Spanish in Contact With Other Languages and Bilingualism Across The Spanishspeaking World

21
Spanish in Contact with

Other Languages and
Bilingualism across the
Spanish-Speaking World
Lotﬁ Sayahi
21.1 Introduction
Within the field of contact linguistics and bilingualism studies, the

Spanish language holds a prominent place. It is spoken in numerous
regions across several continents and serves as an official language in 21
countries. It is also used by a number of minority communities, either as
a native language or as a heritage language, and is rapidly growing world-
wide as an instructed second language. As the field of contact linguistics
continues to investigate the role of contact in language change, language
maintenance, and language shift, among other key issues, the wide array
of situations that involve Spanish have proven to be a valuable laboratory
for advancing research into the processes and outcomes of language con-
tact. The different varieties of Spanish existing in the world today offer
a wealth of data and opportunities for research in bilingualism and contact
linguistics in general. In this chapter, rather than offering a geographical
mapping of bilingual communities and contact zones in the Spanish-
speaking world, I will follow a thematic division that relies on findings
regarding the major issues in contact linguistics that are carried out using
Spanish data and the main contact phenomena that obtain across the
Spanish-speaking world.
In Section 21.2, I describe the major sources of lexical borrowing into
Spanish. The focus is on borrowing from Arabic, the indigenous languages
of the Americas, and English. Section 21.3 describes cases of structural
convergence in situations of contact between Spanish and other languages
at the phonological and morphosyntactic levels. In Section 21.4, I examine
the existence of Spanish-based contact varieties, including both creoles
and non-creolized varieties. Section 21.5 analyzes the phenomenon of
code-switching, with a special focus on English/Spanish code-switching.
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460 LOT F I S AYA H I
Section 21.6 presents two major macro-sociolinguistic issues as they per-

tain to Spanish: language maintenance and language shift. Finally,
Section 21.7 summarizes the status of Spanish as a world language and
offers an outlook into the future of bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking
world.
21.2 Lexical Borrowing
Lexical borrowing is undoubtedly the most common outcome of language

