This paper builds on previous research by offering new perspectives on the importance of spontaneous speech innovation in linguistic, social, and cultural processes of language contact and change in Spanish-speaking communities of Spain and America. The author reconsiders existing data concerning such innovation and synthesizes previous independent findings in a novel, unified approach that relates previously unrelated but functionally similar linguistic phenomena. With the purpose of moving toward a more comprehensive and verifiable model of language contact and change, this paper underlines some complex linguistic and extralinguistic functions associated with spontaneous speech innovations in contact varieties and outlines a coordinated program of interdisciplinary sociolinguistic research to establish appropriate archival tools for documenting corpus-based spontaneous speech innovations for posterior analysis.