Chapter published in:
Amazonian Spanish: Language Contact and Evolution
Edited by Stephen Fafulas
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 23] 2020
► pp. 156–190

Emerging ethnolinguistic varieties in the Amazon

The case of Yagua Spanish

| University of Mississippi
| College of Charleston
We analyze a handful of morphosyntactic features of Yagua Spanish (YS), a contact variety of Spanish spoken in the Amazon. Our results, from sociolinguistic interviews and film narrations conducted with 10 YS speakers from Comandancia, located along Peru’s Orosa River, suggest that YS is characterized by significant occurrence of leísmo, null direct objects, and non-canonical use of the Present Perfect. Analyses based on language proficiency reveal that the Yagua-dominant bilinguals, who learned Spanish primarily as adults, show higher rates of these non-pan-Latin American forms as compared to the Spanish-dominant bilinguals who acquired Spanish earlier in life. We explore the origins of these linguistic features and add to what is known of emerging varieties of Spanish in the Amazon region.
Keywords: Amazonian Spanish, Yagua, bilingualism, language contact
Published online: 15 July 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.23.07faf
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