The transfer of linguistic features—either syntactic, morphological, lexical, phonetic, or phonological—has been empirically attested to take place between different languages and/or dialects when they come into contact. Although most of the work on linguistic contact deals with a speaker’s native features being transferred into their second language (L2), the opposite direction has also been confirmed, i.e., speakers can adopt in their first language (L1) the features of a language or dialect they are in contact with. This latter type of linguistic transfer, from the native language or dialect to a second language or dialect, can take place in different social settings, such as bilingual communities (see Colantoni & Gurlekian, 2004; Elordieta, 2003, 2006; Elordieta & Calleja, 2005; Elordieta & Irurtzun, 2012, 2016; Elordieta & Romera, in press; Mennen, 2004, 2015; Muntendam & Torreira, 2016; O’Rourke, 2005; Romera & Elordieta, 2013; Simonet, 2008, 2011; among others). As Romera and Elordieta (2013) argue, most of the purported cases of adoption of L2 features in L1 are cases of what they call indirect transfer. This situation arises when two dialects of a language are in contact, and one of the dialects is spoken by native speakers of another language and is heavily influenced by it. In their study, Romera and Elordieta claim that n ative speakers of Peninsular Spanish do not adopt features of Majorcan Catalan directly, but only through the variety of Spanish spoken by native speakers of Majorcan Catalan.

This study deals with a particular situation of language contact involving relocated populations, i.e., adult speakers of a given language variety move to a different region and, therefore, they live in contact with another language or a new variety of their native language. The hypothesis is that this contact has an effect on the way the relocated populations speak, as they may converge towards the features of the new language or dialect. The subjacent mechanism underlying this phenomenon of language convergence is commonly known as accommodation. This concept was proposed by Giles (1973) in the framework of social psychology within Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT), and was then adapted to linguistic studies (among others, Giles & Ogay, 2007). In this theory, accommodation is described as a speaker’s ability to modify their linguistic patterns in order t o adjust them to their interlocutor’s speech. This behaviour can follow two directions. On the one hand, divergent accommodation consists in speakers accentuating the features that characterize their native variety with the aim of highlighting their distinctiveness and amounting to linguistic diversification. On the other hand, in convergent accommodation, speakers alter their native features in order to resemble those found in the interlocutor’s speech. This latter type of accommodation contributes to the increase of similarities between the varieties involved.

Trudgill’s (1986) study of relocated British and American English speakers is a pioneer and extensive account of long-term convergent accommodation. Romera and Elordieta’s (2013) account of Peninsular Spanish speakers relocated in the Catalan-speaking island of Majorca constitutes the only work on convergent accommodation by relocated speakers in a Spanish setting. Convergent accommodation has also been attested for momentary situations as short-term accommodation, such as customer–travel agent conversation (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991), telephone conversations (De Looze, Scherer, Vaughan, & Campbell, 2014), experimental tasks (Pardo, 2006, 2013), experimental interactions (MacLeod, 2012), o r exposure to formal contexts (Hernández-Campoy, 2010).

The present study investigates a situation of dialect contact between two varieties of Peninsular Spanish, such as Andalusian and Asturian Spanish. Specifically, it focuses on western Andalusian Spanish speakers, from the province of Cádiz, relocated to the northern Spanish region of Asturias. The Principality of Asturias, located in the Northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, is characterized by the presence of two Romance languages: Spanish and Asturian (also known as Bable). Only Spanish has an official status. The Asturian Language Academy (Academia de la Llingua Asturiana) carried out the standardization of Asturian during the eighties. There are three varieties of Asturian in this region: Eastern, Western, and Central. The latter is considered the standard variety, and it is the variety spoken in the most populated urban nuclei, Oviedo and Gijón. Nowadays, the use, transmission, and promotion of Asturian are legally protected. However, Astur ian is not recognized as an official language by the Spanish government. As a consequence, Asturian society reflects a situation of diglossia, where Spanish and Asturian are used in different contexts.