contact. It is a salient phenomenon – of which speakers are themselves
often aware – and consists in the incorporation of words from other
languages with, although not always, some degree of adaptation into the
recipient language.1 Lexical borrowing is also a reliable tool for assessing
the role of language contact in the historical development of a given
linguistic variety. In the case of Spanish, contact with other languages is
a significant factor in the building of its lexical stock from early on. As the
diglossic situation of Classical and Vulgar Latin came to an end in the
Middle Ages, Castilian was in contact with other Romance varieties,
including Mozarabic, and most notably with Arabic. The latter had been
introduced into the Iberian peninsula in 711 CE and was maintained in
active use there for over eight centuries. Even with the completion of the
Reconquista in 1492, some contact with Arabic continued, as bilingual
Arabic speakers did not totally disappear from mainland Spain until the
Great Expulsion of the Moriscos that was ordered by Philip III of Spain in
1609. It is known that during the Inquisition some Moriscos, especially
women, needed Arabic translators (Galmés de Fuentes 1983:28) and that
Christian missionaries attempting to evangelize Moriscos in the moun-
tains around Granada had to rely on Arabic well into the 16th century
(Martı́nez Ruiz 1994:142).
Before the systematic purging of a large part of Arabic loanwords,
Spanish in the 15th and 16th centuries counted Arabic as its second lexify-
ing language (Lapesa 1981:133), proof of the high degree of bilingualism
that existed among Mozarabs and, later on, among Moriscos. Indeed,
Menéndez Pidal (1986:502) states that the most important outcome of
the contact of Castilian with Mozarabic was lexical borrowing.
The Diccionario de la lengua española (DRAE; Real Academia Española 2001)
indicates that the number of Arabic loanwords in Spanish is around 1,200
words, not counting derivations and toponyms, although Lapesa
(1981:133) estimates the total number of all types of Arabisms in Spanish
to be around 4,000 items. What is significant about Arabic loanwords in
Spanish is not only the number of loans that persist in use today but also
1
See Section 21.5 for a brief discussion of the debate concerning what counts as lexical borrowing and what counts as
code-switching.
Spanish in Contact with Other Languages 461
that some of them are extremely common words with relatively few
lexical competitive variants, such as aceite ‘oil,’ almohada ‘pillow,’ and
alcalde ‘mayor.’ Also significant is the high number of loans that refer to
agriculture, as many of the Moriscos who stayed on after the Reconquista
continued to work in this field (e.g. acequia ‘waterway,’ alberca ‘pond used
for irrigation,’ and almazara ‘olive mill’). Finally, an interesting detail about
Arabic loans in Spanish is the number of super-loans that spread via
Spanish to other European languages including English (e.g. algebra ‘alge-
bra,’ algoritmo ‘algorithm,’ alcohol ‘alcohol’). There are a few function
words, such as ojalá ‘hopefully’ and hasta ‘until,’ that originate from
Arabic, as does the derivational suffix -ı́, as in alfonsı́ ‘Alfonsine’ and
marroquı́ ‘Moroccan,’ but Arabic influence on Spanish outside of lexical
borrowing has not been solidly confirmed.
Similarly, Spanish borrowed extensively from indigenous Latin
American languages and is responsible for the introduction of
a considerable number of Amerindian lexical items into other languages.
Indigenous loanwords vary from one variety of Latin American Spanish to
another, but usually range from a few hundred to a few thousand words
depending on the dialect zone (Lope Blanch 1967:369). Spanish adopted
several cultural borrowings that include words such as canoa and cacique
from the Taı́no language, chocolate and tomate from Nahuatl, choclo ‘corn,’
and carpa ‘tent’ from Quechua, among many other examples. Indeed,
a significant part of the variation at the lexical level between different
Latin American Spanish dialect groups can be attributed to contact with
a specific indigenous language as in the case of words used for “corn” and
the different products derived from it. Of course, in the other direction, the
lexical influence of Spanish on Amerindian languages of Latin America
still in use is much more significant and often serves as a reliable indicator
of the degree of endangerment of these languages. For example, in the case
of the Copala Triqui language of Mexico, Scipione (2011) has shown that
there are more than 1,000 Spanish loanwords that cover a wide range of
semantic fields and include examples such as soldado ‘soldier,’ multa
‘ticket,’ and cultura ‘culture.’ While earlier loans are fully adapted to
Triqui, bilingual speakers increasingly tend to maintain the phonological
integrity of the Spanish words and even reanalyze established loans to
restore their Spanish form. In the case of Nahuatl, studies have shown that
lexical borrowing from Spanish has led to a process of relexification where
up to 40 percent of its vocabulary is sourced from Spanish (Hill and Hill
1977:62).
An additional source of lexical influence during the formation of Latin
American Spanish has been the African languages, especially visible in the
case of Caribbean Spanish varieties, with words such as guineo ‘banana’ and
ñame ‘yam’ (Lipski 1987:33). Finally, lexical influence of other European
languages is also apparent, mainly in Southern Cone Spanish. For instance,
the fact that Lunfardo is recognized as a distinct variety, partly for its
Italian influence, is an indicator of the degree of contact between Spanish

and other immigrant languages (Lorenzino 2014).
A third major wave of lexical items entered Spanish through its direct
and indirect contact with English. In addition to frequent words such as
fútbol, jersey, and detective, modern age advances in science and technology
have contributed English loanwords to Spanish. The DRAE now contains
items such as parking, USB, and blog. While the dictionary officially recog-
nizes some 600 words as originating from English, more direct contact has
resulted in an even higher number of loans in bilingual communities,
especially in US Spanish (Pfaff 1979; Smead 1998; Lipski 2008). Adapted
forms of English words such as high school, truck, and roof are examples that
are often mentioned as among the most frequent loanwords used by
different Hispanic communities in the United States.
In sum, contact with other languages has led to the incorporation of
hundreds of loanwords from other languages into Spanish, reflecting the
different situations of bilingualism that the Spanish language has had
throughout its history and into the present. Both the need to fill a lexical
gap, as in the case of fauna and flora words borrowed from Amerindian
languages, and prestige, as in the case of contact with English now or
Arabic in Muslim Spain, are factors for lexical incorporation (Weinreich
1963). At the same time, equally important is the fact that Spanish is also
the source language for hundreds of loanwords in indigenous languages.
The wide-ranging diversity of situations has led to different types of lexical
influence and associated phenomena that include lexical borrowing, lex-
ical purging, and relexification.
21.3 Structural Innovation and Convergence
In cases of intense language contact, manifested through high levels of

