Linguistic features of Spanish as spoken by Catalan speakers

The Spanish language is widely spoken in most of the Catalan-speaking territories, where it is partly characterized by language contact with the Catalan language. These territories are: Catalonia, the Valencian Community (except some inland areas which are only Spanish-speaking), the Balearic Islands, Andorra, and the easternmost areas of Aragon. This linguistic contact is encouraged by the fact that almost all of the Catalan speakers in these regions are Catalan–Spanish bilingual to a greater or lesser extent.

Many of the features of this Spanish language variety are present due to the transfer of distinctive features of the Catalan language. Many speakers whose native language is Catalan feature an accent brought about through the transfer of phonetic and phonological features from Catalan; such features are recognized by the listener as a "Catalan accent."

Some of the listed features can sometimes be found in native Spanish speakers who live in Catalan-speaking areas; however, in the case of speakers who are not bilingual, this happens almost exclusively with lexical features.

Linguistic features

How a Catalan speaker's Spanish manifests depends heavily on individual sociolinguistic variables related to age, native language, and the differing environments of language use. It is therefore not a uniform variety with little variation. Many of the features listed below are present with very different frequencies in different speakers, and some of the features could be absent in many speakers (particularly those whose main native language is Spanish, who transfer fewer typical Catalan features).

Most Spanish speakers in Catalan-speaking territories use linguistic forms that are not regionally marked; that is, their speech is similar to that of much of Spain; however, there is a tendency, especially among members of the working class, to use forms typical of southern Spanish dialects.

Phonetics

The phonetic features listed below occur much more frequently among speakers whose main language is Catalan than they do among speakers whose main language is Spanish. All of them can be considered transfer of phonetic features from Catalan to Spanish:

Consonants

Vowels

Morphology

Syntax

The following features are common:

This also occurs in some non-Catalan-speaking areas; it is a typical feature of native Spanish speakers who were born in areas where historically the local speech was particularly divergent from standard Spanish (such as Zamora, Cáceres, Navarra, Murcia). It is virtually nonexistent in the core area of Burgos-Madrid-Andalusia.

Lexicon

References

Bibliography

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 7/29/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.