Spanish in contact with indigenous tongues

Changing the tide in favor of the heritage languages

José Antonio Flores Farfán | Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social

In this chapter effects of indigenous languages on Spanish and vice versa are discussed, raising a number of issues. These include a reflection on the variable nature of languages against an ethnocentric idea of a single abstract entity called (e.g. the Spanish, Nahuatl or Maya) “language”, which stems from monolingual approaches to linguistic phenomena. Such diverse configurations of Spanish and indigenous languages allows a characterization of different contact varieties in their social, ideological and political realms. Therefore contact effects will be treated holistically, closing the gap between different realms of the sociolinguistic analysis, including a critique of previous reductionist approaches and its implications from an actors’ perspective and their educational possibilities for (e.g. Mexican) society as a whole.

Keywords: educational implications, indigenous languages, language contact, Spanish

Published online: 28 May 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.8.08far

Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Dakin, Karen & Natalie Operstein

2017. In Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond [Studies in Language Companion Series, 185], ► pp. 1 ff.

Gardani, Francesco

2020. Borrowing matter and pattern in morphology. An overview. Morphology 30:4 ► pp. 263 ff.

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