![]() García-García found a different story in Chile. In Argentina, for example, vos is used almost exclusively as the second-person singular pronoun (“you”), as it is in Uruguay, Paraguay, Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and to a lesser extent in other Spanish-speaking countries. Their usage varies across time and space. One example aimed to quantify the frequency of the Spanish pronoun vos as compared with tú, both pronouns meaning “you.” In his study, García-García examined the changing use of pronouns in written works. ![]() Unlike Portugal, Spain introduced the printing press and universities to its colonies in the Americas in the 16th century, meaning that Spanish was open to local influences and piecemeal evolution over a more gradual period. In Spanish America, however, rapid transformation of this sort was less common, as the colonies typically had more liberties regarding printing presses and educational institutions. “In Brazil, there was a sudden shift in written language that coincided with the country gaining independence from Portugal in 1822 and correlating with increased local autonomy in printing and education,” said García-García, who is a member of the Digital Humanities Focal Group. The changes, however, are not uniform across the Spanish-speaking Americas, and instead he found that the “hybridization” and evolution of language varied from place to place.ĭrawing on his past work on changes in Brazilian Portuguese, García-García also noted intriguing differences between the two languages. That process, he noted, has led to a Spanish that has progressively changed ever since the language first arrived in the Americas. “My new data show that Spanish on the Iberian Peninsula was much more resistant to change over time when compared to Spanish in the Americas, where – since colonization – Spanish from Spain has come into contact with local, indigenous and hybrid influences.” “I wanted to study language evolution through data found in written work to add historical depth to how, where and when languages changed,” he said. To answer the question, Cuauhtémoc García-García, a graduate student in Iberian and Latin American cultures, analyzed 900 years’ worth of texts in over a quarter of a million volumes. Map shows the frequency of the use of the Spanish pronoun vos as opposed to tú in Latin America.
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