Broadcasting standardisation: An analysis of the linguistic normalisation process in Murcian Spanish

The samples used from radio programme recordings have been demonstrated to be very useful sources for the study of styles and the analysis of linguistic variation and change. The aim of this paper is to show the results of a longitudinal study of Murcian speech carried out following a real-time approach with a retrospective trend design in order to detect and measure the apparent increasing diffusion of standard Castilian features from northern Peninsular Spanish over Murcian Spanish, a traditionally non-standard region. For this purpose, following the methodology used in similar studies, we focussed on the quantification of the level of standardisation of people interviewed in radio broadcasts in the last twenty-six years. In this way, the correlation of linguistic variables with social variables (groups) and time intervals, allowed us to compare and analyse the sociolinguistic behaviour of the different social groups in terms of standardisation (adoption of Castilian Spanish features) or non-standardisation (maintenance of local Murcian features) and trends.