Sociolinguistic analysis of the queísmo in the Spanish spoken in Santiago, Chile

Abstract

In this article, we described the use of the queísmo in Santiago's speech, from a sociolinguistic point of view. For this purpose, a stratified sample of 120 interviews of Santiago's speakers was analyzed. The objectives of the study were to identify the internal factors that promoted the use of the queísmo and to correlate this use with the informant's sociodemographic factors (gender, age and socioeconomic group). The results show that the contexts that promoted the queísmo are the omission of a required preposition before the word que (conjunction) and que (relative pronoun) in Spanish. Also, the social factors that are mostly related to the use of queísmo are firstly, the socioeconomic group of the speakers and secondly, his gender. Thus, the queísmo is more commonly found in the lower classes of the community under study and in females of the analyzed corpus.