El [ʃ]oquero: /tʃ/ variation in Huelva capital and surrounding towns

This study examines allophonic realizations of /tʃ/ in Huelva (Western Andalucía) to assess if the traditional Andalusian [ʃ] variant is being maintained or if, similar to Eastern Andalucía, it is undergoing dialect levelling in favor of the Castilian [tʃ] variant (Melguizo Moreno, 2007; Moya Corral and García Wiedemann, 1995a, 1995b; Villena Ponsoda, 1996). The study acoustically analyzed /tʃ/ realizations based on 31 sociolinguistic interviews (15 men, 16 women) of speakers from the city of Huelva and surrounding towns. A mixed effects logistic regression and a conditional inference tree reveal that [tʃ] is most favored by younger and middle- aged women of all educational levels and younger and middle-aged men with university education. A gender by semantic category interaction found that men favor [ʃ] with words of local foods and with the local gentilic (choquero/a) more than with nonlocal words. The results imply that there is a change in apparent time (Labov, 1994) from [ʃ] to [tʃ] in Huelva, similar to cities in Eastern Andalucía. However, [ʃ] remains a linguistic resource among men for constructing a local identity.