Heritage Spanish in Brussels

Abstract This exploratory study investigates the evolution of coda /s/ weakening in Andalusian Spanish as a heritage language spoken in Brussels. Ongoing change promoted by dialect contact with other Spanish varieties was assessed on speech data retrieved via interviews with first- and second-generation Andalusian immigrants in the city. Their coda /s/ production was analyzed in terms of perceptual categorization, acoustic evidence of frication, and duration. A contrastive analysis throughout these parameters confirmed that, within the sample studied, second-generation speakers weaken coda /s/ considerably less than speakers from the first generation, suggesting a shift from traditional Andalusian speech. These results highlight the importance of sociolinguistic approaches for a thorough understanding of the subtle changes that languages undergo in diasporic contexts.