Dialect differences and the bilingual vowel space in Peruvian Spanish
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The quality of Spanish vowels is often described as being relatively stable across Spanish dialects compared to consonants. Quilis & Esgueva (1983) examined vowels in several varieties of Spanish in order to derive a composite description of Spanish vowel quality. Recent laboratory work by Morrison & Escudero (2007) further supports this view. Comparing vowels produced by male and female speakers from Madrid and Lima, significant differences in formant values were not found between the two dialects (with the exception of the second formant (F2) of the vowel /o/). However, Peninsular speakers did employ significantly longer vowel sequences than the Peruvian speakers. Shifts in vowel quality, nonetheless, are observed in a number of contexts. For example, Oliver (2007) observes word-final vowel raising of mid to high vowels (/e/>[i] and /o/>[u]) in Puerto Rican Spanish, a phenomenon also observed in Mexican and Peninsular varieties. In addition, mid vowels in hiatus are raised in diphthong formation ([e.o]>[jo]), for example in Colombian Spanish (Garrido 2007). In Andean Spanish, Delforge (2008) finds that unstressed vowels undergo devoicing as opposed to centralization. Willis (2008) also shows mid-vowel variation in Dominican Spanish, especially with atonic vowels, such that vowels /e/ and /o/ are not equidistant from /i/-/a/-/u/ in the vowel space but rather tend to overlap with the neighboring high vowels. In these examples, the vowel being altered is an unstressed vowel. In addition, Quilis (1993:170-178) describes a number of vowel-related phenomena found in different Spanish dialects, including instability in vowel quality, vowel deletion, labialization and vowel-laxing in word-final position.