Todo el Mundo

Thanks to the Spanish Empire’s ambition to conquer new lands and find a shorter trade route to Asia in the 16th century, Spanish is spoken nowadays all over the Western hemisphere, as well as in the Philippines and Equatorial Guinea in Africa—but in many accents and dialects, depending on its cross-fertilization with indigenous languages from Mayan to Patagonian and with other colonial tongues.

Carmen Ferrero Pino and Nilsa Lasso-von Lang, associate and assistant professor of Spanish, have edited a book with the hefty title of Variedades Lingüísticas y Lenguas en Contacto en el Mundo de Habla Hispana (Linguistic Varieties and Languages in Contact Across the Spanish-Speaking World), about the many ways Spanish has changed and modified after contact with other languages in regions where it has become dominant.

Among the 19 authors from Spain, Latin America, and the United States are Mirta Pimentel ’81, visiting instructor of Spanish, who wrote a chapter about the contact of Spanish with other languages in Puerto Rico, including Taíno (the speech of the original inhabitants of the island) and the languages brought by African slaves.

Nilsa and Carmen each wrote a chapter on Mexico: Nilsa about the influence of the Indian languages Zapotec and Mixtec on Spanish spoken in the Oaxaca region; Carmen about the influence of Náhuatl on the Mayan language in the Yucatán peninsula and then on contemporary Mexican Spanish