This article focuses on the use of contact features as social indexes in a Quechua-influenced variety of Spanish in central Bolivia. I suggest that context of use is important in producing social meaning, and
indeed that context can redefine the indexical relationship between any particular sociolinguistic variable and its social referent or referents (Eckert 2008; Silverstein 2003). Spanish-Quechua contact
features, acting as part of a system or pattern of enregistered features, do not have a single indexical meaning. Rather, their meaning is built through contrast to or congruence with the expected forms of speech for a speaker or group (Agha 2007; Babel 2011). These expected forms of speech are related to a listener’s personal experience with the speaker over time, and with their conceptions of the types of speech that members of certain groups engage in. I argue that speakers form expectations about typical distributions of linguistic features, but that the interpretations of these patterns are highly context dependent and produced through microlevel interactional dynamics. Through these
types of social negotiations, we can observe a system that produces meaning at a variety of scales and over a variety of dimensions, as part of a constantly shifting mosaic of linguistic performance.
Keywords:
Bolivian Spanish, Andean Spanish, indexicality, enregisterment, language contact, context
Babel, A. (2015). The role of context in interpreting linguistic variables. Boletín De Filología, 49(2), Pág. 49 – 85. Retrieved from https://revistachilenahumanidades.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/35816
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