Luis Andrade Ciudad Boeken

An account of modern liberation theory in today's Capitalistic Latin America

This book analyses a set of rarely described regional Spanish varieties spoken throughout much of the northern Peruvian Andes (Cajamarca, La Libertad and Ancash) from a sociohistorical and dialectological perspective. What are the main dialectological features of these varieties? Are these features the same ones that shape southern Andean Spanish, a variety formed mainly through contact with Quechua and Aymara? Which of these features are distinctly outcomes of contact with Culle, the main substrate language of the region, which was mentioned in colonial and postcolonial documents but is now extinct? How are these features linked to the postcolonial history of the region, marked by the Catholic evangelization enterprise and an «economy of plundering» based on agriculture, weaving and mining? Thorough consideration of these matters allows the author to critically assess the standard notion in Hispanic linguistics that considers Andean Spanish as a single, homogeneous code. The study sheds new light on how the regional varieties of Spanish in America were shaped over time and proposes ways of delving into language history in postcolonial contexts, where a written European language has been superimposed on a set of native codes previously lacking written traditions.

Este conjunto de trabajos se concentra en el estudio de los contactos lingüísticos que ocurren, principalmente en el área andina, en el plano léxico. Lenguas como el quechua, el quichua, el puquina, el culle, el cañari, el náhuatl, el llamado „esmeraldeño“ y alguna hipotética como el den son aquí tratadas, ya sea desde la consideración de sus relaciones mutuas o de su interacción con el español. En tres secciones temáticas, especialistas del Perú, Ecuador, México, Alemania y el Reino Unido ponen de relieve cómo el léxico es el aspecto de las lenguas que más se engarza con otras tradiciones culturales, reflexionan sobre la problemática de la descripción léxica en sus aspectos conceptuales, empíricos e ideológicos, y se esfuerzan por conocer las lenguas extintas a través del estudio de su vocabulario.