ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Spanish spoken in Santiago, Chile, and some of the effects that globalization, social dynamics, migration, and ethnicity have had on it. We first contextualize Santiago’s place on the national and global stage and then detail the particularizing features of Chilean Spanish, with emphasis on the high degree of sociolinguistic variation it manifests. We explore the attitudes of Santiago’s inhabitants toward their own and other varieties of Spanish, toward English, and toward concepts of linguistic correctness, before reviewing a series of key language issues. The relationship between the Mapuche people and the Spanish language in Chile is then examined. We trace the history of the Mapuches, with emphasis on their migratory movements to Santiago, and then move on to the main focus of this chapter: monolingual Mapuche Spanish and the impact that migration to Santiago has had on it. We review the main features of the Spanish of Mapudungun–Spanish bilinguals and then present the results of an original study of two of these features in Mapuches who speak only Spanish: the voicing and/or lenition of /p/.
