We briefly introduce the papers in this special issue of Dialectologia devoted to the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI) and the new CSIC project to develop and publish the ALPI materials. The papers focus on several lexical, phonetic and morphological issues examined from synchronic and diachronic perspectives and represent a sample of the many results that can be obtained
by consulting ALPI data.He aquí una breve presentación de las contribuciones de este número especial de Dialectologia dedicado al Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI) así como el nuevo proyecto del CSIC para
elaborar y editar los materiales del ALPI. Los artículos examinan diversos aspectos léxicos, fonéticos y morfológicos tanto desde una perspectiva sincrónica como diacrónica y constituyen una muestra de los muchos resultados que se pueden obtener mediante la consulta de los datos del ALPI

García Mouton, Pilar

Heap, David

Perea, Maria Pilar

Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert

Dialectologia. Special issue, III (2012), 1-6.  
ISSN: 2013-2247 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 
 
THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE OF THE 
ATLAS LINGÜÍSTICO DE LA PENÍNSULA IBÉRICA (ALPI) 
Pilar GARCIA MOUTON1, David HEAP2 & Maria-Pilar PEREA3 
1Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas 
pilar.garciamouton@cchs.csic.es 
2University of Western Ontario 
djheap@uwo.ca 
3Universitat de Barcelona 
mpilar.perea@ub.edu 
 
 
Abstract  
We briefly introduce the papers in this special issue of Dialectologia devoted to the Atlas 
Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI) and the new CSIC project to develop and publish the ALPI 
materials. The papers focus on several lexical, phonetic and morphological issues examined from 
synchronic and diachronic perspectives and represent a sample of the many results that can be obtained 
by consulting ALPI data. 
 
EL PRESENTE Y EL FUTURO DEL ATLAS LINGÜÍSTICO DE LA PENÍNSULA IBÉRICA (ALPI) 
 
Resumen 
He aquí una breve presentación de las contribuciones de este número especial de Dialectologia 
dedicado al Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI) así como el nuevo proyecto del CSIC para 
elaborar y editar los materiales del ALPI. Los artículos examinan diversos aspectos léxicos, fonéticos y 
morfológicos tanto desde una perspectiva sincrónica como diacrónica y constituyen una muestra de los 
muchos resultados que se pueden obtener mediante la consulta de los datos del ALPI. 
 
 
This third special issue of Dialectologia is devoted to an almost hundred-year-old 
project, which, today, thanks to modern technology, will have a large presence on the 
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P. García Mouton, D. Heap & M.P. Perea 
 
 
 
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Internet: the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI). Conceived in 1914, the 
first surveys were begun in 1931, but they were interrupted in 1936 by the Spanish Civil 
War, with the few remaining surveys to be completed in the 1950s after materials exiled 
with Navarro Tomás after the war returned to Spain (Navarro Tomás 1975, see also 
Cortés & Garcia Perales 2009) and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas 
(CSIC), the body which succeeded the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (JAE), took 
responsibility for funding the project. The atlas survey includes data from 527 survey 
points, which can provide a rich overview of the status of dialects of that time in the 
Iberian Peninsula, the Balearic Islands and Roussillon, with the exclusion of the Canary 
Islands, Azores and Madeira.  
Ramón Menéndez Pidal devised this ambitious project at the JAE’s Centro de 
Estudios Históricos, which was directed and developed subsequently by Tomás Navarro 
Tomás. From the beginning, its broad scope linked together researchers in various parts 
of the peninsula. Lorenzo Rodríguez Castellano and Aurelio M. Espinosa Jr., with the 
cooperation of Aníbal Otero and Manuel Sanchis Guarner, surveyed the Castilian 
speaking territories; Aníbal Otero and Luis F. Lindley Cintra, with a previous help of 
Nobre de Gusmão and Armando Sa Rodrigo Nogueira, were responsible of the 
Galician-Portuguese area; while Francesc de B. Moll and Manuel Sanchis Guarner 
surveyed the localities of the Catalan speaking territories. 
The ALPI project experienced many difficulties and obstacles throughout its 
history, including during the editing process, and yet, in 1962, the first volume (of what 
should have been ten) appeared, funded by the CSIC. This single volume (ALPI 1962), 
a landmark at that time, followed the model of the traditional dialect atlas, but 
unfortunately remained without continuation. 
The recovery of the notebook materials (cf. Heap 2002, also this volume), a 
renewed interest in Navarro Tomás and his work (Salaberría 2007, Torrens Álvarez 
2008), and the centenary of the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios (García Mouton  2007), 
all contributed bringing greater attention to the ALPI materials. Funding for the 
publication of the ALPI was secured through an internal project (Elaboración y edición 
de los materiales del Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI), 200410E604), 
sponsored by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, with the objectives of 
developing and publishing the data using among other things the resources of 
technologies based on current Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Spatial Data 
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Dialectologia. Special issue, III (2012), 1-6.  
ISSN: 2013-2247 
 
 
 
