Like many marginalized languages, Chanka Quechua (Peru) lacks community-wide prestige norms associated with standard-language ideology. Formal situations require Spanish, and few speakers are literate in Quechua, so normative speech styles are absent. Speakers’ evaluative judgments do not… read more
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… read more
Linguists generally postulate a mental grammar which children infer from the speech they encounter, and then use to generate their own speech productions. This grammar is often assumed to be invariant and categorical. Language in use, however, is massively variable: the child encounters diversity… read more
Some 60% of the Atlantic slave traffic was directed to Luso-Hispanic America, principally Brazil, Cuba, Hispaniola, Colombia, etc., where people of African ancestry still form substantial majorities in some areas. This paper examines the linguistic consequences of this massive contact between… read more
Western hemisphere varieties of Spanish and Portuguese show substantial similarity in the patterning of sociolinguistic variation and change. Caribbean and coastal dialects of Latin American Spanish share several variables with Brazilian Portuguese (e.g., deletion of coda –s, –r). These variables… read more
SUMMARY Many studies of linguistic change have drawn distinctions between contrasting types of change. Examples are the Neogrammarian distinction between regular sound change and borrowing, and Labov's contrast between 'change from above' and 'change from below'. A basic criterion for many such… read more
RESUMO Internaciaj perspektivoj pri lingva diverseco kaj lingvaj rajtoj La aktuala debato en Usono pri oficiala lingva politiko havas siajn precedentojn en aliaj landoj. En la antikva mondo, ciuj gravaj statoj kaj imperioj estis multlingvaj, same la cefaj mezepokaj kaj frumodernaj statoj. Multaj… read more
