Dialectal trends in Future Subjunctive Decline. A review of Spanish future subjunctive in northwest and southwest Colombia over five centuries (Working paper)

Abstract

The use of future subjunctive (FS) in Spanish declined from the 14th century, but it is not clear whether this disappeared uniformly in the Americas or at a different pace. However, Spanish speakers from Caribbean regions were considered as more conservative, while legal documents from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Santo Domingo, Ecuador, Venezuela and Chile have demonstrated that the decline might have been rather uniform specially in the 18th century. This study aims to understand whether the FS decline and substitution took place differently or at a similar pace in northwest and southwest Colombia, based on legal documents dictated between the 16th and 19th centuries, and on Twitter with geo-located data from the beginning of the 21st century. Despite that more tabulations were found in the Caribbean (northwest), yielded results have demonstrated that the spatial distributions of FS do not exhibit divergent patterns between northwest and southwest Colombia, which aligns with spatial distributions mapped from Twitter data. Therefore, FS was initially more required in northwest Colombia as the socioeconomic activities were more intense in places such as Cartagena de Indias or Santa Marta, while southwest Colombia gained importance later after the 17th century when the extraction of gold and minerals required more regulations for these areas.

Wílmar López-Barrios

Assistant Professor of Instruction

My research interests include prosody, sociophonetics and dialectology.