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PREFACE

ARMIN SCHWEGLER

UC Irvine

The collection of fascinating articles assembled in this volume is a refreshing attempt to give renewed impetus to the study of a speech variety – Colombian Spanish – that in years past had been one of the most intensely studied in all of Latin America. Towards the end of the latter half of the 20th century, that successful tradition, it seemed, had become a weighty legacy from which most Colombianistas seemed unable to free themselves. As a result, linguistic studies in Colombia became overly conventional, thereby gradually losing the opportunity to profit from more theoretically oriented trends in modern linguistics.

To be sure, shortly after the middle of the 20th century, prominent Colombian linguists (e.g., José Joaquín Montes Giraldo) had carried out extensive and well-informed dialectological work that culminated in the ambitious Atlas lingüísticoetnográfico de Colombia (1981-1983). At the same time, the Instituto Caro y Cuervo was still actively promoting and publishing informative linguistic inquiries in a mostly philology-based tradition. And, with the able assistance of European colleagues, large-scale lexicological investigations led to ambitious publications that produced the much-celebrated Nuevo diccionario de colombianismos (Haensch/Werner 1993). Missing, however, were investigations that would, for instance, have taken advantage of the latest trends in Labovian-style approaches, or of the emerging field of pidgin and creole studies, which in the 1980s and 1990s increasingly attracted the attention of linguists in many parts of the world (Schwegler 2010). Within Colombian academia, other, more recent new directions in linguistics went equally unnoticed. Despite its unusually rich multilingualism, during the last quarter of the 20th century, Colombia had, for instance, been noticeably absent from theory-oriented discussions on language-contact phenomena, studied so profitably by Thomason & Kaufman’s trailblazing Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics (1988). With few exceptions, the impetus for new and fresh approaches to the study of Colombian speech varieties thus seemed to come from scholars located outside of Colombia. This explains, for instance, why, some 40 years ago, Germán de Granda (Spain) and Derek Bickerton (USA) rather than a Colombian national were first to correctly identify Palenquero as a creole rather than simply as a “Spanish dialect”. By the same token, this also clarifies why the vast majority of publications on the same creole have been from the pens of European or North American scholars.

Since the beginning of this millennium, forceful attempts have been made to reconnect the study of Colombian Spanish and related speech varieties with contemporary linguistic theory. Key Colombian institutions are participating in this effort, including the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, whose forward-looking Director (Dr. Genoveva Iriarte Esguera) has expressed genuine interest in restoring the Institute’s former leadership role. Within this same post-2000 period, fascinating studies have delved into Colombian varieties from an array of different areas of linguistics, including dialectology, sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, syntax, phonology, morphology, and typology, often from an interdisciplinary approach. The fact that this volume has brought together twelve specialists (with widely differing theoretical orientations and preferences) on Colombian Spanish and/or Palenquero is firm and welcome evidence that the rejuvenation of investigations into Colombia’s speech varieties is well under way, and bearing fruits at a time when young(er) generations of scholars in and outside of Latin America are in need of inspiration and guidance.

As readers will undoubtedly note, Colombian Varieties of Spanish has several features worthy of mention. First, and foremost, the volume is unique in that it brings together studies on Colombian Spanish that employ current theoretical approaches to linguistics, while at the same time addressing topics and varieties of Colombian Spanish that remain unexplored or understudied. As regards its overall conceptualization, the editors have aimed high by including articles that either extend far beyond the national borders of Colombia (see Hurtado Cubillos’s study of Colombian Spanish in Miami, or Orozco’s examination of nominal possession in the Spanish of Colombians in New York City), or transcend the narrow(er) confines of Spanish. The latter is the case with Lipski’s latest contribution on Palenquero, whose revitalization is occurring far more swiftly than anyone had imagined possible a decade or two ago.

