Foreigner-Directed Speech in Argentina

Studies of the speech of non-native speakers have been carried out for many different languages, but particularly for English. For the Spanish language, by contrast, the phenomenon has not been studied very extensively. The aspect of diatopic variation has been disregarded entirely, as has the possible influence of the variety spoken by the non-native speaker. When it comes to Argentina, this latter topic is of particular interest, since Argentinians, as has been shown in other studies, tend to modify their speech when speaking with Spaniards or other non-Argentinians. This study, based on participant observation, describes for the first time the Foreigner-Directed Speech (FDS) of Argentinians from the province of Córdoba on three levels (native speaker - non-native speaker who learned Spanish in Spain, native speaker - non-native speaker who learned Spanish in Argentina, and native speaker - native speaker as a control group).