Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This study opens a window to the linguistic past and contributes to completing the landscape of the Spanish language in the oldest European settlement of the United States. The Spanish language has been present in the United States even before its inception as a nation, leaving behind a heritage trail of historic dialects in its territories. Even when most historical sociolinguistic studies tend to focus on the old Spanish of New Mexico and Louisiana’s “isleño”, it was Florida that first saw the development of the earliest Spanish dialects in the current United States.This work explores the dialects that dominated each wave and stage of settlement in Florida, focusing on the dialects of the geographic origin of its settlers. In doing so, we intend to recreate Floridian dialect and its sounds. We will discover how Floridian morphology, syntax, lexicon, and pragmatics were shaped by historical events deriving into Andalusian and Catalan dialect-dominated stages until its utter disappearance during the American Civil War. This study compiles a wide array of historical information, archival and census data, as well as other studies of language contact. Social, cultural, and regional factors for each period, as well as the element of covert prestige, may require special consideration in future sociolinguistic expansions. Overall, these elements allow us altogether to build a more accurate portrait of the oldest European language within the United States borderlands.