Abstract:

A situation of language contact between Spanish and Portuguese has existed along the border between Uruguay and Brazil since the first forays of Spanish and Portuguese colonizers into this territory in the early 1800s.  As a result, most Uruguayans living along the border speak Portuguese.  Dialects of this language spoken in Uruguay (which have been referred to as Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay or DPU) have been studied extensively (Carvalho 1998, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Elizaincín 1976, 1979; Elizaincín, Behares and Barrios 1987; Hensey 1972; Rona 1965, to name a few).  Surprisingly, very little linguistic research has focused on the Spanish of border communities, which demonstrates considerable influence from Portuguese, especially with regards to phonology.  One of the most noticeable influences from this language is the use of occlusive articulations of intervocalic /d/ (which is typically realized as a fricative or phonetic zero in monolingual varieties of Spanish).  This research analyzes the social stratification and conditioning of two of these language-specific variants (occlusive [d] and phonetic zero) for 63 bilinguals living in the border community of Rivera, Uruguay.

Author: Mark Waltermire