Mauricio Cardona

Following the dialectological approach, my main objective is to present two multidimensional phonetic linguistic atlases of Spanish; one for Panama and one for Belize. These atlases will illustrate the geographic distribution of about 52 Spanish phonetic combinations that, according to Quesada (1992), cause most of the phonetic variations among Latin American Spanish speakers. Then, a comparison will be made between the two countries, based on the final results of each country. In addition, this project will have the following specific objectives:

• To illustrate the dialectal zones in each country.
• To compare the results of the dialectal zones with former studies carried out in these countries, such as the studies carried out by Antonio Quilis, Manuel Alvar, Elsie Alvarado, and others.
• To determine the zones in Panama and Belize where polyphony is more frequent.
• To present a phonetic multi-dimensional geo-linguistic analysis of each country, explaining the current situation of Spanish pronunciation, both in Belize and Panama.

Although some prior geolinguistics works carried out in America will be very usefull to my research, it is the "Atlas Lingüístico Etnográfico de Costa Rica" (ALECORI) by Miguel Quesada (1992) which I will follow most, both in methodology and theory basis, since this work was the beginning of a unified project called "Atlas Lingüísticos y Etnográficos de América Central" (ALPEAC). This project is the first to carry out multi-dimensional linguistics atlases (with territory, age and gender as the variables) with their corresponding analyses, in countries of Central America such as Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama, Belize, and Costa Rica.

Finally, my work will also present a comparison between the two countries proposed, which is necessary since english influences both countries due to commercial, political, and historical aspects. Also, their adjacent location on the Caribbean coast may explain certain phonological similarities, such as the losing of /s/ in final position of a syllable, the strong stressing in open final vowels, the losing of /r/ before /n/, the realization of /r/ as /l/ in syllable-final position, etc. (Alvarado 1971).

Cardona works at the Department of Foreign Languages.