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.
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