Celtic influence

[Rick Mc Callister]

>>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

>>The middle and upper classes speak Spanish and the lower classes generally
>>speak Runa [AKA Quechua/Qheshwa]>

>-- it's geographical, actually.  There aren't many Quechua speakers on the
>coast, except recent migrants from the highlands.

	Who are now possibly a majority of the population of Lima given the
rapid growth of the shanty towns. But in Lima, so I'm told, highland
immigrants have by and large given up Runa

In the 1930's, when my have

>mother was growing up there, nearly everyone locally born spoke Spanish.  My
>mother tells me that apart from more slang and a less educated vocabulary, the
>people she met in the streets spoke pretty much the same variety of Spanish as
>she acquired in her convent school and among upper-class Peruvians.

	I went to grad school with limen~os of different social backgrounds
and the difference in accent between upper class and lower class limen~os
was very noticeable. The lower class limen~os from "barrios populares" had
a different pronunciation --which actually sounded a bit more standard in
that the males from Miraflores and Barranca tended to drop final /-s/ and
pronounced <-ado> as /ao/ in colloquial speech. Lower class pronunciation
was more "tense" and the vowels a bit more hightened and fronted. The lower
class speakers all knew slang from Runa

>Things were different in the highlands, of course.