bilingualism and substantial lexical borrowing, it is not uncommon for
structural convergence and transfer to occur between the different lan-
guages in contact (Thomason and Kaufman 1988). Convergence refers to
cases where a certain feature acquires additional functions or increases its
frequency as a result of contact (Heath 1984).2 This process has been
described by Silva-Corvalán (1994, 2008) as “indirect transfer” and is dif-
ferent from the importation of features that were previously absent from
the recipient language. The latter would be a case of structural borrowing –
still a highly debated issue within the field of contact linguistics (Winford
2003). Spanish as used in different bilingual communities offers many
2
Heath (1984:367–368) offers the following deﬁnition of structural convergence, which is the one adopted in this
chapter: “Structural convergence, also called pattern transfer or calque, is the rearrangement of inherited material
because of diffusional interference. If L1 is the language we are focusing on, convergence takes place when L1 forms
(morphemes, words, phrases) undergo rearrangements which appear to make L1 structures more similar to those of
a neighboring language L2 (which may or may not itself be converging with L1)” (italics in the original text).
examples of indirect transfer, depending on the degree of bilingualism and

the status of the languages involved. For example, in northern Morocco
Spanish is acquired as a foreign language, often in a naturalistic setting,
and shows in many cases the influence of native Arabic and Berber lan-
guages. This is especially evident in phonetic features such as vowel
height – mid vowels tend to be raised since in Arabic there is no phonemic
differentiation between mid and high vowels (e.g. tangerino > tang[i]rino) –
and the realization of the palatal nasal as an apico-alveolar nasal plus
palatal approximant consonant (España > Espa[nj]a), as well as in supra-
segmental features including stress shift in cases of vowel reduction
(Sayahi 2006, 2011).
In Peninsular Spanish, among the most salient situations that present
cases of convergence is that of Spanish in contact with Catalan, both in
terms of the number of speakers involved and the historical antecedents
that have led to a robust normalization of the use of Catalan in Catalonia,
Valencia, and the Balearic Islands. Studies have shown that the influence
of Catalan can be observed with regard to several features, for example
intervocalic /s/ voicing and the devoicing of final /d/, higher rates of the use
of the definite article before proper nouns, and variation in the use of
deictic markers including the use of aquı́ for ahı́ and venir for ir to refer to
the interlocutor’s location as opposed to the speaker’s location (Galindo
Solé 2003; Davidson 2015; Stokes 2015). Additionally, Blas Arroyo (2008,
2011) has shown that contact with Catalan is serving another purpose: that
of slowing down some changes that are in progress in non-contact vari-
eties. He argues that the maintenance of intervocalic /d/ (e.g. for forms
ending with -ado: 74 percent for Valencian-dominant bilingual speakers vs.
37 percent for monolingual Spanish speakers) and higher rates of reten-
tion of the morphological future could be attributed to contact with
Valencian Catalan. In the case of the latter, a rate of use (46 percent) that
is much higher than that found elsewhere is attributed by Blas Arroyo
(2007) to the use of an analytic form in Catalan to refer to actions in the
preterit.3
In Latin America, a major contact zone is the Andes region where
Spanish is in contact with Quechua, in addition to other languages, and,
as a result, shows instances of convergence (Austin et al. 2015). Specifically,
in the case of clitics, Klee and Caravedo (2005) have discussed the use of
leı́smo and the archmorpheme lo for direct object regardless of gender in
the speech of first- and second-generation Quechua migrants to Lima.
Their results confirm the presence of leı́smo in the speech of first-
generation migrants and its transmission to members of the second gen-
eration, given that it is not an overtly stigmatized feature. They also find
significantly high rates for the use of the archmorpheme lo to refer to
3
See Enrique-Arias (2010) for similar arguments regarding contact with Catalan as a factor in inhibiting change in Spanish
in Majorca.
plural masculine direct objects. Rates for the neutralization of the plural
by first-generation migrants reach 64 percent while, for second-generation
migrants, they reach 57 percent, which is significant especially if com-
pared to speakers who are born in Lima to Limeño parents and who
