Peruvian Amazonian Spanish: linguistic variation, social meaning and identities

Abstract

Metalinguistic and metapragmatic comments are resources used to understand linguistic ideologies that underlie, shape and are shaped by language use and other social practices. These linguistic ideologies are crucial to understanding linguistic change and how identities are performed. This work is an exploration of the process of enregisterment and the way in which this process is perceived by educated participants from Iquitos (Peru). In the present study, I examine the sociolinguistic history of this region, adopting Silverstein’s notion of orders of indexicalities. First, I offer a brief historical background about the region and a review of the linguistic features that characterize the Spanish of Loreto. Then, I discuss the theoretical framework that guides the present study, and I provide a description of the data, the instruments of data collection and the data-collection process. Afterwards, I discuss respectively the reported role of others in the formation of present attitudes and the participants’ own attitudes towards their own variety. In the final section, I contextualize the findings in terms of Siverstein’s order of indexicalities and discuss the limitations of the study.