La entonación circunfleja en español guanajuatense oriental

This research explores the geographical and social diffusion of circumflex intonation in the east of the state of Guanajuato, based on a speech corpus comprising 72 interviews conducted with people from Acámbaro, Celaya, San Miguel de Allende, and San Luis de la Paz, stratified according to gender, age, and educational level. To this end, 720 broad-focus assertive utterances were selected following the methodology of Usage-Based Prosody (UBP); these were analysed using the Autosegmental-Metrical model and the Sp-To-BI prosodic notation system. The results confirm the prevalence of the L+(¡) H*L% configuration in this region of Guanajuato and a correlation between the frequency of this intonational contour and proximity to Mexico City. Furthermore, the case of the Spanish spoken in San Felipe is presented as a ‘circumflex island’ in western Guanajuato, providing arguments to explain the diffusion of circumflex intonation to this area, which is detached from the eastern cities. This study provides empirical data that helps complete the map of Mexican dialectal zones, based on the description of an area previously under-represented in dialectological and sociolinguistic literature.