neutralize plural direct objects at the rate of 22 percent. More significant
is the neutralization of feminine direct object pronouns: Klee and
Caravedo (2005) show that it reaches 76 percent in the case of first-
generation migrants and 21 percent in the case of second-generation
migrants, while the rate is only 2 percent in the case of native Limeño
speakers. In another study, Klee et al. (2011) show that indigenous learners
of Spanish in Lima use an OV word order more frequently than do L1
Spanish speakers. Both VO and OV are possible in Spanish, but influence
from Quechua appears to increase the more marked use of an OV word
order by bilingual speakers. Other instances of Quechua influence on
Andean Spanish include the use of an evidential function for the present
perfect, in contrast with the pluperfect that is used for a reportative func-
tion (Escobar 1997, 2011), and the appearance of a double possessive
marking in several Andean varieties (Clements 2009).4
A well-studied contact situation has been that of Spanish in contact with
English in the United States. Although several scholars recognize that
there are instances of convergence, the consensus is that US Spanish is
not a restructured variety, and the claim that it represents a third stable
new variety, popularly denoted Spanglish, is not accurate (Lipski 2008).
Silva-Corvalán (1994, 2001) describes several features that represent cases
of convergence between Spanish and English including the elimination of
the complementizer que ‘that’ in complement clauses, increased prenom-
inal placement of adjectives, and the use of possessive adjectives instead of
the definite article with inalienable nouns. Other pervasive features in
US Spanish include the erosion of the subjunctive in favor of a more
extended use of the indicative mood, and the extended use of the verb
estar. Silva-Corvalán (2008) nevertheless argues that these features are
already present in native vernacular varieties, as opposed to in the
Academy-sanctioned standard Spanish, even though they become consid-
erably more prominent in second- and third-generation bilinguals.
The case of the use of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) has in particular
attracted a good deal of analysis. The fact that this is a conflict site between
Spanish and English, as English generally requires overt pronouns while
Spanish is a pro-drop language, has led to suggestions of a possible English
influence on the rate of overt SPP use by speakers of Spanish in contact
with English. While some scholars have argued that higher rates of overt
4
Due to space considerations, I have chosen to discuss a reduced number of settings both in Spain and in Latin America,
principally focusing on cases where larger groups of speakers are involved and on features that better illustrate the
phenomena under discussion. But, as argued throughout the chapter, the richness of contact situations of Spanish with
other languages is much wider and has been the subject of entire volumes (Roca and Jensen 1996; Silva-Corvalán
1997; Potowski and Cameron 2007; Klee and Lynch 2009).
pronoun use are not the result of influence from English (Cameron 1992;
Flores-Ferrán 2004), earlier studies had claimed the opposite (de Granda
1978; Navarro Tomás 1948). More recently, in a larger study, Otheguy et al.
(2007) and Otheguy and Zentella (2012) have proved that competence in
English in fact plays a role in a higher rate of subject pronoun use, as it sets
apart New York-born speakers and those with higher levels of competence
in English from recent arrivals. Otheguy et al. (2007:779) conclude that:
“there are, as predicted, positive correlations between rates of overt pro-
nouns and years spent in NYC as well as English skills.” But here again, as
with other cases discussed above, we have a feature already present in
Spanish, and what we see are variable rates of its use as opposed to the
incorporation of a totally new feature. It is important to keep in mind,
then, that variations in the use of a feature in situations of language
contact do not necessarily have as their source the other language.
Additionally, Poplack and Levey (2010:394) argue for a distinction between
innovation, a possibly transient phenomenon, and change, which usually
shows considerable diffusion and acceptability in the community.5
An example of an item that has achieved diffusion in US Spanish is
a form such as llamar para atrás ‘to call back’ (cf. standard Spanish llamar
de vuelta/devolver la llamada (Otheguy 1993; Lipski 2008)).
21.4 Spanish-Based Contact Varieties
Contact between European languages and indigenous languages in differ-

