Introduction

Some attention has been paid to the contact situation on the Uruguay–Brazil border where a swathe of border land once belonging to Brazil became part of Uruguay in the nineteenth century. Although a 50- to 100-km strip in Uruguay on the Uruguay–Brazil border has been part of that country for more than 120 years, a variety of Portuguese is still maintained in the area which has been referred to as Portuñol or Fronterizo. (See Waltermire 2006 and references therein.)

The border area between Portugal and Spain, locally known as A Raia or La Raya ‘the border, boundary’, has received less attention although there are several Portuguese–Spanish contact situations in that area. For example, in the Spanish city of Valencia-de-Alcántara there is a sizable enclave of Portuguese-speaking citizens and to my knowledge this situation has yet to be studied systematically. In the case of Barranquenho, the variety of Spanishinfluenced Portuguese spoken in Barrancos, Portugal, the monograph by Leite de Vasconcelos (1955) and the more recent work by Navas Sánchez-Élez (1992, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2001) are seminal, though this contact situation is also largely unknown among the wider audience in contact linguistics. The Barrancos situation is interesting because, over the centuries, the area has been claimed by both Portugal and Spain. In order to illustrate this, I first give a brief historical overview of the area from the Middle Ages onwards. I then discuss the various features that define Barranquenho, using material found in Leite de Vasconcelos (1955) and a corpus comprising speech of twenty-two Barranquenho speakers.