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A Tale of Two Borders: 19th Century Language Contact in Southern California and Northern Uruguay

  • María Irene Moyna and Magdalena Coll
Published/Copyright: March 20, 2015
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Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics
From the journal Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Volume 1 Issue 1

Abstract

This is a qualitative analysis of the historical dimensions of Spanish-English and Spanish-Portuguese contact in the Americas, based on 19th century documents from southern California and northern Uruguay. Language mixing is found in both areas, but whereas in California it is limited to the earliest periods and to informal registers, in Uruguay it is long-lasting and pervades all social and stylistic levels. Additionally, there are differences in the linguistic scope of mixing in both borders. In California it manifests itself through borrowings and syntactic and semantic calques, whereas in Uruguayan documents switching within constituents is frequent and pervasive. Finally, writers in California exhibit metalinguistic awareness of language contact, whereas no such awareness is evinced by Uruguayan authors. Commonalities are attributable to universal outcomes of contact and to historical and social parallelisms, while differences are due to linguistic family resemblance and to more balanced prestige and demographics in northern Uruguay.

Published Online: 2015-3-20
Published in Print: 2008-3-1

© 2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Front Matter
  2. Contents
  3. From the Editor’s Desk
  4. Research Articles
  5. El abundante agua fría: Hermaphroditic Spanish Nouns
  6. Vítimas e perpetradores: Discurso reportado e identidade em narrativas de discriminação racial
  7. Integración conceptual (blending) en el proceso de gramaticalización de construcciones nominales cuantificativas en español
  8. A Tale of Two Borders: 19th Century Language Contact in Southern California and Northern Uruguay
  9. Book Reviews
  10. Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology
  11. State of the Discipline. Topic: Corpus Linguistics
  12. New Directions in Spanish and Portuguese Corpus Linguistics
  13. Viewpoints. Topic: The Place of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics
  14. Some Thoughts on Dialectology and Spanish Historical Linguistics
  15. Viewpoint from Sociolinguistics and Contact Linguistics: On the Role of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics
  16. Homeless in Post-Modern Linguistics? (Re/Dis)placing Hispanic Dialectology
  17. Affirming Differences, Valuing Variation and Dismissing Dialects in Modern Linguistics
  18. Dissertation Notices
  19. A macro- and microsociolinguistic study of language attitudes and language contact: Mercosur and the teaching of Spanish in Brazil
  20. The acquisition of probabilistic patterns in Spanish phonology by adult second language learners: The case of diphthongization
  21. The role of lexical frequency and phonetic context in the weakening of syllablefinal lexical /s/ in the Spanish of Barranquilla, Colombia
  22. Register and style variation in speakers of Spanish as a heritage and as a second language
https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2008-1007

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Front Matter
  2. Contents
  3. From the Editor’s Desk
  4. Research Articles
  5. El abundante agua fría: Hermaphroditic Spanish Nouns
  6. Vítimas e perpetradores: Discurso reportado e identidade em narrativas de discriminação racial
  7. Integración conceptual (blending) en el proceso de gramaticalización de construcciones nominales cuantificativas en español
  8. A Tale of Two Borders: 19th Century Language Contact in Southern California and Northern Uruguay
  9. Book Reviews
  10. Segmental and Prosodic Issues in Romance Phonology
  11. State of the Discipline. Topic: Corpus Linguistics
  12. New Directions in Spanish and Portuguese Corpus Linguistics
  13. Viewpoints. Topic: The Place of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics
  14. Some Thoughts on Dialectology and Spanish Historical Linguistics
  15. Viewpoint from Sociolinguistics and Contact Linguistics: On the Role of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics
  16. Homeless in Post-Modern Linguistics? (Re/Dis)placing Hispanic Dialectology
  17. Affirming Differences, Valuing Variation and Dismissing Dialects in Modern Linguistics
  18. Dissertation Notices
  19. A macro- and microsociolinguistic study of language attitudes and language contact: Mercosur and the teaching of Spanish in Brazil
  20. The acquisition of probabilistic patterns in Spanish phonology by adult second language learners: The case of diphthongization
  21. The role of lexical frequency and phonetic context in the weakening of syllablefinal lexical /s/ in the Spanish of Barranquilla, Colombia
  22. Register and style variation in speakers of Spanish as a heritage and as a second language
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