Intonation in language contact: the case of Spanish in Catalonia
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Abstract
While it is well-known that the long-lasting and ever more intense language contact between Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia has led to cross-linguistic influence at all linguistic levels, the effects of the close contact on the prosodic properties of the two languages have hardly received any attention to date. The present study fills this research gap by investigating the intonation of 31 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals from Girona. Drawing on a corpus of semi-spontaneous and read speech data specifically compiled for this purpose, it provides a detailed description of the intonational patterns of the previously undocumented variety Girona Spanish and first addresses Girona Catalan intonation under the angle of its speakers’ bilingualism. The main findings of the work reveal that the two contact varieties share numerous intonational properties and display only very few differences. Both use the same inventories of pitch accents and boundary tones and pattern alike with regard to the realization of nuclear configurations in a large array of utterance types. Differences can almost exclusively be observed in the frequencies with which particular tunes appear in specific contexts. However, due to cross-linguistic influence, the varieties are also characterized by a great deal of variation, which can often be traced back to extralinguistic factors such as the bilinguals’ language dominance. Overall, the intonation of the current contact varieties can be interpreted as an of outcome of substratum transfer and wholesale convergence between the prosodic systems of Spanish and Catalan.