A SPEAKING ATLAS OF THE LANGUAGES OF THE IBERIAN PENINSULA: FOCUS ON RHYTHM AND VARIETIES IN CONTACT

The objective of this article is twofold: on one hand, it aims to present a speaking atlas of the languages of the Iberian Peninsula; on the other hand, it seeks to analyse the rhythm of the recorded speech samples, with special attention to the Romance varieties whose rhythm had not been described until now, and to the varieties on the border between languages traditionally considered syllable-timed and stress-timed.The results of the rhythmic metrics %V, V, C, VnPVI, and CrPVI show that Aragonese, whose rhythm had not been studied before, is syllable-timed, like the majority of Romance languages in the Iberian Peninsula -including Gibraltar Llanito, despite English loans.The Astur-Leonese spoken in Miranda do Douro, instead of being syllable-timed like the other varieties of the same group, is stress-timed, most likely due to contact with modern Portuguese, from which it may have acquired rhythmic properties.On the contrary, the Portuguese spoken in Valverde del Fresno, instead of being stress-timed like the other varieties of modern European Portuguese, is syllable-timed, probably because it separated from Portuguese before this one transitioned from syllable-timing to stress-timing.