Indexing party identity through dialectal phonetic features in Spanish political discourse
Many studies of regional political discourse have analyzed stylistic variation, revealing differences based on political leaning. Building from previous research, this study compares political speech in four southern/central Spanish cities based on four features of southern Iberian Spanish: coda /s/ deletion, intervocalic /s/ deletion, /tʃ/ deaffrication, and intervocalic /d/ deletion. Televised interviews and formal speeches from thirty-two politicians provided a representative breakdown of gender and political leaning across the four cities. Tokens were analyzed impressionistically and verified by spectrographic data to determine if politicians followed an established so-called party norm. While regional patterns most strongly governed usage, there was fluctuation dependent on speech context and for an innovative variant. Qualitative micro-analysis of this variant, an alveolarized /tʃ/, indicated that it indexed southern identity and liberal values. The lack of stylistic differentiation based on party leaning was found to be indicative of the powerful influence of regional norms on political speech.