Some of the contributions in this volume are narrow in scope, but are nonetheless very useful for understanding regional variation from a synchronic as well as diachronic perspective. Commendable in this regard are Méndez Vallejo’s article on Focalizing Ser ‘to be’ in the Spanish of Bucaramanga, and Travis & Curnow’s study of the locational adverbs (aquí, allí, ahí, acá, allá) in the conversational Spanish of Cali. As Travis & Curnow demonstrate, the use of these frequent adverbs differs markedly from that traditionally described in the literature. This “deviant” behavior may help to explain in part why Palenquero adopted and subsequently changed these elements into all-purpose prepositions (cp. AÍ kasa = ‘IN/AT/BY/ON the house’). As such, the study – like all the others in this volume – invites further investigations into Colombian Spanish and/or Palenquero, and serves as excellent point of departure for theoretical considerations into language contact phenomena.

In their introductory article, the editors (File-Muriel/Orozco) correctly point out that the study of Colombian Spanish in the United States is in its infancy. It would be wrong to conclude, however, that certain varieties of Spanish spoken within the national confines of Colombia are not similarly underexplored or unknown. One of the true merits of this book is that it informs readers not only of what is being done in the field of Colombian Spanish, but also of what is not being done. In this regard, immediate attention must be drawn to the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia, where slavery during the 18th century and the concomitant fluvial gold mining brought Spanish into contact with thousands of speakers of African languages, and probably also with an Afro-Hispanic pidgin similar to that once spoken in Cartagena (Schwegler, forthcoming). Correa’s detailed investigation in this volume concentrates opportunely on these Pacific Lowlands by examining two phonetic features of presumed African origin.

As mentioned earlier, throughout most of the 20th century, sociolinguistic and/or variationist studies were largely ignored in Colombia. Moreover, partly because of Bogotá’s location in the Highlands, the Cachaco macro-dialect – which includes the Spanish spoken in the interior and in the Andean Highlands of Colombia – had received far greater attention from linguists than the remaining speech varieties. This led to a situation in which empirical variationist information on certain Lowland dialects was virtually non-existent until well after the year 2000. Brown & Brown’s study (this volume) on syllable-final and syllable-initial /s/ reduction in Cali constitutes a laudable attempt to redress this situation. Fortunately, this volume also supplements the aforementioned contribution with a very informative second study of s-lenition (by File-Muriel) that concentrates on the Spanish of coastal Barranquilla.

Images

A. Schwegler & Carlos Patiño Rosselli
(Bogotá, June 2010)
PHOTO BY ALEJANDRO CORREA

This volume could not have been assembled without the enthusiastic collaboration of three generations of linguists from inside and outside of Colombia. All of us who have enjoyed studying the speech of this fascinating South American country have in one way or another benefited from the pioneering fieldwork and publications of Carlos Patiño Rosselli. An Honorary member of the Academia Colombiana de la Lengua and Emeritus professor of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá), he was the first to write a grammar in the Palenquero Creole (Patiño Rosselli 1984) while also tirelessly promoting the study of the indigenous languages of Colombia. Sadly, on June 15 of 2010, he passed away just a few days after he cheerfully attended my three-day seminar on Afro-Hispanic creoles (held at the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Bogotá). It is to this beloved colleague that the editors, the contributing authors, and I jointly dedicate this volume.

COLOMBIAN SPANISH AT THE TURN OF THE 21ST CENTURY

RAFAEL OROZCO/RICHARD J. FILE-MURIEL

Colombia, with a population of 46,300,000 has the second largest concentration of Spanish speakers in the world and the first in South America. According to Patiño Rosselli (1991: 148) Colombia’s linguistic situation is one of multilingualism, made up of three components: Colombian Spanish acting as the national language, approximately sixty indigenous languages that still survive, and two creole languages: Palenquero o Lengua, spoken in the village of Palenque¹ (approximately 60 km Southeast of Cartagena) and Isleño spoken in the archipelago of San Andrés y Providencia. Today, there seems to be no consensus as to the name of the language spoken by most inhabitants of Colombia. To that effect, Villa Mejía (2001: 17) indicates that, 45% of respondents to a survey reported to speak Spanish, 40% Castilian, 10% American, and 5% Colombian.

