Spanish Spoken in the Canary Islands: Mestizaje and pan-Hispanic Projection of a Small Dialect

Abstract

It is surprising that, even though the linguistic modality of Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands is the dialect with the smallest territorial extension and the lowest speakers in its own territory, it is, paradoxically, possesses an extraordinary blend of influences, with characteristic elements at all linguistic levels from varied origins but perfectly structured, and a projection that goes beyond its island borders, settling in large areas of the Americas, with such a close influence that it has turned it, like few others, into a two-way dialect; this is demonstrated by the great parallelism with Caribbean varieties, such as, for example, Venezuelan Spanish. It is not surprising, then, that Canarian Hispanic is, in all likelihood, the most and best-studied Hispanic dialect, a circumstance that justifies the existence of an autonomous and decentralized institution: the Academia Canaria de la Lengua, an institution that has contributed to its standardization in its mere twenty-five years of existence.