Hipercorrección de /-s/ en el español de Almería

The dialectological bibliography recorded a profound process of weakening and fall of /-s/ in the southern realizations of Spanish. The solutions adopted, precisely, were one of the indicators of the internal linguistic division in Andalusia. While the western part preferred aspiration, the eastern part was an area of absolute loss, with the consequent opening and/or lengthening of the preceding vowel. Sociolinguistics demonstrated that empirical reality was significantly more complex. In 1984 H. López Morales presented a crucial work, with materials from the core of the eastern part, which nevertheless included achievements that until then were unthinkable for dialectologists, with significant aspirational quotas, even with the maintenance of the sibilant. This last possibility emerged as a constant in the Spanish of the capital of Almería, with a considerably higher occurrence rate than in neighboring areas. Both in research on attitudes and in work on acting, the possibility was raised that it was a case of hypercorrection, given that the sibilant served as a marker of Central Peninsular Spanish, with the prestige that this has traditionally been associated with in Andalusia. In the present investigation, a systematic study of this variant has been carried out. To do this, new empirical samples have been taken and a classic variationist study has been proposed. The results confirm the existence of this pattern, while allowing us to predict its gradual disappearance, in favor of a process of internal convergence within Andalusia.