La identidad y el cambio en A Fala de Xálima

[Resumen extraído de la fuente]

The object of the present dissertation is the A Fala geolect, which belongs to the Galician-Portuguese subgroup of Romance languages. This minority language is used by approx. 5,000 people, who live in three villages: San Martín de Trevejo, Eljas, and Valverde del Fresno in the Spanish province of Cáceres (Extremadura), on the border with Portugal (Xálima region).

A Fala is known in the contemporary linguistic literature (1990s) due to its vitality and a high intergenerational transmission rate, which is exceptional in comparison with the other languages traditionally spoken on the Spanish-Portuguese border, nowadays virtually extinct. The latest research (Ramallo, 2011; Manso Flores, 2016), though generally characterised by optimism, suggests nonetheless a disappearance of some vernacular forms among the youngest generation and a falling number of speakers whose first language is A Fala. The reasons for this are probably changing social structure, new economic relations, contemporary means of transportation and digital communication. A Fala is no longer geographically isolated, which had helped in its preservation since the times of the Reconquista. Furthermore, the Xálima region is no longer the local centre of commerce.

The present author wonders about the future of A Fala and its survival in a fast-changing reality. To find the answers, it is necessary to discover what has helped A Fala to survive in the last decades as well as the real state of preservation of the vernacular forms among the community which participates freely in the postmodern world.

The author proposes two research hypotheses:

1. A Fala is a significant element of the identity of the members of the A Fala community.

2. The real range of penetration of Castilian is probably wider than that reported in previous research, and it has accelerated in the last years.

For the necessities of research on identity, the author determines the epistemic borders of the research group using the sociolinguistic concept of speech community. Having overviewed three of its most important theoretical conceptualizations, the author decides to describe Xálima as a community of practice (Rampton, 2009; Coupland, 2010; Meyerhoff and Strycharz, 2013). This assumption is vital in order to explain the selection of the interviewees and understand the identity dynamics observed during the conversations.

“A community of practice is an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavour. (…) Practices emerge in the course of this mutual endeavour” (Eckert i McConnell-Ginet, 1992). This concept is inherent to social constructivism, whereby “human reality is extensively reproduced, contested and created anew in the socially and historically specific activities of everyday life” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992). The practice in the analysed community could be described as a “work for the protection of A Fala” and the members of this community have the background and the prestige necessary to decide about the future of this local language.

The analysis of the interviews was conducted according to the analytical principles proposed by American anthropologists Bucholtz and Hall Bucholtz i Hall (2004a, 2004b, 2005, 2010) within so-called sociocultural linguistics. The authors propose a dynamic vision of identity created in an intersubjective rather than in an individual fashion and as a social category which emerges in ongoing conversation rather than being aprioristically fixed in unitary and durable macrosociological categories (differently from the traditional sociolinguistics of Labov).

Accordingly to the emergence principle, identity is built through discourse and does not exist before language contact. It is in interaction where it gains social meaning. The positionality principle determines identity as positional in the spatial, cultural and chronological sense. In this manner, we are able to look at the social processes which take place between the individual social actors. The indexicality principle determines the semiotic function of some language elements which (often indirectly) point to a certain social category. Identity also has a relational character: it is a social category which gains meaning in the interactional and intersubjective configuration of an ongoing conversation. The partiality of identity highlights the often incoherent nature of identity constructions. The intersubjective (e.g. ideological) representations shaped through the interaction are partial and ephemeral. They are temporary, local and contextual. It is a constructivist and antiessentialist way of understanding the identity process, whereby agency is partial, intersubjective and distributed among all the interlocutors.

Having analysed 6 interviews (of a duration of about 10 hours), the author states that the interactional dynamic observed during the talks has the abovementioned ontological and epistemic characteristics of an identity. This social category is clearly bound with the vernacular language used by the speech community of Xálima. The analysis of the material and the anthropological observations appears to allow the present author to state that language heritage is an object of some axiologically positive social and ideological stances of the members of a community who are willing to act for its preservation. However, we need to point out their general scepticism towards the ideas of officialization and normativization of A Fala.

The second hypothesis is verified based on research conducted among a group of teenage native speakers of the mañegu variety of A Fala used in San Martín de Trevejo. In the research, the present author analyses the acceptability of geolect samples containing vernacular language features and also those containing castilianised features.

The ability to discern between the two codes should lead to a better understanding of the state of preservation of A Fala and the range of its castilianisation. It might also help to answer the question whether the existing, uninstitutionalized practice of language transmission is sufficient.

Having discussed the demographic and sociolinguistic data about the language use, the present author conducted an acceptability task regarding 17 groups of pre-determined morphonological elements which are characteristic for A Fala and its foreign analogues (144 elements in total).

The results point to an overall acceptance of at least 4 unetymological features (diphthongization of Ě and Ŏ, monophthongization of the decrescent diphthongs, lack of difference between the voiced and voiceless sibilants, simplified -m- forms of -MB-, lack of the affricate /ʤ/). These processes have already been partially described in the literature . (Cintra, 1959; Maia, 1977; Costas González, 2013). Overall, we can point to a tendency to accept the hypercorrect variants styled after Castilian.

The most important constatation is the general acceptance, in all the analysed contexts, of the unetymological velar fricative /x/, which has, up to date, only been described in some isolated borrowings. The author supposes that the spread of this element took place about 10-15 years ago (it was not pointed out in the research from the 1990s) and it has already reached the majority of the young population.

In conclusion, the author confirms both hypotheses. It seems that A Fala has survived to this day also because of its social meaningfulness. The local elite builds their identity around their language. Nonetheless, the author notices a disturbing contradiction: the observed social and ideological stances contribute to the maintenance of the status quo of a profoundly minorized language and inhibits it from gaining any form of institutional prestige (A Fala does not even have an official ortography). From the second part of the investigation it may be concluded that probably, in the current sociolinguistic, social and cultural context, this kind of attitudes might lead to an ever faster castilianization of A Fala.