Portuguese or Portuñol? Language contact in Misiones, Argentina

In the extreme northeastern Argentine province of Misiones, vernacular Portuguese is the primary language of many rural communities, in bilingual contact with Spanish. The present study examines data from Misiones Portuguese and Spanish for evidence of morphosyntactic convergence in the absence of f...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of linguistic geography 2016-09, Vol.4 (2), p.47-64
Main Author: Lipski, John M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bilingualism
Colloquial language
Dialects
Inflection (Morphology)
Language contact
Morphosyntax
Portuguese language
Radio stations
Regions
Rural areas
Sociolinguistics
Spanish language
Speaking
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Summary:In the extreme northeastern Argentine province of Misiones, vernacular Portuguese is the primary language of many rural communities, in bilingual contact with Spanish. The present study examines data from Misiones Portuguese and Spanish for evidence of morphosyntactic convergence in the absence of formal schooling in either language or sociolinguistic pressures to produce canonical varieties. Data from a corpus of vernacular Misiones Portuguese and the results of a speeded translation task reveal that even in this sociolinguistically permissive environment bilingual speakers maintain distinct morphosyntactic systems for Portuguese and Spanish (exemplified by nominal plural marking and first-person plural verbal inflection). The data also suggest that bilingual contact alone does not yield the degree of convergence required for the hybrid Portuguese-Spanish morphosyntaxis that has been reported, for example, in northern Uruguay.
ISSN:2049-7547
2049-7547
DOI:10.1017/jlg.2016.12