doxa.comunicación | nº 31, pp. 251-264 | 253

July-December of 2020

Francisco Manuel Carriscondo-Esquivel and Amina El-Founti Zizaoui

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

2. Analysis

2.1. Sample saturation

There is a fundamental principle of Statistics according to which a sample is representative of the whole that reality assumes if the results we reach after its analysis do not change, regardless of the data that we continue to add. Something similar happens with the analysis of the perception of the variety of Spanish spoken in Andalusia. A great amount of empirical evidence can be provided –from the book tradition, from the cinema, from television, from the press…– but what is incontestable is that the conclusion does not vary. Andalusian is still undervalued, it has little prestige in the professional fields, it continues to be characterized as a way of speaking of uneducated people and as a mechanism for humour, etc.

Even researchers seem to have noticed the saturation of the data, as can be seen from the quotes in the texts by Antonio Narbona Jiménez: “Los estereotipos se repiten hasta el aburrimiento. Nada que no se sepa” (abc, 04.03.2018);2 or by Lola Pons Rodríguez, who alludes to the poor effectiveness of the arguments put forward by the specialists: “[N]o tiene sentido sacar más argumentos lingüísticos o históricos” (El País, 02.02.2017). That is why it is convenient to bring up this statistical principle: it is not worth insisting more, it does not make sense to draw the usual arguments, nor to provide more evidence, because the results will continue to be the same.

The effort of specialised critics, in order to optimise the results of the research, should focus, rather than on an expansion of the sample, already saturated, on the search for new perspectives that serve not only to corroborate the conclusions, if they need to be further corroborated, but also to broaden the spectrum of action. Ramón y Cajal said that “lo primero que se necesita para tratar de asuntos científicos, cuando no nos impulsa la misión de la enseñanza [and this is not the case], es tener alguna observación nueva o idea útil que comunicar a los demás” (1991 [1897]: [137]). The contribution of more samples only serves to endorse what is already known, thus there is no real progress in the research.

Consequently, if the study on the social perception of Andalusian progresses like a flood –that is to say, quantitatively, expanding the corpus of analysis more and more, but only serving to abound in the already known characterization– then it will be necessary to look for new ways of progress, but qualitative, rather than quantitative. It is then that the question arises: what could those perspectives be? In the current state of our inquiries, we have found two: one philological and the other one, linguistic. That is why the analysis of the sample will consist of the development of the following table, which works as a synthesis of our presentation of the results, which have been obtained taking into account the two perspectives indicated.