Women’s letters in American colonial documents

Authors

  • Mariano Franco Figueroa Universidad de Cádiz

Abstract

We base this paper on the linguistic study of seven letters selected from the Archivo General de Indias. Their interest resides in the signature of their writers, in this case women, who answer their relatives about their move to the New World. The analysis of the linguistic, graphemic, phonetic, grammatical and lexical phenomena, shows variants of less formal records and in many cases attributable to the poor cultural level of their scribes, as well as to the possible connotations of style that the  feminine condition explains. The textual typology follows the intimist structure of  these missives between relatives, but it reveals contrastive expressions and uses from a sociolinguistic perspective, with preferences in the idiomatic resources of the women immersed in American colonial emigration.

Keywords:

American Spanish, history of the language, variety of records