Dialect contact as the cause for dialect change

Diachronica ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Israel Sanz-Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
Nouveau Monde

This paper analyzes the genesis of New Mexican Spanish during the colonial period (17th and 18th centuries) as the consequence of ‘new dialect formation via koinéization’ (Trudgill 1986, 2004, Kerswill & Williams 2000, Kerswill & Trudgill 2005). It focuses primarily on the evidence for yeísmo, i.e. the merger of the medieval palatal lateral and palatal fricative phonemes, in a corpus of documents written in the century following the resettlement of New Mexico by Spanish speakers in 1693. The analysis shows that the resettlement involved contact between two groups of speakers exhibiting widely divergent levels of prevalence of the merger, causing the loss of the phonemic contrast in the community in as little as one generation. This contradicts several previous assumptions about the chronology of Latin American yeísmo and about the role of koinéization in the origins of New World Spanish. Resume Cette etude analyse la genese de l’espagnol du Nouveau-Mexique pendant la periode coloniale (17e et 18e siecles) en tant que consequence d’un processus de ‘formation d’un nouveau dialecte par nivellement dialectal’ (Trudgill 1986, 2004, Kerswill et Williams 2000, Kerswill et Trudgill 2005). L’etude se concentre principalement sur le yeismo, phenomene de fusion de deux phonemes distincts en espagnol medieval (une consonne laterale palatale et une fricative palatale), et ce dans un corpus de documents ecrits un siecle apres le retour des espagnols dans cette region en 1693. L’analyse montre que ce retour des espagnols a provoque le contact entre deux groupes de locuteurs qui presentaient chacun des differences nettes pour ce qui est de la confusion des deux phonemes, aboutissant a leur fusion, dans cette communaute, en a peine une generation. On soutient aussi que ces donnees contredisent plusieurs des hypotheses anterieures sur la chronologie du yeismo americain et sur le role qu’a joue le nivellement dialectal dans la diachronie de l’espagnol du Nouveau Monde. Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag wird die Entstehung des Spanischen in New Mexico wahrend der Kolonialzeit (17. und 18. Jahrhundert) als Folge eines Prozesses ‘neuer Dialekt-Bildung durch Koineisierung’ (Trudgill 1986, 2004, Kerswill und Williams 2000, Kerswill und Trudgill 2005) analysiert. Der Augenmerk liegt hauptsachlich auf den Beweisen fur yeismo, d.h. der Fusion zwischen zwei mittelalterlichen Palatalen, lateral und frikativ, in einem Korpus von Dokumenten, die im Jahrhundert nach der spanischen Umsiedlung Neumexikos 1693 geschrieben wurden. Die Analyse zeigt, dass durch die Umsiedlung zwei Gruppen von Sprechern, die enorm unterschiedliche Auspragungen dieser Fusion aufwiesen, in Kontakt gekommen sind. Dies fuhrte in dieser Gemeinschaft zu dem Verlust des phonemischen Kontrasts in weniger als einer Generation. Es wird auch argumentiert, dass diese Beweise einige fruhere Annahmen uber die Chronologie des lateinamerikanischen yeismo und uber die Rolle der Koineisierung in den Ursprungen der spanischen Sprache in der Neuen Welt widerspricht.

The Genesis of Traditional New Mexican Spanish: The Emergence of a Unique Dialect in the Americas

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Israel Sanz ◽  
Daniel J. Villa
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
Single Process ◽  
Analytical Approaches

AbstractThe origin of New World Spanish (NWS) is often identified as an original leveled dialect that arose during the earliest moments of Spanish arrival and then spread throughout the Americas. One common denominator in the available accounts of dialect contact and koinéization in NWS is the fact that such studies usually attempt to encompass its evolution as a single process. Perhaps as a consequence of such analytical approaches, little or no reference is commonly made to the possibility that some areas may have followed highly idiosyncratic sociohistorical paths, causing explanatory difficulties for the single leveled dialect approach. In this article we offer an analysis of the genesis of Traditional New Mexican Spanish that suggests the possibility of a variety of NWS that arose independently of others.

