First indications of normative and diatopical variation from colonial Mexico (1734)

Abstract

The Baratillo is an important New Spanish corpus for its thematically varied content, thanks to the author’s cultural diversity and his satirical focus on colonial administration and the degradation that he witnessed in Mexican society at that time. But it is this work’s linguistic aspect that is of particular interest: analysis of the text reveals a wealth of information, as do the author’s sharp observations on the normative and dialectical variety of American and European Spanish, the news of which this article frames with observations that other Enlightenment thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic made on the subject.