A potential case of attitude change: The Spanish spoken in the city of Malaga and used on social network sites

Chariatte, Nadine (2016). A potential case of attitude change: The Spanish spoken in the city of Malaga and used on social network sites (Unpublished). In: Sociolinguistics Symposium 21. Murcia. 15.-18.06.2016.

The Spanish spoken in the city of Malaga, as Andalusian Spanish in general, was in the past often times considered an incorrect, low prestige variety of Spanish which was strongly associated with the poor, rural, backward South of Spain. This southern Spanish variety is easily recognised because of its innovative phonetic features that diverge from the national standard, even though in the past years in the case of some features a convergence to the standard could be observed. Despite its low prestige the local variety of Spanish is quite often used on social network sites, where it is considered as urban, fashion and cool. Thus, this paper aims at analysing whether the Spanish used in the city of Malaga is undergoing an attitude change. The study draws on naturally occurring speech, data extracted from Facebook and a series of questionnaires about the salience, attitude and perception of the local variety of Spanish. The influence of the social factors age and gender is analysed, since they are both known to play a crucial role in many instances of language change. The first is of special interest, as during the Franco dictatorship dialect use was not accepted in schools and in the media. Results show that, on the one hand, people from Malaga hold a more positive attitude towards non-standard features used on social network sites than in spoken language. On the other hand, young female users employ most non-standard features online and unsurprisingly have an extremely positive attitude towards this use. However, in spoken Spanish the use and attitude of some features is led by men and speakers educated during the Franco dictatorship, while other features, such as elision of intervocalic /d/, elision of final /ɾ/, /l/ and /d/ and ceceo, are predominantly employed by and younger speakers and women. These features are considered as salient in the local variety and work as local identity markers.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Speech)

Division/Institute:

06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Spanish Languages and Literature > Linguistic Studies
06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of Spanish Languages and Literature

UniBE Contributor:

Chariatte, Nadine

Subjects:

800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 860 Spanish & Portuguese literatures
400 Language > 460 Spanish & Portuguese languages

Language:

English

Submitter:

Nadine Chariatte

Date Deposited:

19 Jul 2016 14:33

Last Modified:

05 Dec 2022 14:57

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/84017

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