Learning how to ask: Native metacommunicative competence and the incompetence of fieldworkers

1984 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles L. Briggs
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Rich Source ◽  
Speech Community ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
Interview Techniques ◽  
Sociolinguistic Competence ◽  
Cultural Data ◽  
The Way

ABSTRACTEvery speech community boasts an array of devices for characterizing communicative events. These native metacommunicative repertoires are culturally patterned in terms of both use and acquisition. Interviews meet with varying degrees of success by virtue of their relative (in-)compatibility with the norms underlying such events. An analysis of the way in which Spanish speakers in rural New Mexico gain metacommunicative competence suggests that native metacommunicative routines provide a rich source of sociolinguistic and social/cultural data and that awareness of these repertoires can assist fieldworkers in using interviews more appropriately and effectively. (Interview techniques, metacommunication, acquisition of sociolinguistic competence, ethnopoetics, New Mexican Spanish)

Latin American Cities: Aspects of Function and Structure

1962 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Morse
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
New World ◽  
American City ◽  
American Cities ◽  
The City

This essay will advance two interrelated hypotheses about the Latin American city. The first of them has to do with the role of the city in the settlement of the New World. The second suggests certain characteristics of the modern Latin American metropolis.

scholarly journals Using the variationist comparative method to examine the role of language contact in synthetic and periphrastic verbs in Spanish

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 394-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Dumont ◽  
Damián Vergara Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Convergence Hypothesis ◽  
Verbal System ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
Linguistic Constraints

Language contact and linguistic change are thought to go hand in hand (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1994), however there are methodological obstacles, such as collecting data at different points in time or the availability of monolingual data for comparison, that make claims about language change tenuous. The present study draws on two different corpora of spoken Spanish — bilingual New Mexican Spanish and monolingual Ecuadorian Spanish — in order to quantitatively assess the convergence hypothesis in which contact with English has produced a change to the Spanish verbal system, as reflected in an extension of the Present and Past Progressive forms at the expense of the synthetic Simple Present and Imperfect forms. The data do not show that the Spanish spoken by the bilinguals is changing to more closely resemble the analogous English progressive constructions, but instead suggest potential weakening of linguistic constraints on the conditioning of the variation between periphrastic and synthetic forms.

Como dicen los americanos

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Israel Sanz-Sánchez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Language Shift ◽  
The United States ◽  
Written Language ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
Lexical Borrowing ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
Us Southwest ◽  
The Us

This study analyzes the patterns of incorporation of English elements in New Mexican Spanish in the decades following the annexation of New Mexico by the United States as reflected in a corpus of private letters written between 1848 and 1936. The quantitative analysis shows that most types of contact features are infrequent during much of this period, but there is an increase in the presence of English elements in the last decades covered by the corpus. It also shows that semantic and lexical borrowing is much more frequent than structural interference or code-switching. These findings are then correlated with the general sociolinguistic environment of post-annexation Hispanic New Mexico, where bilingualism and language shift to English were much more infrequent than elsewhere in the US Southwest. Attention is also paid to features that pertain exclusively to the written language, and their distribution is explained as a function of the degree of exposure of Hispanic New Mexicans to literacy in English and Spanish.

Stylistic Variation and the Role of Dialect Contact in the leísmo of Basque-Spanish

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-115
Author(s):  
Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez
Keyword(s):  
Basque Country ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Gender Effects ◽  
Parental Origin ◽  
Stylistic Variation ◽  
Dialect Contact ◽  
Considerable Debate ◽  
The Status ◽  
Parental Input

