ABSTRACT

This chapter defines and illustrates the concept of a sociophonological variable as a function of diatopic, diastratic, and diaphasic aspects of variation across Spanish-speaking communities. It is guided by the main perspectives on phonetic variation, sociophonological variables, and approaches to the study of sociophonological phenomena. The term sociophonological variation is used to emphasize the implications that a phenomenon could have for the sound system of a language, ranging from stigma to prestige and to language change more broadly. The main focus is the quantitative variationist methodology that has proven effective in uncovering some of the typical forces behind sociophonological variation and language change, including phonetic/phonological, grammatical, and social conditioning. This perspective is used to define the sociolinguistic variable and apply it to the study of such Spanish-language phenomena as lateralization, elision, and gliding of liquid consonants; hiatus resolution; elision of the syllable-final /s/; velarization in consonant clusters; and intervocalic /ɾ/ deletion, among others. While this is by no means an exhaustive account, the chapter attempts to present not only a variety of relevant phenomena situated in the contemporary context but also a wide geographical and theoretical scope of sociolinguistic study of sound variation.