Abstract

In sustained Spanish–Portuguese contact zones, there is often a mismatch between observable linguistic data and speakers’ views on the degree of resulting hybridity. Terms like “Portuñol/Portunhol” are suggestive of a “third” language, but little empirical evidence has been offered in support of such outcomes, and spontaneous speech does not provide the complete envelope of variation. The present study draws on data collected in Misiones province in northeastern Argentina, where vernacular Portuguese is spoken natively in rural households, and Spanish is first acquired informally. To empirically test popular notions of “Portuñol” hybridity, an array of experimental tasks has been employed to present various monolingual and mixed configurations to bilingual participants. In the sociolinguistic free-fall environment of Misiones, the potential for the emergence of a stable hybrid is at its greatest, but the increasingly fine-grained array of experimental techniques designed to force-feed putative “Portuñol” shows that even with priming, lexical borrowing is still the only consistent contact-induced phenomenon.

IPC Classification

Keywords