Chapter 6

Some grammatical characteristics of the Spanish spoken by Lacandón and Mazahua bilinguals

The native languages that are spoken in Mesoamerica have been in intense and continuous contact with Spanish for over 500 years. Those languages have been affected reciprocally in some of their structural characteristics resulting in what are called transfers (Silva-Corvalán 2001). In this paper we undertake the task of studying varieties of Spanish in contact that have not been studied so far; specifically, Spanish-Lacandón and Spanish-Mazahua. The main goal is to identify grammatical features that are not present in the standard monolingual varieties and that can be said to be transfers from the substrate languages. In particular, we discuss transfers that are also shared with other bilingual varieties such as Spanish-Nahuatl and Spanish-Otomí: (a) the absence of number agreement inside the noun phrase (NP), (b) the absence of articles in NPs and (c) the omission of the direct object differential marker a. We argue that these characteristics have their source in typological features shared by the substrate languages and that they are likely to be of an areal type. We also address the case of one grammatical transfer particular to the Spanish-Lacandón variety: the juxtaposition of two determiners inside the noun phrase. It is what we call a “local” transfer.