera Spanish

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of language contact on three generations of bilingual Spanish and Uruguayan Portuguese speakers in Rivera City, Uruguay, located on the Uruguayan–Brazilian border. Focusing on the confirmed presence of the Portuguese-like/b/and/v/phonemic distinction, and the lower frequency of the Montevideo Spanish-like approximantized stops in Riverense Spanish (RS), the research examines the production of and in 29 female Rivera Spanish bilinguals belonging to different age groups. More specifically, the aim was to see if the previously observed differential use of language-specific phonological variants could be accounted for by using precise measurements of relative intensity, duration, and voicing coupled with a distributional analysis of realizations derived from auditory coding. At the same time, their production is compared to that of 30 monolingual Montevideo Spanish (MS) speakers, who served as the control group, offering a first description of the production of and within this distinct Rioplatense Spanish variety. Riverense’s higher overall relative intensity, duration, and voicing values support auditory coding results, providing evidence of the expected phonological differences between both Uruguayan Spanish varieties. In particular, an exclusive presence of fricative/v/and less approximantization of/b/in RS speech exposed the influence of Portuguese in Rivera bilinguals and their divergence from MS. In addition, as predicted, the findings reveal a higher presence of Portuguese-like productions of [v] and [b] in older bilinguals when compared to younger generations. This illustrates a continuum from Portuguese-like forms to Spanish-like forms, which is confirmed by both acoustic and distributional analyses. Finally, evidence of the existence of innovative forms resulting from mixing Portuguese and Spanish phonological systems in RS are presented. This study’s findings contribute to sociolinguistics and bilingualism by exposing cross-linguistic influence in a border setting with rigorous analytical methods that offer reliable results and go beyond a basic analysis based on auditory identification.

Keywords

• sociolinguistics
• phonetics and phonology
• languages in contact
• speech production
• border linguistics
• bilingualism