Spanish In Afro-American Settlements

According to Lipsky (2004a), Hispanic Creoles are not Spanish dialects, but independent languages, products of linguistic mixing and an uninterrupted and restructured transmission process that breaks with traditional genealogical models of Indo-European languages. These Creole modalities are historically related to the slave trade during the colonial period, principally in the hands of the Portuguese, to the settlement of slaves onto plantations, and to the resulting communicative circumstances. One of these Creoles is Palenquero, spoken by a portion of the Palenque de San Basilio population, in Bolivar (Colombia). The formation of this language began around 1600, when a large number of slaves, all coming from Congo-Angola, arrived in Cartagena (Colombia) via San Tome (Gulf of Guinea). For this reason, Palenquero has a homogenous African substratum, almost exclusively made up of the Kikongo and Kimbundu languages (Bartens, 2000). Another of the Creole languages with a Hispanic component is Papiamento, currently spoken in the Dutch Antilles and whose social process is related to the history of the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao). On arrival of the Dutch in 1634, almost all the Amerindians and Spaniards abandoned the islands. In 1650 the first African slaves were imported and, shortly after, Sephardic Jews and their slaves began to immigrate there, having been expelled from Brazil, Holland, and Portugal. The crystallization of Papiamento, thus, contains elements of the diverse languages that arrived in the islands: African languages, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Judeo-Spanish (Bartens, 2000). In addition to Palenquero and Papiamento, there are other Creole varieties such as the Caribbean tongue Bozal (the language of African born slaves that spoke Spanish with difficulty), the dialect of the Congo Blacks of Panama, and some remnants of a creolized Spanish, such as the variety of Valle del Chota in Ecuador or the variety of the the Afro-Aymara “Yungas” in Bolivia (Lipsky, 2004a; Perl & Schwegler, 1998).

In Central America along the Atlantic coast, numerous populations of Caribbean origin speak English-based Creoles: Panamanian Creole, the Limonese Creole of Costa Rica, the Creole of Costa Mosquitia and that of Rama Cay in Nicaragua, English in the islands of the Bay of Honduras, the English Creole of Guatemala, and the Creole of Belize. These Afro-American settlements were historically linked to, first, colonial production (coco, sugar, indigo) and, later, to British and North American financial enclaves (exploitation of the banana tree, rubber, wood; the construction of railroads and of the Panama Canal). During this last stage, until halfway through the 20th century, English and Creoles based on English formed the communication medium in the region. Afterwards those English-based Central American states whose official language was Spanish (with the exception of Belize) imposed Spanish on the Creole speaking populations, seeking their acculturation. However, local populations have resisted and preserved their maternal language and, even now, speak both Creole and Spanish (Herzfeld, 2002).

These Creole languages have cohabitated with and/or still coexist with Spanish. For this reason, they have had foreseeable reciprocal influences on each other. With respect to the Spanish of the Americas, it is important that dialectological and sociolinguistic research take these contacts into account, particularly with regards to the Caribbean. In this respect, Schwegler and Morton (2003), who describe the vernacular Spanish of Palenque (Colombia), Kateyano, make a notable contribution from a historical and contemporary perspective. The conclusions drawn from this work suggest that, in the second half of the 16th century, the region must have developed a vernacularized regional Spanish, conditioned in part by African influences (Schwegler & Morton, 2003). Likewise, other contributions made by Lipsky (2002) and by Schwegler (1998, 2002) deal with the role played by African languages in the Caribbean. Whereas Lipsky studies the contact between Creoles and the genesis of Afro-Caribbean Spanish, Schwegler (2002) analyzes the ritual Bantu vocabulary of Cuba.

Spanish in Colonized and Ethnically Diverse Territories

Up through the present, former Spanish colonies in Latin America and the Caribbean have maintained a strong ethnic, social and linguistic hierarchy. The historic imposition of Spanish as the language of power, knowledge, and prestige has generated a diglossic situation, to the detriment of Creole and indigenous languages, many of which are now threatened or in danger of extinction. Millions of Latin Americans whose first language is indigenous must now communicate in a Spanish acquired as a second language, often in adverse situations, during the course of their new communicative interactions. Currently, diverse works have been devoted to the study of amply diffused Spanish sociolects that have developed as contemporary lingua francas in indigenous America. These mixed modalities often constitute a strategic standpoint that guarantees ample communication with Spanish speakers as well as loyalty to their own community of origin.