This diglossic situation has a clear effect on the number of native speakers of Asturian. According to statistical studies carried out by Llera Ramo (1994) and Llera Ramo and San Martín Antuña (2002), the percentage of L1 Asturian speakers has decreased from 36 % in 1991 to 16 % in 2002 (100,000 speakers, according to Ethnologue; Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2015), and Asturian is in fact considered an endangered language by UNESCO. Nevertheless, there has been an increase in the number of bilingual speakers of Spanish and Asturian, that is, L2 Asturian speakers (from 5.8 % in 1991 to 20 % in 2002, or 450,000 speakers; see Ethnologue, 2015). Bilingual speakers shift from one language to another rather easily, even in the same conversation, sometimes depending on the register required by the situation (Muñiz Cachón, 2002–2003). This pattern of intense language contact has led to the emergence of a new linguistic variety in which Spanish and Asturian come together: Amestáu (d’Andrés Díaz, 1998). The literature on the linguistic situation in Asturias distinguishes two views of what Amestáu should refer to, depending on which variety is considered to be the baseline of this mixture. Amestáu can be considered a variety of Spanish with linguistic features from Asturian, or a variety of Asturian with linguistic features from Spanish (Muñiz Cachón, 2002–2003). However, as suggested by Muñiz Cachón (2002–2003), it should be noted that many of the dialectal characteristics that arise in Amestáu as spoken by Spanish–Asturian bilinguals seem to be also present in the variety of Spanish spoken by monolingual speakers, a variety that may be call ed Asturian Spanish. Thus, the boundaries between Amestáu and Asturian Spanish are not clear to many researchers. For the purpose of this study, we consider Amestáu a variety where both Spanish and Asturian converge, without taking into account which of the two languages is the base one.

Some morphosyntactic differences between Asturian or Amestáu and standard Peninsular Spanish could include the co-occurrence of a determiner and a possessive in DPs (see 1a and 1b) and the existence of postverbal clitics (i.e., enclitics) in finite verbs (see 2), among other aspects:

There are differences in verbal inflection and morphology between Asturian or Amestáu and standard Peninsular Spanish, such as the lack of perfect tenses in Asturian/Amestáu. In nominal inflection, the masculine singular u of Asturian/Amestáu contrasts with Peninsular Spanish o. Feminine plural in Asturian/Amestáu is es, whereas in Peninsular Spanish it is as. Regarding the lexicon, a huge amount of borrowings from Asturian (e.g., mancar ‘to hurt’; prestar ‘to please’; guah.e ‘boy’) have been fully incorporated to Asturian Spanish.

The phonology of Asturian has been widely studied at prosodic and segmental levels (cf. Alvarellos Pedrero, Muñiz Cachón, Díaz Gómez, & González Rodríguez, 2011; Canellada, 1984; Cuevas Alonso & López Bobo, 2010; Cuevas Alonso, López Bobo, Arias-Cachero Cabal, & Bleorţu, 2012; Díaz Gómez, Muñiz Cachón, López Bobo, González Rodríguez, & Cuevas Alonso, 2007; López Bobo, Cuevas Alonso, Díaz Gómez, & Viejo Lucio-Villegas, 2008a, 2008b; López Bobo, González Rodríguez, Cuevas Alonso, Díaz Gómez, & Muñiz Cachón, 2005; Muñiz Cachón, 2013; Muñiz Cachón & Al varellos Pedrero, 2008; Muñiz Cachón, González Rodríguez, Díaz Gómez, & Alvarellos Pedrero, 2006–2007–2008), but very few empirical studies focus on the influence of the Asturian language on the variety of Spanish spoken in the region or vice versa.

As regards the variety of Spanish spoken in Andalusia, it is considered to diverge from Castilian Spanish and other Peninsular varieties. Authors such as Carbonero, Álvarez, Casas, and Gutiérrez (1992), García-Amaya (2008), Gil Fernández (2000), Hualde (2005, 2013), Henriksen and García-Amaya (2012), Narbona, Cano, and Morillo (1998), or Navarro Tomás (1991), to cite a few, have contributed to the vast literature on Andalusian Spanish by reporting its linguistic features. Two major dialectal groups (Eastern and Western) can be distinguished in Andalusian Spanish, based on the different distribution of linguistic features (Caja, 1977; García Mouton, 1992; Narbona, Cano, & Morillo, 1998). For instance, consider the difference in the use of the second person plural pronoun in (3), between ustedes in Western Andalusian Spanish and vosotros in Eastern Andalusian Spanish:

The main differences between Western and Eastern Andalusian dialects are phonological. These aspects, described in linguistic atlases (Alvar, 1959; García Mouton, 1992), include the neutralization of standard or Castilian Spanish /s/ and /θ/ into /θ/ (known as ‘ceceo’) in Western Andalusian Spanish and into /s/ (‘seseo’) in Eastern varieties (García-Amaya, 2008; Hualde, 2013; Mondéjar, 2001, among others), or the presence of vowel opening in plural nouns and adjectives in Eastern dialects (Zamora Vicente, 1967). This study will only involve the Western variety, as all of the speakers that participated in the study were born and raised in cities and towns in the province of Cádiz, in Western Andalusia.

