Dialectology meets sociophonetics: The social evaluation of ceceo and distinción in Lepe, Spain

Abstract

This article analyzes the social perceptions of ceceo and distincion in the town of Lepe, Spain using a matched-guise experiment created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve speakers, varying only in realizations of syllable initial coronal fricatives. Based on an analysis of 92 listeners’ evaluations, the speaker guises with distincion are rated as higher status, more educated, more urban, and more formal and are assigned more occupational prestige than those with ceceo. Additionally, listeners with more years lived away from Lepe perceived these differences more so than those with little to no years lived away from Lepe. The implications are three-fold: (i) listeners in Lepe evaluate the national standard feature of distincion as more prestigious than the traditional dialect feature of ceceo; (ii) it can be suggested that time away from Lepe impacts listeners’ social evaluations of ceceo and distincion; and, (iii) even smaller non-urban communities are susceptible to changing language attitudes. Such differences in the perceived social value of these phonetic norms likely contribute to the ongoing dialect convergence of ceceo to distincion in Lepe.

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