In the Andes, a number of diverse monographic studies about Andean Spanish have appeared. It is fitting to mention Granda's book (2001) on the general Andean area, Escobar's (2000) and Cerrón-Palomino's (2003) studies of Peru, Haboud's book (1998) on Ecuador and the volume written by Fernandez and Valle Rodas (1998) on the Argentinean Northeast. Calvo Pérez's (2000) study is among the more specific studies of Andean Spanish. Calvo demonstrates that the influence of Quechua and Aymara has encouraged temporal, copulative, and restrictive particle schemas that are explicitly Spanish. Granda's (2003) study analyzes the complex case of morphosyntactic convergence between Spanish's syntactic connector de and the illative suffixes of Quechua and Aymara. The corpus gathered by Muyskens in Salcedo (Province of Cotopaxi, Ecuador) for the study of the Media Lengua (Muyskens, 1997) has served Ent (2005) and Olbertz (2005), respectively, in their recent works on the use and omission of object clitics and on the use of dizque from a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Gómez (2005) describes the social history, use and structure of the Media Lengua in the Province of Imbabura (Ecuador). He proves that the contact between Quechua and Spanish had produced distinct Media Lengua varieties. Essentially, these share the same features, but differ in the degree of relexification and influence of Spanish morphosyntactic structures (Gómez, 2005).

Some recent research specific to the case of Peru includes Gugenberger's study (2005) of the linguistic displacement of Quechua migrants in their passage to the city. Cerrón-Palomino (2005) studies the survival of the Culli -enque suffix in regional Peruvian Spanish. Godenzzi (2004) studies the retention of the opposition /l/ - /y/ in the Spanish of the city of Puno, which is used as a resource for the construction of a regional identity. In the case of Bolivia, one finds Sichra's study (2005) of the bilingual character of the city of Cochabamba and the linguistic behaviour and identity of its speakers. Mutendam (2005) studies the use of the reflexive pronoun in the Spanish of Tarata (Cochabamba), whereas Pfänder (2002) studies the contact and linguistic change of Andean Spanish in Cochabamba. This last work provides a useful methodological tool. It analyzes sixteen morphosyntactic phenomena and illustrates certain tendencies such as the preference for analytic forms rather than synthetic and nominalization rather than subordination.

The migration of the rural population to large and medium-sized cities is the result of profound technological changes and of the economic growth pattern, for the most part, during the second half of the 20th century. In particular, the crisis in agriculture, poverty and social unrest, provoked by violence and terrorism in many Latin American countries, produced massive displacements of indigenous populations to urban spaces. This has brought about the sociocultural and ethnic reconfiguration of cities. Population displacements are accompanied by the displacement of languages and of technological communication mediums. Using the parameters of migration and urbanization, Ludwig (2002) has carried out research on the Spanish of Santiago de Chile. He not only analyzes the contact between Spanish and Mapudungu, the language of the Mapuche people, but also the contact between different registers or styles within a same language. His study concludes by affirming that, as compared to what occurs in other parts of the Andean region, Mapudungu interferences in migrants' Spanish seems not to orient itself toward a fossilized interlect. Rather, it would appear to be generating language hybridization resulting from a process of reoralization tied to communication mediums and to traditional networks of belonging. This interesting field merits new research efforts. Urban spaces are convergence points for migrations, and have become the place where new integration strategies and social divisions manifest themselves. Research illuminating the linguistic dimension of the new cartographies of urban segregation should be undertaken.

In other areas of the continent, one finds a variety of studies examining the Spanish in contact with the indigenous languages in Mexico. Zimmermann (2004) offers an integral sociolinguistic vision of the contact between Amerindian languages and Spanish. He suggests that there is more to the changes than form and structure. According to Zimmermann in the substratum of Aboriginal Spanish semantics one can perceive the outlook of different indigenous peoples (Zimmermann, 2004). Hernández Sacristán (2000) discusses the maintenance of the hybrid Spanish-Nahuatl language in communities in the south of Mexico. Flores Farfán (2000) offers a collection of indigenous language interferences in Spanish and advocates a programme for the investigation of Indigenous Spanish in Mexico.