Colombian Spanish is often characterized in popular discussion as the “best spoken Spanish in Latin America” (Arango Cano 1994: 40), with many laypersons making (perhaps) unsubstantiated claims regarding the “neutral value” of the “most comprehensible” Spanish in Latin America. The sociolinguistic prestige of Bogotá is quite strong, and its speech patterns have traditionally been considered a model for educated Colombians to follow. In turn, this has helped maintain the prestige of Bogotano speech (Villa Mejía 2001: 29), which is spoken by the Colombian elite since Bogotá is home to Colombia’s highest status individuals. As with all other varieties of Latin American Spanish, Colombian Spanish shows indigenous as well as African influence (Zamora/Guitart 1982). The African influence, especially strong in the coastal regions, is attested in Palenquero, in the Caribbean region, and the Spanish of Chocó, on the Pacific coast. Perhaps these diverse influences inspired the publication of León Rey’s (1983) El breve diccionario de colombianismos, which compiles a sizable list of lexemes and expressions that are specific to Colombian Spanish. At the phonetic level, varieties of Colombian Spanish run from the Andean highland dialects, which are very conservative in terms of their pronunciation, to the coastal varieties, which feature drastic consonantal sound variations.

The Colombian dialect regions mainly follow geographical criteria (Flórez 1961, Montes Giraldo 1982). Concurring with Henríquez Ureña (1921), Montes Giraldo (1982: 12) divides Colombia into two macro-dialect areas, a classification that also incorporates the main distinctions popularly made by most Colombians. One of these macro-dialects is Costeño, the word used to refer to the inhabitants of the Colombian coastal regions. The other has been called Cachaco (Orozco 2004: 30, 2009a: 97), after the word used by Costeños to refer to those from the Colombian interior including the Andean highlands. The two Colombian macro-dialects are mainly differentiated by a series of phonological distinctions. The occurrence of coda /s/ in the Cachaco dialect and its weakening, aspiration, or deletion in the Costeño dialect are seen as the main distinctions between them (Flórez 1961, Lipski 1994, Montes Giraldo 1982, Quesada Pacheco 2000, inter alia). Another major difference between the Colombian macro-dialects is the pronunciation of the other Spanish coda consonants [d, n, l, r]. Costeño, being Caribbean Spanish, shares the main phonological features found throughout the Caribbean (Canfield 1988, Zamora/Guitart 1982). For instance, besides coda /s/ being consistently aspirated or deleted, /n/ is velarized. The Cachaco macro-dialect is characterized by phonological conservatism and a predominantly Spanish-derived lexicon as well as the ustedeo, a preference for the second person singular pronoun usted (Quesada Pacheco 2000: 89). According to Lipski (1994: 213), the choice of familiar pronouns and their corresponding verb morphology is the most outstanding morphosyntactic variable in Colombian Spanish. Montes Giraldo (1982) points out that the use of the second person singular tú as the familiar pronoun is the form of choice on the Caribbean coast. On the Pacific coast the use of vos is widespread although tú is also heard. The rest of the country prefers some combination of usted and vos, but usted predominates and speakers of the Cachaco macro-dialect preferentially use usted in most contexts. Nevertheless, in recent decades tú has started to gain popularity among speakers of this variety.

Additionally, Colombian Spanish is spoken in diasporic settings and is found in contact with English in North America. The first Colombian community in the US was formed in New York City almost a century ago (Orozco 2007a: 312). According to US Census figures, today Colombians constitute the largest segment of the population of South American origin in the United States, where the largest concentrations of Colombians are found in New York City, Miami, and Chicago, respectively. There are also sizeable numbers of people of Colombian origin in virtually every major North American city. This direct contact situation of rather recent inception provides a unique opportunity for short-term diachronic observation. Studies of this sort, as Weinreich proposes, “may make it possible to clarify basic problems involving longer time spans as well” (1967: 104). The contact with English and with many other varieties of Spanish make the Colombian Spanish spoken in the US fertile ground for the expansion of studies on Spanish in North America. The Colombian communities in the United States provide ideal opportunities for empirical exploration of the simultaneous effects of language contact and dialect leveling on an immigrant population. The status of Colombian Spanish as a minority variety within larger minority language communities makes it even more interesting since, as Lamanna (this volume) indicates, Colombians do not constitute the largest Hispanic group in any of the major North American Spanish-speaking conglomerates.

