Edited by Stephen Fafulas
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 23] 2020
► pp. 105–126
This chapter outlines various linguistic phenomena involved in the creation and transmission of ethnolinguistic variation, as a general framework for understanding Amazonian Spanish specifically. Language and dialect contact, second language acquisition, bilingualism, and language shift have all played important roles in the emergence and maintenance of ethnicity-based language varieties around the world, and Amazonian Spanish is certainly no exception. The chapter considers the potential explanatory value of the concept of an ethnolinguistic repertoire (Benor, 2010) when accounting for patterns of variation observed in Amazonian Spanish, and also points out the need to examine the interaction between ethnicity and other relevant social factors such as age, gender, and social class (Wolfram & Schilling, 2016) as speakers index their multifaceted identities.