LANGUAGE, POLITICS, AND POWER
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/3020.9854rvcl.2.1.2025.32047Keywords:
political speech, Galician Spanish, Identity, Sociophonetics, Regional VariationAbstract
Abstract
Politicians style-shift between regional and national variants as a means of constructing a coherent identity and appealing to voters. In Spain, previous research in the south has shown how conservatives may favor normative national variants, while socialists employ regional ones to connect with working-class and rural communities. However, little research has examined political speech in Spanish in the north of the country.
The current study examines how six rural speakers and six politicians from Galicia use sociophonetic variation, including consonant clusters, word-final /n/, vowel height, intervocalic /d/, and coda /s/. Findings reveal that politicians' speech reflects previously observed trends: usage varies by the party and social context of the speaker, with intervocalic /d/ elision occurring more frequently among politicians than rural speakers. This supports previous hypotheses about stylistic variation in Peninsular Spanish political speech. Furthermore, by analyzing regionally salient phenomena, this study develops a baseline for Galician political speech, showing how stylistic choices align with broader patterns in Peninsular Spanish, demonstrating the agentive use of language to navigate identity and sociopolitical positioning.
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