Code switching and linguistic accommodation in front of television cameras: Gheada and rhotacism. A contribution to linguistic change in Galician

Abstract

Code-switching and linguistic accommodation are more or less natural and common phenomena within bilingual communities composed of speakers who, the greater their linguistic repertoire, the more pragmatic possibilities they will have when communicating with their interlocutor, adapting to the topic, situation or registration.

How these changes occur and what they mean for the ongoing linguistic change in Galician will be the objective of this work. In addition, we will focus on the analysis of the behavior of a group of Moranese speakers with respect to the dialectal features of the gheada and the rhotacism when they are recorded by television cameras. Thus, and following Lavob’s variationist sociolinguistics methodology, we were able to observe that gheada is the trait that will receive the greatest accommodation in the face of the great maintenance of rotacism, that women are the most innovative group and that the younger generation seems to recover some uses traditional language.