Uruguayan Portuguese in Artigas: Tri -dimensionality of transitional local varieties in contact with Spanish and Portuguese standards

This sociolinguistic study focuses on identifying the causes and consequences of language displacement occurring in the Uruguayan border town of Artigas, the unique point of contact between Spanish and Portuguese that lies well within the bounds of Uruguay along the Brazilian-Uruguayan border. The phenomenon of language admixture that has resulted has been an object of linguistic inquiry for nearly half a century. Diatopical studies aimed to geographically delineate and identify specific varieties within the Portuguese-speaking region of Uruguay, while sociolinguistic research focused on the speakers and variation that occurred within specific areas of northern Uruguay. It has been long understood that the region is experiencing language shift from a variety of Portuguese monolingualism to bilingualism in Uruguayan Portuguese, a contact variety referred to by linguists as Uruguayan Portuguese (UP), and Spanish. This shift has now reached members of the urban and rural poor, as nearly all members of the community speak Spanish in addition to UP. However, little attention has been given to the possibility of a shift away from bilingualism toward Spanish monolingualism, with the consequent loss of the contact variety, or toward balanced bilingualism in the Spanish and Portuguese standards, with the displacement of UP by the more prestigious variety of Portuguese. Moreover, the nature of the transitional variety that results from these stages of shift is often misinterpreted. The present dissertation documents and proposes to provide an understanding of the functional and structural processes of language displacement and loss of the UP variety in the city of Artigas and surrounding rural communities. This goal is accomplished by examining the sociopolitical environment and data collected from personal interviews containing speakers' production of Spanish and Portuguese varieties, as well as speakers' attitudes towards them and values attributed to them.