The linguistic and ethnographic Atlas of Chile by regions (ALECH)

Abstract

The article shows the criteria born in mind in the elaboration of the linguistic and ethnographic Atlas of Chile by regions (ALECH), whose first stage began the second semester of 1997. It is a national atlas by regions, and ethnographic too, made up by four similar regional maps, for which a differentiated questionnaire of about one thousand items was written. 217 locations were chosen, including rural, urban and seashore areas. Urban areas were treated differently methodologically.

The information supplied by ALECH will explain many problems of the linguistic reality of Chile by means of the description and analysis of the Spanish spoken in this country, as well as its comparison with other varieties of Spanish spoken in Latin America.