Verbal voseo among Chilean speakers in Montreal: A case study in a dialect contact situation

Authors

  • Víctor Fernández Mallat Université de Montréal

Abstract

Due to the presence of several groups of Spanish speakers of various backgrounds, a language contact environment exists among different varieties of Spanish in the Canadian city of Montreal. Despite the possibilities that this situation offers to the field of American Spanish Linguistics, no study, as far as we know, has been undertaken to determine the effects of dialect contact on first- and secondgeneration migrants’ Spanish. With this article, we aim to make the first contribution to this area of study; in particular, we focus on the Spanish of Chilean migrants. Using a corpus of naturally-occurring conversations, we analyze the verbal voseo feature in the speech of these migrants.

Keywords:

Chilean Spanish, dialect contact, migration, verbal voseo, Montreal