Sociolinguistic stratification in New Spain

Abstract

The model of historical evolution proposed in the introduction is tested using the case of New Spain as the quintessential region where all the sociolinguistic phenomena occurred. Sociolinguistic strati®cation Ð an undeniable reality stemming from social strati®cation Ð is conceived both as a substage of a more encompassing phase that extends throughout the colony, and as a major predictor of language policy, bilingualism, diglossia, and language shift. It is proposed that an initial period of koineization took place in the ®rst few decades after the arrival of Europeans in Mesoamerica, where speakers of diverse peninsular dialects interacted with one another and with speakers of Amerindian languages, Nahuatl being the most important of all. Nahuatl/Spanish language contact also took place during the same initial period, but reciprocal transfers are not reported until the more intense phase of diversi®cation. During this intermediate stage, members of the Nahuatl-speaking elite were exposed to Spanish and learned to read and write. At the level of pronunciation, the system of one language is interspersed in the other, whereas lexical borrowing is likewise bilateral. Although Spanish was politically dominant in New Spain, Nahuatl remained the most widely spoken language of the New Spanish capital, where a few thousand Spaniards took control over the ``center'' of the Great Tenochtitlan. A minority of Spanish speakers promptly built institutions that rationalized their priviliges and the prestige of the transplanted language. While there is no data demonstrating that bilingualism was massive or widespread, sucient information is extrapolated from di€erent sources indicating that in the mid-eighteenth century there were a good number of Nahuatl/Spanish bilinguals who experienced a shift to Spanish. Sociolinguistic strati®cation in New Spain was polarized early in the colony due to the cultivation of various literary genres starting in the mid-sixteenth century.

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