ent geographical regions across the globe, principally as a result of the
European waves of colonization and slave trade, led to the appearance of
several types of contact varieties, ranging from radical vernaculars to
pidgins and creole languages. The status of Spanish-based creoles as pro-
totypical creoles has been disputed in the literature with some scholars
claiming their non-existence (McWhorter 2000), while others provide sig-
nificant evidence that Spanish-based creoles show similar grammatical
features and processes of formation to other creoles (Clements 2009 and
references therein). Overall, studies have shown that there is a wide range
of Spanish-based contact varieties, including creoles such as Palenquero
and Chabacano, restructured vernaculars including Bozal Spanish and
other Afro-Spanish varieties, and even intertwined systems such as
Media Lengua.
In the case of creole languages, Palenquero has enjoyed a good deal of
attention over the last few decades. Spoken in San Basilio de Palenque in
Colombia, it has its origin in the speech of African slaves who escaped
from Cartagena in the 17th century and remained isolated for a long
5
See also Silva-Corvalán’s (2008) article “The Limits of Language Contact” for an in-depth discussion of what counts as
contact-induced change in US Spanish.
period of time. Common creole structural features of Palenquero include

a lack of gender marking and definiteness of noun phrases, and, at the verb
phrase level, invariant verbs, as Palenquero relies on preverbal markers to
express time, mood, and aspect (TMA), a feature common in creole lan-
guages. Increased access to Spanish and its use in Palenque is leading to
a less natural inter-generational transmission of Palenquero, especially
given the low number of its speakers (estimated by Schwegler (2011) to
range between 4,000 and 5,000). More recently, an increased awareness of
the importance of Palenquero as an ethnic identity marker and its recogni-
tion as a valuable cultural product of community, national, and world
heritage, has led to its introduction in the school system. Recent studies
have shown that younger bilingual speakers present new features that are
a result of contact with Spanish, such as the use of verb morphology and
definite articles (Lipski 2011).
Another documented Spanish-based creole is Chabacano, spoken
principally in and around Zamboanga City, and, less commonly, in
other smaller communities in the Philippines. Chabacano emerged as
a result of contact between Spanish, introduced in the Philippines
as early as the 16th century, and indigenous Filipino languages such
as Tagalog. These have had significant influence on the structure of
Chabacano, including in its preference for a VSO word order (Lipski
2012). A different case is that of Papiamento, which combines gramma-
tical features that are the result of Afro-Hispanic contact with other
lexifying languages including Dutch, English, and Portuguese.
Papiamento is spoken in the Caribbean islands of Curaçao, Aruba,
and Bonaire; many of the grammatical features of its different varieties
are shared with other Iberian-based creoles such as the use of pre-
verbal TMA markers, including the marker ta (present in Palenquero
and Chabacano (Andersen 1990:67)).
There also exist contact varieties of Spanish that represent the process of
L2 acquisition rather than prototypical cases of creole genesis. These
include Afro-Hispanic varieties such as the historical pidgin known as
Bozal Spanish used by African slaves and possible post-Bozal varieties
described by Lipski (2007), Barlovento Spanish in Venezuela (Dı́az and
Clements 2008), Afro-Boliviano (Lipski 2011), and Chota Valley Spanish
(Sessarego 2014). The case of Media Lengua, spoken in the Ecuadorian
Andes, is a particularly interesting case from a theoretical standpoint.
Media Lengua is a variety formed by the superposition of Spanish lexicon
onto Quechua grammar, used by rural migrants and their descendants as
an intra-group code. The fact that about 90 percent of the lexicon comes
from Spanish while the grammar remains that of Quechua (Muysken 1981;
Gómez Rendón 2008) has attracted considerable interest from scholars of
mixed languages. In addition, the analysis of Media Lengua has contribu-
ted to our understanding of language contact resulting from rapid and
massive population movements and the concomitant emergence of new
mixed varieties, such as we find with several urban vernaculars in Africa

