The nature of language history

Almost all histories of highly standardized languages, including those of Spanish, treat the development of the language concerned as if that development were linear. That is to say, such histories adopt the convenient fiction that there has been an unbroken chain of events leading from the earliest phase examined down to the present. There are excellent presentational reasons for adopting this approach, and it has been adopted in this book.

However, there are good reasons for claiming that language history is not linear, but rather that it proceeds from one condition of variation, through other such conditions, down to the inherently varied present state of affairs (see Penny 1998). In particular, I have claimed elsewhere (Penny 2000) that the history of Spanish is particularly discontinuous, since the present-day language has emerged from a series of dialect-contact situations (e.g. in tenth-century Burgos, in twelfth-century Toledo, in thirteenth-century Seville, in sixteenth-century Madrid, not to mention sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico City, Lima, etc.). At each stage, the creation of a new community, made up principally of immigrants who spoke noticeably different varieties of Peninsular Romance, led to a process of koineization: the creation of a new variety (a koiné) which typically preferred the linguistically simpler variants that were available to the community at large.