Abstract

One way in which languages change has been termed dialectal divergence, which can be defined as the process whereby differences between speakers and their dialectal variants increase (Auer & Hinskens, 1996; Christen, 1998). While the socio-economic structure of Chilean society is known to be highly stratified, recent research suggests that Chilean Spanish speakers from different socio-economic groups are diverging in the way they use consonants, along clear and predictable paths (Figueroa et al., 2013). In this study, we demonstrate that the vowel system of Chilean Spanish is also undergoing a process of dialectal divergence. In order to do so, a stratified corpus of sociolinguistic interviews was obtained from 60 speakers, and F1 and F2 acoustic values were extracted from all monophthong vowels present in the corpus. The quantitative analyses revealed that, indeed, different socioeconomic groups are using slightly different vowel systems.