In this study, linguistic and anthropological research methods are employed in investigating the use of one salient feature in the speech of a small community in northern Spain. Though set in rural Spain, the study is of interest both to readers with special interest in Spain and to those concerned mostly with broader possibilities of inference from linguistic data. In the first case, findings provide insight into social change experienced by generations of villagers marked by the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. In the second, data provide evidence that, in this small and relatively homogeneous community, sex and political orientation are factors that influence the use of an established sociolinguistic variable. Speech data used in the study were obtained in a series of recorded interviews conducted by the author. Material of an ethnographic nature was collected during field research over a period of approximately two years. (Linguistic variation, social motivation, Spanish dialectology, Spanish regionalism, Cantabria, montañés)