The Sociolinguistic Evolution of a Sound Change

This study focuses on the analysis of linguistic and extralinguistic factors influencing the phonological variation of vowel nasalization in the speech of bilingual speakers of Uruguayan Portuguese (UP). The setting is the city of Rivera located along the Uruguayan-Brazilian borderline. The data were collected in participant-observation and sociolinguistic interviews with fifty-four local UP speakers. Data results show that vowel nasalization is a linguistic variable constrained mainly by morphophonological and sociophonetic factors. Phonological processes interact with affixation in inflectional and derivational morphology in the process of vowel nasalization. Results show that functional category of the word and preceding phonological environment play a significant role in the distribution of nasal variation in contemporary UP in Rivera.