Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador
Universidad de la Plata
Master’s Degree in Hispanic Lexicography, Master’s Degree in Educational Management and Leadership, research professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, recipient of the Aurelio Espinosa Pólit National Literature Prize. He has published two books of short stories and the lexicographic work “Dictionary of Ecuadorianisms with Citations.” He worked as a research fellow at the Ecuadorian Academy of Language on projects such as the New Grammar of Spanish, the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts, and the Dictionary of Americanisms.
Vitality of Ancestral Languages in Ecuadorian Andean Spanish
As is the case with diverse variants of Spanish worldwide, ancestral languages enrich Spanish by contributing to the expansion of its referential capacity in accordance with the various cultural realities in which its speakers are immersed. In the case of Ecuador, the thirteen ancestral languages have influenced Spanish across various linguistic levels, with the lexicon being the most productive. This study aims to determine the lexicon of Ecuadorian speech originating from ancestral languages that is present in written language. To achieve this, a corpus of 300 literary works and 2000 newspaper articles is utilized. This overview allows for the description of the Ecuadorian language as a variant with particular characteristics and the need for scientifically valid tools to study and comprehend it.