Linguistic nativeness in Chilean Spanish of the colonial period

Abstract

A series of phonetic features important in the historical development of the Spanish language in Chile during the colonial period are analized in this paper. The studied documents, 216 texts paleographically transcribed, include peninsular as well as Chilean ("criollos") authors. A set of features has been selected which, if not exclusive, turns up in the meridional-andalusian linguistic dialect as "seseo", "yeísmo", aspiration of /-s/ and /h-/ < /f-/, palatal consonants velarization and unstability of /r, l/ liquids. Examples are given for each case and a sample of the corpus.