Phonetic accommodation and domestic migration: vowel raising and palatalization in the Judeo-Spanish community of Bulgaria
Abstract
This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.
The Bulgarian variety of Judeo-Spanish (BJS) is spoken today by no more than 20–25 elderly heritage speakers, all of whom are dominant in Bulgarian (BG). The largest community is in Sofia, but many of its members originally come from eastern Bulgaria. Eastern varieties of BG differ from the (western) close-to-standard variety of the capital mainly in two aspects: (1) the raising of unstressed non-high vowels affects not only /a/ and /ɔ/ but also /ɛ/; (2) before /ɛ/ and /i/, many consonants undergo palatalization. Both features are stigmatized all over Bulgaria and generally avoided by speakers who have relocated from the east to the capital. Drawing on spontaneous speech data from narrative interviews conducted in BJS and BG with 8 bilinguals, we address the question of how BJS speakers of eastern descent deal with the three varieties at their disposal (Eastern BG, Western close-to-standard BG, and BJS) by analysing if and to what extent the aforementioned phonetic features show up in both their BJS and BG. Through acoustic measurements and auditive analyses it is shown that /ɛ/ raising and palatalization are generally more prevalent in speakers still living in eastern Bulgaria, but the speakers’ linguistic behaviour strongly diverges. However, the interrelation of the results of the phonetic analyses with the speakers’ individual biographies suggests that the individual contact scenario crucially affects the outcome of language contact.
Keywords: Language contact, Judeo-Spanish, vowels, palatalization, Bulgarian