Contact features in Colonial Peruvian Spanish

Although it is beyond question that lexical borrowing from Quechua into Spanish occurred during the colonial period, determining when structural interference of Quechua on Peruvian Spanish can be said to have begun is a more difficult matter. It is here proposed that the development of contact features is dependent on a series of sociolinguistic conditions that trigger the development of a contact variety. The development of contact features, then, is understood not as a second-language phenomenon, but as a social phenomenon. A review of the social, demographic, and linguistic characteristics of Peruvian society from the early colonial period onward indicates that the necessary sociolinguistic conditions were not present in the colonial period in Peru. Only after a transition period (from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century) were the social conditions in place for a contact variety to develop.