Variación lingüística en la documentación histórica canaria (ss. XVI-XVIII). A propósito de la colección Documentos para la historia lingüística de Hispanoamérica, vol. II

The article presents a historical corpus that has served as a basis for the analysis of the history of the Spanish language in the Canary Islands. Although it was published twenty-five years ago, it has not been analysed until now. The edition is situated in the new research trend that puts its focus on archival documentation and in which all kinds of documents are collected, overcoming the previous practices that had literary texts as references for the history of Spanish language. The texts belong to the collection Documentos para la historia lingüística de Hispanoamérica, vol. II, published in 2000 by the Royal Spanish Academy. The total of the 62 selected texts highlights the main trends in Spanish throughout the 16th to 18th centuries. The most outstanding feature is that of the seseo, which connects with the southern Spanish trends that expanded from the moment of the Canarian and American conquests. Other phenomena such as vowel hesitations, assimilations, dissimilations, morphological forms and some particularities of the lexicon are considered. It is concluded that a good part of the features described are characteristic of the general tendencies of the language, particularly in its southern and Atlantic aspects.