Linguistic Variability across Four Generations of Basque Spanish Speakers: From the Regional Preverbal Double Negation Construction to the Standard Variant

Abstract

The present study uses the apparent-time construct to analyze cross-generational variability of the preverbal double negation construction (i.e., yo tampoco no voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’), traditionally cited as a regional characteristic of the Spanish spoken in the Basque Country. An acceptability judgment task and a semi-structured interview were carried out among four different age groups. The results show that speakers of the two older generations tend to accept and produce the regional construction significantly more than speakers of the two younger generations, who favor the Standard Spanish variant (yo tampoco voy a la fiesta ‘I’m not going to the party either’). It is suggested that this trend is mainly due to the participants’ different language contact situations (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988) and levels of formal education. Since older speakers grew up in a situation of shift via interference and with lower levels of formal education, they prefer the preverbal double negation construction, which was already a norm in the regional Spanish. However, younger speakers grew up in a language maintenance situation and have relatively high formal education levels, factors that have conditioned dialectal leveling in this case.