Language Contact in a Corpus of Personal Correspondence Spanning the 19th and 20th Centuries

The CD-ROM “Epistolari d’Antoni M. Alcover (1880-1931)”, published in 2008, contains the complete transcription of the Majorcan lexicographer's personal correspondence between 1880 and 1931. Alcover kept 16,005 documents, which include letters, postcards, visiting cards and other written materials, 638 of which were written by himself (drafts, copies or letters that he perhaps never intended to send). Although the correspondence is in Catalan, Castilian, German, French, Italian, English, Latin, Galician, and Esperanto, Catalan language dominates with 10,456 documents (65.3%). Up until now this corpus has been useful for studying the linguistic interference between Catalan and Castilian and also for looking some dialectal traits in verb morphology in usage at the beginning of the 20th century.This paper shows how the CD-ROM can help to analyse linguistic variation throughout the more than 5 million words of the corpus of correspondence (3,529,159 of them different). In this case, we are paying special attention to cases of any linguistic contact, loanwords and language shift appearing over this period of fifty years, primarily between Spanish and Catalan (fallo, barato, etc.), and French and Catalan (comitè, turisme, etc.), and secondarily between Italian and Catalan (cicerone, aquarel·la, etc.), and between English and Catalan (tròlei, túnel, etc.). The words are first classified and the processes of importation, graphic adaptation and meaning transfer are then analysed.