Geography of "ll" in Chile

Abstract

This paper intends to show the real extent and distribution of the lateral palatal in Chile, since first hand information has been gathered through systematic in situ surveys carried out along Chile. The analysis of the corpus shows the reduction of the lateral palatal to a very low number places located on two areas; on the other hand, the central palatal has increased in all its levels of realization. The corpus shows the presence of six realizations of the /y/ in Chile, out of which four are the most relevant, not only because of their frequency of use, but also because its geographical distribution marks very well-defined dialect areas.