Principales rasgos gramaticales del español de Nicaragua

Abstract

Abstract This work offers an in-depth description of the main morphosyntactic features found in present Nicaraguan Spanish, a lesser known Central American variety despite being the subject of one of the pioneering dialectological studies on Spanish (Barreto 1893). With the help of text corpora and sociolinguistic surveys, an updated grammatical overview is provided, which takes into account most categories: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and locutions (coordinators, subordinators, among others), and illustrates with examples taken from both formal and informal settings. By comparing these features with previous grammatical descriptions, this study helps in identifying some common American features ―such as the use of medio as an agreeing adjective instead of an adverb particle― as well as some specific patterns ―such as the prominence of ‑udo/‑uda and ‑oso/‑osa suffixes― in present-day Nicaraguan Spanish, some of which remain to be incorporated in the Academy grammar.