The Spanish language arrived in America first through Cristóbal Colón’s exploratory travels, and then with the rest of colonizers, at the tip of the fifteenth century. At now the Spanish language was already firmly consolidated in the Iberian peninsula. In the “new world”, however, Spanish had yet to be established, and this was done through a process labelled by historians as “hispanización”.
During this era, the southern part of the Yank continent was a conglomerate of tons of various languages and dialects. Moreover, the cultures {that the} settlers encountered were radically completely different from the Spanish one. Communication, thus, was extremely a challenge in the primary stages, and it absolutely was done 1st through gestures and presently through captive natives who acted as interpreters.
The Catholic Church played a fundamental role in the enlargement of the Spanish language throughout Latin America. So, Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries established faculties where they educated and converted into Catholicism most kids and teenagers. Of course, this was all drained Spanish, and thus this language began to penetrate very little by very little within the daily lives of the various indigenous groups.
The evangelization was among the slow but firm administrative imposition of the Spanish language, that relegated the Amerindian languages to an unprivileged position. This was the inevitable consequence of the cultural and ethnic cleansing imposed by the Spanish Empire to its colonies.
But, there was a 2-approach flow of cultural and linguistic influence between the colonizers and also the colonized. This happened as a result of, in spite of their dominant position, the natives of Spain perpetually constituted a terribly small minority within the Yankee continent. Therefore, there was a relentless contact among languages and a progressive mixing among the different populations. This allowed the incorporation of aspects belonging to the pre-Columbian cultures into what would later become Yankee Spanish. African languages, brought by people who were taken to America as slaves, additionally contributed to the formation of this wealthy mosaic.
Just listening to the intonation of the different South American Spanish dialects we tend to will see that they are closer to the varied native languages than to peninsular Spanish. In terms of vocabulary, two of the most influential languages were the Mexican náhuatl (spoken by the Aztecs) or the Peruvian quechua (spoken by the Incas). These 2 languages were accepted and spoken by a significant part of the population, and so they were used for commerce purposes, even when the arrival of the Spanish conquerors. Examples of words that are incorporated into Yankee Spanish from these languages are “papa” (potatoe), “cuate” (friend), or “chamaco” (boy).
On the other hand, the characteristics of the Spanish explorers were additionally heterogeneous, since they came from all over Spain. But, their meeting purpose before starting their long journey was Seville, in Andalucía, the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula. Since they stayed a very long time whereas making ready their adventure, they ended up adopting some of the characteristics of the Andalusian dialect. Then they took them to the “new world”. This is why American Spanish shares most of the Spanish pronunciation characteristics with Andalusian Spanish. The foremost important one is that the phenomenon known as “seseo”, that indicates the fact {that the} sound “c” (pronounced “th”) is remodeled into the sound “s”.
All these factors have made Yank Spanish the rich and multicultural linguistic selection that it is today.
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