What records tell: writing the history of Colonial Chilean Spanish

Abstract

While increasingly the concept of ‘Atlantic Spanish language’ has been gaining strength as characterising definition of a type of speech with common isoglosses, it is also true that, within the Latin American context, colonial Chile has not enjoyed the same attention drawn to other countries. Training in paleography and diplomatics, once considered ‘auxiliary sciences of history’, but which are also part of the field of philology, has not been a minor problem. Knowledge of historical sociolinguistics for understanding the distinctive role of the speech community in the development of the Spanish language
of colonial Chile, is essential if we are to account not only for the ‘rules’ governing linguistic change in our dialectal variant through time, but more Importantly, to recover memory. In this article I try to review the works that are the basis for this historical sociolinguistics of the Spanish language in Chile, with some recommendations that can serve as a starting point when going over the colonial linguistic history, as well as the difficulties encountered and how, from my experience, they can be solved.