INTONATION AND CONVERGENCE: EVIDENCE FROM BULGARIAN JUDEO-SPANISH
INTONATION AND CONVERGENCE: EVIDENCE FROM BULGARIAN JUDEO-SPANISH

Author(s): Bistra Andreeva, Snezhina Dimitrova, Christoph Gabriel, Anna Gazdik, Jonas Grünke
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Факултет по славянски филологии, Софийски университет »Св. Кл. Охридски«
Keywords: intonation; convergence; bilingualism; Bulgarian; Judeo-Spanish
Summary/Abstract: We address the intonation of Bulgarian Judeo-Spanish (Djudezmo), a diaspora variety of Spanish brought to the former Ottoman Empire by the Sephardic Jews after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century and still spoken by their descendants in the respective communities. Based on readings of The North Wind and the Sun, recorded by four Djudezmo-Bulgarian bilinguals and four Bulgarian monolinguals (age: 79–88, sex: fem., data collection: Sofia 2011/2016) weshow that the bilingual speakers use the same inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones in both of their languages and that they differ from the Bulgarian monolinguals only in the frequencies of pre-nuclear H* and L+H* on penultimate stress words. This speaks in favor of convergence of Djudezmo with the speakers’ dominant language, Bulgarian, at the level of intonation.

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