Colombian Spanish has been studied by linguists for over a century. Rufino José Cuervo’s Apuntaciones críticas sobre el lenguaje bogotano published in 1872 constitutes the first linguistic study of any variety of Colombian Spanish. However, not much was done until the founding of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo (ICC) in 1942 served to restart linguistic studies in Colombia. The impact of this institution was so important that most of the work on Colombian Spanish completed during the 20th century was produced by members of the ICC dialectology department (Montes Giraldo 1995: 137). As a result of the research carried out there, Colombia is one of the most thoroughly studied Latin American countries in terms of dialectology (Lipski 1994: 204). In fact, the bulk of 20th century linguistic research on Colombian Spanish was mainly devoted to contributions to the Atlas lingüistíco-etnográfico de Colombia (ALEC), directed by Luis Flórez and published in six volumes between 1981 and 1983. The ALEC was the first such project completed in a Latin American nation (Montes Giraldo 1995: 78). The ICC has also played a pivotal role as the main outlet for research on Colombian Spanish through the publication of its journal, Thesaurus, and the dozens of volumes published as part of the series entitled Biblioteca de Publicaciones del Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

Perhaps one of the most fruitful areas of investigation in the Colombian territory has been in the area of pidgin and creole studies (i.e. creolistics). As already noted, Colombia has two documented “creole” languages, Palenquero or Lengua, spoken in the village of Palenque de San Basilio and Isleño spoken in the archipelago of San Andrés y Providencia. Patiño Rosselli (2002) and Schwegler (2011b) provide a thorough treatment of the historical and social conditions that gave birth to these languages, namely, the multiethnic language contact that took place during the forced transplantation of hundreds of thousands of peoples of African origin.

The majority of research on the Colombian creole languages has focused on the former (Palenquero), perhaps due to its unique status of being only one of two Spanish-based creoles in all of Latin America (cf. McWhorter 1995). Indeed, Palenquero has attracted the attention of numerous scholars, including Ochoa Franco (1945), Escalante (1954, 1988), Montes Giraldo (1962), Granda (1968, 1978), Bickerton/Escalante (1970), Del Castillo (1982, 1984), Friedemann/Patiño Rosselli (1983), Patiño Rosselli (1983, 1999), Megenney (1986), Schwegler (1989, 1990, 2010), Davis (1993, 2000), Piñeros (2003), Morton (2005), and Moñino (2002, 2003, 2005), Moñino/Schwegler (2002) among others. These scholars have examined a diverse array of issues from a variety of different perspectives, including the language bioprogram hypothesis (i.e. that creole languages are formed when children use their innate language endowment to transform a highly-unstructured language into a fully-fledged language), monogenesis (i.e. that creole languages are all derived from a once wide-spread Portuguese-based pidgin), and the substratist hypothesis, which sees the similarities among creole languages as attributable to the African substrate languages. With reference to African influence, Hualde/Schwegler (2008) delve into one of the least understood aspects of Palenquero: its intonational system. They argue, convincingly, that at some point in the history of Palenquero, its prosodic system was interpreted as involving lexical tone. This finding contradicts a strong reading of McWhorter’s (2005) claim regarding lack of tone in the creole prototype.

Equally interesting research has been carried out on the language contact situation in the islands of San Andrés and Providencia. Patiño Rosselli (1986) and Bartens (2002, 2003, 2009) have conducted several comparative studies looking at several lesser-known varieties of Western Caribbean Creole English, including Isleño. Bartens (2002) provides a clear picture of the Spanish-Isleño contact situation. Although English-lexified Isleño is in contact with Spanish as the prestige language, there is no stable diglossia of any kind on the Colombian islands, where a shift to Spanish is under way. She notes that most of the population is bilingual, code-switching is minimal, and most creole influence on the local Spanish is eliminated during schooling. Furthermore, she reports massive Spanish calquing in the creole. Unlike other varieties of creole English, which are in contact with Standard English (Jamaica, Belize, and Costa Rica) due to the demographic makeup of the tourists, Isleño sustains heavy contact with continental Colombian Spanish. Bartens (2003) provides an interesting overview of specific structures of Isleño grammar followed by descriptions of corresponding structures in Caribbean Standard English (CSE) and Spanish. She looks at each word class in turn, with attention to their sentential role and phrasal function. In addition to three future markers and one past marker, Isleño verbs may occur without any temporal marking in unambiguous contexts. In the appendix, Bartens provides a list of purported lexemes of African origin with their suggested etymologies.

