Diachronic Change of the Vowel Harmony in the Speech of Pas

This document presents a comparison of the conservation state of the most relevant phenomena in the vowel system of the Pasiegu Dialect, spoken in some valleys of Central-Eastern Cantabria, in Northwestern Spain. We do so by taking Penny’s (1969) model and comparing it with data from two groups of present-day speakers, the most conservative speakers and the most conservative school-age speakers. The interview has two parts, a directed conversation and a linguistic questionnaire; the former searches for different various phenomena, while the later is focused on the henomenon known as vowel metaphony, characteristic of some Asturleonese dialects. This document includes the first qualitative date from the conservation interview as well as qualitative and quantitative data from the linguistic questionnaire, both showing a rapid retreat of most dialectal features, replaced by Castilian Spanish.