The contact between Spanish and Guarani deserves an enormous amount of continued attention from researchers. Currently, the Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico (ALGR) is being produced. Its objective is to register the linguistic variation of the Guarani region along the Río de la Plata (the greater part of Paraguay and the border regions of Brazil and Argentina). TheAtlas also considers the diatopic, diastratic, intergenerational, diasexual, and diaphasic dimensions of these variations. Thun and Aquino (2002) present initial results from this project. Dietrich (2002) also presents some results pertaining to the Guarani regions of Argentina. Thanks to recent research, we now know more about the pronominal system of Paraguayan Spanish (Palacios, 2000), the phonetic interferences of Guarani in Spanish (Pruñonosa, 2000), the sociolinguistic situation of Guarani in the Itapua region (Zajícová, 2005), the syntactic interferences of Guarani in popular Spanish (Symeonidis, 2005), and the Spanish lexicon in the Guarani region of Paraguay and of the Argentinean Northeast (Dietrich, 2005).

Research into the linguistic contact between Creole and Spanish in the Dominican Republic has revealed that Creole lexical borrowings not only appear in the Spanish of upper class Dominicans, but that a new system is emerging which could be based on Haitian Creole and Spanish of second or third generation Haitians, born and raised in the Dominican Republic (Díaz, 2002). Figueroa and Ourdy (2004) study this same type of contact in Barrancas, in the Province of Santiago de Cuba and confirm mutual phonetic interferences.

Finally, changing continents, let us consider the case of Chabacano, a Creole that emerged from the contact between Spanish and Filipino languages during the period when the Philippines were subjugated to Spanish rule, from the 16th century until the end of the 19th century. Chabacano suffered a constant mixing process, gathering elements from Spanish, Filipino and English (e.g., Quiere lang yo na maga single hombre [‘I only like single men’]) (Fernández, 2004, p. 51). Three recent studies analyse Chabacano of Zamboanga. The first study, by Lipsky (2004a), offers a sociolinguistic panorama of Zamboangan Chabacano and describes its phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical features. The second study, by Steinkrüger (2004), is dedicated to derivational morphology and states that the majority of the productive morphemes of Chabacano come from Filipino languages. Furthermore, the study states that a decrease has occurred in the productivity of the morphemes of Spanish origin. The third study, by Fernández (2004), analyses the diversity of uses and functions of the na particle, and demonstrates that it is more related to Filipino languages than to Portuguese, as was commonly believed. All of these studies are more open to the role that Filipino languages have played in the complex game of contact. They should be followed by more studies for the purpose of elucidating the nature of Chabacano: Is it a product of the relexification of a Portuguese pidgin? Is it an indigenous creolization of Spanish? (Bartens, 2000).

Spanish in Border Areas or Bilingual Enclaves

Border areas are also contact zones. There, family, commercial, cultural, and other types of exchanges occur between populations that speak different languages. Such situations promote bilingualism and/or the emergence of mixed modalities. Portuguese influences Spanish in rural areas along the border of Hispanic speaking countries and Brazil, especially in Cuenca del Plata, and produces interferences such as: (a) the omission of prepositions: voy cantar (voy a cantar [‘I am going to sing’]); (b) the “experimentator” in dative Spanish (me gusta…) becomes the nominative (yo gusto de…), for example, yo gusto de volver temprano (me gusta volver temprano [‘It pleases me to return early’]); (c) the personal pronoun with reference to animals or things: 'porque también el buey lo llaman y élviene, ¿no?; (d) the verb dar (to give) with the preposition para: con este calor, da parair a la playa (con este calor es posible ir a la playa [‘with this heat one could go to the beach’]); (e) the verb decir (to say/to tell) strictly with the preposition para: yo dije parala señora (le dije a la señora [‘I told the lady…’]) (Elizaincín, 2004, pp. 110–114).

