Regional Speech Surveys: Between Homogenization and Diversity of the Spanish Spoken in the Territorio Nacional de La Pampa (1945-1950)

Abstract

Berta Vidal de Battini, responsible for the Folklore and Nativism Commission of the National Council of Education, developed a survey project between 1940 and 1964, which reached all the schools in the country, and involved teachers in surveying regional speech and folklore. In this paper, in which just the files sent from the Territorio Nacional de La Pampa will be considered, we will look into the Regional Speech Survey (1945) and the Second Regional Speech Survey (1950), with the aim of analyzing how teachers collected and recorded Spanish in contact with other languages. Finally, although the teachers’ efforts to homogenize speech can be noticed, linguistic diversity remains, and this can be seen in the coexistence among Spanish and other languages or varieties spoken in the Territory.