A sociolinguistic analysis of the elision of /d/ in Toluca Spanish

Résumé 0

It is widely known that there are Spanish speakers in the Mexican community who tend to omit the phoneme /d/ in postvocalic position at the end of words, for example, /verdad/, /universidad/, /salud/, etc. Despite the increasingly high amount of research which has investigated social variation in Hispanic groups, and the social stigma that this phenomenon carries, there is still no research discourse of the sociolinguistic variables that condition the elision of this phoneme. With the aim of filling this research gap, the present paper reports on a study that set out to explore the elision of the phoneme /d/ in postvocalic position at the end of words in the Spanish spoken in the city of Toluca, Mexico. This exploration involved examining its behaviour in relation to sociolinguistic variables, namely, gender, education level, and style shifting. The results indicate that the phoneme /d/ tends to be elided 1) by speakers with low educational levels; 2) by men rather than women; and 3) in speech involving informal styles. Taken together, these findings suggest that this phenomenon is multifactorial and multidimensional.