Contacto de lenguas en la América dieciochesca: español y portugués en el Paraguay

Abstract

Although Spanish and Portuguese coexist in several areas of America, almost all studies have focused on the contact situation in the North of Uruguay, and this contact has been hardly considered from a historical point of view. This work tries to mitigate this lack of knowledge in presenting several texts from Paraguay in the 18th century, which show a clear influence from Portuguese. A philological edition of such documents is provided here and a study of linguistic characteristics possibly due to Portuguese influence is made. Our aim is twofold: 1) to describe the linguistic variety used in these written texts in comparison with the synchronic and diachronic data which are already available regarding the Portuguese Dialects in Uruguay (DPU) and some other areas; 2) to provide data which could be helpful to understand the idiosyncratic characteristics of the linguistic contact of these two Romance languages and the significance of Portuguese in the shaping (of some linguistic varieties) of American Spanish.