The border of the northern speech in Mexico. A comparison between the PRESEEA corpus of Tijuana and Mexicali

Abstract

The dialectal variant of the Spanish of northwest Mexico is, in many ways, one of the most recent in the country. Its study and characterization have had different representation processes (Lope Blanch, 1970; Henríquez Ureña, 1993; Moreno de Alba, 1994; Moreno Fernández, 2009; Martín Butragueño, 2004; Mendoza Guerrero, 2004; Serrano, 2007). The objective of the present work is to confirm whether the notion of the northern Bajacalifornian of Juan Manuel Lope Blanch (1970) remains in force, taking as reference the phonetic features characteristic of the speech of the Northwest (Mendoza Guerrero, 2004). This is achieved through the comparison of two corpus of the PRESEEA project: Mexicali and Tijuana. For this, some linguistic variables were considered, three phonemes and their phonetic features of the northwestern dialect variant, and the sociolinguistic variables of gender and age. The data obtained show the presence of these features today and seem to confirm the notion of the northern Bajacalifornian.