Spanish Diversity in the Amazon : Dialect and Language Contact Perspectives

This book, the first of its kind, is dedicated to different Spanish varieties spoken in the Amazonian regions of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The contributions present diverse perspectives on theoretical, methodological, and descriptive characterizations of the study of Amazonian Spanish. It includes linguistic (phonological, syntactic, discourse-pragmatic), typological, ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and language contact approaches. The analyses of oral corpora include comparisons between monolingual and contact varieties of the speech of bilingual speakers who are native speakers of an indigenous Amazonian variety. This collection contributes to the fields of Hispanic and Amerindian Linguistics, and language contact.

Margarita Jara, Ph.D. (2006), University of Pittsburgh, is Associate Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She has published a monograph and several articles on variation and change, language contact, and language ideologies in Peruvian Amazonian and Limeño Spanish.

Roberto Zariquiey, Ph.D. (2011). Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, is Associate Professor of Linguistics at that University and Director of the Masters Program in Linguistics. He has published books and papers on Amazonian languages, including A Grammar of Kakataibo (Mouton de Gruyter 2018).

Pilar Valenzuela Ph.D. (2003), University of Oregon, is Professor at Chapman University in California. She has published monographs and articles (Panoan and Kawapanan languages, Peruvian Amazonian Spanish), worked in language documentation and revitalization, and authored pedagogical materials for indigenous schoolteachers.

Anna María Escobar, Ph.D. (1986), University at Buffalo-SUNY, Professor Emerita, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Publications include writings on the sociolinguistics, contact phenomena, and grammaticalization processes in Spanish-Quechua contact, and The Handbook of Contact Linguistics, coedited with Salikoko Mufwene (forthcoming).