Ethnocultural Languages in the Study of Language Contact: The Case of Amazonian Spanish

Applying traditional (linguistic) methodologies to research with ethnocultural populations presents challenges (Trimble & Fisher 2006). The study of contact between Indigenous languages and a global language (e.g., Spanish) inevitably questions traditionally understood social correlates, such as population composition, age and gender distribution, social networks, degree of urbanization, and others. A comparison of the socio-linguistic profiles of Peruvian Andean and Amazonian Spanish populations highlights the need to rethink additional theoretical concepts regarding linguistic diversity, linguistic density, and language acquisition to define better the concept of ‘Amazonian Spanish.’ A call to focus on cross-linguistic conceptual grammatical categories is exemplified with ‘possession’ to suggest potential new paths of studying linguistic influence in these contact scenarios.