Phonetic phenomena in New Flamenco. The linguistic stylisation of flamenco over time: a corpus study

Abstract

The aim of this article is to check whether the phenomena that were indexicalised in flamenco singing during the early stages of the professionalisation of singing (seseo, fricatisation, aspiration and elision of sounds, rhotacism) have been preserved over the generations. Above all, we want to know whether these phenomena have survived in this period and in the new varieties of the genre, such as flamenco fusion. For this work we elaborated and transcribed two flamenco corpora from the analysis of 44 hours of recordings and a total of 94978 lemmas with phonetic phenomena. The results have shown that, indeed, in flamenco there are indexical phonetic phenomena that have been registered as representative marks of the cante. In fact, the cantaores themselves, regardless of their origin, use the same sounds. However, a decrease in the use of phonetic phenomena of the genre in New Flamenco has been observed, especially in the younger generations.