Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas

Mutual Influence in Situations of Spanish Language Contact in the Americas focuses on the structural results of contact between Spanish and Maya, Quechua, Guaraní, Portuguese, and English in the Americas. This edited volume explores the various ways in which these languages affect the linguistic structure of Spanish in situations of language contact, and also how Spanish impacts their linguistic structure.

Across ten chapters, this book offers a broad survey of bidirectional influence in Spanish contact situations both geographically (in the US Southwest, the Yucatán Peninsula, the Andean regions of Ecuador and Peru, and the Southern Cone) and structurally (in the areas of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, semantics, and pragmatics). By examining the potential structural effects that two languages have on one another, it provides a novel and more holistic perspective on mutual linguistic influence than that of previous work on language contact.

The volume serves as a reference on mutual influence in bilingual language varieties and will be of interest to researchers, scholars, and graduate students in Hispanic linguistics, and more broadly in language contact.

Mark Waltermire is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at New Mexico State University, USA.
Kathryn Bove is an Assistant Professor in the Languages and Linguistics Department at New Mexico State University, USA.