Sociolinguistic stratification in New Spain

Abstract

The model of historical evolution proposed in the introduction is tested using the case of New Spain as the quintessential region where all the sociolinguistic phenomena occurred. Sociolinguistic strati®cation Ð an undeniable reality stemming from social strati®cation Ð is conceived both as a substage of a more encompassing phase that extends throughout the colony, and as a major predictor of language policy, bilingualism, diglossia, and language shift. It is proposed that an initial period of koineization took place in the ®rst few decades after the arrival of Europeans in Mesoamerica, where speakers of diverse peninsular dialects interacted with one another and with speakers of Amerindian languages, Nahuatl being the most important of all. Nahuatl/Spanish language contact also took place during the same initial period, but reciprocal transfers are not reported until the more intense phase of diversi®cation. During this intermediate stage, members of the Nahuatl-speaking elite were exposed to Spanish and learned to read and write. At the level of pronunciation, the system of one language is interspersed in the other, whereas lexical borrowing is likewise bilateral. Although Spanish was politically dominant in New Spain, Nahuatl remained the most widely spoken language of the New Spanish capital, where a few thousand Spaniards took control over the``center'' of the Great Tenochtitlan. A minority of Spanish speakers promptly built institutions that rationalized their priviliges and the prestige of the transplanted language. While there is no data demonstrating that bilingualism was massive or widespread, sucient information is extrapolated from dierent sources indicating that in the mid-eighteenth century there were a good number of Nahuatl/Spanish bilinguals who experienced a shift to Spanish. Sociolinguistic strati®cation in New Spain was polarized early in the colony due to the cultivation of various literary genres starting in the mid-sixteenth century.

Dialect contact as the cause for dialect change

“…This claim is confirmed by the spelling of specific individuals, which reveals a clear pattern of linguistic behavior according to demographic provenance (New Mexico vs. Mexico), as well as the distribution of relevant spellings in the whole corpus, which exhibits a sharp decrease in the number of individuals whose spellings retain the etymological distinction for these two phonemes in the decades immediately postdating the resettlement. These findings are remarkable given that this merger has been proposed almost universally as one of a number of features present in a general koinéized variety of Spanish already in place by the end of the 16th century (Fontanella de Weinberg 1992, Granda 1994, Parodi 2001, Hidalgo 2001). The evidence provided by the corpus clearly contradicts this assumption and points to the need to reassess the application of the koinéization framework to the understanding of the genesis of dialectal differentiation in colonial Latin American Spanish.…”

“…In Granda's view, this simplified variety spread everywhere in the Spanish colonies during the 1500s (see below). Most later approaches (Parodi 1995, Penny 2000, Hidalgo 2001, Sánchez Méndez 2003 have also proposed a koinéized variety of Spanish as the source of NWS dialects, usually considered to have included yeísmo. A pervasive view in these studies is that this koinéized variety had already developed into a fully established form of Spanish (see 'focusing' in Trudgill 2004: 88-89) by the end of the 16th century in most areas (Granda 1994: 42, Parodi 2001.…”

“…§8 concludes with implications for the study of NWS and for other sociohistorical approaches to dialect contact. All in all, I show that the common formulation of the early colonial español koiné (Fontanella de Weinberg 1992, Granda 1994, Parodi 2001, Hidalgo 2001) must be revised. I now turn to the description of the merger.…”

Documenting Feature Pools in Language Expansion Situations: Sibilants in Early Colonial Latin American Spanish

“…A sizable amount of literature describes various aspects of contact in the Spanish American colonies from both the lens of contact among varieties of Spanish (Fontanella de Weinberg ; Granda ; Parodi ; ; Hidalgo ; ) and between these and other languages (Lockhart ; Escobar ; Lipski ; Cerrón‐Palomino ). Much of this literature is dedicated to seseo , namely the merger of four medieval sibilants into one single segment, which is now categorical in Latin American Spanish.…”

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

“…Most of those studies, however, have focused on the synchronic dimensions of the phenomenon, an understandable choice given their significance to test theoretical claims and to establish linguistic and educational policies. On the other hand, historical studies often restrict references of contact to the encounter of Spanish with indigenous populations (Cifuentes 1992, Granda 1999, Hidalgo 2001, Moreno de Alba 1988 and more recently, with speakers of African languages (Lipski 2005). In gramáticas históricas, reference to contact between Spanish and other European Brought to you by | New York University Bobst Library Technical Services Authenticated Download Date | 7/4/15 11:05 AM languages tends to be limited to lists of lexical borrowings into standard Spanish (e.g.…”