Linguistic variation in the Governació d’Oriola

Abstract

This study explores some of the variable rules that existed in the Catalan language of the Governació d’Oriola region (an area approximately covering the current autonomous communities
of Alicante and Murcia) in the 16th and 17th centuries. The rules analysed are grouped into four different types: those that preserve medieval Catalan; those that indicate the persistence
of features of eastern Catalan; those that tend to incorporate Spanish language structures; and others that emerged locally within the region of Oriola. Given the fragmentary nature of written documentation from the era, not all the selected features can be studied quantitatively, as required by variationist linguistics. Nevertheless, a number of trends could provide adequate results for research, if more documentation were available. All the same, other features, such as the articulation of [ʃ] or [jʃ] in words such as peix (‘fish’) and the infix [-ʃtɾ-] in verbs such as coneixtre (‘to know’), allow for a study of covariance.

Key words: historical sociolinguistics, variable rules, Catalan language, linguistic change, Governació d’Oriola.