Defonologization between flap and trill in contemporary Judeo-Spanish of Israel

Abstract

Among scholars, phonological opposition between flap /ɾ/ and trill /r/ in Judeo-Spanish is an issue. Considering just written text –where double resh hardly ever appeared–, it is not easy to establish whether the historical development of Judeo-Spanish kept this phonological opposition or a process of defonologization took place in the Sephardic language. This paper focuses on describing the current situation about defonologization between flap and trill in contemporary Judeo-Spanish of Israel. To perform my analysis, I take in account written and oral texts. On the one hand, I describe the use of the digraph rr in Aki Yerushalayim, a magazine published in Israel from 1979 to 2016 that has become a global reference of the contemporary Judeo-Spanish. On the other hand, I analyse the acoustic performance of the trill phoneme through several spectrograms taken from recorded oral interviews to Sephardic speakers that I could carry out during a research stay in Israel.

Keywords

• judeoespañol, fonética, vibrante simple y vibrante múltiple, aki yerushalayim, entrevistas orales.