Variação no espanhol de Montevidéu - Uruguai: o uso de consoantes fricativas

Abstract

Even though the Spanish language spoken in Montevideo, Uruguay is very similar to other variations of the language, like the one spoken in Argentina, it has specific characteristics, such as a hybrid formation, derived from the flow of different agents within the eastern territory. In the current 62 neighborhoods in the city of Montevideo there are people who in the 21st century still have not had the chance of leaving the eastern territory to know different cultures. This might be the reason for which there is such little variation in the Spanish spoken in the area. The present research was developed by selecting 18 informers from these 62 neighborhoods, and the overall objective of this investigation was to describe and analyze the behavior of the labial and coronal fricative consonants of the Spanish language spoken in the River Plate, as well as the process of fricativization of the labial plosive, under the light of the Linguistic Variation Theory, with particular focus on the phonological dimension of the sound trace in speakers from Montevideo, Uruguay. The central phenomenon of the study was analyzed from the perspective of linguistic production and perception, controlling two social variables: age group - divided into three generational groups, and sex - and structure variables. The corpus was obtained through four types of data collection: an interview, a production test and two perception tests, an identification test and a discrimination test. The results of the tests, both production and perception (identification type) were submitted to the Rbrul statistics program. Regarding the labial forms, the Rbrul analysis showed that, in terms of perception, the lowest percentage was related to the bilabial fricative [β], and there was difficulty in differentiating the forms [b], [β] and [v], which was interpreted as an indication that the tested forms are being processed by the speakers as allophonic variants; As to production, the results corroborate the tendency in Spanish to have fricativization of the plosive labial sound in an intervocalic context. Referring to the palatal coronal fricative forms, the Rbrul analysis showed that, in relation to the production, there is a favoring to the voiceless coronal fricative [], taking the place of the coronal fricative sound /ʒ/; As to perception, the non-vocalized form has obtained predominant results, especially in the younger generations, becoming an indication that there might be a change occurring in the unvoiced form. Generally, the results of the present study lead to the maintenance of the status of allophonic variants for the three labial forms [b], [β] and [v] in the phoneme representation / b /], and the two coronal fricative forms [ʃ] and [ʒ] in the phoneme representation [ʒ]; However, the prevalence of perception and production of the voiceless coronal fricative form [ʃ] may be an indication of the phonologization of this fricative, taking the place of the voiced coronal fricative /ʒ/ in the consonantal system of the Spanish language spoken in the River Plate.