El español hablado en Olivenza: ¿Una variedad en vías de asimilación al estándar?

Abstract

The variety of Spanish spoken in Olivenza, a town located in the border area between Extremadura and Alentejo, is characterized by the influence of (Olivenza) Portuguese (Matias 1984, 2001; Carrasco González 1997). Without any doubt, a closer look at Olivenza Spanish would contribute to an exhaustive description of the varieties of European Spanish and enable us at the same time to better understand contact-induced change. However, there are quite few studies that describe Olivenza Spanish in detail until now. In a first step, the present work summarizes these studies, offering a description of the phonological (including both segmental and suprasegmental), morphosyntactic, and lexical properties of this ‘forgotten’ variety and showing that Olivenza Spanish shares linguistic characteristics with (Olivenza) Portuguese, Standard (or Castilian) Spanish, and the Spanish varieties spoken in Extremadura (Sánchez Fernández 1997, 2000; González Salgado 2003; Kireva and Gabriel 2015, 2016). In a second step, I discuss the mechanisms responsible for the emergence of Olivenza Spanish and its further development. Based on the outcomes of recent suprasegmental studies (Kireva and Gabriel 2015, 2016), it will be pointed out that the prosody of Olivenza Spanish can be analyzed as the result of transfer processes followed by convergence processes. Since some of the findings presented in this paper suggest that Olivenza Spanish converges towards the Standard variety, it will be hypothesized that the ‘Olivenza Portuguese’ features found in the current variety of Olivenza Spanish will be replaced by ‘Spanish’ ones due to convergence towards the Standard variety (or towards a regional Extremadura Standard, if such a regional Standard emerges in a near future).