(McLaughlin 2009).
Another example of a contact situation involving Spanish is that of
Spanish in contact with Portuguese, whose outcome is generally referred
to as Portuñol (Elizaincı́n 1992). Two Luso-Hispanic contact varieties have
attracted interest: Fronterizo and Barranqueño. In the former, different
degrees of mixing of Spanish and Portuguese in communities along the
border between Brazil and Uruguay have resulted in Fronterizo (or
Uruguayan Portuguese) as its major manifestation. Given the structural
overlap between Spanish and Portuguese and the variable nature of the
different contact systems grouped under Portuñol, no definitive lines have
been drawn to account for clear structural distinctive features that could
separate the different bilingual communities (Lipski 2006:13).
In the second case, the contact is between Spanish and Portuguese on
the border between Spain and Portugal in the Iberian peninsula.
Barranqueño, which emerged as a variety of Portuguese acquired by
Spanish dominant speakers, is spoken by some 2,000 people in
Barrancos (Clements et al. 2008). Among the most salient features
accounted for as a direct influence of Spanish in Barranqueño, Clements
et al. (2011) list the aspiration and deletion of final /-s/ and the deletion of
final /-r/, both of which are common in the neighboring regions of Spain,
and several phenomena related to the use and placement of pronouns
including the doubling of indirect objects with full noun phrases and the
preference for proclisis in contexts where Portuguese requires the use of
enclisis with third-person indirect object clitics.
Finally, another case of language contact in the Spanish-speaking world
is that involving Spanish/Limonese creole speakers in the province of
Limón in Costa Rica, where we find an English-based creole in contact
with Spanish. Limonese is a variety of the Jamaican creole, and its contact
with Spanish is leading to substantial code-switching and influence from
Spanish without the appearance of a distinct third variety. Spanish is the
source language for frequent lone and multiword insertions in Limonese
and for some morphosyntactic claques, including the predominant use of
the “have + years” construction to express age as opposed to the “be +
years” form (LaBoda 2015).
In sum, the history of Spanish and its large-scale nativization by indi-
genous and creole populations has led to the creation of varieties that offer
a window into different outcomes of intense language contact.
21.5 Code-Switching
Studies of code-switching between Spanish and other languages, espe-

cially between English and Spanish, have been among the most influential
in the field. Early studies provided an initial description of bilingual
speaker use of Spanish and English in the same communicative event

(Gingràs 1974; Timm 1975; Pfaff 1979, among others). These studies helped
dissipate some of the misunderstandings about code-switching which
even today continue to be perceived by non-specialists and users them-
selves as deviant behavior. They also established that, in bilingual com-
munities, speakers frequently code-switch not randomly but according to
a set of social, pragmatic, and grammatical constraints, and that the pre-
sence of code-switching may in fact serve as an indicator of the vitality of
the languages in contact rather than of their mutual erosion.
The occurrence of English/Spanish code-switching has been examined
not only in oral conversation but also in other types of discourse, including
in written and electronic communication (Callahan 2004; Toribio 2011;
Montes Alcalá 2015).
The variationist approach to code-switching introduced by Poplack
(1980) has provided proof not only of the quantitatively high frequency
of code-switched occurrences in Hispanic communities, but also of the
engagement by members of bilingual communities in different types of
code-switching which often reflect the richness of their linguistic reper-
toire. A distinction is made between inter-sentential and intra-sentential
code-switching. In the first case, switch points occur across sentence
boundaries without major implications for the structure of either of the
two languages (21.1).6 In the second case, code-switching occurs within the
same sentence but without violating the grammatical rules of either of
the two languages involved (21.2).
(21.1) Está desconectado en este momento. I have a – I have a local number. Yo tengo
teléfono en mi habitación si eso ayuda.
‘It is disconnected at the moment. . . . I have a phone in my room if it
helps.’
(21.2) En la República Dominicana, oh it has to be in Spanish.

‘In the Dominican Republic, . . .’
Intra-sentential code-switching has been shown to be a good index of

the degree of bilingualism: more balanced bilinguals tend to code-
switch at the intra-sentential level. Lipski (2014:41) has argued that
code-switching also occurs in the speech of low-competency speakers,
but that “in the case of low-fluency or semi-fluent bilinguals . . . not all
language mixing may follow the ‘canonical’ code-switching trajectory”
described above.
In the case of Spanish in contact with English, as with many other
contact situations, lone noun insertion remains a very frequent phenom-
enon (21.3). Debates on how to interpret these – whether as instances of
code-switching, of borrowing, or of nonce-borrowing – have been heated.
6
All examples are from Dominican-American bilingual speakers collected as part of the University at Albany Corpus of
New York Dominican Spanish.
While Myers-Scotton (2002), for example, argues that non-established

noun insertions are cases of code-switching, Poplack and Meechan (1998)
have argued that these often behave like instances of borrowing.
(21.3) Yo trabajé en una fábrica donde hacı́an clothes de leather y jackets de leather.
Yo peleaba mucho con el dueño.
‘I worked in a factory where they made leather clothes and leather jack-
ets. I argued a lot with the owner.’
A particular focus within code-switching studies has been on the use of

