Highland Colombia and Venezuela
1. Introduction
The mountainous area comprising central and eastern Colombia on the one hand and western Venezuela on the other is traditionally regarded as forming a dialect zone. Although that view is not unmotivated, it has to be remembered that while Venezuela is primarily a Caribbean nation with some inland settlement, Colombia’s mountainous interior hosts as much if not more of the nation’s cultural and economic life than do its coastal areas. The locations of the two countries’ capital cities are indicative in this regard, with Caracas (Venezuela’s capital) giving onto the Caribbean Sea and Bogotá (Colombia’s capital) being situated in the Eastern Cordillera.
Historically, much of the dialect zone in question belonged to the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, established in 1718 with Bogotá as its capital. In addition to the territory of modern Colombia, the Viceroyalty in its heyday included the Venezuelan provinces of Maracaibo in the west and Guayana in the south east, but these came under the jurisdiction of Caracas following the establishment of the Captaincy General of Venezuela in 1777.
As the capital of the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, Bogotá was on a par with Mexico City and Lima, and can be assumed to have received similar demographic inputs, viz. appreciable numbers of administrators, senior clerics and academics who would be likely to act as vehicles for the diffusion of the Castilian norms. To this day, in fact, the educated speech of Bogotá represents a prestige variety for many Latin Americans.
2. Pronunciation tendencies
Highland speech in Colombia diverges from general Venezuelan speech in terms of how
syllable-final /s/ is realized. Away from the coasts, Colombian Spanish tends towards the retention of /-s/ as a sibilant,
whereas Venezuela is generally an area in which /-s/ is weakened, usually through debuccalization. This difference in the treatment of /-s/ reflects in part the location of the two capital cities, Bogotá and Caracas, which no doubt play an important role in conditioning variable usage in their respective hinterlands. The usage in Bogotá,
which is an Andean city, legitimizes the prevailing Andean tendency towards
strong consonantism, a tendency that happens to coincide with the normative
principal in Spanish that privileges sound–letter correspondence. Caracas, in
contrast, belongs to the Caribbean dialect zone, where /-s/ weakening is
routine. However, because of Caracas’s pre-eminent position in Venezuelan society in
general, this ‘coastal’ tendency has spread into the mountainous areas inland.
The legitimizing effect of the Venezuelan capital runs counter, then, to the
tendencies that usually prevail in highland areas.
On the other hand, in both areas, /s/ (corresponding either to s or to z/ci,e) may be
realized as [h] in syllable-initial position, as in [unaheˈɲoɾa] una señora ‘a woman’. As elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world,
the process is often triggered by dissimilation with respect to a following /s/:
[nehesiˈðað] necesidad ‘necessity’
[lihenˈsjaðo] licenciado ‘graduate/lawyer’
In parts
of the western Colombian highlands, particularly Antioquia, /s/ may be apical, as in Castile.
In rural districts, particularly in the Eastern Cordillera, assibilated variants of /ɾ/ and /r/ are common. In urban centres, however, assibilation is less likely to be encountered.
A similar
geographical spread is associated with the retention of /ʎ/, the palatal lateral phoneme. Its use was actually widespread until the end of the nineteenth century. For example, when the
celebrated Colombian linguist Rufino José Cuervo described Bogotá speech in the 1870s, the digraph ll was still routinely pronounced as [ʎ] throughout the Colombian highlands. By the
beginning of the twentieth century, however, the use of /ʎ/ was already becoming
identified with rural areas in the Andes, both in Colombia and Venezuela. Nevertheless, even today, it is not uncommon to hear middle-class speakers from urban
backgrounds pronouncing words like ella as [ˈeʎa].
The voiced
obstruents /b/, /d/ and /g/ are often realized as stops, [b], [d] and [g],
in postconsonantal position, as opposed to fricatives, which is their normal articulation in this position in Spanish. Examples of the regionally marked pronunciation are as follows:
[ˈalgo] algo ‘something’
[oɾdiˈnaɾjo] ordinario
‘ordinary’
[ˈjeɾba] hierba ‘grass’.
