SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY ABOUT THE LINGUISTIC EVOLUTION OF ANDALUSIAN SINGERS: THE CASE OF PABLO ALBORÁN

Abstract

This research presents a sociolinguistic study about the linguistic variation of a particular Andalusian speaker: Pablo Alborán. On one hand, we will analyze the possible linguistic evolution of the singer-songwriter from Málaga. And, on the other hand, we will observe his linguistic behavior according to the context in which he is immersed. It should be noted that, due to strictly personal and professional reasons, we are dealing with an Andalusian speaker who is fully integrated in a community that presents a different linguistic solution from his own one and that, furthermore, is considered the prestigious one. The methodology of our study consists in the elaboration of an oral corpus based on different linguistic situations, selecting two very contrastive roles (singer and interviewee), and using diverse linguistic, exclusively phonetics (/s/; /x/; /st/), and extralinguistic (type of speech; artistic stage) variables with their respective variants. Our results will allow us to verify is there is a linguistic evolution in Pablo´s speech applied to different linguistic and extralinguistic contexts related to his –already quite extensive– musical career. In addition, we will be able to observe if he uses the regional variants of the Andalusian Spanish or if he, on the contrary, uses more often the standard Spanish mainly associated with the north-central peninsula. However, and taking into account the complete analysis of the data from our study, we anticipate that the singer Pablo Alborán almost always opts for the prestigious variant of Spanish. Moving away, in this manner, from his own linguistic variety which corresponds to the southern variant of the Spanish language. Nevertheless, we appreciate some exceptions and typical features of the Spanish spoken in Andalusia in his second last album, titled Vértigo. Alborán is much more free in Vértigo since, in this music album, he neglects all the linguistic or extralinguistic stereotypes and he only gets carried away by his feelings and his passion for music.