Linguistic variation in the Governació d’Oriola Authors Brauli Montoya Abat Departament de Filologia Catalana. Universitat d’Alacant Antoni Mas i Miralles Departament de Filologia Catalana. Universitat d’Alacant Keywords: historical sociolinguistics, variable rules, Catalan language, linguistic change, 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 communitiesof 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 persistenceof 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. Author Biography Brauli Montoya Abat, Departament de Filologia Catalana. Universitat d’Alacant Downloads PDF (Català) Published 2014-05-19 Issue No. 23 (2013): La sociolingüística de la variació en l’àmbit de la ll engua catalana Section Secció monogràfica. La sociolingüística de la variació en l’àmbit de la llengua catalana License Intellectual property Intellectual property in articles belongs to the respective authors. By submitting their articles to TSC to request their publication, authors agree to the following: Authors assign all rights of reproduction, public communication and distribution of articles submitted for publication in TSC to the SCS (a subsidiary of the IEC). Authors are accountable to the SCS for the authorship and originality of their articles. It is the responsibility of authors to obtain permissions to reproduce graphic material sourced from elsewhere and included in their articles. The SCS may not be held liable for any possible violation of intellectual property rights by authors. Material published in TSC is subject - unless otherwise indicated in the text or in graphic material - to a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Spain (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 ES) licence, the full text of which can be found at this link. Accordingly, the general public may reproduce, distribute and communicate the article provided the author and publisher are acknowledged and as long as no commercial or derivative use is made of the article. TSC cannot be held responsible for ideas and opinions as expressed by the authors of articles published in the journal.