Many aspects of the varieties of Spanish from Latin America can beexplained by considering their historic roots. In the same way, theinterpretation of modern synchrony helps to understand its diachronicprecedents, including the graphemic and phonetic features of thewritten language. The first part of the present article explores thisissue by focusing on texts by Neruda. Then it compares Neruda's textsto the corpus of the Chilean Úrsula Suárez, which draws from thefirst half of the 18th century. Starting from this synchronic snapshotand with the help of references from later documents, a text writtenin the same Chile during the years of the independence is analyzed.The analysis concludes by pointing out that there are both patternsthat continue as well as those that change. Several of these patternsare sociolinguistic and normative in nature in the colonial Spanishon the brink of the independent period. These evolutionary patternscan be applicable, in general, to all the varieties of Spanish fromLatin America.
Keywords:
diachronic comparisons, sociolinguistic changes, tradition and innovation
Author Biography
Juan Antonio Frago Gracia, Universidad de Zaragoza
Juan Antonio Frago Gracia (jafrago@unizar.es), Departamento de Lingüística General e Hispánica, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Zaragoza, Pedro Cerbuna 12, 50009 Zaragoza, España.
Frago Gracia, J. A. (2010). On Chilean Spanish: from the colonial to the independent period. Boletín De Filología, 45(1). Retrieved from https://actabioethica.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/1324
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