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The varieties that are going through a process of dedialectalisation undergo a progressive loss of idiosyncratic characteristics through assimilation to the prestigious variety. In this process, all levels of the language are affected and there is a progressive loss of traditional features. This process can be documented at all language levels, but it remains relatively understudied in the context of suprasegmental features.
This is why this work focuses on the language shift on the prosody of yes-no questions, since interrogative sentences provide more information for dialectal classification than declarative sentences (Elvira-García 2022). Previous research shows that falling patterns are used for this type of questions in the territories of the former Kingdom of León (Bargiela, 2022; Fernández Planas et al., 2020), whereas Castilian and Standard Spanish exhibit a rising pattern (Estebas-Vilaplana & Prieto, 2010; Face, 2008).
The variety of Spanish spoken in the region of León (Spain) shows a significant influence from Asturleonese, the Romance language that was spoken in the area before the language shift that has led Spanish (specifically its Castilian variety) to be the most spoken language in León. The process of Castilianisation is in an advanced state, since in most of the territory only vestigial rests of the Asturleonese substrate survive (Menéndez Pidal, 1906). However, suprasegmental features seem to exhibit greater resistance to language shift than other characteristics that may be more noticeable at first glance like, for example, the lexicon.
To investigate the process of dedialectalisation within these language varieties, we analyse 74 yes-no questions obtained thourgh a Discourse Completion Task uttered by 11 informants from El Páramo, a rural region characterised by an elderly population in the province of León. The data collected in the rural area are compared with a set of 50 yes-no questions produced by 4 young speakers from urban areas in León, Zamora, Salamanca, and Palencia, obtained both through a DCT and a MapTask. This comparison aims to discern whether a suprasegmental sound change affecting the intonational patters of yes-no questions is underway.
The rural corpus provides clear evidence of the preservation of traditional Asturleonese intonational patterns for yes-no questions, with the standard Castilian rising pattern being scarcely present in the sentences we analysed. However, the rising standard pattern does emerge in some of the young urban informants within the second corpus. Furthermore, this second corpus also reveals the existence of hybrid patterns, corresponding to the concept of fudged lect (Chambers & Trudgill, 1980; Elvira-García, 2020), that appears in situations of vertical dialectal convergence (Røyneland, 2010). The regions where the Asturleonese has historically been spoken still display distinct intonation patterns that significantly differs from Castilian Spanish prosody. This research sheds light on the complex dynamics of language change, providing insights into the preservation and adaptation of suprasegmental linguistic features.