The case of the Basque country differs from the above. There Spanish has entered into contact with a non-Romance language. The Basque Autonomous Community is located in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, along the Bay of Biscay, and has a population around two and a half million inhabitants. Approximately 20 percent of the population speak Euskera as a first language, 76 percent speak Spanish, and 4 percent speak both languages. On the whole, since the Statute of Autonomy was passed in 1979, the process of loss of Euskera has begun to reverse itself. The number of bilingual young people has increased. Although Spanish continues to be the dominant language, Euskaldunes (speakers of Euskera) use Euskera at home and by preference in informal settings, although they speak Spanish in other places. This has provoked a process of code-switching affecting both languages by way of interference or convergence (Etxebarria, 2004). The following are two examples of code-switching: Etze honetan pedida de mano izan zen (En esta casa fue la pedida de mano [‘The marriage proposal was in this house’]); Zer iruditzen zaizun, nosotros ya te preguntaremos (Nosotros ya te preguntaremos qué te parece [‘Next time we'll ask you your opinion’]) (Etxebarria, 2004, pp. 141–142).

In a completely different area, Amazonian indigenous languages constituting ethnic and cultural enclaves are more and more driven towards linguistic displacement. Valenzuela (2000) explores the grammar of the Wariapano language. Belonging to the Pano family, Wariapano is found around the border regions of the Amazon forest of Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia. Its population reaches some 50,000 people. The documents and facts examined by Valenzuela, which correspond to different moments of the 20th century, allows one to discern the problem of Amazon languages and their speakers. Isolated and compelled by a religious and cultural assimilation through missionaries, these languages are becoming debilitated and atrophied. Fragmented and reduced in its uses, Wariapano, which once was a “general language” in the Central Amazon region of Peru, ceded its vehicular function first to Quechua and, later, to Spanish.

A little-known facet of the Spanish of America is that of the contact between Spanish and recent immigrant languages that occurred at the end of the 19th century and during the 20th century. These cases of microbilingualism (German colonies in Paraguay, Galicians in Argentina, Italians in Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico, etc.) are mentioned by Lipsky (2004b). However, a detailed analysis of the linguistic results of these contacts has yet to be done, as well as an analysis of the effect they may have had on local varieties of Spanish.

Spanish in Transnational Migration and Globalization

For different reasons, principally economic and political ones, a good portion of the population of Latin American countries has migrated to countries of the northern hemisphere and there created new multilingual spaces. The most notable case is that of Spanish-speaking immigration to the United States. In New York, one of the great capitals of the Spanish speaking world, the mix between English and Spanish has moved from the streets, where it was born, to popular culture. Hybrid expressions are common: vacunar la carpeta (vacuum the carpets), te llamo para atrás (I'll call you back), el rufo del bildin (the roof of the building), delibera groserías (deliver groceries). The Spanish-speaking population of this country (calculated at more that 34 million people) comes from all parts of the Hispanic world. This, then, has intensified the process of contact between the different varieties of Spanish with each other and between these varieties and English. As a result of these contacts we see the appearance of borrowings, adaptations, neologisms and so-called “Spanglish,” typified as a code-switching phenomenon (Roca, 2000). Condemned by some, Spanglish is considered by others to be a new American language, an astonishing, creative linguistic amalgam of tongues used by people of Hispanic descent (Stavans, 2003). The works of Silva-Corvalán (1994, 2000) and Otheguy and Zentella (2003) show how the grammatical system of Spanish enters into a process of simplification, accommodation, or convergence. The problem of Spanish unity and diversity in the United States and the emergence of a standard variety remain to be discussed (Perissinotto, 2005)

Globalization denotes the unity of earthly space and demands the common administration of humanity's great problems. In this way, globalization is connected to new projects for “living together” and to conflicts derived from the opposition between the unity of the species and ethnic, sociocultural, and linguistic diversity. Local histories continue, remodelled, but not erased by globalization. At present, great technological transformations, such as those from the communicative domain, have not ceased to affect the way in which social representations, knowledge, and identities are constructed. The presence of Spanish in both ethnic communication media (Knauer, 2005) and the Internet (Millán, 2001) is giving way to new forms of communication and sociability. Concurrently, questions are emerging as to the relatively limited weight of Spanish on the web, in language industries, or as to the effects of the Internet on Spanish. From a geopolitical perspective, Mignolo (2004) states that Spanish, despite having more speakers that French or German, has remained displaced as a relevant language of modernity, as compared to English, French, or German.