English and Spanish discourse markers, which include such frequent
particles as “so,” “you know,” “entonces,” and “tú sabes,” among others
(Aaron 2004; Lipski 2005). Torres (2002) found that, within the Puerto
Rican community in Brentwood (New York), speakers with varying levels
of competence in both languages used a high number of English dis-
course markers when speaking Spanish, albeit to varying degrees and
for different discourse functions. The English discourse markers “you
know” and “so” are the ones most commonly used by speakers with
different levels of bilingual competence, to the degree that Torres con-
siders them to be borrowings integrated into Spanish discourse. At the
same time, this does not cause the displacement of Spanish discourse
markers, which continue to be used alongside English ones in an over-
lapping fashion.
In Spain, code-switching between Spanish and Catalan, Basque, and
Galician has also been examined, with a special importance given to
the emblematic use of minority languages and to the more common
discourse functions carried out (Alvarez-Cáccamo 1990; Blas Arroyo
1993). Code-switching is also common in other bilingual communities
across the Spanish-speaking world including, to give an example of
lesser-known cases, in northern Morocco, Ceuta, and Melilla, where
code-switching between Spanish, Arabic, and Berber is frequent, and
the British territory of Gibraltar, where, as Moyer (1992) has shown,
competence in both English and Spanish again results in frequent
code-switching.
21.6 Language Maintenance and Language Shift
The particular ecology of a language contact situation (Mufwene 2001)

determines the domains of use of each of the languages involved and
leads to the emergence of different phenomena. Contact can lead to
language maintenance in cases of balanced bilingualism and a strong
ethnolinguistic vitality of both languages, or to language shift in cases of
an interruption in the natural transmission of the socially-subordinate
language. Spanish as a world language has enjoyed a long history of
expansion that in many cases has led to the restricted use of indigenous
languages or even to their death.7 In fact, Spanish is the dominant lan-

