Chapter published in:
Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16: Selected papers from the 47th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Newark, Delaware
Edited by Irene Vogel
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 16] 2020
► pp. 133–154

Trajectories of change in Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas

| New York University

This paper examines ways in which varieties of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in the Americas have diverged significantly from their peninsular sources, and from each other, in the half-millennium since colonization. Some of this divergence is a consequence of spontaneous innovations in the New World varieties (e.g., ‘zheismo’ and ‘sheismo’ in Platense Spanish; emergence of the new 1pl pronoun a gente in Brazilian Portuguese). Historically, a significant driver of change was language contact, with indigenous languages, and especially with African languages. A suite of linguistic characteristics shared by Caribbean Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese indicate that both varieties were affected by the irregular transmission of these languages to the African population transported to these locations in the time of slavery.

Keywords: language change, language contact, dialects, innovation, African influences
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Processes of language change in the Americas
    • 2.1Dialect mixture
    • 2.2Language contact
    • 2.3Spontaneous changes in Latin American languages
  • 3.Parallel changes in Caribbean Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese
    • 3.1Phonological reductions
    • 3.2Morphosyntactic changes
      • 3.2.1Subject pronoun expression
      • 3.2.2Number agreement
      • 3.2.3Negative repetition
  • 4.Explanation
    • 4.1European sources for popular American varieties
    • 4.2Language contact
    • 4.3African sources
    • 4.4Adult learner strategies
    • 4.5Afro-Bolivian Spanish
  • 5.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 21 August 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.16.09guy
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