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Infrastructure (SDI) (cf. García Mouton 2010). This project also has institutional 
collaboration from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM), the Universitat de 
Barcelona (UB), the Instituto da Lingua Galega de la Universidade de Santiago de 
Compostela (ILGA-USC), the Centro de Linguistica de la Universidade de Lisboa 
(CLUL), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) 
and the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC). Coordinated by Pilar García Mouton (CSIC), 
a specialist in geolinguistics, the team includes specialists working on the various areas 
surveyed: Inés Fernández Ordóñez (UAM), David Heap (UWO), Maria-Pilar Perea 
(UB), João Saramago (CLUL) and Xulio Sousa (ILGA-USC). 
This CSIC project involves an online transcription tool that allows for data entry 
by teams at each of the institutions involved, with a virtual keyboard which displays a 
full phonetic symbol set for transcriptions on screen. The highly-detailed Revista de 
Filología Española (RFE 1915) phonetic alphabet originally adapted by Navarro Tomás 
for the ALPI project has been simplified to a transcription system based on the 
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), with a number of equivalences to ensure that the 
same simplifications from the original transcriptions are performed at the different 
centres by the different research teams. 
Retranscribing the ALPI data is of course a vast undertaking involving many 
coordinated efforts by different teams with specially trained research assistants working 
on the different linguistic zones of the Iberian Peninsula. Nonetheless, the advantages of 
a fully transcribed ALPI corpus will be immense. One of them will be the ability to 
search the whole corpus for specific linguistic variables in many ways such as searching 
by phonetic transcription, by orthographic form or by semantic fields. In addition, all 
the comments noted by the fieldworkers during the surveys will be available, thus 
ensuring the preservation of all the original information. The original images of the 
questionnaires will be also accessible to users the in PDF format, so that anyone will be 
able to consult the original transcriptions made in the RFE phonetic alphabet. The 
results of any search can be displayed cartographically using a Geographic Information 
System (GIS) platform, so that the computerized ALPI will be a powerful tool for 
understanding the dynamics of language variation across Iberian Romance. Unlike a 
traditional atlas which has a finite number of fixed maps, the future ALPI will include 
the potential to generate not only display maps of the individual variables included in 
the original questionnaire, but also interpretative maps which include correlations 
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P. García Mouton, D. Heap & M.P. Perea 
 
 
 
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between different variables and statistical summaries of different items, leading to 
analyses which extend well beyond the realm of the static maps of the linguistic atlases 
of the last century. 
 
 
The papers 
 
The papers published in this issue represent a sample of the many results that can 
be obtained by consulting ALPI data and their possibilities, and also an invitation for 
future studies. Some of these papers focus on lexical issues, as is the case with 
Saramago’s lexico-botanical contribution, which surveys names of leguminous plants in 
varieties of the Western Peninsula. Perea’s article traces indirect uses of data from the 
ALPI surveys to enrich the dialect vocabulary in Catalan-Valencian-Balearic 
lexicography. Lexical variation is also the focus of Mouzo Villar’s study which 
examines both local variations and semantic motivations in expressions designating 
children born out of wedlock in Galician varieties, as well as Negro Romero’s study of 
terms for the uvula across Western Iberian Romance varieties.  
Phonetic evolution is the focus of Estrada Arráez’ contribution dealing with the 
loss of /d/ in intervocalic and final positions across the Peninsula. ALPI data (for the 
most part from the 1930s) can also be used as a baseline to study features which may 
have changed (or not) in later dialect surveys which employ similar, if not identical, 
methodologies. In García Mouton and Molina Martos’ study we see a phonetic variable 
which has phonological impact (yeísmo), with a great advantage that the ALPI data now 
allow for a diachronic study of the /ʎ/-/ʝ/ merger by contrasting the earlier dialect 
surveys from the 1930s with more recent regional surveys conducted in the 1980-1990s 
and in 2002-2003.  
Sousa’s contribution also exploits the real-time diachronic potential of the ALPI 
data by contrasting phonetic and lexical variables between the surveys from the 1930s 
with more recent atlas data, The same real-time diachronic approach is adopted in 
Rodríguez Lorenzo’s study of three variables (one phonetic, one morphological and one 
lexical) in Galicia, using the ALPI data from the 1930s, Galician atlas data from the 
1970s and recent dialect survey data from 2008. Rosés Labrada’s article is similarly 
diachronic in perspective, focusing on morphological features (third person pronoun 
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Dialectologia. Special issue, III (2012), 1-6.  
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usage: leísmo, laísmo, loísmo) in Zamora, using ALPI survey data from the 1930s to 
show that the regional unity noted for these features is in fact a not a recent 
phenomenon. While it does not contrast ALPI data with other dialect surveys, Lara 
Bermejo’s study looks at morphological changes, specifically the use of third person 
plural for second person plural pronouns of address, in Andalusian Spanish and in 
Portuguese dialects, from a historical perspective. Heap’s contribution traces the early 
years of the online ALPI, before the current CSIC project. 
The first results of the computerization of the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península 
Ibérica (ALPI) will soon be available on the Internet from the future geoportal of the 
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, www.alpi.csic.es). The passage of time 
will allow what was intended to be a conventional linguistic atlas on paper to become 
instead a free-access interactive atlas, with extensive possibilities of simple and 
complex queries and with the inclusion of ethnographic and folklore materials in the 
form of images. The recovery of the past and the ability to compare data with current 
results opens a rich field of action for potential research. 
 
 
Acknowledgments 
 
We are grateful to each of the authors for their work, as well as to the Consejo 
Superior de Investigaciones Científicas for the financial support that has made this 
special issue possible.  
 
 
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El presente y el futuro del Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI)

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