In addition to the valuable contributions to Colombian dialectology provided by Flórez (1950, 1951, 1961) and Montes Giraldo (1962, 1974, 1982, 1985), there have been a number of studies looking at different phonological processes in Colombian varieties of Spanish. Several researchers provide new insights at perhaps the most contemplated phonological problem in Hispanic Linguistics: the weakening (i.e. aspiration and deletion) of the implosive /s/. Lafford (1986) looks at the role of socioeconomic status, age, and gender in Cartagena; File-Muriel (2007, 2009) looks at the role of lexical frequency in Barranquilla, and Brown (2009) also looks at the role of lexical frequency in four different s-weakening dialects, including that of Cali. In their 2010 study, File-Muriel/Brown depart from the traditional transcription approach and quantify s-lenition in terms of three acoustic measurements, including duration, centroid, and voicelessness. Besides syllable-final s-reduction, Correa Ramirez (1990) examines the reduction of stops in consonant clusters in a rural Spanish variety spoken in Antioquia.

In addition to the fascinating work on spoken Spanish varieties in Colombia, there have also been a handful of studies carried out in the area of sign language. These studies are particularly interesting because they shed light on a speech community that has received very little scholarly attention. Colombian Sign Language (LSC) is used by an increasing number of deaf people in Colombia due to its implementation in bilingual/bicultural education programs throughout the nation (cf. Tovar 2006). Gómez (1999) looks at the LSC community from a phonological perspective, providing a description of the movement-hold model for the phonetic and phonemic representation of sign structure. She provides a useful overview of the basic sign structures and major phonological processes found in LSC.

Despite extensive research on regional variation in Colombian Spanish, which has been largely devoted to the Cachaco macro-dialect, empirical variationist studies are a relatively recent development (Orozco 2009: 96). Consequently, the assertion that “there is very little data available for coastal subvarieties” (Placencia 2007: 86) applies to studies on politeness as well as to research on other areas of linguistics such as language attitudes (cf. Castellanos 1980). By the same token, variationist studies of Colombian Spanish continue to be scarce (Orozco 2010a: 196). The chapters by File-Muriel, Lamanna, Hurtado and Orozco, respectively, in this volume add to recent variationist work by Orozco (2004, 2005, 2009, 2010a), File-Muriel (2007, 2009, 2010), and Orozco/Guy (2008) that has started to fill the existing void.

The study of Colombian Spanish in the US is also in its infancy. This volume aims to contribute to the emerging body of sociolinguistic literature on Colombian Spanish in general, and specifically on Colombian Spanish in the US. Previous research is limited to communities in Florida and New York State. The earliest studies include Hurtado’s (2001) analysis of variable pronominal usage among Colombians and Colombian Americans in Miami-Dade County, Florida, Ramírez’s (2003) study of pronominal expression in impersonal sentences among Colombians in New York State, and Orozco’s (2004) preliminary analysis of the future and the possessive in the Colombian community in New York City. Those studies have been followed by research further exploring those issues (Hurtado 2005a, 2005b; Orozco 2007a, 2007b; Ramírez 2007a). Additionally, Orozco (2010b) explores subject personal pronoun usage by Colombians in New York City, and Montoya (2010) analyzes the expression of possession by Colombians and Latinos of various other backgrounds in New York State. The studies in this volume by Hurtado, Lamanna, and Orozco, respectively, constitute valuable additions to the study of Colombian Spanish in the US.

