Both generations, young adult and elderly bilinguals, seem to have the same underlying process (perhaps a substrate effect) driving plateau-shaped intonation in Palenquero, which enhances language differentiation. However, elderly bilinguals show a wider intonational distance between their two languages, while young adults appear to have a more simplified prosodic system.

The use of future subjunctive (FS) has suffered a steady decline in written Spanish from the fourteenth century. It is not clear whether it disappeared similarly in each clause, and whether its use was determined by regional distinctions to be considered as a dialectal feature. Granda (1986) suggested that the Hispanic Caribbean countries in the Americas were more conservative in the use of FS in contrast to other regions in a southerly direction. Ramírez-Luengo (2008), however, argued that FS decline occurred uniformly in the Americas, with the eighteenth century being the critical time for the substitution. In a sample of 45 legal documents (60,852 words) from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, issued in northwest and southwest Colombia, the proportions of FS and other alternating forms were equally likely in both regions. FS tabulations were less likely to occur in the nineteenth century within relative clauses, while they were equally likely to occur in conditional protases. This suggests that FS in written Spanish does not show dialectal differences and that its decline might have occurred earlier in relative clauses than conditional protases, probably due to a stylistic motivation.

Creole languages from the Caribbean seem to exhibit a hybrid prosodic system with tones from African substrate languages, and stress from European dominant languages. It is unknown however whether bilingual speakers of creole languages, such as Palenquero, have specific contexts where their two languages are prosodically distinct. Hence, this study examined whether the bilingual Palenquero/Spanish speakers keep their two languages prosodically distinct in statements and yes/no questions. Speakers performed two discourse completion tasks in two unilingual sessions, the first one in Palenquero and the second one in Caribbean Spanish. F0 contours and final lengthening of 189 five-syllable statements and 153 yes/no questions, from 9 participants, were tested with functional principal component and linear regression analyses. Results demonstrated that their two languages did not have distinct intonation in statements, and that final lengthening was not conditioned by language. Despite that, these speakers kept their two languages prosodically distinct in questions. Palenquero yes/no questions ending with iambic rhythm exhibited F0 peaks at the same height, yielding the global implementation of flat and plateau-shaped contours that did not occur in their Caribbean Spanish. This implies that these bilingual speakers, having two languages with a high overlap, can acquire/develop language-specific intonations in specific contexts.

This study investigates duration and fundamental frequency (F0) contours on trochees and iambs in the final position of intonational phrases using functional principal component analysis with mixed effects models, and allowing LANGUAGE and SENTENCE MODALITY effects to be assessed on Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals.

The main objective of this paper is to review the phenomenon of the Spanish seseo in a sample of documents from Nuevo Reino de Granada registered during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This paper presents the synthesis of the research project titled “Phonological comparison of Muisca with Uwa, Barí and Nasa Yuwe”. This work involved a comparative exercise based on the phoneme inventories of the four above-mentioned languages, and a list of glosses compiled from previous studies.