What is it about?
Chilean Spanish is a highly distinctive dialect of modern Spanish, but its history is not very well known. Private letters written by working class Chilean people from late 19th and early 20th centuries contain a vast number of dialectal features. They reveal the historical persistence of features originating from the Colonial period. They also give us some hints about the sociolinguistic procceses of language change that occured during the period of Independence in Chile.
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Why is it important?
The article deals with a corpus of private letters that had never been studied before. These letters are unique in the sense that they show a high level of oralization and their authors are working class people. Most studies about Chilean Spanish deal with the Colonial period, and use only or mostly formal and public documents, written by the elites. Therefore, our study gives new insights on the historical formation of varieties of Spanish in postcolonial times.
Perspectives
My main area of expertise is the study of discourses about language in 19th-century Chile and how they reveal political stances. But I consider the study of language use in that same period as much important as the former, because it allows us to know the linguistic facts that motivate the construction of social representations about language.
Dr. Dario Rojas
Universidad de Chile
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Rasgos fónicos y morfológicos en cartas de hispanohablantes emigrados a la pampa salitrera chilena (1883–1937), Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie (ZrP), January 2015, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/zrp-2015-0046.
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Resources
Ideas linguisticas en Chile, 1875-1927 [Linguistic Ideas in Chile, 1875-1927]
Website of a research project that studies discourses about Spanish language in Chile in late 19th and early 20th century as carriers of "language ideologies".
Letras del Desierto: edición de un corpus epistolar para su estudio linguistico
Book by Tania Aviles (main author of the article) containing the philological transcription and linguistic study of the corpus of private letters.
The Chilean Academy of the Spanish Language: the institutionalization of a discourse community
Entry written by Dario Rojas (co-author of the article) for the academic blog History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. It shows the language ideology of the Chilean Spanish-speaking elite from the late 19th century.
Contributors
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