Towards a social dialectometry: the analysis of internal border effects

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to broaden the scope of border studies in dialectology and show that intra-state political borders can impact dialect continua as significantly as inter-state political borders. Our analysis focuses on the processes of language change currently taking place on either side of the Catalonia–Aragon border in Spain. We aim to bring dialectometry and sociolinguistics closer together by using generalized additive mixed-effects regression modelling. This approach enables us to simultaneously analyze a large corpus of items sourced from four age cohorts and assess which social variables are responsible for this internal border effect. Firstly, our results confirm that the internal border between Catalonia and Aragon, arising from two simultaneous processes of vertical advergence (towards standard Catalan in Catalonia and towards standard Spanish in Aragon), has a stronger effect than the international border between Spain and Andorra. This finding emphasizes the need to investigate internal borders in linguistic convergence and divergence studies. Secondly, our findings indicate that the main predictors of change are the speakers’ year and region of birth. This proves that the border effect should be attributed to the long-term consequences of belonging to distinct administrative entities more than any other social factor. Finally, after comparing various indicators of the sociolinguistic evolution of the Aragonese Catalan dialects, we conclude that the decline in ethnolinguistic vitality of the recessive language during this language shift correlates with an increase in structural hybridization caused by advergence towards the expanding language. This prompts further exploration into whether hybridization is a cause, mechanism, or result of the processes of language substitution.