Abstract There is considerable debate with respect to the status of Basque-Spanish leísmo as a contact phenomenon. To address this conundrum, the present study adds another variable, dialect contact and examines the synchronic variation of Basque-Spanish leísmo among educated young speakers, paying special attention to possible stylistic effects. The speech of 41 Basque-Spanish speakers was gathered by means of sociolinguistic interviews and an elicited production task. Participants were stratified by region: 22 speakers were recruited from Gernika where contact with Basque has been intense and compared to 19 speakers from the Greater Bilbao Area where the contact with Basque is less strong. Dialect contact was operationalized through parental input (Basque Country vs. Monolingual Spain). Results indicate that leísmo is quite extended in the Spanish of the Basque Country and mainly driven by animacy. Basque-Spanish leísmo is also subject to stylistic effects, whereby animacy and grammatical gender effects were found, suggesting that Basque-Spanish speakers alternate between two systems depending on speech formality. Finally, results indicate that parental origin had an effect in Bilbao, but not in Gernika. I situate these results within a discussion of previous work on dialect contact.

New–Mexican Spanish

PMLA ◽  
1906 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 706-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. C. Hills
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Mexican Spanish ◽  
New Mexican ◽  
Spanish Speaking

This article is merely a contribution toward a record of popular New-Mexican Spanish. It is incomplete and fragmentary; and, doubtless, it has many errors, since most of the words and expressions it contains were received through the ear. By New-Mexican Spanish is here meant the popular Spanish speech of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. This region is only a small part of the southwestern States and Territories where Spanish is spoken, and yet it is as large as Italy. Its population may be roughly estimated at 125,000 Spanish-speaking persons, of whom some 40,000 or 50,000 are in Colorado and the remainder in northern New Mexico.

Santiago Chile, 1541–1581: A Case Study of Urban Stagnation

1976 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-225
Author(s):  
Joseph B. Fichandler ◽  
Thomas F. O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
New World ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
American Cities

Attempts to understand the nature of colonial Latin American cities have tended to focus on the role of urban centers in the process of empire building. The Spanish cities of the New World served initially as spearheads of conquest, and later as centers for the exercise of Imperial control. A particularly important aspect of this control was the effort by the Crown to limit the power of encomenderos, men whose royally granted right to use Indian labor threatened to create a local ruling class independent of Imperial power. Richard Morse has recently asserted that the patrimonial nature of many of these urban centers resulted from the efforts of the mother country to retain them in the Imperial structure against the counter-claims of the encomenderos. As for those poorer settlements on the outskirts of empire. Morse believes that the appeal of landed wealth drew many of their most prominent citizens into the countryside, leaving the cities to stagnate.

Asymmetric Communication in Bilingual Exchanges

1986 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Heredia de
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Asymmetric Communication ◽  
Latin American Spanish ◽  
American Spanish

This paper analyzes the characteristics of exolinguistic communication, a type of asymmetric communication. The data base contains five dialogues between French speakers and Latin American Spanish speakers. The subjects did not have any knowledge of French before their arrival in France. The recording situations were as authentic and varied as possible.In exolinguistic communication two speakers actively work together with varying degrees of cooperation and complementary strategies to achieve mutual understanding. In this study we examine the role of repetition, simplification, and facilitation (breaking up information, paraphrases, types of questions which warn of difficulties, etc.) and analyze the characteristics of asymmetric exchanges made up of three- or four-turn sequences which allow speakers to check understanding and avoid misunderstanding.This leads to several hypotheses on natural second language acquisition and, more specifically, on the “guidance” offered by the native speaker and on the role of metalinguistic activities.

A Scholarly Debate: The Origins of Modern Mexico-Indígenistas vs. Hispanistas

1992 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Lafaye ◽  
James Lockhart
Keyword(s):  
Annual Meeting ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Latin American ◽  
American History ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
History Of

This year, 1992, marks the quincentenary or quincentennial of the first voyage of Columbus to the Western Hemisphere. In 1990, as Chair of the Mexican Studies Committee of the Conference on Latin American History, I invited two of the leading scholars on Mexico during the colonial period– Professor Jacques Lafaye (Universite de Paris IV) and Professor James Lockhart (UCLA)–to help set the debate for the upcoming anniversary by delivering a 20 minute summary of the role of Spain in the history of colonial Mexico at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in San Francisco. The following essays are the result of that discussion held on December 29, 1990 in San Francisco.Barbara A. Tenenbaum

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