Language alternations in the Portuguese community living in Andorra: a sociolinguistic study

Abstract

According to the Department of Statistics of Andorra (2025), there are 8510 Portuguese people living in Andorra, which represents 9.7% of the population. The objective of this paper is to characterise the language alternations present in the oral speech of informants from the Portuguese community in Andorra. More specifically, based on Poplack's (2020) proposal, our aim is to verify how and in what contexts language alternations (Portuguese-Catalan/Portuguese-Spanish) are present in the oral discourse of speakers who have Portuguese as their native language and as a heritage language. In order to study the influence of Catalan and Spanish on the oral discourse of Portuguese residents in Andorra, we interviewed 18 native speakers of Portuguese living in Andorra for more than four years and 9 Portuguese heritage language speakers. The results show that the social variables schooling and years of residence in Andorra are determining factors in explaining the frequency of occurrence of linguistic alternations and their characterisation. The role of other variables, such as language use in work contexts, in the patterns of alternation displayed by speakers is also discussed.