Not One, but Several Amazonian Spanish Varieties

Abstract

Amazonian Spanish remains a relatively understudied reality. Based on two characteristic features of the speech of part of the population—intonation and syntactic alteration—a stereotype of the region’s speech has been constructed. This is little more than a joke, since the intonation is exaggerated and syllables are inverted, creating forms that do not actually exist in the region’s speech. Another problem is the assumption that Spanish is spoken in the same way throughout the Peruvian Amazon. This is related to the tendency toward simplification, such as the approach that divided Peruvian territory into three natural regions.