Volume 63, Issue 1

In this contribution we seek support for the hypothesis that Otomí, a language from Mexico, which is in intense contact with Spanish, is developing a specialized set of adjectives, a category that is lacking from the classical language. Arguments are derived from two sources, a corpus of translations into Otomí of around 750 Spanish adjectives, and a corpus of 59 short texts in spoken Otomí, in which a number of Spanish adjectives were found as loanwords. Pointing out several changes in the contemporary language, mainly among younger, often bilingual speakers, we provide support for our hypothesis, which suggests that Otomí is undergoing a typological change.

This contribution offers a comparison between the usage of borrowed Spanish articles into two dialects of the Guaraní language spoken by mestizos in South America: Paraguayan Guaraní, spoken in Paraguay, and Correntinean Guaraní, spoken in the Argentinean province of Corrientes. With respect to the Paraguayan dialect, the presence of the definite feminine Spanish la and definite plural lo (> Sp. los ) has been attested early on by scholars (Gregores & Suárez 1967, Morínigo 1990, Thun 2006). On the other hand, borrowed articles in Correntinean Guaraní shape a more complex repertoire, including both definite masculine el, feminine la , and definite plural lo , as well as indefinites un and una . This article makes a comparative analysis of the usage of borrowed articles in both varieties. It also provides an overview of the historical and sociolinguistic background of both the Correntinean and Paraguayan varieties.

Paraguay is characterized by a specific kind of bilingualism. More than 90% of the population does not use, in colloquial situations, only one of the official languages of the country, Spanish or Guaraní, but both of them in the same discourse. Continuous code switching is the main characteristic of this phenomenon, called “Jopara”. The article discusses the problem of the nature of this phenomenon and, moreover, gives lexical examples of the partial convergence of the two languages in contact. Speakers of Jopara distinguish the two linguistic systems, but are not always aware of the origin of some specific lexical items.

This article deals with code switching in a corpus of narratives collected in Sia Pedee (Chocoan) among the Épera of the northern Pacific coast of Ecuador. The reinsertion of Sia Pedee in the nowadays dominant Spanish-speaking ethnic community has resulted in older speakers making use of code switching as a way to flag their ethnic identity and index their attitudes towards propositional content. While code switching seems to be inducing certain incipient changes in Sia Pedee, the seriously endangered state of the native language would prevent those changes from taking definite shape. Similarly, the diglossic condition of Sia Pedee before Spanish is preventing the crystallization of a systematic pattern of language mixing.

In this paper I investigate how different factors can influence the range of grammatical categories affected by language contact, drawing on a sample of ten native languages of Latin America. The languages are all in contact with the highly dominant languages Spanish and Portuguese, but they differ with respect to a range of sociolinguistic factors relating to the contact situation. I am investigating the categories affected by borrowing in the languages of the sample, relating them to these different factors. My aim is to shed light on the reasons for why some Native American languages display borrowing in a wide range of categories, whereas other appears more restricted in what is borrowed.

This paper seeks to determine in which way the introduction of the Spanish indefinite article un into the determiner system of Chamorro interferes with the inherited definiteness-based ergative split of the recipient language. It is argued that modern Chamorro employs Spanish-derived un as an indefinite article to introduce new discourse participants with relatively high topicality which are specific-referential. The employment of un in this function makes it possible to differentiate formally between two types of indefiniteness (the pre-Spanish zero article being responsible for non-specific, non-referential new discourse participants with low topicality).