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The Spanish language arrived in America first through Cristóbal
Colón’s exploratory travels, and then with the rest
of colonizers, at the end 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 yet to be
established, and this was done through a process labelled by historians
as “hispanización”.
During this period, the southern part of the American continent
was a conglomerate of hundreds of different languages and dialects.
Moreover, the cultures that the settlers encountered were radically
different from the Spanish one. Communication, therefore, was really
a challenge in the first stages, and it was done first through
gestures and later on through captive natives who acted as interpreters.
The Catholic Church played a fundamental role in the expansion
of the Spanish language throughout Latin America. Thus, Jesuit
and Franciscan missionaries established schools where they educated
and converted into Catholicism most children and teenagers. Of
course, this was all done in Spanish, and thus this language started
to penetrate little by little in the daily lives of the different
indigenous groups.
The evangelization was accompanied by 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-way flow of cultural and linguistic influence
between the colonizers and the colonized. This happened because,
in spite of their dominant position, the natives of Spain always
constituted a very small minority in the American continent. Thus,
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 those
who were taken to America as slaves, also contributed to the formation
of this rich mosaic.
Just listening to the intonation of the different South American Spanish
dialects we can see that they are closer to the various native
languages than to peninsular Spanish. In terms of vocabulary,
two of the most 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 therefore they were used for commerce
purposes, even after the arrival of the Spanish conquerors. Examples
of words that have been incorporated into American Spanish from
these languages are “papa” (potatoe), “cuate” (friend),
or “chamaco” (boy).
On the other hand, the characteristics of the Spanish explorers
were also heterogeneous, since they came from all over 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 long time while preparing their adventure,
they ended up adopting some of the characteristics of the Andalusian
dialect. Then they took them to the “new world”. This
is why American Spanish shares most of the Spanish
pronunciation characteristics with Andalusian Spanish. The
most significant one is the phenomenon known as “seseo”,
which indicates the fact that the sound “c” (pronounced “th”)
is transformed into the sound “s”.
All these factors have made American Spanish the rich and multicultural
linguistic variety that it is today.
>> Learn more about a Spanish language course in Latin America |
