Curtis W. Snyder and Dr. Willis Fails, Spanish and Portuguese
With the Paraguayan constitution of 1992, Guaraní gained a particularly interesting status as it became recognized by the government as the “national” language of Paraguay with Spanish being the “official” language. Although not all people in Paraguay speak Guaraní, the overwhelming majority do. Figure one illustrates the percentages of people that belong to the different linguistic communities of Paraguay. If we add the Bilingual Spanish and the Monolingual Guaraní sections we see that 92% of Paraguayans can speak Guaraní, either as a native or second language. The percentage of the total population included in this group is astonishing and definitely illustrates the strong presence of the Guaraní Speakers in the linguistic communities of this area.
Because of the large number of bilingual persons what commonly happens is code-switching, which the Paraguayans refer to as a jopará (mixture). This code switching has lead to much lexical borrowing as the line between the two languages has been blurred for many of the speakers. These two languages each have sounds that are not part of the other, and as the borrowed lexicon is used in different phonetic contexts it undergoes phonetic changes in different ways and/or to different degrees.
In order to determine what changes take place I conducted interviews with 223 participants in both Spanish and Guaraní; and with the use of a DAT recorder, I recorded these interviews which contain many loanwords in different phonetic contexts as they were spoken by the native speakers of the respective languages. I did this in Paraguay in order to collect the most accurate data possible. Then with the use of a spectrograph, I created spectrograms of the speech of the participants. I then systematically compared the phonemic and allophonic variations of each with the anticipated variations based on the phonology and phonetic rules of each language. One of the first things that I noticed is that if a pre-nasalized phoneme from Guaraní occurs after a pause and before a nasal vowel, and is used in a Spanish context, then the sound will be a regular nasal and not a pre-nasalized stop. This seems to happen only when the underlying sound is a pre-nasalized stop. In fact when Guaraní words are used in a Spanish context the only position in which pre-nasalized stops retain their pre-nasalization is inter-vocalically. This is something that is consistent among most of the participants.
This is probably because pre-nasalization is a major difference between the stops in Spanish and Guaraní and word initially in Spanish they are always oral and when found inter-vocalically the archiphoneme /N/ is neutralized and can therefore appear without problem in the Spanish phonology and it indeed does. However, when a pre-nasalized stops precedes a nasal vowel in a Guaraní loanword it will be articulated as a nasal and not a pre-nasalized stop.
I also noticed that in corrected speech there was often a voicing of normally voiceless stops in an intervocalic position. For example if I or someone else had asked the participant to repeat what they had just said they would sometimes change the voicing and other times they would not change the way they had said it. There did not appear to be any rhyme or reason behind this until I realized the factor that determines the output of the participant is the language that was used to ask the person to clarify themselves. For example, if a participant normally does not voice these sounds but was asked either to repeat or clarify what they said, they would the change from the voiceless allophone to the voiced allophone in this position when the person that had asked for clarification had spoken it in Guaraní. Likewise if the person usually voiced these sounds but was then asked by someone speaking Spanish to clarify themselves they would then stop using the voiced allophones and start using the voiceless ones.
Although this happened with the majority of the participants that I looked at there were also several that did not change their use of allophones no matter the language that had been spoken to them. For example if they used the voiced allophones they would continue to do this regardless of the fact that people were asking them questions in Spanish. Based on what the participants told me about the language that they express themselves easier with, I found that this small minority of the participants that does not change are the participants that said that they had difficulty expressing themselves in the other language. So for someone that said they felt more comfortable speaking Guaraní they would not use the voiceless stops in this particular place even if they are speaking in Spanish. This leads me to believe that the way in which a person realizes this phoneme is either directly related to their dominate language or in the case of the participants that appear to dominate both languages, the language in which they are spoken to and the register of speech that they themselves choose to use either consciously or subconsciously.
The study of phonological adaptation has revealed many interesting aspects of Paraguayan Bilingualism. The vocalic systems of these languages also interact in a very intriguing way and it would be beneficial to study this interaction in the future