Tesis doctoral en la red
Language contact has presumably had an impact on all of the world’s languages. This PhD thesis provides a thorough description of the lexical outcomes of the contact between the arguably young American Spanish with the youngest variety of Southern Hemisphere Englishes, thus closing a gap in the literature on Spanish and English as contact languages.
Situated at the crossroads of toponomastics, lexical semantics and language attitudes, and embedded within a theoretical framework of contact linguistics, this thesis addresses the contact history of Falkland Islands English with Spanish, and examines to what extent such contact played a part in the shaping of the archipelago’s official language. In order to do so, an innovative mixed-methods approach is used with the purpose of broadening the analytical depth of the results. Furthermore, a range of sources are used, i.e., archival research, literature reviews, and ethnographic fieldwork.
The findings show that (i) Spanish-English contact in the Falklands has left two main linguistic products: loanwords and place names; (ii) even though the Falklands currently host an English-speaking community, the Islands have a long history of Spanish-speaking settlers; (iii) Spanish loanwords are mainly related to horse tack and horse types, and most words are tightly connected to gaucho vernacular but not exclusively with their equestrian duties; and (iv) Falkland Islands English hosts a handful of loanwords that are originally from autochthonous South American languages.
This dissertation will be of interest to scholars working on language contact, toponomastics, world Englishes, and in ethnolinguistic approaches to data collection.
1. General introduction
1.1 The archipelago and its language situation
1.2 Perspectives
1.2.1 Outline
1.3 A Mixed-methods approach
1.4 Relevance
2. A socio-historical overview of Falkland Islands English in contact with Spanish
2.1 Introduction
2.1.1 Falkland Islands English overview
2.2 The relevance of social history reconstruction for dialect formation
2.3 Outcomes of the first stages of language contact
2.4 The language contact history
2.4.1 18th century: The many settlement attempts
2.4.2 19th century: It all comes down to livestock
2.4.3 20th century: Times of ups and downs
2.4.4 21st century: Sovereignty assertion and the new Spanish wave
2.5 Spanish-English contact footprints in FIE: place names, loanwords and semantic fields
3. Spanish Place Names of the Falkland Islands: A Novel Classification System
3.1 Introduction
3.2 An overview of Falkland Islands history and its Spanish naming practices
3.3 Methodology
3.4 Findings
3.4.1 Argentinian place names
3.4.2 Gaucho-heritage place names
3.5 Summary and discussion
4. Competing place names: Malvinas vs. Falklands. When a sovereignty conflict becomes a name conflict
4.1 Introduction
4.2 The renaming of toponyms
4.3 Methodology
4.4 The beginning of the place naming competition
4.5 A linguistic war over the name of the archipelago
4.5.1 The “M word”
4.5.2 The capital dispute
4.5.3 Other conflicting place names
4.5.4 Malvinas, Falklands, or both? Better get it straight
4.6 Is it about islandness, nationalism, and/or a claim instrument?
4.7 Final remarks
5. An ethnolinguistic approach to contact onomastics Falkland Islanders’ attitudes to gaucho place names
5.1 Introduction
5.1.1 Place names and contact linguistics 10 2
5.1.2 Socio-cultural setting: gauchos in the camp
5.1.3 Language attitudes and linguistic ethnography
5.1.4 American Spanish and Falkland Islands English
5.2 Methodology
5.3 Results
5.3.1 Falkland Islands Spanish place names in maps
5.3.2 Gaucho place names discussed in fieldwork
5.3.2.1 What fieldwork -not maps nor archives- shows
5.3.2.2 Contemporary functioning
5.3.2.3 Islanders’ attitudes towards local Spanish place names
5.4 Conclusions
6. The Spanish component of Falkland Islands English: A micro-corpus approach to the study of loanwords
6.1 Introduction
6.1.1 Falklands English: An overview
6.1.2 Loanwords
6.2 Spanish loanwords in FIE
6.3 Methodology
6.3.1 Corpus and data collection
6.3.2 Classification
6.4 Analysis and results
6.4.1 Frequent in the corpus but not in dictionaries
6.4.2 Most permeable semantic fields
6.5 Conclusions
7. Los Préstamos Lingüísticos como Registro de la Historia: Indigenismos en el Inglés de las Islas Malvinas/Falkland
7.1 Introducción
7.2 La relevancia del estudio del fenómeno del préstamo para reconstruir situaciones lingüísticas
7.3 El contexto sociolingüístico-histórico
7.4 El inglés hablado en las Islas su componente hispano-americano producto del contacto lingüístico
7.5 Objetivos y metodología
7.6 Resultados, análisis y discusión
7.6.1 Resultados
7.6.1.1 Guanaco
7.6.1.2 Mate
7.6.1.3 Warrah
7.6.1.4 Yapper
7.6.1.5 Otras palabras
7.6.2 Análisis y discusión
7.7 Reflexiones finales y direcciones a futuro
8. Final Considerations
8.1 Overview
8.2 The socio-historical contact scenarios leading to Falkland Islands English Spanish components
8.3 Limitations of this study
8.4 Summary of the contributions and some methodological implications
8.5 Suggestions for further research directions
Appendix
References
Summary
Nederlandse samenvatting Dutch Translation
Resumen en español Spanish Translation
Curriculum vitae
Universidad de la República (Uruguay)
<ylianarodriguez
gmail.com>