guage in the majority of the cases where it is in contact with other
languages. In Latin America, it has advanced quickly at the expense of
Amerindian languages, with very few cases of balanced bilingualism such
as that which we see in Paraguay (Gynan 2005).
The other side of the coin is when Spanish is a minority language. There
are cases where Spanish was not nativized and did not displace an indi-
genous language, but where it has the status of a foreign language coex-
isting with a local native language. In North Africa, Equatorial Guinea, and
the Philippines, Spanish as a minority language enjoys considerable pres-
tige, leading to its maintenance as a second language. In northern
Morocco, about 80 percent of students in the 11 official Spanish education
centers which still exist are Moroccan, and the Instituto Cervantes in many
Moroccan cities often has long waiting lists for its classes. Spanish is
perceived as a language that can provide educational and economic oppor-
tunities in addition to access to cultural and audio-visual products. In the
disputed territories of the Western Sahara, where Spain was an occupying
power until 1975, Spanish has been adopted as one of the official lan-
guages of the Sahrawis and is one used for education in the refugee
camps. Equatorial Guinea, the only African country where Spanish is an
official language, is a typical case of postcolonial language policies, as the
colonial language is the language of education and administration, and
even the language used for literary production.
In the United States, the status of Spanish as a minority language varies
by region and by historical period (Amastae and Olivares 1982; Lipski
2008). In addition to Puerto Rico and the regions with a traditionally
heavy Hispanic presence, other areas have seen an increase in the number
of Spanish speakers in recent years, including the Midwest (Escobar and
Potowski 2015). Moreover, Spanish is among the heritage languages in the
US that is best transmitted to the second generation. According to the Pew
Research Center (2013), eight out of every ten second-generation Hispanics
claim to speak Spanish, which is much higher than is the case with Asian
Americans (only four out of ten second-generation Asian Americans claim
to speak their heritage language). However, as has been frequently argued,
this is not enough to secure Spanish as a fully accepted language in the
United States. Misconceptions about the threat of Spanish are abundant,
and language shift continues to happen across generations (Potowski
2014; Escobar and Potowski 2015). While new waves of immigration con-
tinue to sustain the presence of Spanish in the United States, in traditional
communities where Spanish had been maintained in the past – such as in
the US Southwest and enclaves like St Bernard Parish in Louisiana – we see
Spanish disappearing quickly or being assimilated to other varieties (Bills
and Vigil 1999; Torres Cacoullos and Aaron 2003).
7
See Terborg et al. (2006) for the situation of the indigenous languages of Mexico, for example.
21.7 Summary
The Spanish language today is used in very diverse settings that range from
its status as a native language in Spain and Spanish-speaking Latin
America, an official language in Equatorial Guinea, an
“unofficial” second language in northern Morocco and the Philippines,
and a language with variable status as a heritage language in the United
States and other destination countries for Latin American and Spanish
immigration. This diversity of situations has promoted the appearance of
different language contact phenomena. At the same time, the continued
unity of the language, in terms of mutual intelligibility among Spanish
speakers regardless of native dialect, is remarkable. Despite its notable
lexical and structural variability, Spanish continues to be considered, and
rightly so, as a single language. In some 500 years Spanish has become
a language used by many types of speakers in very different places: This
supports its status as a global language offering a wide range of research
opportunities for a better understanding of the nature of bilingualism and
the processes and outcomes of language contact.
Moving forward, it appears that – in Spain – a greater recognition and
revitalization of minority languages, with a concomitant increase in their
normalization and use in a wider set of domains, will lead to increases in
language contact. In North Africa, the two autonomous cities of Ceuta and
Melilla continue to sustain the use of Spanish in northern Morocco and
offer interesting cases of Spanish in contact with Arabic and Berber.
In Latin America, as the spread of education and urbanization continues
to promote the imposition of Spanish, there are increasing efforts to
maintain and teach the indigenous languages. Although these efforts
face an uphill battle, given the overwhelming symbolic and socioeco-
nomic power of Spanish, they promise to at least increase awareness at
the level of both affected communities and policy makers. Finally, in the
United States, demographic changes and the long history of Spanish in
the country support a continuing presence of this language well into the
future.
In conclusion, a priority of research programs into bilingualism in the
Spanish-speaking world and Spanish in contact with other languages
should be to provide much-needed data on the many contact situations
involving the hitherto far less researched languages with rapidly dwind-
ling numbers of speakers. This can help achieve two things at once: first, to
increase awareness about the situation of minority languages in general
and to further document the processes of language maintenance and
language shift; and, second, to cast additional light on the mechanisms
of language variation and language change in situations of bilingualism,
which is of interest to the field of linguistics in general given that the
majority of people in the world today speak more than one language.
Additionally, massive population movement and migratory trends con-

tinue to represent an excellent opportunity for specialists in contact lin-
guistics, including those working on Spanish. Finally, in the age of “big
data” and increasingly dominant electronic modes of communication,
research on lexical borrowing and contact-induced structural change
from and into Spanish should follow suit by becoming even more quanti-
tative and usage-based.
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21

Spanish in Contact with

Within the field of contact linguistics and bilingualism studies, the

Section 21.6 presents two major macro-sociolinguistic issues as they per-

21.2 Lexical Borrowing

Lexical borrowing is undoubtedly the most common outcome of language

Italian influence, is an indicator of the degree of contact between Spanish

21.3 Structural Innovation and Convergence

In cases of intense language contact, manifested through high levels of

examples of indirect transfer, depending on the degree of bilingualism and

21.4 Spanish-Based Contact Varieties

Contact between European languages and indigenous languages in differ-

period of time. Common creole structural features of Palenquero include

mixed varieties, such as we find with several urban vernaculars in Africa

Studies of code-switching between Spanish and other languages, espe-

speaker use of Spanish and English in the same communicative event

(21.2) En la República Dominicana, oh it has to be in Spanish.

Intra-sentential code-switching has been shown to be a good index of

While Myers-Scotton (2002), for example, argues that non-established

A particular focus within code-switching studies has been on the use of

21.6 Language Maintenance and Language Shift

The particular ecology of a language contact situation (Mufwene 2001)

languages or even to their death.7 In fact, Spanish is the dominant lan-

Additionally, massive population movement and migratory trends con-

Cameron, Richard (1992). Pronominal and Null Subject Variation in

Galmés de Fuentes, Alvaro (1983). Dialectologı́a mozárabe. Madrid: Gredos.

Navarro Tomás, T. (1948). El español en Puerto Rico. Rı́o Piedras: Universidad

(ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics. Chichester: John Wiley, pp.

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