2026 Theses Bachelor's

Friars at the Linguistic Frontier: Shift-Induced Interference and the Pastoral Varieties of Maya and Quechua

Bryden, Sarah

This thesis in contact linguistics compares two historical cases of shift-induced interference: L2 acquisition of Yucatec Maya by Spanish friars in the early colonial period, and L2 acquisition of Quechua by the same demographic at the same time. Using a corpus of early-colonial texts (including mundane or legalistic genres, Spanish and Indigenous religious texts, esoteric manuscripts, and two new archival documents), I show that friars’ L2 Maya was morphosyntactically distinct from L1 Maya, while friars’ L2 Quechua was not. This thesis extends previous work on the lexicons of friars’ L2 Maya (called “Maya reducido”) and Quechua (called “Pastoral Quechua”). Tracing the morphosyntactic and lexical features of these two varieties through the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, I show that vernacular Maya and Quechua have retained the lexical innovations of Maya reducido and Pastoral Quechua, but have lost the morphosyntactic innovations.

Keywords: Linguistics; Historical Linguistics; Mexico; Peru; Quechua; Yucatec Maya; Mayan Languages