Open AccessLanguage Encounters: Toward a Better Comprehension of Contact‑Induced Lexical Change in Colonial Nahuatl
Author(s) -
Justyna Olko
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
politeja
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2391-6737
pISSN - 1733-6716
DOI - 10.12797/politeja.12.2015.38.04
Subject(s) - nahuatl , linguistics , language contact , colonialism , indigenous , neologism , language change , focus (optics) , meaning (existential) , comprehension , history , sociology , psychology , ecology , philosophy , physics , archaeology , biology , optics , psychotherapist
The extensive corpus of colonial Nahuatl texts lights on almost every sphere of colonial life and cross‑cultural interactions between the Europeans/Spaniards and the indigenous world. This corpus contains rich language data related to contact‑induced change that reveal a simultaneous, prolonged use of neologisms and loanwords, a widespread “Nahuatlization” of foreign terms as well as adoption of Spanish ideas and cultural stereotypes. The linguistic phenomena discussed in the present paper focus on lexical change, neologization, meaning change, borrowing and the creation of calques. These language innovations reveal the nuances of the complex process of cross‑cultural translation, the receptivity of European influence, the domestication of the new and the survival of traditional language resources.