The main objective of the present work is to observe whether native speakers of Andalusian Spanish relocated for socio-economic reasons to Asturias show any degree of accommodation (divergent or convergent) to the language varieties spoken in Asturias, namely Asturian, Amestáu, and Asturian Spanish. Although Andalusia and Asturias are geographically distant areas, social mobility between these two communities has been constant. Apart from the significant number of Andalusians who emigrated to Asturias in the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, in the present century an average of 500 natives of Andalusia have emigrated to Asturias every year (Sociedad Asturiana de Estudios Económicos e Industriales, 2017, available data from 2001 until 2015). This mobility provides us with a specific setting in which the varieties spoken in those regions come into contact. The focus is on the Asturian cities of Oviedo and Gijón, as these urb an nuclei receive more than half of the population migrating to Asturias: 33.04 % and 27.82 %, respectively. We assume that Andalusian Spanish immigrants relocated in Asturias are in contact with Asturian Spanish and/or with Amestáu rather than with Asturian. Although the contact situation between Asturian and Spanish is the source of Amestáu, the percentage of native Asturian speakers is rather low nowadays, as we described above (16 %; see Llera Ramo & San Martín Antuña, 2002), and the percentage of L1 Asturian speakers in urban nuclei is very low (Llera Ramo & San Martín Antuña, 2002).1 Thus, it is reasonable to assume that Andalusian speakers will be more in contact with Asturian Spanish and Amestáu speakers than with L1 Asturian speakers.

Furthermore, in order to contribute to the study of what social factors modulate accommodation, we identify the role that social factors play in the variability found among speakers, in particular, the degree of social integration in the new community. Following Romera and Elordieta (2013) and Giles, Coupland and Coupland (1991), our hypothesis is that the most socially integrated speakers will display a higher degree of adoption of features from the varieties that they are in contact with.

Finally, we also investigate why some variables are more readily subject to accommodation. There is a substantial amount of work suggesting that perceptual salience determines which linguistic features are more likely to be acquired (Auer, Barden, & Grosskopf, 1998; Graff, Labov, & Harris, 1986; Fridland, Bartlett, & Kreuz, 2004; MacLeod, 2012; Schirmunski, 1930; Trudgill, 1986; van Bezooijen & Gooskens, 1999). Our hypothesis is that the features of Asturian Spanish or Amestáu that are more salient to an Andalusian speaker will be acquired or adopted more easily. In other words, if speakers do converge to the varieties spoken in Asturias, diverging from their native dialect, the more salient the feature is, the more likely it will be used by the relocated speaker.

Our corpus was obtained through recordings of spontaneous conversations with three different types of speakers: (1) the experimental group of Andalusian speakers who have emigrated to Asturias, (2) a control group of Asturian Spanish and Amestáu speakers, and (3) a second control group of nonrelocated Andalusian speakers. Other data elicitation methods such as Discourse Completion Task (DCT) or reading tasks are more practical in terms of allowing the corpus to be analyzed faster and allowing for more control over the stimuli used. However, we sacrificed functionality over naturalness, as we consider accommodation to be a spontaneous phenomenon. Taking into account the studies by Romera and Elordieta (2013) the idea was that unscripted conversations would provide a suitable context for natural accommodating behaviour to take place (see below for a more extended explanation of the data elicitation procedure).

As previously stated in Section 2, we annotated the sentences extracted from the relocated speakers and compared their prosodic patterns to those found in control populations groups and the previous literature for Andalusian, Asturian Spanish, and Amestáu. When we mention Andalusian Spanish, we are referring only to the variety of Andalusian Spanish relevant for this study, namely Jerezano Spanish (see Section 2.1.2). When referring to the varieties spoken in Asturias, we always refer to those spoken in the Central region of Asturias. In this article we will concentrate on nuclear contours (i.e., the sequences formed by a nuclear accent and a boundary tone), where the main differences between varieties are found. Prenuclear regions are more similar (see 3.1). As a reference, Table 2 summarizes the most frequent nuclear accents and boundary tones found in declarative and absolute interrogative utterances for these contr ol varieties.3

Tables 3 and 4 contain the relative frequencies of the nuclear contours represented in Table 2, for the control Amestáu and Asturian Spanish speakers, and the control Andalusian speakers, respectively, in declarative and absolute interrogatives. The tables also indicate the number of utterances of each type of sentence for each speaker.

