Processes of lexical americanization in the history of Salvadorian Spanish: Diego de Palacio’s "Carta-relación" as example

Abstract

One of the most relevant aspects of the history of Latin American Spanish may be the americanization that this language undergoes when it arrives to America, in order to transform it in a useful tool to express American reality. In the case of lexicon, this adaptation takes place through two different strategies: the incorporation of loanwords from American languages or the semantic modification of Spanish lexical items. Both processes happen very soon and they are found not only in creoles’ writings, but also in Peninsular emigrants’ ones. This paper aims to describe these processes as they appear in an official document that Diego Garcia de Palacio writes at the end of 16th. century from nowadays Salvadorian region. Its main goal is not only to verify the use of both strategies in this corpus, but also to point out the usage preferences that the author shows in his text.