Diana Andrea Giraldo Gallego

The main objective of my research project is to register Muisca linguistic elements in the Spanish spoken in the ancient Muisca territory. This area is located in the Departments of Cundinamarca and Boyacá, Colombia. Muisca or Chibcha was the language spoken by one of the indigenous communities that inhabited in Colombia and their contact with Spanish started in 1537 AD. This language was the so-called ‘lengua general’ and its extinction occurred during the 18^th century.

In spite of the importance of Muisca in Colombia, only few studies have been carried out for identifying its influence in the territory in which this language was once spoken. Early studies focused mainly on Bogotá D.C., and then, on some other cities based on the data collected for the Atlas lingüístico-etnográfico de Colombia (ALEC). A possible phonological influence due to Muisca substratum was once exposed by Rodríguez de Montes, but no other studies have confirmed or rejected her proposal.

This research project is a further development of my master’s thesis about lexical borrowing from Muisca into Spanish in which, besides loanwords, other linguistic features were identified: some loanwords have the alveolar lateral approximant [l], thus was proposed as a possible dialectal feature of this language. This phoneme is not included in the phonemic inventory of Muisca. Morpho-phonological varieties were recognized as chubas ~ rubas, chisacá ~ risacá, rucha ~ chuya, and chucha ~ runcho, these varieties show a ch ~ rr alternation that was proposed as a Muisca dialectal feature by Montes Giraldo. Other endings in some loanwords were identified as classifiers of this language: -ca, -che, qui, -quin/guin, -guy, -uba.

For data collection a written questionnaire is going to be implemented. This instrument is going to be divided in semantic fields: agriculture, environment, animals, food, family, human body, clothes. Towns selected for the application of the instrument are located in the ancient Muisca territory. Muisca or possible Muisca lexical elements are going to be selected according to the following criteria: referential, etymological, genetic, geographical, phonetic, historical, dialectological, and morphological.

This study will help not only to identify Muisca lexical borrowings and how they were adapted into Spanish, but to recognize other linguistic phenomena in this language. This research is embedded in the Språkkontakt project.

Giraldo works at the Department of Foreign Languages.