A descriptive analysis of Castellano loanwords into Muylaq'Aymara

This article investigates the linguistic processes involved when loanwords from Andean Spanish (Castellano) are incorporated into Muylaq’Aymara, a variety of Aymara spoken in the southern Peruvian highlands. The research draws on extensive fieldwork data to document and analyze patterns of adaptation across lexical, morphological, and semantic dimensions.

Our analysis reveals several significant patterns in how loanwords are integrated into Aymara. Semantically, borrowed terms often undergo transformations including meaning expansion (where the loanword takes on additional meanings not present in the source language), meaning restriction (where only a subset of the original meaning is retained), or other semantic shifts.

Morphologically, we examine how Spanish loanwords adapt to Aymara’s agglutinative structure, documenting cases where grammatical categories are reanalyzed—for instance, Spanish plurals being reinterpreted as singular nouns in Aymara, or shifts in grammatical gender assignment. The article presents numerous examples illustrating these phenomena drawn from natural language data.

This research contributes to our understanding of language contact in the Andean region and provides insights into the cognitive and linguistic processes that govern loanword adaptation more broadly. The findings have implications for theories of language contact and may inform language revitalization efforts by documenting how Aymara has historically incorporated foreign elements while maintaining its structural integrity.