Spanish and Indigenous Languages in the Amazon

Research Strand

Amazonian Spanish:
Language Contact and Evolution

Amazonian Spanish: Language Contact and Evolution explores the unique origins, linguistic features, and geo-political situation of the Spanish that has emerged in the Amazon. While this region boasts much linguistic diversity, many of the indigenous languages found within its limits are now being replaced by Spanish. This situation of language expansion, contact, and bilingualism is reshaping the sociolinguistic landscape of the Amazon by creating a number of Spanish varieties with innovative linguistic features that require closer scholarly attention. The current book documents this situation in detail. The chapters in this volume include work on distinct geographical regions of the Amazon, with primary data collected using different methodologies and language contact situations. The scholars in this volume specialize in an array of fields, including anthropological linguistics, bilingualism, language contact, dialectology, and language acquisition. Their work represents both formal and functional approaches to linguistics.

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Publications

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Fafulas, S., Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, M., Döhla, H.-J., & Rodriguez Zelaya, B. A. (2025). Variación de los pronombres y el marcado de objeto directo en el español monolingüe y bilingüe de Loreto, Perú. Letras, 96(144), 53–81.

Fafulas, S., Henriksen, N., & O’Rourke, E. (2022). Sound change and gender-based differences in isolated regions: Acoustic analysis of intervocalic phonemic stops by Bora-Spanish bilinguals. Linguistics Vanguard, 8(5), 557–568.

Henriksen, N., & Fafulas, S. (2017). Prosodic timing and language contact: Spanish and Yagua in Amazonian Peru. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 10(2), 225–257.

BOOK CHAPTERS/ CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

Henriksen, N., Fafulas, S., & O’Rourke, E. (2020). Intervocalic phonemic stop realization in Amazonian Peru: the case of Yagua Spanish. In R. Rao (Ed.), Spanish phonetics and phonology in contact: Studies from Africa, the Americas, and Spain (pp. 142–161). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fafulas, S. (2020). Spanish in the Amazon region: Some preliminaries on its status and geographical extension. In S. Fafulas (Ed.), Amazonian Spanish: Language Contact and Evolution (pp. 2–6). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fafulas, S., & Viñas de Puig, R. (2020). Emerging ethnolinguistic varieties in the Amazon: The case of Yagua Spanish. In S. Fafulas (Ed.), Amazonian Spanish: Language Contact and Evolution (pp. 156–190). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, M., & Fafulas, S. (2020). Insights for contact linguistics and future investigations of Spanish in the Amazon region. In S. Fafulas (Ed.), Amazonian Spanish: Language Contact and Evolution (pp. 288–297). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, M., & Fafulas, S. (2016). Double Possession in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish. In A. Cuza, L. Czerwionka, & D. Olson (Eds.), Inquires in Hispanic Linguistics: From Theory to Empirical Evidence (pp. 335–354). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

O’Rourke, E., & Fafulas, S. (2015). Spanish in Contact in the Peruvian Amazon: An Examination of Intervocalic Voiced Stops. In E. Willis et al. (Eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Laboratory Approaches to Romance Phonology (pp. 145–162). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.

MANUSCRIPTS IN PREPARATION/UNDER REVIEW

Fafulas, S., & Rodríguez-Mondoñedo, M. Spanish in contact with Peruvian Amazonian languages. To appear in L. Cerno, H. Döhla, M. Gutiérrez Maté, R. Hesselbach, & J. Steffen (Eds.), Handbook of Contact varieties of Spanish and Spanish-lexified contact varieties (Handbooks for Linguistics and Communication Science). Mouton De Gruyter.