Miguel Ángel Quesada Pacheco

University of Bergen, Norway

Non-dominant varieties of Spanish: the Central-American case

The Central American nations, comprising Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama, have over the last years experienced a considerable increase on studies about the Spanish language spoken there (cf. Quesada 2013). These studies can be divided into two broad categories. The first category has to do with corpus linguistics or field work for collecting data meant to be used for future analysis and can be subdivided into two groups: a) the linguistic atlases for each of the countries: Belize (Cardona 2013), Guatemala (Utgård 2006 and 2009), El Salvador (Azcúnaga 2012), Honduras (Hernández 2012), Nicaragua (Chavarría & Rosales 2010), Costa Rica (Quesada 2010) and Panama (Tinoco 2010; Cardona 2012); and b), publication of national or local dictionaries (for example Romero 2005 for El Salvador, Quesada Pacheco 2015 for Costa Rica and Arellano 2009 for Nicaragua). The second category represents interpretive works of the Spanish spoken in this part of the Americas; i. e. scientific analysis of any of the levels of language, both within dialectology and sociolinguistics, some of them within language history or ethno-linguistics, and many of them by means of using the data collected on field work (for example Rosales (2007), Cardona (2010a and 2010b), Utgård (2006, 2009 and 2010), Azcúnaga (2010), Hernández (2010), Rosales (2010), Quesada & Vargas (2010).

Nevertheless, and in contrast to countries like Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile or Spain, Central American countries are very little known linguistically, and a lot of stereotypes domain the panorama (for example, to believe that Central American Spanish is a dialectal area). Needless to say, these countries have not had the economic or cultural power to export their varieties into other countries; when this has happened, though, as for literature is concerned, the Spanish language represented in books (Miguel Angel Asturias, Rubén Darío, Gioconda Belli and many more) is almost always and with few exceptions, standard Spanish.

In this paper, attention will be paid to describing the most remarkable features of the Spanish language spoken in Central America (vowel system, consonant system, address pronouns, verbal characteristics, etc.) in order to show how difficult it is to identify the Spanish of the Isthmus as a whole, as well as to analyze the ideas or attitudes other Spanish speaking nations have about the Spanish spoken here.