DOI: 10.22363/2686-8199-2020-7-291-296

NATIONAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY OF THE URUGUAYAN NATIONAL VARIANT OF THE

Vyacheslav V. Tkachev Peoples’ Friendship University of (RUDN University) Moscow, Russia e-mail: [email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-3168-958X

Abstract. Studies on the problems of Spanish variability have become extremely popular nowadays. The study of the nature and causes of differentiation in Spanish-American speech is an essential Spanish dialectology task. Usually, one talks about Argentine Spanish as “rioplatense”, an adjective that takes it name from the areas adjacent to the River Plate. However, this is a mistake, as the River Plate also forms part of Uruguayan territory. Therefore, when speaking of , one refers to the idioms that are typically used in as in , two brother countries as far as customs and traditions are concerned. The differences between each variant are negligible and are indistinguishable for Spanish speakers from other places. The Uruguayan variant is very similar to the variant (because of its relationship with the port of Buenos Aires). However, it does have some differences con the latter, and talk of homogeneity does not apply in this case. The same applies to the Spanish spoken in Buenos Aires and spoken in , which sound practically the same but have slight underlying differences. The manuscript analyzes the history of the Spanish language formation in Uruguay as the Uruguayan national variant of the Spanish language, differences from “Pyrenean Spanish.” and the influence of factors on the language. The article also clarifies the phonetic, lexical, and grammatical features of the language. Special attention is paid to the absence of the 2nd person plural personal pronoun “vosotros”, which is the key difference between the Uruguayan national variant of Spanish and other Spanish variants. Our research has shown that the Latin American version of the Spanish language's uniqueness lies in the ability to maintain its authenticity in the multilingual environment of Latin America, keep and transmit cultural realities from generation to generation. And, at the same time, develop with modern trends in unison. The nature of the Latin American variant determines its identity. It opens up prospects for further comparative studies of the Spanish language's geographical features at different levels of the system. Keywords: Uruguayan national variant of the Spanish language, Spanish, phonetic, grammatical, Portuñol

291 Introduction Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, and the problem of its external variability deserves special attention. There are 20 countries spoken Spanish. Uruguay borders Brazil to the North, Argentina to the West, and the Atlantic Ocean to the East and South. The land borders are 1,564 km long, and the coastline is 660 km long. The country was named after the river of the same name Uruguay, whose name, in turn, comes from the language of the Guarani Indians and translates as “river of colorful birds”. A slight influence of In some cases, this is even to the point of bilingualism, which is commonly known as “Portuñol.” and is similar to what happened in areas on the Argentina-Brazil border. It is true that the Italian colonization influence exists in Uruguay, but almost exclusively in the capital. In the rest of the country, there is more of an effect of Brazilian/Portuguese idioms. It dates back to the Portuguese colonization period, primarily because of and Portugal's constant disputes over the borders. Later, the Treaty of Tordesillas was created in order to divide the land belonging to the two kingdoms fairly. It was at this time that the Portuguese founded Colonia del Sacramento. Starting then, many disputes began between the Portuguese and the Spanish and between the Spanish and the indigenous peoples living on the eastern side of the country until the fight for independence began (1825). Borrowed vocabulary and influence The sub-variant of Rocha has a slight influence of Brazilian Portuguese. In the Uruguayan cities of Rivera and Artigas, on the border with Brazil, there is a mixed Portuguese-Spanish known as portunol — a similar phenomenon is observed in the Argentine-Brazilian border. The influence of native American languages on the Uruguayan dialect is small. The languages of the charrua, minuan, Chana, boan, Genoa, and Guarani Indian tribes in Uruguay disappeared almost without a trace. These languages' words remained only in the names of many toponyms and autochthonous representatives of the plant and animal world. The influence of European languages on the Uruguayan dialect, on the contrary, is very significant. It was associated with the mass immigration of non-Spanish-speaking Europeans to the country in the 20th century. The influence of Italian and the languages and of the Spanish provinces is particularly noticeable. Several gallicisms (liceo, bulevar, chofer) have taken root, which is not common in other countries of the region. Italian loanwords are widely used in gastronomic and musical subjects.

