Documenting Feature Pools in Language Expansion Situations: Sibilants in Early Colonial Latin American Spanish

Abstract

This paper proposes a reconstruction of the demographic and linguistic composition of the Spanish settling contingent in the American colonies as one of several key factors determining the evolution of Spanish in the early colonial period (sixteenth century). It focuses on the evidence for contact among several sibilant systems, including seseo, i.e. the reduction of four medieval sibilants to /s/. In the standard narrative of the history of Latin American Spanish, this reduction is seen as the consequence of the demographic primacy of seseo in the early metropolitan colonial mix and the inherent phonological simplicity of the merger (Catalán 1958; Granda 1994; Parodi 1995; Hidalgo 2016). This study calls for a reassessment of several of these previous assumptions. The bulk of the data in this study come from a corpus of private letters by early colonial settlers from Spain, analysed quantitatively and contextualized on the basis of additional demographic and linguistic evidence. The sociolinguistic reconstruction that emerges from this data contradicts the canonical presentation of the internal and external ecology of early colonial Latin American Spanish, and calls for the incorporation of a variety of cognitive and sociodemographic triggers beyond the action of the metropolitan input.