Repensando el concepto del ‘español indígena’ desde la perspectiva de las ideologías lingüísticas en el contexto mexicano

Abstract

The analytical concept ‘Indigenous Spanish’ (or ‘Amerindian Spanish’) has been established to capture structural phenomena at the phonetic-phonological, morphosyntactic and semantic levels resulting from language contact between Spanish and different indigenous languages in a given multilingual space (cf. Lastra 1995; Flores Farfán 1999; Zimmermann 2004; Pfadenhauer 2012). While at the terminological level, the problematic semantics inherent in the term ‘indigenous’ have already been discussed (cf. Zimmermann 2016: 30-31; Pfadenhauer 2021: 264), the consequences of linguistic-ideological attributions arising from the assumption of a model linguistic usage of a particular social or ethnic group have not yet been analyzed in depth. The main goal of this contribution is to show, taking the sociolinguistic situation in Mexico as an example, that the concept of ‘Indigenous Spanish’ constitutes above all an interpretative construction of a specific social meaning that corresponds mainly to the needs of linguists to capture certain linguistic phenomena and define them within the category of a specific language.