A study on the /r/ assibilation in the Mexico City and Tupe Spanish

This paper examines the phenomenon of the assibilation of the so-called 'trilled r' in the Spanish spoken in Mexico City and Tupe, Peru. The Spanish /r/ exhibits various allophones based on regional and social influences. This research aims to analyze the specific conditions that promote the assibilation of /r/ in those two linguistic communities. For the analysis, the PRESEEA corpus collected in Mexico City and the corpus compiled in the Tupe district between 2015-2017 through sociolinguistic interviews were used. Of the total 975 cases of /r/ analyzed, the assibilated variants reached 21.4% in Mexico City and 31.4% in Tupe. Two linguisitc variables and one social variable were found to be determining factors in the corpus of Mexico City: "phonetic environments", "(un)stressed syllable" and "gender". In contrast, none of the variables implemented for the corpus of Tupe were significant.