Spanish in the Americas: History, Spread and Substrate

Spanish in the Americas

The Spanish in America began to spread after 1492, coinciding with Columbus's discovery. The Spanish language spread very quickly over American territory; such rapid expansion had previously only been seen with Latin.

The Spanish spoken in the Americas is not uniform but varied depending on the origin of the settlers (mainly Extremadura and Andalusia). This variation was due to several factors: the more or less mixing that occurred, the African influence from the slave trade, and the immigration of Europeans to parts of South America — for example, Italians in the nineteenth century.

Creoles (children of an Indigenous mother and a Spanish father) quickly appeared. Spanish was often adopted as a native language rather than something to defend. Language functioned as a social currency.

By the mid-eighteenth century, 80% of the population was already speaking Spanish. Spanish had attained a very high degree of maturity at that time compared to many indigenous languages that were primarily oral; this caused a negative effect: the disappearance of numerous indigenous languages.

Evangelization was another reason for the rapid diffusion. It also had a great influence on the indigenous substrate.

Indigenous Substrate

The influence of the native substrate was one of the causes of the spread of Castilian. When a language spreads into an area where other languages existed, those languages do not always disappear but leave traces in phonetics and vocabulary, as occurred in this case.

Another cause of this expansion was evangelization. At first indigenous languages were used in missionary work and administration, and later Castilian, which helped the diffusion of the language.

In the Americas, Spanish incorporated a number of substrate words. The most important languages and their regions were:

• Nahuatl: Mexico and Central America
• Arawak: Coast of Venezuela, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and northern Colombia
• Quechua: Interior of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and northern Chile
• Araucano: Chile
• Guaraní: Region of the Río de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay), southeastern Bolivia, and Paraguay

Peripheral areas had less similarity to Castilian, since colonists tended to settle in central regions.