Panorama de la sociolingüística andaluza

Abstract

The variety of Spanish spoken in Andalucía has always attracted the attention of both linguists and writers, who have used it to depict their “local characters”. The first studies of the dialect spoken in Andalucía followed the traditional methodology used in dialectology. This also holds true for the ALEA — Atlas lingüístico y etnográfico de Andalucía. It was this extraordinary work that first triggered the interest in this variety, and its data has served for many dialectological and sociolinguistic studies. Most of these studies pay attention to the phonological aspects, as these are the most frequent and the most suitable for quantitative research. Recently, however, other approaches have also appeared. One of them is represented by the diachronic study of archive materials, which enables linguists to study the evolution of pronunciation, grammatical phenomena and lexical units. Even though many studies have been carried out on the varieties spoken in Andalucía, there are still many topics to explore and many questions which will always attract linguists and motivate them to improve the methodology and the range of their studies.