Atrició fonològica i desestabilització de l’estàndard en la televisió valenciana

Abstract

In the context of the Valencian linguistic conflict, the native language undergoes a progressive reduction of the phonological repertoire that tends to eliminate any phoneme that does not exist in the dominant language. This ongoing process exceeds the traits and territory of the well-known apitxat. This adaptation of the phonological system to that of Spanish is accompanied by lexical impoverishment, semantic and grammatical calque of the dominant language. In such a situation, mass media can be a tool not only to increase language use, but also for standardization, that is, the transmission of a normative and genuine model of language. In this contribution, we analyse a corpus of news from the Valencian public television À Punt, in a period of great prominence of the COVID-19 pandemic, to find out what impact the attrition of phonemes has on the speech of professional broadcasters. From a sociophonic point of view, we focus on the pronunciation diverging from the normative Valencian, especially when caused by the approach to Spanish, in order to determine the model of language that this broadcaster transmits to the Valencian society.