Acceso usuarios
Claudia Parodi
From California to South America, the Spanish loanwords into Amerindian languages (or hispanismos) show that the various peninsular dialects coexisted in the New World along with the Spanish koineÂ, which spread in the dierent regions in only a few decades. In addition, the New World Spanish (NWS) koine adopted lexical items from Amerindian languages.
Special attention is given to language and dialect contact issues such as levelling, koineization, vernacularization, and borrowing as processes that intervened in the con®guration of NWS. Some generalizations are drawn with respect to lexical changes, which spread faster than phonological changes; when the latter are regular, they are as easily adopted as rules.
This explains the swift adoption of seseo as the preferred form of pronunciation. The NWS koineÂ, however, is not necessarily identical to southern varieties of peninsular Spanish because it immediately borrowed lexical items from three of the most widely spoken Amerindian languages:
Taino, Nahuatl, and Quechua. At the same time, many of the Amerindian languages borrowed lexical items from Spanish that re¯ect the pronunciation of dierent dialects: castellano-viejo, andaluz, and espanÄol americano nivelado or the NWS koineÂ. The NWS koine was disseminated in the highland areas of the continent by males of dierent ethnic backgrounds who participated in the creation of rural institutions such as ranchos and haciendas (or rancherada).
