La frontera lingüística entre Alicante y Murciael contacto del Valenciano y el Castellano en la comarca de La Vega Baja del Segura (Alicante)

Résumé

This study pursues the sociolinguistic description of Vega Baja del Segura (Alicante), in the Southernmost part of the Valencian Community, based on its border situation between two linguistic varieties: the Valencian (Catalan), historical language of the territory, and the Murcian (Spanish), because this is a transition zone to the dialect variety of the Region of Murcia. Our objectives are focused on two purposes: the analysis of results from the point of view of language in society (interferences, loanwords and dialectal polymorphism) and, on the other hand, the description of the sociolinguistic situation generated by the linguistic contact in the community of speakers (bilingualism, diglossia, language conflict, attitudes and identity). In this way, we seek to update the research around the linguistic border between the provinces of Alicante and Murcia, analyze the attitudes derived from this contact of languages, as well as make a contribution to the dialectological studies of Murcian speeches. Regarding its geographical, historical and linguistic enclave, we will approach methodologically, on the one hand, the analysis of the results of influence by linguistic contact through the lexical survey formed by twenty dialectalisms, considered by lexicography as general orientalisms, that allow us verify the validity of dialectical lexicon of Catalan-Aragonese origin in the passive knowledge of the community of speakers. On the other hand, we will address the social component through the analysis of the perceptual attitudes of the speakers both towards their own language and towards the Valencian through interviews to informants from three selected locations as strategic survey points (Cox, Orihuela and Pilar de la Horadada). These interviews include questions aimed at describing the linguistic conflict related to the displacement of the Valencian in the province of Alicante. According to the main conclusions we have obtained, the results offer us a multidisciplinary vision. From the geographical-linguistic point of view, we can see a dialectal continuum in examples of lexical polymorphism and in data related to the passive knowledge of dialectalisms that allow us to locate a double border: an abrupt one between Catalan/Valencian and Spanish, and an internal one in the Castilian very gradual and with no continuity solution that links the Aragonese and Catalan influx towards the southern Andalusian area. From the sociolinguistic point of view, we witnessed diglossic attitudes towards the Valencian related to a border identity whose language differentiation allows for a dual identification (local and national, "I am from my town / from the Vega Baja and Spanish"), which leaves on the one hand the regional identification ("I feel more Spanish than Valencian") and that even prioritizes the proximity, not only geographical but also linguistic, to the nearby Region of Murcia ("I feel more Murcian than Valencian").