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Ricordi del Perù (Babel Publishing Company, 2025)
Ricordi del Perù is the travel diary of Costante Sangiacomo (1895–1985), an Italian emigrant from Isola del Cantone, Italy. Written between 1965 and 1975 in a blend of Spanish, Italian, Genovese dialect, and Quechua, this diary provides a vivid and reflective account of Sangiacomo’s experiences in Peru from 1912 to 1933. Sent at the age of 17 to assist his family’s trade operations in the Andean highlands, Sangiacomo documented local customs, the lives of the Uros people, trade with Quechua communities, hunting and mining activities. His observations also reveal the socio-economic and cultural intersections between Italian immigrants and indigenous Andean societies, offering a unique perspective on early 20th-century Peru. Curated by Sandro Sessarego and Sergio Pedemonte, what sets this manuscript apart is its rare multilingual composition and the perspective of a well-educated, bourgeois immigrant, which contrasts with the more common narratives of working-class migration. By seamlessly blending personal narrative with ethnographic, sociological, and historical observations, Ricordi del Perù serves as a significant resource for migration studies, Latin American Studies, and linguistic anthropology. |
Eje sapo qui taba queré sé istreya (Babel Publishing Company, 2024)
Translation of "The Frog Who Wanted to Be a Star" into Afro-Bolivian Spanish, spoken by the descendants of enslaved Africans, who were taken to the Bolivian highlands in colonial times. All illustrations have been reimagined by a Bolivian artist, Mariana Lacunza, offering a fresh visual and linguistic interpretation of this famous story by Óscar Alfaro.
Translation of "The Frog Who Wanted to Be a Star" into Afro-Bolivian Spanish, spoken by the descendants of enslaved Africans, who were taken to the Bolivian highlands in colonial times. All illustrations have been reimagined by a Bolivian artist, Mariana Lacunza, offering a fresh visual and linguistic interpretation of this famous story by Óscar Alfaro.
Di nojotro pa oté (Plural Editores, 2023).
Este libro representa la primera colección de cuentos infantiles escritos en idioma afroboliviano. Consta de cinco cuentos breves acompañados de imágenes relativas al contexto natural de los Yungas, valles tropicales en los que vive la comunidad afroboliviana. El objetivo de este libro es crear una literatura básica en esta lengua minoritaria para fomentar su uso y preservación.
Este libro representa la primera colección de cuentos infantiles escritos en idioma afroboliviano. Consta de cinco cuentos breves acompañados de imágenes relativas al contexto natural de los Yungas, valles tropicales en los que vive la comunidad afroboliviana. El objetivo de este libro es crear una literatura básica en esta lengua minoritaria para fomentar su uso y preservación.
Wawa príncipe (Edition Tintenfass, 2023).
Translation of The Little Prince into Afro-Bolivian Spanish, spoken by the descendants of enslaved Africans, who were taken to the Bolivian highlands in colonial times. All illustrations have been redesigned by a Bolivian artist and adapted to the Afro-Bolivian context. A wonderful new pictorial and linguistic perspective on The Little Prince.
Translation of The Little Prince into Afro-Bolivian Spanish, spoken by the descendants of enslaved Africans, who were taken to the Bolivian highlands in colonial times. All illustrations have been redesigned by a Bolivian artist and adapted to the Afro-Bolivian context. A wonderful new pictorial and linguistic perspective on The Little Prince.
Research on Puerto Rican Spanish [Borealis Special Issue] (Septentrio Academic Publishing, 2022). This special issue is a collection of articles that address linguistics and social aspects of Puerto Rican Spanish. The studies presented in this volume are examined mostly from a sociolinguistic perspective and analyzed through different theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, in order to present the most recent developments in the field of Puerto Rican Spanish dialectology. The compilation of these studies is grouped into two sections. The first section focuses on aspects of language identity that characterize Puerto Rican Spanish as spoken in the US, and on the language expressions that, through contemporary reggaetón music, have become a consumer product for a global audience. The second section examines some sociohistorical and socioeconomic issues that affect the linguistic reality of the Spanish used on the island by focusing on a stimulating set of studies that reflect a historical and cultural journey through different regions of Puerto Rico.
