Intervocalic /s/ voicing in the Andean Spanish of southern Peru

This chapter focuses on intervocalic /s/ voicing, a phenomenon that has been attested in the highland varieties of Ecuadorian Spanish and Quichua, in the town of Calca in the Andean region of southern Peru. We found that the overall rate of /s/ voicing in the Spanish of Calca is quite low (6.64%) compared to highland Ecuador. The results of a mixed-effects linear regression show that intervocalic /s/ voicing occurs most frequently in word-final position and in the speech of men and the upper social group. In contrast to Ecuador (Davidson 2019), in Calca, the older campesinos and the lower urban class, who have had the most exposure to Quechua in their daily lives, have the lowest rates of voicing. We hypothesize that the lack of voiced variants in the Quechua spoken in Calca inhibits to some degree the natural voicing that can occur in Spanish.