It turns out that Spanish dialects falls into two major groups which Gonçalves and Sánchez call superdialects. The first of these is used more or less exclusively in major Spanish and American cities. This is an international variety of Spanish that is similar across continents. Gonçalves and Sánchez speculate that this is the result of an increasing homogenization of language caused by global communication systems like Twitter. The second superdialect is used almost exclusively in rural areas. Gonçalves and Sánchez used a machine learning algorithm to find subclusters within this group and discovered three different variations. These correspond to a dialect used in Spain, a Caribbean and Latin American dialect and another variation used exclusively in South America. The researchers say these regions reflect the settlement patterns of Spanish immigrants dating back many centuries. “Conquerors and settlers occupied first the territories of Mexico, Peru and the Caribbean, and only much later colonists established permanent residence in [South America], which stayed away from prestigious linguistic norms,” they say. The fact that patterns of language have preserved this history is fascinating. “This strong cultural heritage that can still be observed, centuries later, in our datasets deserves to be further analyzed in future works,” say Gonçalves and Sánchez.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 04:51:54 +0000
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