Considering the scope of this issue, a new direction for applied linguistics could be the study of language variation and contact in relation to semiotic spheres organized around differently mediated supports: orality, writing, and new information and communication technologies. These semiotic fields possess socially and culturally differentiated communicative networks. They have their own vernacular and vehicular linguistic instruments that mold themselves to their users and, in consequence, influence forms of participation in social life as well as forms of teaching and learning.

Spanish in Bilingual Intercultural Education Programs

Facing the educational requirements and demands of indigenous peoples, Latin American states have proceeded with bilingual intercultural education (BIE). Among their declared objectives, these programs propose the cultivation of the students' first language as well as an elevated Spanish competence, insofar as it is a widely used national language. However, in all BIE programs, teaching Spanish as a second language remains an unresolved problem in Spanish speaking Latin American countries. As the reports by López (2003) and Albó and Anaya (2004) indicate, official schools cannot claim any major success in this task. Difficulties originate in an inadequate conception of the differences between the first language (L1) and the second one (L2), in the lack of instructor training for the teaching of second languages, in the little time allotted to L2 in schools, and in the communities' demand that their children learn to read and write in the dominant language, whereas BIE programs insist on teaching oral language before teaching how to write. This last point suggests that there is a conflict between the expectations about school in relation to immediate communicative necessities (forces of vernacularization) and the communicative necessities of distance communication (forces of vehicularization). It would be worthwhile, in this sense, to continue studies along the same lines as those studies begun by Ames (2004), De la Piedra (2004), Niño-Murcia (2004), Salomon (2004), and Zavala (2002) on literacy and its functions. The work of Aikman (2004) about the Arakmbut people in the Peruvian Amazonia illustrates the complex interrelationship that has developed between an oral language (Arakmbut) and Spanish, and questions orthodoxies associated with bilingual education. The volume edited by Jung and López (2003) is one contribution describing the state of research on language learning in BIE. It includes diverse studies concerning Spanish as a second language (see the Annotated Bibliography). It is fitting to mention two other works discussing linguistics applied to education. First, López García (2004) studies preposition use in the Spanish of Buenos Aires in contact with Quechua (of Bolivian migrants) for the purpose of designing Spanish teaching strategies from a communicative perspective. Second, Roca and Colombi (2003) address the development and maintenance of Spanish as a heritage language, as well as the teaching of Spanish to bilingual Hispanic students in the United States.

Regarding research on bilingual language acquisition, Sánchez's work (2003) focuses on the issue of interference and convergence within the functional features associated with the direct object system among bilingual Quechua-Spanish children. It provides a formal account of the linguistic mechanisms that operate in cases of syntactic cross-linguistic influence. Sánchez postulates that interference has a role in generating syntactic changes, and that convergence “demonstrates the conditions under which a fusion of functional features occurs. Among his results, the following are highlighted: (a) Bilingual Quechua uses a SVO word order (instead of the canonical SOV word order) and drops the accusative marker –ta, while an indefinite determiner emerges; (b) the bilingual Spanish gender neutralizes the specification of clitics, while null objects as continuing topics emerge; (c) in Quechua-Spanish bilinguals, clitics and determiners are affected by functional convergence (2003, p. 155). This study makes an original contribution to the debate on bilingual language acquisition and on syntactic acquisition in children, with data from the Andean region where Spanish, having expanded as a lingua franca, is in contact with Andean Amerindian languages.

Spanish as LF Spoken as First Language

Spanish spoken as a first language in a contact language situation is a continuum between standardized varieties and mixed sociolects. Thus, in a Latin American regional context, Spanish could be the result not only of its European heritage and its internal evolution, but also of its contact with indigenous languages, creoles or recent immigration languages (Lipsky, 2004b). Hence, great phonetic, morphosyntactic, lexical and discursive diversity characterizes the Spanish speakers in the continent, for example: (a) retention of syllabe-final /s/ in ample areas of Mexico, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia; weakening or loss of /s/ in other areas; (b) retention of the oposition /λ/-/y/ in Paraguay or in parts of the Andean region; the merger of the two phonemes (yeísmo) is present in most varieties of the Spanish in the Americas, with variation in the pronunciation; (c) use of the pronoun vos as the singular informal mode of address, either in competition with tú (Chile, Ecuador, Colombia), or as the dominant form (Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and most of Central America and southern Mexico) (Penny, 2001).

