Contact and South American Languages

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of language contact involving indigenous languages in South America, emphasizing cases that may have broader implications. It examines the loanwords in SA indigenous languages, and surveys the several linguistic areas which have been proposed in South America. The chapter also surveys the contact languages, lingua francas, and mixed languages involving indigenous languages of South America. Work on language contact in South America has shown how social, political, and economic factors affect the diffusion of linguistic traits among languages. The chapter focuses on one factor, linguistic exogamy. The causes of language endangerment and in many cases of extinction in SA vary from region to region, and have varied over time, although some recurring factors are clear.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.