292 The Purpose of the study is to study the peculiarities of the Spanish language in Uruguay. Methodology The problem of the variability of language units has been studied for decades. There are many works aimed at investigating specific aspects of variability. The classical works of the Russian and foreign linguistics in this area should include researches by Shuchardt (1950), Zhirmunsky (1954), Canfield (1959), Elizaincín (1992), Hensey (1993), Nevokshanova (2011), and others. N.M. Firsova (2007) and V.G. Stepanov (1963) investigated the problems of variation in Spanish studies. To understand the Uruguay national variant of the Spanish language's national and cultural identity, we used the functional approach, comparative method, analytical description of language facts, and global Internet application. Findings Uruguay's official language is Spanish, but Italian influences the pronunciation, and the dialect of Uruguay and Argentina is also called rioplatense dialect or Castellano (castellano). It is characterized by articulating combinations of “” and similar to [sh] and the presence of about 9,000 words that are incomprehensible to Spanish-speaking people from other countries. Most residents of the capital speak Spanish and other European languages. Approximately half of the capital's population belongs to the Roman Catholic Church. Methodist and Anglican faiths are also common. In , the surrounding areas, and the entire southern zone of Uruguay and the dialect of Buenos Aires, the classic Castilian “tú” (you) is not used. The pronoun “vos “is used instead, and when it is used, the verb is also conjugated in an unusual form for classical Castilian — “vos tenés” (you have, you have) instead of the Castilian “tú tienes”. In some cases, “tú” is used, but the verb is in the form corresponding to “vos” — “tú tenés”. The use of “tu” instead of “vos”. In Uruguay, the personal pronoun “tú”, similarly to “vos”. Also, both pronouns share the same verb conjugation: “tú tenés; tú sos/vos tenés; vos sos”. In other words, it is normal for an Uruguayan to create phrases using one verb form or another, interchangeably. In contrast, the use of the pronoun “tú” is expected in the area bordering Brazil in the Department of Rocha and in some regions of Maldonado and Lavallejo, which is presumably because of the population of these regions dates back to immigrants from Castile. Another theory claims

293 that this is due to the influence of the dialect of Brazilian Portuguese used in the neighboring Brazilian province of Rio Grande do Sul. The dialect of this province is archaic and uses “tú”, while the word “você” (analogous to “vos”) is used in modern Portuguese. is a sub-variant of Spanish rioplatense or Castilian rioplatense, which is a dialect variety of Spanish spoken partly from Argentina and Uruguay. Its use extends to the Rio de basin, Argentina and Uruguay, and other surrounding regions. Focusing on the agglomerations of Gran Buenos Aires, Rosario, Montevideo, , and La Plata, the region's most important population centers, it extends its cultural influence to geographically remote regions, especially through audio-visual media, in which it is the standard lecto for Argentina and Uruguay. In regions with close ties to other countries, such as the borders with , Bolivia, , or Brazil, where the influence of other dialects of Spanish, Quichua, Guarani, and Portuguese, as in the case of Northern Uruguay, it is noticeable that they merge with them, creating different variants. However, in areas with relatively stable populations before the migration waves of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is the most common Spanish form in the region. Also, there is a dialect in Uruguayan national variant of the Spanish language-Portunol, which has Portuguese influence on Uruguayan Spanish. Portunol, or portunol (Spanish: Portugal, port. Portunhol, also known as Spanish: fronterizo, port. fronteiriço, lit. “borderline” or misturado letters. “mixed”) — a mixed spoken language on the borders of the closely related Spanish and Portuguese languages (Latin America, especially Northern Uruguay, Brazil, and in — in Portugal). Portunol is the Lingua Franca, or a simplified mixture of two languages that allows people who speak Spanish or Portuguese and do not speak another language to communicate with each other. If the media is one of the languages that will try to speak another language, there are often “interference” from the native language, which causes the phenomenon of “switching codes.” Since Portuguese and Spanish are close , such dialogues can be conducted relatively freely. These languages have almost identical syntactic structures and similar vocabulary, which means that a single macro occurs when mixed. For example, the phrase “en el hueco de la noite longa e langue” illustrates code-switching between the Spanish article la and the Portuguese noun “noite”. Language contact between Spanish and Portuguese is the result of long — term contact between the two languages in border regions and multilingual trade Conditions such regions include the border areas between

