Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics

Until the early 19th century, the letter <x> was a common representation of the voiceless velar fricative /x/ ( Quixote , brúxula ). Despite the Royal Spanish Academy’s (RAE) 1815 elimination of <x> for /x/, it has survived in a number of Mexican indigenous toponyms and their derivatives as well as in a handful of Spanish anthroponymic variants. Drawing on diatopic, diachronic demographic data, this paper traces the retention of vestigial <x> in six anthroponymic variants: the