The Hamburg Corpus of Argentinean Spanish (HaCASpa)

The paper outlines and illustrates the design of the Hamburg Corpus of Argentinean Spanish (HaCASpa, compiled 2008−2009), which comprises oral data from two varieties of Argentinean Spanish (Buenos Aires and Neuquén, Northern Patagonia). Both varieties are characterized by prosodic features that can plausibly be traced back to the contact with Italian during the period of large streams of immigration between 1830 and 1950. After providing the reader with general information on the historical situation of Spanish-Italian bilingualism in Buenos Aires, the contribution focuses on the data types contained in the corpus and the speakers recorded. In addition, the main findings stemming from the analyses performed thus far based on the corpus are summarized.