294 Portugal and Spain on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as areas between Portuguese-speaking Brazil and Spanish-speaking neighboring countries, such as Uruguay and Paraguay. Since portunol occurs spontaneously due to the accidental mixing of Spanish and Portuguese, it can be very diverse; there is No single dialect or standard of portunol. However, as a rule, the presence of Spanish in portunol is more substantial. In recent years, portunol has begun to appear in everyday speech and other areas. It has become a literary medium, especially in Uruguay and Brazil. Maria Jesus Fernandez Garcia describes it as “a linguistic break from the real language.” However, it suggests that the literature only occasionally provides an accurate representation of portunol, and that authors often choose only some of the characteristic features of portunol. One of the influential literary works written in portunol is Mar paraguayo by the Brazilian author Wilson Bueno. The excerpt below shows a mix of Spanish and Portuguese in this novel. Latin Americans are more likely than Spaniards to use suffixes in words, the main ones being –ico/ica and –ito/ita. For example, platita (money) is derived from the word “plata”, ranchito (ranch) from “rancho”, ahorita (now) from “ahora”, and prontito (soon) comes from “pronto”. Also, some nouns have a different gender than in classical Spanish. For example, the word actor in Spain is masculine and pronounced comediante. In Latin America — comedianta feminine, and in Spain la lamada — feminine, Latin American countries ell lamado — masculine. New words are formed by using the root of non-Spanish origin and adding suffixes and prefixes to it. It is based on typical American concepts adapted to a specific situation and nationality. Word-forming particles or suffixes are added to them, which give them a completely different meaning: –ada, –ero, –ear, –menta. All of them have their history, “nationality.” and meaning. For example, the suffix –menta is actively used in the word-formation of the Venezuelan dialect. It has a generalizing meaning: papelamnta — a pile of papers, perramenta — a pack of dogs. The same meaning has the suffix –io for Uruguay and Argentina — tablerio — a pile of stones. But the suffix — ear –­ creates new verbs or American nouns: tanguear — to dance the , jinitear — to ride a horse, and other examples. Spanish in is more mobile, lively, and developing than its European counterpart. There is a constant replenishment of vocabulary, the formation of new concepts and phrases due to the population's movement on the mainland, and the arrival of immigrants.

295 Discussion This study shows that the Uruguayan national version of the Spanish language has many differences from the Pyrenean Spanish language in Spain. The use of the analytical method of research helped discover the features of “Uruguayan Spanish” to analyze the Spanish language's phonetic, grammatical, and lexical structure in Uruguay. Also, the study results can serve as the creation of textbooks for the study of “Uruguayan.” the creation of dictionaries, etc.

R e f e r e n c e s Shuchardt, G. 1950. On the classification of romance dialects. Selected articles on linguistics 1: 122–140. Zhirmunsky, V.M. 1954. On some problems of linguistic geography. The issue of Linguistics 4: 17–25. Canfield, I. 1959.The Spanish pronunciation in Americas, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 128 p. Elizaincín, A. 1992. Dialectos en contacto. Español y portugués en España y América. Arca, Montevideo, 250 p. Hensey, F. 1993. “Portuguese and/or ‘Fronterizo’ in northern Uruguay”, en TRLP, V, pp. 433–452. Nevokshanova, A.A. 2011. Features of the modern language situation in Argentina and their reflection in legislative and didactic texts, Abstract of the thesis for the degree of PhD in Philology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Mocsow, 2011, 24 p. Firsova, N.M. 2007. Modern Spanish in Spain and Latin America, AST: East-West, Moscow, 352 p. Stepanov, G.V. 1963. Spanish in th countries of Latin America, Publishing house of literature in foreign languages, Moscow, 202 p.

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