Interfaces and Domains of Contact-Driven Restructuring (Cambridge University Press, 2021). The Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs) present a number of grammatical similarities that have traditionally been ascribed to a previous creole phase. How did these features come about? Are they really the result of a process of (de)creolization? What linguistic mechanisms can account for their parallel existence in several contact varieties? How can we formalize such mechanisms within a comprehensive theoretical framework? How can these new datasets help us test—and possibly refine—current formal theories, which have primarily been based on standardized language data? In addressing these important questions, this book not only casts new light on the nature of the AHLAs, it also provides new theoretical and methodological perspectives for a more integrated approach to the study of contact-driven restructuring across language interfaces and linguistic domains.
Aspects of Latin American Spanish Dialectology: In Honor of Terrell A. Morgan (John Benjamins, 2021). This book focuses on contemporary sociolinguistic approaches to Spanish dialectology. Each of the authors draws on key issues of contemporary sociolinguistics, combining theoretical methods with empirical data collection. Overall, these chapters address topics concerning language variation and change, sound production and perception, contact linguistics, language teaching, language policy, and ideologies. The authors urge us, as linguists, to take a stand on important issues, and to continue applying theory to praxis so as to advance the frontiers of research of the field. This edited volume in honor of Professor Terrell A. Morgan is a means of celebrating an amazing friend, advisor and human being, who has dedicated his career to teaching graduate and undergraduate students, performed key research in the field, and helped to further pedagogy in the classroom through his textbooks, seminars and websites.
Language Patterns in Spanish and Beyond: Structure, Context and Development (Routledge, 2021). The scholarly articles included in this volume represent significant contributions to the fields of formal syntax, conversational analysis and speech act theory, as well as language development and bilingualism. Taken together, these studies adopt a variety of methodological techniques—ranging from grammaticality judgments to corpus-based analysis to experimental approaches—to offer rich insights into different aspects of Ibero-Romance grammar. The volume consists of three sections, organized in accordance with the topics treated in the chapters they comprise. Section I focuses on structural patterns, Section II analyzes pragmatic ones, and Section III investigates the acquisition of linguistic aspects found in the speech of L1, L2 and heritage speakers. The authors address these issues by relying on empirically-rooted linguistic approaches to data collection, which are coupled with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of sentence structure, discourse dynamics and language acquisition.
Variation and Evolution: Aspects of Language Contact and Contrast across the Spanish-Speaking World (John Benjamins, 2020). This book is a collection of original studies analyzing how different internal and external factors affect Spanish language variation and evolution across a number of (socio)linguistic scenarios. Its primary goal is to expand our understanding of how native and non-native varieties of Spanish co-exist with other languages and dialects under the influence of several linguistic and extra-linguistic forces. In particular, some of these studies show how power and prestige may support (or not) the use of Spanish in different social contexts and educational realities, given that the attitudes toward this language vary greatly across the Spanish-speaking world. On the one hand, in some regions, Spanish represents the variety spoken by the majority of the population, typically related to prestige and power (Spain and Latin America). On the other hand, in other contexts, the same language is conceived as a minority variety, which may or may not be associated with stigmatized immigrant groups (i.e., in the US).
Los castellanos del Perú: historia, variación y contacto lingüístico (Routledge, 2020). Este libro reúne contribuciones de destacados investigadores de la lingüística hispánica para ofrecer un panorama integral de los castellanos del Perú, incluidos algunos que han sido tradicionalmente objeto de discriminación, como el castellano andino, el amazónico y el afroperuano. Los capítulos se enfocan en diferentes variedades habladas en el Perú desde distintos enfoques teóricos y metodológicos, atendiendo a su formación, su contexto social e histórico y los fenómenos de contacto que las caracterizan. De este modo, aunque el volumen tiene un foco regional muy específico, los problemas que aborda son de interés y relevancia para el estudio de otras variedades del español, para el tratamiento de otros problemas derivados del contacto lingüístico y para la dialectología e historia de los castellanos latinoamericanos en general.
Interface-Driven Phenomena in Spanish: Essays in Honor of Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach (Routledge, 2020). This is an edited volume presenting new theoretical and empirical insights concerning the fields of Spanish syntax, semantics and their interface, i.e. the points of mapping between the syntactic and the semantic modules. This book brings together a group of researchers, who, besides having been good friends and colleagues of Professor Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, are also working on interface-related phenomena in Spanish. Thus, this collection of papers provides an updated perspective on current research topics while honoring the memory of a great scholar and friend.
Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Exploring creole studies from a linguistic, historical, and socio-cultural perspective, this study advances our knowledge of the subject by providing new insights into language shift, language acquisition and language change. It compares the legal system regulating black slavery in Chocó, Colombia with the systems implemented by other European colonial powers in the Americas, to address questions such as: What do Chocó Spanish linguistic features say about the nature of Afro-Hispanic vernaculars? What were the sociohistorical conditions in which Chocó Spanish formed? Was slavery in Chocó much different from slavery in other European colonies? While primarily focused on Afro-Hispanic varieties, this methodology can be easily applied to other contact settings, and used to addresses current debates on the origin of other Black communities in the Americas and the languages they speak.
Current Trends in Afro-Hispanic Linguistics. [Lingua Special Issue] (Elsevier, 2018).This edited collection provides an up-to-date look at the field of Afro-Hispanic creolistics by focusing on the varieties that developed in colonial times from the contact of African languages and Spanish in the Americas. This volume consists of original studies dealing with a number of key topics across a range of linguistic subfields, including formal, variationist, and experimental standpoints. This work strives to offer an overview of the main hypotheses that have been proposed in the field to account for the genesis and evolution of the Afro-Hispanic languages of the Americas. In so doing, this special issue analyzes a number of morphosyntactic and prosodic phenomena that characterize these contact varieties.
Language Variation and Contact-Induced Change: Spanish across Space and Time (John Benjamins, 2018). The present volume is a collection of original contributions dealing with Hispanic contact linguistics. It covers an array of Spanish dialects distributed across North, South, and Central America, the Caribbean, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Bosporus. It deals with both native and non-native varieties of the language, and includes both synchronic and diachronic studies. The volume addresses, and challenges, current theoretical assumptions on the nature of language variation and contact-induced change through empirically-based linguistic research. The sustained contact between Spanish and other languages in different parts of the world has given rise to a wide number of changes in the language, which are driven by a concomitance of different linguistic and social processes. This collection of articles provides new insights into such phenomena across the Spanish-speaking world.
La schiavitù nera nell’America spagnola (Marietti Editore, 2018). Questo libro fornisce un'analisi comparativa della schiavitù nera nelle Americhe. Evidenzia le differenze e le somiglianze tra i vari sistemi coloniali e, attraverso un approccio legale, offre una spiegazione dell'eterogeneità riscontrata. L'attenzione si concentra sul sistema schiavista spagnolo in contrasto con i sistemi legali implementati dalle altre potenze europee coinvolte nella colonizzazione delle Americhe (Francia, Inghilterra, Paesi Bassi e Portogallo). In particolare, lo studio esplora la realtà della schiavitù nel Dipartimento del Chocó (Colombia) durante il XVIII secolo, confrontando il sistema legale formale in vigore in quel momento (law in books) con la sua effettiva implementazione nella società del tempo (law in action) (cfr. Pound 1910).
Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis (John Benjamins, 2016). This book explores the current state of Spanish sociolinguistics and its contribution to theories of language variation and change, from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It offers original analyses on a variety of topics across a wide spectrum of linguistic subfields from different formal, experimental, and corpus-based stand points. The volume is organized around six thematic sections: (i) Cutting-edge Methodologies in Sociolinguistics; (ii) Bilingualism; (iii) Language Acquisition; (iv) Phonological Variation; (v) Morpho-Syntactic Variation; and (vi) Lexical Variation. As a whole, this collection reflects an array of approaches and analyses that show how in its variation across speakers, speech communities, linguistic contexts, communicative situations, dialects, and time, the Spanish language provides an immense wealth of data to challenge accepted linguistic views and shape new theoretical proposals in the field of language variation and change. Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis represents a significant contribution to the growing field of Spanish sociolinguistics.
Afro-Peruvian Spanish: Spanish Slavery and the Legacy of Spanish Creoles (John Benjamins, 2015). This work not only contributes to shedding light on the origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. The current study has focused on an aspect of the European colonial enterprise in the Americas that has never been closely analyzed in relation to the evolution of Afro-European contact varieties, the legal regulations of Black slavery. This book proposes the 'Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis', which ascribes a prime importance in the development of Afro-European languages in the Americas to the historical evolution of slavery, from the legal rules contained in the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis to the codes and regulations implemented in the different European colonies overseas. This research was carried out with the belief that creole studies will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary approach, capable of combining linguistic, sociohistorical, legal, and anthropological insights. This study is meant to represent an eclectic step in such a direction.
