| Description:
Media Lengua (Spanish for "half language" or "in-between language") is a language spoken in Salcedo, about 100 km south of Quito, Ecuador, by about 1,000 people of Native American ancestry. It is usually classified as a mixed language as it combines Spanish vocabulary with a Quechua grammatical system, most conspicuously morphology. Most of its lexemes, especially almost all content words, are of Spanish origin, only adapted to Quechua phonology, while its morphology, syntax and some particles are Quechua.
It was discovered by the Dutch linguist Pieter Muysken during field work on Ecuadorian Quechua (also called Quichua). The origin of Media Lengua is in the 1920s, when young Quechua speakers from the highlands came to Quito as railway construction workers and, by this language, tried to build an identity of their own for themselves, coinciding neither with Spanish nor their native Quechua.
Along with Michif, Mednyj Aleut and Mbugu or Ma'a, Media Lengua (although not mentioned in Thomason & Kaufman 1998) is one of the few widely acknowledged examples of a "mixed language" in the conventional, narrow linguistic sense (that all of these names happen to start with an "M" makes for a..... full article at Wikipedia |
