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date: 05 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter offers an overview of the languages with which Spanish has entered into contact in the course of its history. As is to be expected, most contact-induced changes in standard Spanish are found in the lexicon, although some derivational suffixes of foreign origin have also become productive. Spanish also underwent a few contact-induced morphosyntactic changes. Spanish’s sister-languages in the Romance family (including French, Catalan, Portuguese, and Italian), and their shared ancestor Latin, are by some stretch the biggest donors, although English, Basque, Celtic, Germanic and especially Arabic are also notable donors, and some of these loans have replaced previously inherited items of Latin origin.

Keywords: Spanish, contact-induced change, lexical borrowing, morphosyntactic borrowing, loanword, Latin, pre-Roman, Arabic, English, Ibero-Romance

Miriam Bouzouita

Miriam Bouzouita is Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the Linguistics Department of Ghent University. She has also taught at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London. She is active in several research areas, such as Hispanic philology, historical linguistics, dialectology and formal linguistics (Dynamic Syntax). She has published on the development of clitic pronouns, left periphery phenomena, the Latin influence in Biblical translations, and spatial adverbial expressions.

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