Workshop on Amerindian Languages in Contact Situations: Spanish-American Perspectives

[natacha at ucla.edu]

Dear Colleagues:

We are inviting contributions to the workshop Amerindian Languages in  
Contact Situations: Spanish-American Perspectives, to be held at the  
21st International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Oslo  
(August 5-9, 2013). I am enclosing the call for papers below and as an  
attachment to this email; the abstracts can be submitted until  
February 1, 2013 at  
http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/events/ichl2013/workshops/.

Best regards,
Natalie Operstein

***

Workshop

Amerindian Languages in Contact Situations: Spanish-American Perspectives

Organizers

Karen Dakin (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Natalie  
Operstein (California State University, Fullerton), Claudia Parodi  
(University of California, Los Angeles)

Call for Papers

The linguistic situations in present-day Spanish America have been  
shaped to a considerable extent by the long-term contact among the  
indigenous languages and cultures, which has resulted in profound  
consequences for the participating languages. Although many of the  
possible lexical, phonological, and structural commonalities among  
these languages have been explored in prior literature (cf. Campbell,  
Kaufman, and Smith Stark 1986 and Smith Stark 1994 for Mesoamerica),  
there are no more recent comparable attempts at a study of the  
relevant areal traits. Detailed studies placing the structural  
features of individual languages within their areal contexts are also  
lacking, as are attempts to place the areal linguistic adaptations  
within the wider context of human ecology, in the sense proposed by  
Hill (1978), in sharp contrast with the amount of attention that  
continues to be received by linguistic areas located in other areas of  
the world, such as the Balkans, Ethiopia, or Southeast Asia.

Another important factor for the history of contact in the area is  
that since the early sixteenth century, the indigenous languages have  
been in close contact with Spanish. This proximity has left a profound  
imprint on the languages, changing each in a variety of ways that  
range from influences on lexicon and phonology to impact on diverse  
levels of the languages’ morphology, syntax, and discourse. In the  
process, regional Spanish, including the national varieties of Latin  
American Spanish, has undergone a number of changes as well.

Finally, reconstruction of linguistic and cultural histories of  
individual languages is greatly aided by the study of loanword  
adaptations. By studying phonetic, structural, and semantic changes in  
the borrowed words, it is possible to trace not only the direction of  
borrowing and source languages but also the relative chronology of  
borrowing (linguistic stratigraphy in the sense of Andersen 2003) and  
the type and nature of past contacts. Inferences drawn from a careful  
study of loanwords are especially important in the case of unwritten  
languages and those that only recently have begun to be written,  
including most languages of Hispano-America.

The proposed workshop will combine these research threads by focusing  
on the diachronic aspects of language contact in Spanish America. Its  
principal goals are to spark an interest in further study of the  
possible areal traits, especially as they relate to the wider issue of  
area-level human adaptations; to highlight the importance of  
contact-induced changes observable in these areas for contact and  
diachronic linguistics more generally; to contribute to the study of  
linguistic stratigraphy; and to provide a context for a meaningful  
dialogue between students of the indigenous languages and those of  
Spanish. In addition, the workshop seeks to bring together scholars  
from different language backgrounds, linguistic traditions, and  
theoretical orientations with the aim of fostering collaborative  
research on these complex areas.

References

Andersen, Henning, ed. 2003. Language Contacts in Prehistory: Studies  
in Stratigraphy. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Campbell, Lyle, Terrence Kaufman, and Thomas C. Smith-Stark. 1986.  
Meso-America as a Linguistic Area. Language 62: 530-558.

Hill, Jane H. 1978. Language Contact Systems and Human Adaptations. Journal of
Anthropological Research 34: 1-26.

Smith-Stark, Thomas C. 1994. Mesoamerican Calques. Carolyn J. MacKay  
and Verónica Vázquez, eds. Investigaciones lingüísticas en  
Mesoamérica, 15-50. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
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