The immense research possibilities that Colombian Spanish offers have given rise to an increasing number of studies that extends beyond the national borders and that has been shared by linguists from Colombia and abroad, mainly the United States. This volume touches on the great linguistic diversity found in Colombia, bringing together a cadre of “Colombianistas.” Although our goal is to foster the study of Spanish varieties that have not received sufficient attention, we have not intended to produce an all-inclusive volume, which would cover every aspect of Colombian Spanish. Indeed, to suggest this as a possibility would be to underestimate the great diversity that exists within the Colombian territory. The contributors to this volume are only a few of the scholars currently conducting exciting research on Colombian Spanish. In fact, within the past ten years alone, there have been a score of fascinating studies looking at Colombian varieties from an array of different areas of linguistics, including dialectology, sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, syntax, phonology, morphology, and typology, often from an interdisciplinary approach. It is our hope that the reader of this volume will not only learn from the work that is being done, but also from what is not being done. We truly hope that this volume will inspire linguists, whether they have worked on Colombian Spanish or not, to carry out further research in this still under investigated nation.

The idea of producing a volume devoted exclusively to Colombian varieties of Spanish is not completely novel; in fact, the ICC has published two monographs authored by José Joaquín Montes Giraldo, which address Colombian Spanish dialectology from an ethnographic perspective: Estudios sobre el español de Colombia (1985) and Otros estudios sobre el español de Colombia (2000). Additionally, the ICC has published monographs by Luis Flórez and several others. However, this volume strives to take a fresh look at Colombian Spanish at the turn of the 21st century from perspectives not previously used.

This volume is unique in that it represents a compilation of studies of Colombian Spanish that employ current theoretical approaches to linguistics, as well as addressing both topics and varieties of Colombian Spanish that remain unexplored or understudied. As the Table of Contents shows, the remainder of this volume is devoted to three main themes. The next two chapters deal with contact varieties in Colombia. Chapters 4-7 deal with mainland regional varieties. Chapters 8-10 focus on the third main theme in this volume: Colombian Spanish in the United States.

The first main theme of the remainder of this volume looks at language contact varieties in Colombia. The first chapter focuses on Palenquero, which is one of the few remaining Spanish-based creole languages in the world. John Lipski examines the unique language contact and acquisition situation of Palenquero, which has been caused by recent language revitalization efforts to teach Palenquero in Palenque’s schools. Lipski notes that most young speakers acquire Palenquero as a second language and that many of them are starting to speak it outside of the school environment as an affirmation of ethnic pride. Thus, this new generation’s version of Palenquero represents a unique opportunity to test models of post-creole continua. Young Palenquero speakers are in effect acquiring a language that is morphosyntactically a proper subset of Spanish (lacking nominal and verbal inflection), and in doing so are creating a variety of Palenquero, which, like creole and semi creole languages, is the result of incomplete trans-generational transmission. Lipski’s study analyzes both morphosyntactic carryovers from Spanish (e.g. lingering feminine gender concord) and innovations (e.g. the transformation of ma from a plural marker to a definiteness marker). He also discusses a partial lexical split, between words cognate with Spanish (which show a greater tendency to exhibit some morphological inflection) and Palenquero words with little or no resemblance to Spanish, which are more resistant to inflection. By explaining both the “undoing” of Ibero-Romance inflection systems and the emergence of new determiner configurations, Lipski sheds additional light on the role of functional categories in second language acquisition and creolization.

Continuing with the theme of African influence in Colombian varieties of Spanish, José Alejandro Correa explores two features of African origin in the Spanish spoken in the Pacific Lowlands, which until now had been presumed to be attributable to African influence (cf. Montes 1974, Granda 1988, Lipski 2007). The intervocalic phones [ Images ] and [ɾ] and the realization of the Spanish voiceless velar stop [k] (realized as a glottal stop [?]) in particular had been tied to substratal influence. This article provides a new and refreshing look at these earlier proposals. Correa provides phonetic analyses of spontaneous speech to enrich and deepen his discussion. The author presents compelling, synchronic as well as diachronic, evidence which suggests that (1) the variation between [ Images ] and [ɾ] also involves the coronal consonants [r] and [l], and (2) the variable artic-ulatory phenomena in question may well have been diffused by African languages once spoken in the Pacific Lowlands. Furthermore, the author presents strong evidence that the development of the glottal stop represents a regular phonetic change, and, contrary to the [ Images ~ ɾ ~ r ~ l] variation, it is not substrate driven.

