Cohesion and Particularity in the Spanish Dialect Continuum

Abstract

This paper studies the degree of cohesion among varieties of Spanish, proposing an analysis of Spanish dialectal variation and the internal cohesion of varieties using the Varilex-R database (2016). A battery of complementary statistical tests (correlation analysis, cluster analysis, association analysis) has been applied to these data in order to establish the distances between the principal modalities of the Spanish language. It also introduces the calculation of indices of generality and particularity, which, by establishing associations between linguistic uses within different countries, illustrate the extent to which each country’s Spanish, by virtue of its linguistic uses, can be considered more general or more particular.

Keywords

• dialectometry
• linguistic cohesion
• varieties of spanish