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Phonetic Variation and Language Attitudes in Northern Catalonia

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Language Attitudes and Minority Rights

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Abstract

Hawkey undertakes a variationist study of vocalic and consonantal variables in the Catalan speech of residents of Northern Catalonia. In addition to traditional macrosociological categories (such as sex, age, and place of residence), Hawkey uses participant language attitudes as potential predictors of phonetic variation. For three of the four variables, attitudes are shown to reliably predict the usage of a particular variant. In each of these cases, if a participant rates Catalan highly as a language of status, s/he is more likely to employ supralocal variants (i.e. those akin to the speech of Barcelona). However, if Catalan is rated highly as a language of solidarity, the participant shows a tendency to employ local variants.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Participant occupation (as a proxy for social class) was not examined, given the small size of the sample required (N = 20), and the relative homogeneity of the rural participants.

  2. 2.

    The term phoneme is used here to code the preceding or following segment after lexical processes but before post-lexical processes have been applied. For example, word-final obstruent devoicing means that perd (s/he loses) /pɛɾd/ is pronounced [pɛɾt]. In this case, t would have been given as the following phoneme, but the exact phonetic detail of [t] (e.g. VOT, closure duration etc.) is not taken into account.

  3. 3.

    While this process largely applies to word-final fricative [ʃ] (Gómez Duran 2016: 40), the common word vaig (‘I go’), which ends in the affricate [t͡ʃ] is also frequently affected, and has thus been included for analysis. The supralocal pronunciation of [bat͡ʃ] thus often appears in Rossellonese varieties alongside the local variant [baj], and this is confirmed by the present data.

  4. 4.

    [ɛ] is used here, as opposed to the [e̞] which appears in stressed position in Rossellonese Catalan , in line with Recasens i Vives (1996: 109). Moreover, the mid front Rossellonese Catalan vowel [e̞] is closer in articulation to [ɛ] than [e] (Fouché 1924, in Recasens i Vives 1996: 78) and so any differences should be minimal.

  5. 5.

    This data is based on values for French vowels. Since [Å“] does not typically appear in most varieties of Catalan, it is unsurprising that reference formant data for Catalan [Å“] does not exist. The Hz values for [É›] and [Å“] from Maurova Pailleareau (2016) were not used as guidelines for testing here, since all participants in this study were female, and thus the absolute mean Hz readings would be higher than for a cross-sex sample.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Modern Languages, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    James Hawkey

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Hawkey, J. (2018). Phonetic Variation and Language Attitudes in Northern Catalonia. In: Language Attitudes and Minority Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74597-8_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74597-8_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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