3. Morphology
Highland
Colombia/Venezuela is an area of tuteo–voseo coexistence, with tuteo carrying the highest
social prestige. In much of the region the verbal morphology associated with vos involves assimilated verb forms in the present tense (in both indicative and subjunctive), together with imperatives that have no final /d/ and variable usage in
the future between forms ending in -ás and forms ending in -és. An approximation to this situation is given in the table below.
Voseo in Highland Colombia/Venezuela (idealization)
| |
-ar |
-er |
-ir |
Pres. ind. |
cantás |
comés |
subís |
Pres subj. |
cantés |
comás |
subás |
Imperative |
cantá |
comé |
subí |
Future |
cantarás ~ cantarés |
comerás ~ comerés |
subirás ~ subirés |
In the area around Lake Maracaibo, essentially Zulia state, vos goes with dissimilated 2nd person verb forms, i.e. those which in the Iberian Peninsula go with vosotros. This gives rise to the famous verbal paradigm known alternatively as the voseo zuliano or the voseo maracucho.
Another interesting feature of the region, one perhaps more associated with Colombia than Venezuela, is ustedeo, which refers to the use of usted without any deferential value, for example between a husband and a wife. A related phenomenon is the use of
archaic su merce(d), often, though
not in all cases, as a deferential term of address, i.e. as an equivalent to standard usted.
4. Syntax
The emphatic es construction as in (1) below, is common in
the highlands as well as in the rest of Colombia and Venezuela:
(1) Pero lo están investigando es desde el 94. (Curnow and Travis 2003:6)
‘But they’ve been investigating him since 1994.’
The construction is encountered also in Ecuador and Panama but is likely to have originated in Colombia – where it has been attested for at least a century –
and been transported to neighbouring countries in the speech of migrant
workers.
As in the
Caribbean, the subject of an infinitive may be placed before the verb, rather
than after it as in standard Spanish:
(2) antes de yo salir de mi país
(3) para él sacar mejores notas
In
Quechua-influenced dialects in southern Colombia, phenomena are likely to be
encountered that are typical of language contact areas. For example,
non-standard patterns of clitic doubling are widespread, often with invariant lo, as in (4) below.
(4) Lo mató una danta.
‘He killed a tapir.’
Null direct objects may also be encountered, as in (5):
(5) Usted me llevó carne pero no
me dio.
‘You brought me bread but you didn’t give me any.’
Finally,
gerundial constructions may be used that are modelled on Quechua constructions,
especially with the verb dar ‘to
give’, as in (6) below:
(6) Déles pasando el cafecito.
‘Pass them the coffee.’
5. Lexicon
Items that
are associated with the Spansh of the region include the following: araguato light brown’, bahareque ‘wattle-and-daub wall’, bajera ‘lower leaf of the tobacco
plant’, bombillo ‘light bulb’, botalón ‘post to which animals are
tied’, buchón ‘pot-bellied’, cachaco ‘person from Bogatá’, cachetón ‘chubby cheeked’, calungo (type of dog with wavy hair), en un tilín ‘in a flash’, encimar ‘to give [in addition]’, faludo ‘steep’ (of terrain), gavera ‘crate/sugarloaf mould’, gritadera ‘shrieking’, joropo (type of dance), limpión ‘dishtowel’, liquilique (rough cotton smock), locho ‘blond’, manigua ‘swamp/tropical rainforest’, mapuro ‘skunk’, múcura ‘pitcher’, patacones ‘banana chips’, pechugón ‘opportunistic’, peinilla ‘machete’, perico ‘coffee with a drop of milk’, pico ‘kiss’, pisco ‘turkey’, provocar ‘to appeal to’ (of
food/drink), rejo ‘whip’, remonta ‘shoe repair’, ruana (type of poncho), serenarse ‘to go out in the damp night
air’, tapado ‘dimwit’, tapaojos ‘blinker’, templado ‘tough/difficult’, tigre ‘casual job’, toche ‘person from the
Andes/fool’, zamuro ‘turkey vulture’.
6. References
Curnow, Timothy, J. and Catherine E. Travis. 2003. ‘The Emphatic Es Construction of Colombian Spanish.’ Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society.