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Article published In: Spanish in Context
Vol. 17:3 (2020) ► pp.438–463

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Seeds of change

Social factors conditioning intervocalic /s/ voicing in Loja, Ecuador

 | Saint Louis University
Published online: 15 January 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sic.19012.gar
Abstract
Intervocalic /s/ voicing is of much interest recently in Hispanic Linguistics for two principal reasons: this feature has been attested in diverse dialects of Spanish, and it has been shown to correlate in production and perception with social factors (Davidson, Justin. 2014. “A comparison of fricative voicing and lateral velarization phenomena in Barcelona: A variationist approach to Spanish in Contact with Catalan.” Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 61: 223–244. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; . 2016. “On the social perception of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish.” Language Variation and Change 28 (3): 357–378. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; . 2019. “Social evaluation of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Ecuadorian Spanish.” In Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception, ed. by Whitney Chappell, 125–152. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; among others). One finding that often surfaces is that male speakers voice more than female speakers, and recent studies consider whether this may be due to physiological differences (File-Muriel, Richard J., Earl K. Brown, and Michael Gradoville. 2015. “Disentangling the physiological from the socially-learned in gradient, sociophonetic processes: Evidence from s-realization in Barranquilla, Colombia.” Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Chappell, Whitney, and Christina García. 2017. “Variable production and indexical social meaning: On the potential physiological origin of intervocalic /s/ voicing in Costa Rican Spanish.” Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 10 (1): 1–37. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The present study examines the interaction of gender, age, and interspeaker variation in the voicing of intervocalic /s/ in the speech of 31 natives of Loja, Ecuador. While variationist studies overwhelmingly show women leading change in progress, I argue that young men are leading voicing in Lojano Spanish and that this study of a smaller, non-English speaking community further elucidates the intricacies of gender and linguistic change.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Ecuadorian Spanish
    • 2.2Spanish /s/ voicing
    • 2.3Gender and linguistic change
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data collection
    • 3.2Acoustic analysis
    • 3.3Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overall results
    • 4.2Results of continuous analysis
    • 4.3Results of categorical analysis
    • 4.4Interspeaker variation
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Intersection of age and gender
    • 5.2Voicing and gender
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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