The results of our study confirm that all speakers, in different degrees, showed a convergent accommodating behaviour after living in Asturias for a short period of time. Therefore, we can conclude that Asturian prosodic features, such as the falling nuclear contour in declarative and absolute interrogative utterances, are observed in relocated Andalusian Spanish speakers. Moreover, the different percentages of occurrence of these contours confirm the key role that the interlocutor plays in the process of accommodation, as there is a general tendency for these features to appear more frequently when the participants are engaging in conversation with the Amestáu interlocutor.5

The sociolinguistic interview of the relocated speakers carried out by the Andalusian interlocutor provided enough information for the classification of the relocated speakers, following the criteria in Auer et al. (1998). The parameters include the ties and the attitude that the speakers have with the local community (cf. Babel, 2010), and the degree of satisfaction with their personal situation in Asturias. Speakers 1 and 2 both had boyfriends who were either Andalusian or half Andalusian, and they were unsatisfied with their situation, stating explicitly that they wanted to go back to Andalusia as soon as possible. They both described Asturian people as cold, introvert, or less enjoyable than Andalusians, and they deemed weather in Asturias unbearable and the main cause for them to want to get away from Asturias. In addition, they were both unemployed and their social networks in Asturias were small a nd mostly formed by other relocated speakers. They did not have intense contact with locals and, therefore, they were less exposed to the features of Amestáu or Asturian Spanish. We can assume that infrequent exposure leads to a worse perception of prosodic aspects that are novel or different from the native language or dialect, which in turn derives in a more unlikely adoption of such features.

The opposite situation was found in Speaker 3, who was a student at the University of Oviedo, and Speaker 4, who was employed. They had contact with Asturians on a daily basis, and in fact they reported their closest group of friends to be Asturian. As expected, the analysis shows that, during the entire recording including the interview with the Amestáu and the Andalusian interlocutors together, these speakers were the ones showing the highest rates of falling nuclear configurations in their declarative and interrogative utterances.

It is interesting to point out that a negative association is observed between the attitude towards the Asturian community and the attitude towards the Andalusian community. Thus, Speakers 1 and 2, who offered a rather negative description of the Asturian community, praised Andalusian lifestyle; and, vice versa, Speakers 3 and 4, who focused on positive aspects of Asturias, such as landscape, gastronomy, job opportunities, and Asturian culture, were the ones who often criticized the Andalusian population characterizing them as narrow-minded, among other features.

All the criteria mentioned above allow us to describe Speakers 3 and 4 as the most socially integrated in Asturias, and Speakers 1 and 2 as the least socially integrated. Taking into account the results described in Section 3, an association is observed between the degree of social integration and the percentage of Amestáu or Asturian Spanish features in these speakers. Speakers 3 and 4 feel more comfortable in Asturias, have a positive attitude towards Asturian culture, larger social networks and praise less enthusiastically Andalusian traditions. They are the ones showing a higher degree of presence of Amestáu or Asturian Spanish intonational features when engaging in conversation with an Andalusian or an Amestáu interlocutor. These speakers have an overall frequency of occurrence of Amestáu or Asturian Spanish nuclear configurations in declarative and interrogative sentences of 59.98 % and 54.6 %, respectively, taking into account their performance with both the Amest� �u and Andalusian interlocutors. On the other hand, Speakers 1 and 2, who do not show this positive attitude, present a smaller presence of such features: 46.88 % and 40.95 % of final falling contours in declarative and absolute interrogative utterances, respectively. The difference between Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 is not statistically significant (χ² = .466, p = .495), nor the difference between Speakers 3 and 4 (χ² = 2.109, p = .146), and the difference between Speakers 1 and 2 and Speaker 3 is significant (χ² = 5.660, p = .017 and χ² = 9.564, p = .002, respectively). If a comparison is made of these two groups, that is, the less integrated speakers (Speakers 1–2) versus the more integrated ones (Speakers 3–4), the difference is significant (χ² = 8.655, p = .003). The division in two groups formed by Speakers 1–2 on the one hand and Speakers 3–4 on the other hand is not completely warranted, due to the lack of statistical significance of the difference between Speakers 1–2 and Speaker 4: χ² = .891, p = .345 and χ² = 2.694, p = .101, respectively). We can thus (tentatively) conclude that an association between the degree of social integration and the degree of presence of intonation features of Amestáu or Asturian Spanish can be observed.

