Measuring language contact in geographical space: Spanish loanwords in Galician

Abstract

The quantitative analysis of linguistic data has been used in variational linguistics to reveal relationships between varieties and distribution patterns of linguistic variants that have often been hidden from traditional methodologies. This research approach helps to understand the spatial organization of varieties in a more comprehensive way, as well as the similarities and differences between them, regardless of their classification as languages or regional varieties. Nevertheless, neither modern methodology nor traditional dialectology has yet given much attention to the analysis of the lexical transfer that occurs between varieties that are in close geographical contact, be they varieties of the same or two different languages. The purpose of this article is to show how dialectometric techniques can be used to analyse the contact between linguistic varieties, as well as to identify the distributional patterns of loan words. The data analysed are taken from a Galician linguistic geography project – a Romansh variety spoken in north-western Spain – carried out in the 1960s (“Atlas Lingüístico Galego” – “Galician Language Atlas”). The lexical variables studied contain Galician and Spanish variants. The dialectometric methods used make it possible to identify geographical distribution patterns for the Spanish variants, to identify areas that are more resistant to the inclusion of loan words, and to evaluate the influence that extralinguistic factors can have on the distribution of loan words. Finally, the paper shows the usefulness of quantitative methods to provide a more comprehensive description of contact-induced language change.