New Perspectives on Hispanic Contact Linguistics in the Americas (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2015). This volume is a collection of papers that focus on a variety of social and linguistic aspects of Spanish in contact with other languages in the Americas. This book brings together scholars working on little-studied varieties (e.g., Venetian communities in Mexico and Baure communities in Bolivia), as well as researchers proposing new and challenging analyses on the origins and nature of more well-known contact languages (e.g., Papiamentu, Spanish in the US). The project is composed of four main sections, organized according to the type of sociohistorical scenario that characterizes the nature of the contact situation:(a) Spanish in contact with native languages; (b) Spanish in contact with coerced-migration languages; (c) Spanish in contact with free-migration languages; and (d)Spanish in contact with languages outside of Latin America (but still in the Americas).
The Afro-Bolivian Spanish Determiner Phrase: A Microparametric Account (Ohio State University Press, 2014). This study provides a syntactic description of the Afro-Bolivian Spanish determiner phrase. Afro-Bolivian Spanish is one of the many Afro-Hispanic dialects spoken across Latin America and, from a theoretical point of view, is rich in constructions that would be considered ungrammatical in standard Spanish. Yet these constructions form the core grammar of these less-prestigious, but equally efficient, syntactic systems. Because of the wide variety of their usages, the study of these contact varieties is particularly valuable in developing and refining theories of syntactic microvariation. This dialect presents phenomena that offer a real challenge to current linguistic theory. This book elaborates on the importance of enhancing a stronger dialogue between formal generative theory and sociolinguistic methodology, in line with recent work in the field of minimalist syntax. This study combines sociolinguistic techniques of data collection with generative models of data analysis to obtain more fine-grained, empirically testable generalizations.
Chota Valley Spanish (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2013). Chota Valley Spanish is an Afro-Hispanic language of Northern Ecuador spoken by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work on Jesuit sugarcane plantations during colonial times. Based on fieldwork research carried out in Choteño communities, the current book provides a linguistic description of this language by exploring several aspects of its lexicon, morphosyntax, phonetics and phonology. This work also assesses the origin of Chota Valley Spanish and draws attention to its implications for creole studies. In particular, this study suggests that Chota Valley Spanish was never a creole language since the sociodemographic conditions for a creole to emerge were not in place in colonial Chota Valley. In so showing, this work also pays close attention to the Jesuit enterprise in colonial Ecuador and to the broader role played by the Company of Jesus in shaping the Afro-Hispanic dialects of the Americas.
Current Formal Aspects of Spanish Syntax and Semantics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). This book is a compilation of articles on different aspects of Spanish grammar in the areas of current theoretical syntax and semantics. The issue brings together scholars working on some formal aspects of Spanish predicative complementation (e.g., dequeísmo), neuter demonstrative pronouns, the subject of psych verbs, the nature of non-verbal predication, and the internal structure of the Determiner Phrase (DP). Linguists and philologists with interests in Spanish and/or in other Romance languages are the main target audience. The book will appeal also to researchers and students specializing in generative grammar, semantics and in the syntax/semantics interface. It will also be of interest to historical linguists and dialectologists addressing theoretical/formal issues. The research in this book points to a cohesiveness in Spanish linguistics that lies in the integration of up-to-date empirically-based linguistic research with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of syntax and semantics.
Introducción al idioma afroboliviano: Una conversación con el awicho Manuel Barra (Plural Editores, 2011). En este libro se ofrece una descripción gramatical e histórica del español afroboliviano (EAB). Incluye un corpus escrito de entrevistas orales y un CD. Como sugiere el título, las entrevistas transcritas consisten en la historia de la vida del Sr. Manuel Barra, contada a través de sus propias palabras. Manuel Barra fue uno de los testimonios del peonaje forzado en Bolivia, que terminó en 1952, año de la Reforma Agraria. Era uno de los hablantes más ancianos del EAB. Las transcripciones de sus narrativas, grabadas durante los años 2008-2010, representan el primer documento escrito totalmente en esta variedad.