The status of /f/ in Mayan-accented Spanish

Abstract Although scant, the previous research on Guatemalan Spanish has suggested that both /f/ lenition, /f/ → [h], and /f/ fortition, /f/ → [p], are more common among Mayan-Spanish bilinguals with lower levels of education as /f/ is not present in any Mayan language. The present study analyzes 1,430 tokens of /f/ from sociolinguistic interviews in Spanish from 40 bilinguals of Spanish and the Mayan language K’iche’ according to both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Overall, both lenition and fortition were relatively infrequent. The results indicate that /f/ lenition is favored by the following phonetic contexts of [u̯i] and [u̯e] and by speakers with less formal education, especially for those who were more K’iche’-dominant. /f/ fortition is favored by previous nasals and pauses and by speakers who were more K’iche’-dominant. That is, while /f/ fortition is predicted by language dominance, /f/ lenition, similar to other varieties of Spanish, is most predicted by educational attainment, although with an interaction between education and language dominance. Thus, it is argued that in this community, /f/ lenition is due to sociolinguistic variation of a diachronic sound change while /f/ fortition is a result of language contact and processes of enregisterment. The findings indicate that sociolinguistic studies in bilingual communities must examine the role of education, language dominance, and the interaction between the two as language dominance does not inherently explain all variation in situations of language contact.