Prosody and Language Contact: Spanish-French-Arabic in North Africa (Western Sahara)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Laura Morgenthaler Garcia
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 183361469

Different to the so far research of the linguistic history of the Spanish and French in North Africa (Western Sahara and Morocco) and the analysis of the structural effects of the Spanish Arabic language contact on the phonology, the lexis and the intrasentential code-switching the further research period focuses on the suprasegmental level, specially the intonation. The French as an additional L2 in the Western Sahara is considered to a greater extent than during the first period. The fact that a new emphasis is set in the area of intonation, results from the results of the first researching phase. These indicate that the focus of the suprasegmental level promises insightful answers to the complex question of the language dominance criteria between L1 and L2 in Afro-Romance contact varieties. For this specific case an heuristic revision of the terminology relating bilingualism and multilingualism, as common in the field of language contact research, has to be conducted. The data which is to be collected is significant, on the one hand, for the production of the AMPER (Atlas Multimedia Prosodique de l Espace Roman) for the Western Saharan region as a first subproject, which deals with the coexistence of two Romance language varieties in an African country. On the other hand, the circumstances of which of the prosodic systems of the involved contact languages predominate during the realization of L2, or the consecutive acquired L1, are studied. The data will be analyzed through the Autosegmental Metrical Model. The final part of the study discusses if the influences of L1 (Arabic) while realizing two different L2 (Spanish and French) can provide further answers to the question of the relation of prosody and language contact in multilingual societies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants