A Quantitative Sociolinguistic Study on the Variation of /b, d, g/ in Intervocalic Position in the Spanish Spoken in Central Peruvian Andes
This paper examines the variation of the intervocalic /b, d, g/ in the Spanish spoken in one of the Andean Spanish varieties. One of the regional phonological features that characterize the Andean Spanish is the use of occlusive [b, d, g] in intervocalic positions where other standard varieties would favor approximate variants [ß, ð, ɣ]. This research provides the first quantitative study on the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors influencing the use of [b, d, g] in Andean Spanish. A total of 4,080 tokens from 24 speakers in the Tupe district were analyzed via multivariate statistical analysis with Goldvarb X. The results show that the most important extra-linguistic factors are speakers’ gender and age, with old female speakers producing significantly more occlusive [b, d, g] than other speakers. The results also indicate that the speakers are standardizing their use of /b, d, g/ but its process is quite different between the male and female speakers.