Sociolinguistics of Avoidance in Rural Communities: The Case of Eastern Andalusia

Abstract

This article addresses the sociolinguistic problems of avoidance languages, employing three perspectives that are relatively uncommon in the literature. The first is a research setting little used in this type of study, the rural Spanish town of Pedro Martínez, in the province of Granada. Second, it analyzes attitudes toward the linguistic variant developed by its speakers in the 1980s. Finally, it combines quantitative methodologies with the involvement scales designed by Bailey in the early 1970s. The results show positive evaluations of what was a conjunctural, identitarian variant during the adolescence of the speakers. They also support the universality of linguistic avoidance mechanisms, with no restrictions as to the type of speech communities in which they may appear, that are always subject to a sociolinguistic function that distinguishes groups of speakers.