To this diversity of linguistic features one should have to add the diversity of linguistic perceptions and evaluations on the part of the speakers, which also influences in the direction of the variation of a language. As shown by Caravedo (2005), the seseo (neutralization of the opposition /s/-/θ/ in favor of the /s/) and the voseo (use of vos for the second person singular) take on different meanings according to the time and place in which the evaluation is made. Likewise, the lateral palatal /λ/ and the assibilated vibrants are stigmatized depending upon the region or the social group. A feature with the same objective description thus includes phenomena that are subjectively perceived in different ways according to each divergent social space (Caravedo, 2005).

The singularity of the Spanish of the Americas and the process of its formation continue to be objects of reflection and debate. Some approaches postulate the formation of a relatively stable coiné primitiva, although with a distinct chronology depending on the region. Others sustain that dialectal diversity was continuous and occurred at numerous points of the system, without coineization. As opposed to the concept of coiné primitiva, it is fitting to postulate the notion of hereditary restructuring (Rivarola 2005) as an instrument that accounts for endogenous linguistic processes, and through which some language elements end up occupying a new position as compared to the one they had occupied in the pre-transplant context.

Above all, borrowings from Amerindian languages into Spanish are frequent in the Spanish spoken in regions where there is a strong indigenous presence (e.g., aguacate [avocado], cacahuete [peanut], chicle [chewing-gum], chocolate [chocolate], tomate [tomato] from Nahuatl; cancha [open space], cóndor [condor], coca [coca], puna [high plateau] from Quechua; anana [pineapple]; jaguar [jaguar], ñandu [rhea, American ostrich] from Tupi-Guarani) (Penny 2001, p. 277). In the Andes, Cerrón-Palomino (2004) argues that influences from Quechua into Spanish were already present at an early period of the contact. Examining a text dating from the beginning of the 17th century (Dávalos y Figueroa, 1602), he shows that some of the Quechua terms that criollos and Spaniards borrowed from Quechua generally refer to the geographic environment, utensils and Andean techniques: Cocha [puddle, lake, pond, reservoir]; guayco [stream]; pampa [field, plain] guasca [rope, cord, string]; chácara [vegetable garden, vineyard] (Cerrón-Palomino, 2004).

SLF Spoken as Second Language

Let us consider the transferences from Quechua into rural Andean Spanish in Peru, in a language shift situation. Some of the phonic transferences produced by bilinguals whose second language is Spanish include: instability of mid and high vowels (iducación < educación [education]; pulvo < polvo [dust]); consonant substitution (wardia < guardia [guard]); consonant simplification (parinu < padrino [god-father]); fricatization of plosives (oftener < obtener [obtain]). Some examples of morphosyntactic transfers include: (a) article omission (e.g., “En la noche vino [Ø] compadre de mi abuelo” Lit.: “In evening came [Ø] intimate friend of my grandfather”); (b) locative redundancy (e.g., “El zorro colgado en ahí.” Lit.: “The fox hanging in there”); (c) absence of gender or number concord (e.g., “Los dioses está ahí” [The gods is there] instead of “Los dioses están ahí” [The gods are there]); (d) adjective preceding the head noun (e.g., “Viejo cuchara” instead of “cuchara vieja” [Old spoon]); (e) Object-Verb order (e.g., “Pan voy a comprar” [Bread I will buy] instead of “Voy a comprar pan” ‘I will buy bread’) (Cerrón-Palomino, 2003, pp. 83–95, 192–197; Godenzzi, 2005, pp. 167–175).

