Diffusion trends and Nahuatlisms of American Spanish: Evidence from dialectal vocabularies

Abstract

Abstract Missionary linguistics and considerations of Nahuatl as a lingua franca lead us to propose that Nahuatlisms have historically been prominent in American Spanish. Diachronic studies show that after Spanish spelling was standardised, involving occasional losses and extensions of meaning, Aztec words were incorporated into Spanish language vocabularies in the Americas. Because 16th and 17th -century data provide inconsistent depictions of the spread of Nahuatlisms in the Caribbean and in South American regions, our research aims to collect data from American Spanish dialectal vocabularies to reconstruct regionalisation and diffusion trends of Nahuatlisms in the centuries that followed. Utilising quantitative and qualitative methodologies, we design a research study that identifies restricted and regional characteristics of more than 84% of Nahuatlisms and of remnants of Nahuatl words in the Caribbean and in South American regions.