Spanish spoken by mapuches. Features at the morphosyntactic level

Abstract

This paper deals with languages in contact. Dialectological characteristics present in the morphological and syntactycal levels of the Spanish spoken by the mapuches from Nueva Imperial (a county in the Region of Araucanía), are specifically analized here.

The linguistic samples studied in this paper were taken from several interviews of bilingual adult mapuche informants.

Some of the described characteristics could be attributed to internal tendencies of the adopted language (Spanish), but others -much more specific- are the result of influences coming from the nature of mapudungun, the vernacular language.