The next set of articles is devoted to mainland regional varieties. Chapter Four, by Catherine Travis and Timothy Curnow, is the first paper in this part. This article constitutes an analysis of the ‘locational’ adverbs aquí, acá, ahí, allí and allá, as used in a corpus of conversational Caleño Spanish. The authors address both spatial and non-spatial uses of these adverbs, focusing their discussion of the non-spatial uses primarily on ahí, as close to 40 percent of its tokens in the corpus are non-spatial, including what they call ‘situational’, ‘temporal’, ‘approximative’ and ‘emotive’ uses. Travis and Curnow draw meaningful comparisons with the use of these adverbs in other dialects and genres based on Sedano’s work on spoken Venezuelan Spanish (1994, 1996, 1999), and Richardson’s work on novels by Spanish authors (1996). The results reveal that traditional analyses of locational adverbs fail to fully account for their use, in some cases because of dialect specific features and in others because of the nature of interactive conversation.

Chapter Five provides an analysis of the aspiration of syllable– and word-initial /s/ in Cali. The authors, Earl K. Brown and Esther L. Brown, investigate the aspiration of syllable– and word-initial /s/ (for example, la señora > la [h]eñora) in the spontaneous speech of 25 speakers from Cali. The authors compare their results with those of previous studies of syllable– and word-initial /s/ aspiration in other dialects of Spanish (such as Brown, Esther 2005), as well to the results from the study of syllable– and word-final /s/ reduction (aspiration and deletion) in these same data from Cali (Brown, Earl 2008). This analysis contributes to the ongoing discussion in the literature about the possibility that syllable– and word-initial /s/ aspiration is merely a continuation of syllable– and word-final /s/ reduction as suggested by Lipski (1999) and Brown, Esther (2004).

In Chapter Six Catalina Méndez Vallejo explores the syntax of the Focalizing Ser structure in the Spanish of Bucaramanga. This structure has been attested in only a few varieties of Spanish (Venezuelan, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Dominican, and Panamanian), and is not stigmatized, despite being dialectally marked. Although the FS shows some resemblance to the pseudo-cleft construction, Méndez Vallejo’s syntactic analysis reveals that the two forms are syntactically different. The author presents compelling evidence suggesting that the FS is a functional projection generated below TP and above vP, and that the FS is present in all varieties of Spanish.

In Chapter Seven, Richard J. File-Muriel takes us back to the Caribbean region. He examines the production of the sound “s” in the Spanish of Barranquilla. With very few exceptions (cf. File-Muriel/Brown 2010, 2011; Erker 2010), previous studies looking at s-weakening have relied almost exclusively on impressionistic categorizations of “s” as [s], [h], etc. In the present study, the author employs CPU-assisted measurements (developed in File-Muriel/Brown 2010) in order to capture three acoustic properties of the sound “s:” duration, central tendency of the spectrum, and voicing. Linear regressions reveal that s-production is significantly conditioned by speaking rate, surrounding sounds, lexical frequency, gender and the socioeconomic class of the speaker. File-Muriel discusses the advantages of adopting CPU-assisted measurements in lieu of symbolic representation, as temporal and gradient acoustic details about the sound are concealed when tokens are represented symbolically.

The third main theme explored in this volume takes us beyond the territory of Colombia. It consists of three variationist papers on Colombian Spanish in the United States. Chapter Eight, by Luz Marcela Hurtado deals with impersonal pronouns in the Spanish of Bogotá and that of the Colombian community in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Hurtado’s analysis reveals that the most frequently occurring impersonal pronoun is uno. She also shows that the use of impersonal pronouns is simultaneously conditioned by a multiplicity of factors rather than just one specific social constraint. As occurs in the Colombian Community in New York (Orozco, this volume) the Spanish of Colombians in Miami-Dade County appears to reflect dialect leveling. Hurtado’s study indicates the importance of the context of interaction as well as the influence of language and dialect contact. It also constitutes an important foundation for the study of impersonal pronouns in other Hispanic communities.

