Tonal Proximity Relationship in the Spanish of the Canary Islands in the Light of Dialectometry

Abstract

Traditional linguistic geography has not dealt with issues relating to the prosodic study of languages and linguistic varieties. The international project AMPER (Atlas Multimédia Prosodique de l’Espace Roman) achieves a key milestone in this area by studying the prosody of Romance languages and varieties in order to disseminate research outcomes in the form of interactive online atlases. Using prosodic data from a wide corpus of declarative and interrogative sentences, obtained from a range of informants from the seven Canary Islands (AMPERCan), a dialectometric study was carried out with a tool especially designed within the framework of AMPER. Correlation values, dendrograms as well as multivariate analysis by means of the multidimensional scaling technique (MDS), have enabled us to establish relationships of close prosodic proximity among the Canary Islands.

Keywords

• dialectometry
• intonation
• declarative and interrogative sentences
• dialectology of the Canary Islands