Several of the aforementioned features are included in Pfänder's (2002) detailed description of the morphosyntactic features of the Spanish of Cochabamba. The following are some other features revealed by this author: the verb saber [to know] is not only used to express a faculty or skill, but is also employed in the sense of soler [to usually do something] (e.g., “Sabía trabajar de noche” [I used to work by night] instead of “Solía trabajar de noche” [I used to work by night]). This feature is linked as much to Aymara and Quechua as it is to an already existing use in medieval Castilian. Furthermore, it appears in Palenquero as a mark of habitude (e.g., “Bo sabé kaminá” meaning ‘You usually walk’). With reference to the temporal system, Andean Spanish prefers analytic solutions and reduces synthetic ones: ha de estar hablando (he/she must be speaking), había sabido estar hablando (he/she has been known to be speaking). Moreover, it is restructured. In this way, for example, the pluperfect form (había estado) in Andean Spanish no longer retains a temporal value, but a nonexperienced reported value: the enunciated “dice que había estado arriba” [he/she says that she had been above] neutralizes the allusion to temporality (anteriority with respect to the past) and replaces it with a testimonial value, thus allowing it to signify “someone told me that presently she should be upstairs” (Pfänder, 2002; see also Escobar, 2000, 2005).

Comparing the Spanish varieties of pronominal systems in the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Andean areas, Paraguay and the bilingual Tzutujil-Spanish areas of Guatemala, one confirms that a simplification of the pronominal paradigm occurs as part of a general process of change. Such a change is partially connected to the cognitive structures imported by speakers from their respective Amerindian languages. Thus, for example, in an utterance such as “Yo le traigo la foto mañana, ahí lo tengo” (I will bring you the photo [feminine] tomorrow, I have it [masculine] somewhere), the simplified system only distinguishes cases (direct and indirect object) while gender remains neutralized (Palacios Alcaine, 2005, pp. 65–83).

These kinds of issues, related to a situation of language shift, were also present during colonial times. A corpus of judicial texts written between 1587 and 1679 by bilinguals whose first language was Quechua or Aymara shows phenomena profoundly affecting the grammatical system of Spanish as a second language: fusions, categorical and functional generalizations, the reduction or elimination of morphological marks and lexical hypodifferentiations (Rivarola, 2000). Likewise, these texts presented by Rivarola are set within particular discursive traditions. This provides evidence that the diffusion of Spanish as a second language also implied the imposition of textual models (Garatea, 2004). A greater understanding of the history of Spanish in the Americas will require more studies on what is considered to be both Spanish as a native language and Spanish as a second language, and on revealing the traces of both oral and textual traditions.

SLF Spoken using Hybridized Forms

As an example, we will consider the linguistic features of the Media Lengua of Imbabura. The phoneme inventory coincides with that of the Quechua of Imbabura. Although 75 percent of the lexical roots of the Media Lengua come from Spanish, in turn, 80 percent of the morphological elements are native to Quechua. Only a few morphemes come from Spanish: -itu dimunitive; -s plural; -dur agent; -ndu gerund; -li enclitic of indirect object. In the enunciation “Y mientras traba-shpa-ndu primer año estudia-rka-ni” (“Y mientras yo trabajaba el primer año, yo estudiaba” [And while I worked the first year, I studied]) we notice the presence of the morpheme –ndu, from Spanish, and three morphemes from Quechua: -shpa gerund; -rka preterit; and -ni first person. The Quechua mark of the origin of information is also transferred to the Media Lengua. The syntactic order of adjectivation and possession follow the Quichua canon Adj – N and Possessor – Possessed, different from that of Spanish (Gómez, 2005).

Now let us observe some characteristics of Palenquero and Papiamento (Bartens, 2000; Lipsky, 2004a). Among its phonetic features, Palenquero presents the following: regressive assimilation of liquids (aggo < algo [something]); pre-nasalization of initial consonants (ndo < dos [two]), lambdacisms (aló < arroz [rice]). For its part, Papiamento presents phonologized tonal oppositions to distinguish verbs (low-high) from nouns (high-low). It also possesses a multitude of diphthongs (two ascending and eleven descending) and five triphthongs (Bartens, 2000). With regards to morphosyntaxis, Palenquero presents a verbal system that is effectuated on the basis of an invariable root and preverbal particles: ta (habitual, progressive); sabé (habitual); tan (future); a (past/perfective); taba (past/imperfective). Likewise, Papiamento presents an invariable root and preverbal particles: tábata (imperfect, progressive).