History Of The Spanish Language In Latin America
Posted on December 13, 2009
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The Spanish language arrived in America 1st through Cristóbal Colón’s exploratory travels, and then with the rest of colonizers, at the top of the fifteenth century. At this point the Spanish language was already firmly consolidated in the Iberian peninsula. In the “new world”, however, Spanish had however to be established, and this was done through a method labelled by historians as “hispanización”.
Throughout this period, the southern half of the Yank continent was a conglomerate of lots of various languages and dialects. Moreover, the cultures {that the} settlers encountered were radically different from the Spanish one. Communication, thus, was very a challenge in the first stages, and it was done first through gestures and in a while through captive natives who acted as interpreters.
The Catholic Church played a fundamental role in the expansion of the Spanish language throughout Latin America. Therefore, Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries established colleges where they educated and converted into Catholicism most kids and teenagers. Of course, this was all drained Spanish, and therefore this language started to penetrate little by little within the daily lives of the various indigenous groups.
The evangelization was in the midst of the slow but firm administrative imposition of the Spanish language, which relegated the Amerindian languages to an unprivileged position. This was the inevitable consequence of the cultural and ethnic cleansing imposed by the Spanish Empire to its colonies.
However, there was a two-method flow of cultural and linguistic influence between the colonizers and the colonized. This happened as a result of, no matter their dominant position, the natives of Spain forever constituted a very little minority in the American continent. So, there was a constant contact among languages and a progressive mixing among the different populations. This allowed the incorporation of aspects belonging to the pre-Columbian cultures into what would later become American Spanish. African languages, brought by people who were taken to America as slaves, additionally contributed to the formation of this wealthy mosaic.
Simply paying attention to the intonation of the different South Yankee Spanish dialects we have a tendency to will see that they’re nearer to the various native languages than to peninsular Spanish. In terms of vocabulary, 2 of the foremost influential languages were the Mexican náhuatl (spoken by the Aztecs) or the Peruvian quechua (spoken by the Incas). These two languages were accepted and spoken by a significant part of the population, and so they were used for commerce functions, even when the arrival of the Spanish conquerors. Samples of words that are incorporated into Yank Spanish from these languages are “papa” (potatoe), “cuate” (friend), or “chamaco” (boy).
On the other hand, the characteristics of the Spanish explorers were additionally heterogeneous, since they came from everywhere Spain. However, their meeting point before starting their long journey was Seville, in Andalucía, the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula. Since they stayed a while whereas making ready their adventure, they ended up adopting some of the characteristics of the Andalusian dialect. Then they took them to the “new world”. This is often why Yankee Spanish shares most of the Spanish pronunciation characteristics with Andalusian Spanish. The most significant one is the phenomenon known as “seseo”, that indicates the fact {that the} sound “c” (pronounced “th”) is transformed into the sound “s”.
All these factors have created Yank Spanish the rich and multicultural linguistic variety that it is today.
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