In the second chapter on Colombian Spanish in the US, Scott Lamanna, takes us to one of the newest Colombian communities in North America. He examines the use of second person singular pronominal address forms (tú and usted) in Bogotá as it compares to that of Bogotanos who reside in the, Mexican-dominated, Hispanic community of the North Carolina Piedmont Triad. Lamanna’s findings indicate North Carolina Colombians use tú less frequently than both those in Bogotá and North Carolina Mexicans. This study also reveals that dialect contact can influence linguistic phenomena below the individual speaker’s level of consciousness without influencing other behavior. Lamanna’s findings further tell us about the effects of dialect contact on the choice of second person singular pronoun and open up interesting possibilities for future research.

The concluding chapter takes us to the Colombian enclave in New York City, the community most geographically remote from Colombia studied in this volume. Rafael Orozco uses data from the Corpus del Español Colombiano en Nueva York to study the virtually unexplored linguistic variable used to express nominal possession in Spanish. This study reveals that possessive periphrases occur more frequently in New York than in Barranquilla. It also reveals that the expression of possession is conditioned by a number of linguistic and social constraints including semantic category and speaker’s sex. Interestingly, the linguistic conditioning on the expression of possession is largely the same as that found in Colombia (Orozco 2010a), notwithstanding the effects of direct contact with English. In general terms, this study shows how language and dialect contact simultaneously affect the Spanish of New York Colombians. Orozco’s results help increase our understanding of variation in contemporary Spanish and of how the sociolinguistic forces constraining language variation in Colombian Spanish conform to or depart from established sociolinguistic theory. Despite recent research, including the papers in this volume, and despite constituting the largest segment of the population of South American origin in North America, the linguistic situation of expatriate Colombian communities continues to be under investigated.

As Orozco (2004: 60) affirms, the future of Spanish in Colombia depends largely on the country’s social and demographic conditions. As population continues to increase in the southern and Amazonian regions, one inevitable outcome would be the genesis and evolution of new dialects, perhaps influenced by the surviving indigenous languages. Concurrently, if the internal migrations that Colombia experienced during the latter part of the 20^th century are an indication of increased mobility, they stand to further impact the instances of ongoing variation in Colombian Spanish. Additionally, the continued emigration of Colombians to other Latin American nations, as well as to the United States, Canada and Europe will most likely result in the imminent formation of other Colombian communities abroad. All of these factors will undoubtedly contribute to opening exciting lines of research for scholars in linguistics and other disciplines.

We wish to thank our colleagues who provided us with valuable feedback on various aspects of this volume, including: Dary Marcela Ángel, Iris Bachman, Hugh Buckingham, Alicia Cipria, J. Clancy Clements, Concepción DeGodev, Manuel Díaz-Campos, Jeremy King, Edwin Lamboy, Tom Morton, Rafael Nuñez-Cedeño, Richard Ogden, Daniel Olson, Alberto Pastor, Carmen Ruiz Sanchez, Agnes Ragone, Lotfi Sayahi, Armin Schwegler, Sandro Sessarego, and Erik Wills. Their insightful comments were valuable to the contributors as well as to the editors in enhancing the quality of this volume. They are absolved, of course, of responsibility for any shortcomings, which we fully assume ourselves.

Notas al pie

1There is some variation regarding the actual name of this village: Schwegler, Morton, Escalante, Friedemann, and others consistently refer to it as “El Palenque de San Basilio,” whereas Del Castillo, Montes Giraldo, Navarrete, and Lipski refer to it as “San Basilio de Palenque.” Native Palenqueros represent it as both on their website (http://palenquedesanbasilio.com) and have this to say about it: “Los abuelos no aceptan que se diga Palenque de San Basilio argumentan que el pueblo no es del santo sino el santo del pueblo, por eso se le de llamar San Basilio de Palenque y no Palenque de San Basilio, pero políticamente tiene mayor reconocimiento llamarle Palenque de San Basilio y así lo han hecho los académicos.”