Eva Núñez-Méndez

The volume focuses on different processes undergone by sibilants in Spanish (e.g., weakening, voicing, aspiration, merging, elision) in various geographical areas and language contact situations. It offers an updated collection of studies on sibilants in one single book by experts in the field. While there are articles and manual chapters on this subject, they are scattered in different sources. There is no volume that ties together this one class of sounds.

Through a variety of methodological and analytical angles, the volume offers a collection of 11 chapters on sibilant variations in different Spanish dialects. It includes an introductory overview on the matter (c. 1) and also new topics such as: heritage speakers (c. 6) and under-researched Spanish speaking communities (e.g. Boston and NY (c. 4), and Miami Cuban Spanish (c. 5).

Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact: Sociolinguistic Case Studies traces the development of Spanish and its contact with other languages using a sociolinguistic framework from both synchronic and diachronic angles. The chosen linguistic areas exhibit socio-historical contact with Spanish.
Three sections compose this volume:
(i) Border speech communities;
(ii) Outcomes and perceptions in situations of language and dialect contact; and
(iii) Contact and alternation: social boundaries of language switching.
This collection offers new perspectives in the field of language contact and change. It serves as a valuable reference for educators, scholars, language professionals, and general readers with an interest in the vitality of the Spanish language in contact with other languages. The volume provides a historical, social, and linguistic overview of Spanish varieties in the United States, Latin America, and Spain. Each chapter presents an original study that details social factors that have shaped contact varieties of Spanish, providing principal arguments and theories about language use, contact, and change. Each chapter can be read independently and ends with a series of guided topics for discussion, reflection, and further research, enhancing its appeal as a classroom text. With its wide scope, this book is a landmark in language interaction processes and studies.

This volume presents specific topics in diachronic Hispanic linguistics, including: lexical survivals in Ibero-Romance, Arabisms, lexical variation in Early Modern Spain, the origins of the confusion of b with v, Andalusian Spanish in the Americas, the expansion of seseo and yeísmo, processes of koinization, syntactic change in scribal documentation from the Middle Ages, and the semantic changes of the verbs ser, estar and haber. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the Spanish lexicon, phonetics, morphosyntax, dialectology and semantics with the input of ten prominent scholars.

This chapter presents the notion of linguistic policies and rights to a language from a sociopolitical and multicultural perspective. Spain becomes a sociolinguistic prototype due to its extensive history of language planning policies and bilingual education. The case of Spain is studied as representative of a legitimate multilingualism with illustrative examples in terms of officiality, vitality, governmental response, social identity, and educational programs. The chapter is divided into five sections, which explain the linguistic landscape of the Peninsula in terms of language contact approaches and introduce recent research in variationist sociolinguistics.
It includes diachronic accounts to explain the contemporary panorama where Spanish is in contact with four other languages, including both the origin and trajectory of its contact with non-Indo-European Basque, and its eventual contact with three other Romance varieties: Portuguese, Galician and Catalan. It concludes with an overview of the repercussions of this contact to map modern Spanish and its role in both society and the educational system. All the sections are inter-linked and encompass topics like language choice, variation according to style and identity. The chapter also contains a range of features such as key terms, glossary, further readings, and topics for discussion.
The main scope consists of offering an insight into the sociolinguistic reality of languages in contact, urging the reader to reflect upon this situation. Secondly, it covers social aspects of language planning, and the relations between minority and official languages, and how they are represented in legal policies with Spain as an illustrative example. At the same time, it intends to open a dialogue with the reader to underline how the right to a language becomes a socio-cultural need as an extension of human rights.

The evolution of the medieval sibilant phonetic system is central to understanding how original Castilian expanded and evolved on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time, it helps to distinguish varieties such as Andalusian Spanish, trans-Atlantic Spanish, and Judeo-Spanish, which in many ways constitutes proof of all the diachronic processes happening during and after the late medieval period. The sibilant merger and its resulting graphic confusion represent a crucial chapter in the development of Spanish. This study offers an extensive overview of the evidence, chronology, dialectal divergence, theories of causation, and phonetic background of this merger. It helps the reader understand how the sibilant system evolved into its modern realization by exploring the origins and different steps in their complex evolution.

Key words: Spanish sibilants, sociolinguistics, dialectology, sibilant merger, voicing, aspiration, elision, /s/ weakening, assibilation.

Con un total de 5 nominaciones y galardonada con 1 premio Goya a la mejor canción original en el 2018, la película La llamada ofrece una experiencia escenográfica cargada de simbolismos. Dirigida y escrita por Ambrossi y Calvo, propone un relato de iniciación mediante un trasfondo musical. Las canciones y las vivencias de unas jóvenes en un campamento de verano en Segovia revelan un entramado de símbolos e iconografía que desembocan en un lenguaje fílmico peculiar, con elementos de comedia y drama. Las protagonistas crecen ante el espectador con el dinamismo poético de los diálogos y las letras de las canciones. En el presente estudio se pretende analizar el lenguaje musical y simbólico tras el prisma social subyacente.

