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Mixed-Effects Regression Models in Linguistics pp 71–97Cite as

Border Effects Among Catalan Dialects

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Abstract

In this study, we investigate which factors influence the linguistic distance of Catalan dialectal pronunciations from standard Catalan. We use pronunciations from three regions where the northwestern variety of the Catalan language is spoken (Catalonia, Aragon and Andorra). In contrast to Aragon, Catalan has an official status in both Catalonia and Andorra, which likely influences standardization. Because we are interested in the potentially large range of differences that standardization might promote, we examine 357 words in Catalan varieties and in particular their pronunciation distances with respect to the standard. In order to be sensitive to differences among the words, we fit a generalized additive mixed-effects regression model to this data. This allows us to examine simultaneously the general (i.e. aggregate) patterns in pronunciation distance and to detect those words that diverge substantially from the general pattern. The results reveal higher pronunciation distances from standard Catalan in Aragon than in the other regions. Furthermore, speakers in Catalonia and Andorra, but not in Aragon, show a clear standardization pattern, with younger speakers having dialectal pronunciations closer to the standard than older speakers. This clearly indicates the presence of a border effect within a single country with respect to word pronunciation distances. Since a great deal of scholarship focuses on single segment changes, we compare our analysis to the analysis of three segment changes that have been discussed in the literature on Catalan. This comparison shows that the pattern observed at the word pronunciation level is supported by two of the three cases examined. As not all individual cases conform to the general pattern, the aggregate approach is necessary to detect global standardization patterns.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In Andorra, Catalan is the only official language. In Catalonia, where Spanish and Aranese (a variety of Occitan) are also official, Catalan was the vehicular language of education during the 1920s and the 1930s and achieved this status again after Franco’s dictatorship in the early 1980s [1]. That means that all subjects except second and third languages are taught in Catalan in the public schools of Catalonia and Andorra. In Aragon, Catalan has only been a voluntary subject in schools in the eastern counties (where Catalan is spoken) since 1984 [2]. The standard variety used at all schools in these areas is the one sanctioned by the Institut d’Estudis Catalans [3].

  2. 2.

    Wieling and Nerbonne [13, 14] summarize several earlier attempts to ascertain the linguistic foundations of aggregate dialectometric differences, so we shall not review those here.

  3. 3.

    It might be argued that this pattern is due to the fact that the Catalan standard language is mainly based on the eastern dialects of Catalonia. Although it is true that the northwestern varieties of Catalonia and Andorra have historically converged towards the (closer and more prestigious) eastern varieties during the twentieth century, Valls et al. [9] have shown that the standardization process has been much more effective in the diffusion of the prestigious features westwards.

  4. 4.

    While the precise effect of speaker’s year of birth is different for both regions (Aragon, and Catalonia and Andorra) across all three variables, the difference in the effect of this predictor on Aragon as opposed to Catalonia and Andorra was never significant (all p’s > 0.07) due to the small number of locations in Aragon (i.e. eight) and the limited number of words. Therefore, strictly speaking, none of the variables completely adheres to the aggregate pattern (where this difference was significant).

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Acknowledgements

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments which have helped to improve this manuscript. This research was partly funded by the project Descripción e interpretación de la variación dialectal: aspectos fonológicos y morfológicos del catalán (FFI2010-22181-C03-02), financed by MICINN and FEDER.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities Computing, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Martijn Wieling & John Nerbonne

  2. Department of Catalan Philology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Esteve Valls

  3. Department of Quantitative Linguistics, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany

    R. Harald Baayen

  4. Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    R. Harald Baayen

  5. Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany

    John Nerbonne

Authors
  1. Martijn Wieling
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  2. Esteve Valls
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  3. R. Harald Baayen
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  4. John Nerbonne
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martijn Wieling .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts, Research Group QLVL, KU Leuven, Belgium

    Dirk Speelman

  2. Faculty of Arts, Research Group QLVL, KU Leuven, Belgium

    Kris Heylen

  3. Faculty of Arts, Research Group QLVL, KU Leuven, Belgium

    Dirk Geeraerts

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Wieling, M., Valls, E., Baayen, R.H., Nerbonne, J. (2018). Border Effects Among Catalan Dialects. In: Speelman, D., Heylen, K., Geeraerts, D. (eds) Mixed-Effects Regression Models in Linguistics. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69830-4_5

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