Exchanges and interactions between Spanish and indigenous American languages

In the present assessment of research on the contact of Spanish with the autochthonous languages of the Americas we propose a greater integration of the disciplines that have focused on this topic. In particular, it is still necessary to fully incorporate the advances from the fields of second language acquisition and learning and of bilingual development. Studying the different conditions and trajectories of bilingualism also implies coming to an understanding of the processes of language shift, loss. Spanish in America offers the ideal opportunity to achieve this consilience because the New World represents the most important realm of its acquisition as first language and its learning as second language, in contact since the 16th Century with hundreds of other languages. We will take up two contrasting cases of indigenous language-national language interaction. By hypothesis, in the first instance the interchange has resulted in the maintenance of mutual autonomy, despite widespread mutual influence; in the second, researchers are debating the possibility of a convergence.