Recently, linguistics has been a tendency to study the problems of bilingualism. Much attention has been paid to examining individual linguistic phenomena in a comparative aspect, in synchronic and diachronic terms. Unfortunately, studies of the linguistic situation in the Caribbean are primarily limited to the analysis of the phonetic features of the national variants of Spanish compared with the Iberian and the description of Anglicisms in these variants. In this connection, a comprehensive study of the formation of national variants of Spanish becomes practically and theoretically significant and valuable.
The Puerto Rican national variant of Spanish has some peculiarities on the phonetic, morpho-syntactic, and lexical levels. Some words in the Puerto Rican version of Spanish are of African origin: gandul, malanga (tuñillo), mondongo (sopadecallos) (Paffey 2021). It is worth noting that people aged 55 years most often use Africanisms in speech. Therefore, it can be said that grandparents operate Africanism in their addresses, an example of which is given above. Close contact with English has naturally played its part in forming the modern Spanish language. The situation is complicated because English is gradually moving from business establishments to Puerto Rican homes, where children from a young age begin to use many Anglicisms under the influence of electronic games and new technologies (Paffey 2021). For this reason, in every family, the more youthful generation uses many Anglicisms, while the grandparents prefer using other borrowings. Moreover, people use different registers to describe the same everyday situations. This is especially evident in the behavior of young people who use Americanisms, while their parents are inclined to express their thoughts using Africanisms.
At the same time, the national Spanish development in Argentina is determined by extra-linguistic factors, including the country’s political, economic, geographical, and social situation. The peculiarities and originality of Argentine Spanish depend on the social differentiation of the population, which is due to the presence of monolingual, bilingual receptive, and semi-speaking communes and cantons and memory keepers. The formation of Spanish in Argentina is mainly influenced by local language groups, in particular Quechua and Tupi GuaranĂ, due to the numerical superiority of the population speaking these languages. The principal parts of speech that are subject to variation in Argentine Spanish are the pronoun, the noun, the adverb, the verb, and the functionary words (Marchman et al., 2020). The main semantic processes in Argentinean Spanish are narrowing meaning, broadening the definition, shifting importance, and emerging connotations. The syntactic constructions of Argentinean Spanish are characterized by a particular valency and by the specific collocation of the corresponding sentence members (Marchman et al., 2020). The process of globalization is reflected in Argentinean Spanish mainly at the lexical level and is expressed through borrowings.
Language acts as a means of communication and interacts with culture through various complex relationships. Among the critical consequence of the facilitation of diverse cultures is borrowing lexical units, which simultaneously is a particular phase or stage in adopting values. As a result of the growing number of contacts within language groups, an active adoption of vocabulary that describes all kinds of objects of nature and cultural phenomena becomes visible. There are some national differences among the various users of the Spanish language, especially among speakers of dialects and sociolects. The national Spanish language differs in many respects from one country to another. Under specific natural, economic and ethnocultural conditions, it has been enriched by new words and turns and peculiar semantic changes.
References
Marchman, V. A., BermĂșdez, V. N., Bang, J. Y., & Fernald, A. (2020). Off to a good start: Early Spanishâlanguage processing efficiency supports. Spanish language academy.
Paffey, D. (2021). State-appointed institutions: authority and legitimacy in the Spanish-speaking World. Spanish language academy.