Spanish in contact in the Americas

KORNFELD, LAURA; ALICIA AVELLANA

A Guide to Spanish Dialects: Descriptive and theoretical aspects of linguistic variation in the Hispanic world

Oxford University Press

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2022;

Two (or more) languages are said to be in contact when they coexist in the same territory or in the same society. Not considering situations of (relatively) stable contact occurring in border areas, language contact situations often underlie dramatic process form a social and individual perspective (war, conquest, invasion, migration), which usually cause significant demographic displacement.Spanish, the language of an empire which spread throughout four continents, has been in numerous language contact situations in history. The most variable instances of language contact Spanish has experienced probably happened in the Americas, which reflects the past and present of social, cultural, political, economic and demographic processes. In all Hispanic-American countries, Spanish is the majority language, and it is dominant from a political and social perspective, since it is the official language, and especially, the language of culture and administration. Consequently, there exist several cases of diglossic language contact with preexistent indigenous languages, as well as with languages of mass migration and other European languages spoken in the continent (especially Portuguese and English).In this chapter, we will first go over a series of essential concepts needed to describe the contact situations of the Spanish language in the Americas . We will then focus on the linguistic properties of the varieties of Spanish in contact with indigenous languages. Lastly, we will outline some conclusions about the nature of the influence each indigenous language can have over Spanish, particularly over its grammar.