Stylistic Variation and the Role of Dialect Contact in the leísmo of Basque-Spanish

Abstract There is considerable debate with respect to the status of Basque-Spanish leísmo as a contact phenomenon. To address this conundrum, the present study adds another variable, dialect contact and examines the synchronic variation of Basque-Spanish leísmo among educated young speakers, paying special attention to possible stylistic effects. The speech of 41 Basque-Spanish speakers was gathered by means of sociolinguistic interviews and an elicited production task. Participants were stratified by region: 22 speakers were recruited from Gernika where contact with Basque has been intense and compared to 19 speakers from the Greater Bilbao Area where the contact with Basque is less strong. Dialect contact was operationalized through parental input (Basque Country vs. Monolingual Spain). Results indicate that leísmo is quite extended in the Spanish of the Basque Country and mainly driven by animacy. Basque-Spanish leísmo is also subject to stylistic effects, whereby animacy and grammatical gender effects were found, suggesting that Basque-Spanish speakers alternate between two systems depending on speech formality. Finally, results indicate that parental origin had an effect in Bilbao, but not in Gernika. I situate these results within a discussion of previous work on dialect contact.