A final point is in order regarding the differences in frequency of adoption of intonational features between declarative and absolute interrogative utterances. When addressing an Amestáu interlocutor, relocated Andalusians use the Amestáu/Asturian Spanish H+L* L% nuclear contour in 41.6 % of the total number of nuclear contours in declarative sentences. In absolute interrogatives, relocated Andalusians use the Amestáu/Asturian Spanish H+L* L% nuclear contour 59.59 % of the total number of nuclear contours. We resort to the notion of salience to explain variability in this phenomenon of linguistic transfer. Following Auer et al. (1998), Flege (1995), Fridland et al. (2004), Graff et al. (1986), MacLeod (2012), Schirmunski (1930), Trudgill (1986), and van Bezooijen and Gooskens (1999), among others, we assume that features of language or dialect that are salient to native speakers of another language or dialect are more easily noticed and picked up than nonsalient features (cf. the role of salience in Flege’s 1995 model of acquisition). We assume that prosodic salience is based on the relative difference between two prosodic configurations. To the native ears of the speakers of a language or dialect, a prosodic configuration of another language or dialect that is nonexistent or significantly different from their native language/dialect will be more salient than a prosodic configuration that is only a marginally different variant of their native configuration. Hence, the hypothesis would be that features that are prosodically salient are more easily adopted than others, the same way that salient segmental fe atures are more easily acquired than nonsalient or less salient features (see Flege, 1995). Thus, the fact that some prosodic features (such as absolute interrogative contours) are more likely to be acquired than others (such as declarative prosodic configurations) can be explained by the effect that linguistic silence has on dialect convergence.

If we take into account the configuration for absolute interrogatives and declaratives in Andalusian Spanish compared to Amestáu and Asturian Spanish, we can hypothesize that the prosodic configuration of absolute interrogatives in Amestáu or Asturian Spanish is perceptually more salient to Andalusian speakers than the contours found in declaratives. Absolute interrogatives of Amestáu and Asturian Spanish end in the falling nuclear configurations H+L* L% or H* (H)L%, whereas in Western Andalusian they end in final rising configurations, L* H% or L+H* H%. Hence, the difference between the nuclear contours of Amestáu or Asturian Spanish absolute interrogatives and those of Andalusian Spanish lies both in the nuclear accent and the boundary tone.6 On the other hand, in declarative utterances the difference between varieties is smaller. In Western Andalusian Spanish the final contour is L* L%, whereas in Amestáu or Asturian Spanish it is H+L* L%. The difference lies only in the nuclear pitch accent, as the boundary tone is the same, and the difference is limited to the presence versus absence of a leading H tone, as the starred tone is L* in both cases. Thus, absolute interrogatives would be more salient than declarative sentences for Andalusian Spanish speakers, and the higher degree of salience could explain the relatively higher degree of adoption of nuclear contours of absolute interrogatives by relocated Andalusian speakers.

We observed that relocated Andalusian speakers changed their native nuclear contours in declarative and absolute interrogative sentences after living in Asturias for a short period of time (1 to 5 years). We have successfully identified the prosodic features that these speakers adopt. In declarative sentences, the falling pitch movement is delayed as late as the nuclear accent of the sentence, as opposed to the Andalusian configuration, where the nuclear accent is already a low valley. As regards absolute interrogatives, falling final contours are even more frequent in the production of these speakers, in whose native variety of Spanish the predominant configuration is the complete opposite, a rising tone.

We took into consideration to what extent social factors were intervening in the degree of social accommodation. As expected, we found that the interlocutor has a key role in this process, as the relocated speakers modified their speech patterns by means of incorporating Asturian features more frequently when they were in conversation with the Amestáu interlocutor. Moreover, an association was observed between social integration and accommodation, as those speakers who were better socially integrated, and therefore are more constantly exposed to the varieties spoken in Asturias, were the ones displaying higher levels of accommodation in both conversation stages.

Finally, our results of the analysis of the production of these speakers indicate that the relocated Andalusian speakers show a higher presence of Amestáu or Asturian Spanish nuclear contours in absolute interrogative utterances than in declarative utterances. Our proposed explanation for this difference is that phonetic salience also plays a role in determining which features are more easily affected by linguistic transfer. The falling nuclear contours in absolute interrogatives typical of Amestáu and Asturian Spanish (H+L* L% and H* (H)L%) are salient to the Andalusian speakers, with mostly rising configurations (L*/L+H* H%). Both the nuclear accent and the boundary tone of Amestáu and Asturian Spanish are different to the Andalusian variety. The difference between the falling nuclear accents in declaratives typical of Amestáu (H+L* L%) and Andalusian (L* L%) is not so salient, as only the nuclear accent is different and the contour is falling in both cases. A plau sible explanation would thus be that most salient features are acquired more easily. In conclusion, then, our study provides support to the idea that accommodation is modulated both by linguistic factors (native variety of the interlocutor, salience of linguistic features) and social factors (degree of social integration).