Asturian mAsturian markers and value judgmentsarkers and value judgments: Linguistic attitudes toward noncount nominal agreement and enclitic pronouns

Abstract

Bilingualism between any two languages produces cross-linguistic effects in the interpretation and production of each. In this investigation, we examine the perception of two linguistic features from Asturian in Castilian speech production by two groups of participants: (i) speakers of Castilian and (ii) bilingual Castilian/Asturian speakers. Pronominal enclisis in sentences such as ‘Vila ayer’(‘I saw her yesterday’) is an Asturian feature that forms part of the dialectal continuum that d’Andrés (2002) calls Asturianu Mínimu Urbanu (AMU), which is a variant of Asturian spoken in populated centers of the region and is characterized by significantly widespread contact with Castilian. Mass neuter, or neutru de materia, is an agreement feature consisting of adjectival agreement in -o with certain continuous nouns found in what d’Andrés (2002) calls Asturianu Total (AT), which describes the least-Castilianized system of the Asturian language that is spoken in rural zones with less intense contact with Castilian. This linguistic feature is less extended than pronominal enclisis geographically. We conducted an experiment consisting of a Bilingual Language Profile questionnaire, a naturalness judgment test, and a matched guise task. The results of this investigation suggest that speakers from both groups have a perception of enclisis forms in Castilian (associated with AMU) as being more natural than noncount agreement (associated with AT), and even monolingual Castilian speakers accept enclisis as a natural form in Castilian from Asturias. However, both groups indicate that their perception of Asturian features is not very professional. We analyze these results considering potential social consequences of these perceptions and linguistic ideologies about bilingualism.