Variable Contrast in Border Uruguayan Spanish /b/ From Cognates to Orthographic Loyalty

This study addresses variation in the realization of intervocalic /b/ in the Spanish of Rivera, Uruguay, a border community that is bilingual in Portuguese and Spanish. While Spanish has one phoneme that corresponds to the graphemes b and v, which is normally realized as an approximant or deleted intervocalically, Portuguese contrasts a voiced bilabial stop phoneme /b/ with a voiced labiodental fricative phoneme /v/. Sociolinguistic interviews from 40 native speakers of Riverense Spanish were analyzed acoustically using a consonant-vowel intensity ratio as a correlate of the degree of constriction in the realization of intervocalic /b/. Results indicate that speakers that use more Portuguese are more likely to contrast degree of constriction in words with Portuguese /b/ and /v/ cognates. Speakers that primarily use Spanish, on the other hand, contrast constriction based on orthography, a phenomenon that has been called "pedantic v"and "orthographic loyalty"in other Spanish varieties.