Dialectology and History

A Pan-Hispanic Projection of the Canarian Linguistic Variety

Abstract

Despite the small size of the Canarian Archipelago (some 7,000 square kilometres) and the low native population (a little over 2 million people), the Canarian language variety has become one of the Spanish dialects with the greatest Pan-Hispanic projection, exponentially surpassing the boundaries of its limited territory. This variety shows an array of distinct characteristics in all linguistic levels, which reflect how the various influences (Pre-Hispanic, Portuguese, and above all American) have shaped it by contributing phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic features that have made the Canarian dialect a central variety possessing peculiarities of Spanish found in many different countries.

My aim in this paper is to locate the Canarian dialect – incidentally one of the most studied – in the wider context of standard Spanish, while trying to show its Pan-Hispanic projection, a result of a accidental multiculturalism, but which does not diminish in the least its role as a marker of identity, notwithstanding constant interference from other varieties. For this purpose, I use a questionnaire compiled by renowned dialectologists, all of them specialists in this Spanish language variety.