Linguistic Acculturation in Nivaclé and Chorote

Abstract

Linguistic acculturation in Nivaclé and Chorote is striking since there are very few Spanish loanwords in either of these two languages, unlike many other Latin American Indian languages, and because there are remarkable examples of the deployment of native linguistic resources to accommodate concepts acquired through contact with Spanish culture. Nivaclé and Chorote do not allow items of acculturation to impose foreign lexical material on these languages, but rather impose their own linguistic resources on newly acquired items. This paper considers the linguistic consequences of acculturation, of contact with Spanish cultural items not formerly known to the speakers of these languages. While the linguistic and anthropological literature contains numerous studies of hispanisms and linguistic acculturation, the Nivaclé and Chorote cases are different from the majority of these other studies, and this calls for closer investigation