Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond

Bakhtin’s dialogical principle (DP) is a social theory of language that provides the right framework to characterize the Spanish language in the Americas (LAS) in intrinsic relation to the ‘mestizo’ (mixed) culture and identity that emerged from the biocultural contact resulting from the Spanish intrusion in the New World. I present an approach that uses the DP theory of the utterance , which meshes its constitutive extraverbal elements, interlocutors, chronotope , and theme , with the words and