Linguistic Strategies for Mitigation in the Spanish Language of Bucaramanga, Colombia

This article presents a part of the results of a research project on frequently used features considered characteristic of the Spanish spoken in the city of Bucaramanga, Colombia. In this case, we study some linguistic strategies used in mitigation. For this purpose, 10 oral interviews from the Oral Language Corpus of Bucaramanga were analyzed. After determining the structures of interest to the study, ATLAS.ti was used to identify 203 contextual fragments (units of analysis) in which these structures acted as mitigators. As a result, it was possible to establish the percentages of occurrence of certain phrases in these interviews—conditional (27.09%); diminutives (11.33%); such as [como] (19.7%); suddenly [de pronto] (11.82%); and that is [digamos] (30%) being among the most frequent. This study contributes to an exhaustive characterization of the aforementioned variety of Spanish. At the same time, it allows us to correct the lack of studies on this variety; therefore, it can serve as a reference point for other works that delve deeper into the subject, specifically in the knowledge of linguistic variation at the pragmatic level of the regional varieties of Colombian Spanish, an area of ​​enormous interest, which has not received much attention in research on linguistic variation.