Los límites de la lengua y los límites de la historia en los inicios de la lingüística hispanoamericana

Abstract

The history of linguistics and philology in Latin America has been described, since the first prestigious essays on the subject, as a history marked for a long time by a series of individual efforts that lacked the strength and institutional continuity necessary, until the late twentieth century, to think of the development of a field of linguistic studies proper. This paper aims to explore one of those early stages, based on a review of the contributions with which two fundamental pioneers in the field – Rodolfo Lenz and Federico Hanssen – began their scientific endeavours in Chile at the end of the nineteenth century, and its relationship with later developments, following the arrival of the Madrid school on the continent. The working hypothesis that we would like to explore in this case, from the perspective of the history of the language sciences in this region, is that this trajectory of linguistic research on Latin American Spanish (and its neighbouring languages) can often be read as a way of dealing with language boundaries in history. These boundaries concern both the place of Spanish among the Romance languages, the historical unity, and possible future of the Spanish language in America, and its permeability in the face of contact.