Coixet is one of the most prominent international Spanish-language directors. Her films, advertisements, documentaries, and shorts demonstrate a creative approach to producing movies and visual art. She highlights the human condition in a universal frame with no temporal or national constraints. Coixet’s movie titles and narrations make us reflect on the artistic image’s power to provoke social and visual commitment. Watching her movies becomes a synesthetic process: the visual discourse brings us to other sensorial layers of feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. This paper analyzes the synesthetic processes in Coixet’s films, where the visual experience awakens other senses and emotions in the audience. Her art is active and moving, far from the passive voyeurism of other directors’ aesthetics.

Key words: Coixet, synesthesia, voyeurism, senses, tray-woman.

Abstract: The natural tendency for language variation, intensified by Spanish’s territorial growth, has driven sibilant changes and mergers across the Spanish-speaking world. This article aims to present an overview of the most significant processes undergone by sibilant /s/ in various Spanish-speaking areas: devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision and voicing. Geographically based phonetic variations, sociolinguistic factors and Spanish language contact situations are considered in this study. The sibilant merger and its chronological development in modern Spanish, along with geographic expansion, have resulted in multiple contemporary dialectal variations. This historical lack of stability in these sounds has marked modern regional variations. Tracing and framing the sibilants’ geo-linguistic features has received much attention from scholars, resulting in sibilants being one of the most studied variables in Spanish phonetics. In this article we provide a concise approach that offers the reader an updated sociolinguistic view of the modern cross-dialectal realizations of /s/. It is essential to study sibilant development to describe Spanish dialects, the differences between Transatlantic and Castilian varieties, and the speech features found in Spanish speaking communities in the Americas. Examining sibilance from different approaches with a representative variety of Spanish dialects as examples advances the importance of sociolinguistic phenomena to index language changes.

Keywords: Spanish sibilants, Spanish /s/, devoicing, weakening, aspiration, elision

Tomando como punto de partida las narraciones oníricas de Lucrecia de León, el presente artículo analiza una serie arabismos que se encontraron en los legajos de la Inquisición sobre su caso de ajusticiamiento. La documentación de los sueños de esta madrileña, atestiguada prolíficamente por escribanos e inquisidores de finales del siglo XVI, recoge 415 fragmentos narrativos, catalogados por las fechas en que ocurrieron entre 1587 y 1590. El propósito de esta investigación reside en analizar tres voces: alcabala, ataifor y búcaro como testimonios de la influencia lingüística y cultural árabe en el vocabulario de la época, resaltando y comparando los cambios sociolingüísticos que estas palabras experimentaron. Además del análisis filológico y sociolingüístico, nos acercamos históricamente a esta mujer y a su época, lo cual nos permite contrastar los estereotipos y prejuicios ante las mujeres a finales del siglo XVI. La importancia de este artículo estriba principalmente en el análisis léxico y, secundariamente, en la reflexión sobre el papel de la mujer y su derecho a expresarse en un discurso narrativo dominado por hombres.

Palabras clave: Lucrecia de León, arabismos, Inquisición, alcabala, ataifor, búcaro, Castilla, siglo XVI.

Abstract

Based on Lucrecia de León’s oneiric records, this study focuses on a series of Arabisms in the Inquisition manuscripts of her persecution and imprisonment. The written documents of this young woman’s dreams, collected and conserved by scribes and inquisitors at the end of the sixteenth century, comprises 415 narrative fragments, dated between 1587 and 1590. The main goal of this article is to analyze three Arabisms, alcabala, ataifor, and búcaro, as examples of the Arabic influence on the Castillian vocabulary of the time. Besides the sociolinguistic analysis of these three words, we present this woman as representative of her gender at the end of the sixteenth century, which will enable us to reflect on stereotypes against women’s voices at that time. The strength of this article rests on the sociolinguistic analysis of lexical terms, while also providing the reader an opportunity to reflect on women’s social roles and voices in a male-dominated discourse. 

Key words: Lucrecia de León, Arabisms, Inquisition, alcabala, ataifor, búcaro, Castille, 16th century.

The movement of English, Spanish, Portuguese and French speakers across the Atlantic from Europe to the Americas, for example, has drastically changed the language ecologies of the Western hemisphere. In the same way, the 300 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade impacted culturally and linguistically diverse areas, especially the Caribbean and Brazil. Slaves’ efforts to communicate with local languages in times of colonization and work in plantations created a large group of creoles and pidgins.
Whatever the cause, the movement of people also means the movement of languages from their original geographic locations to new locations and to new language ecologies. Where users of a language may once have been in contact with speakers of a specific set of languages, in the new context they are interacting with a very different configuration of speakers and their languages.
These changes in the linguistic environment, studied by linguists as "contact linguistics" and by sociolinguists as "language ecology," result in changes in the languages themselves, as we see happening, for example, with the influence that Spanish is having on English in contact zones in North America, and perhaps even more obviously, that English is having on Spanish in both border areas and urban centers.
As we think about the influx of refugees and safety-seekers in Europe, we can expect to see some significant modifications in the language repertoires of the migrants. These contact phenomena touch on the well-known and often studied feature of linguistic variation and the implications of that variation for language identification.