Origen etimológico y variación lingüística del arabismo ojalá en el español de las dos orillas

The present article studies the linguistic variation of the phraseological loan ojalá in peninsular Spanish and in the variety of Spanish spoken in America. For this purpose, the article presents an overview of its lexicographical, grammatical and pragmatic treatment, as well as the main contributions that have defended its classification into one or another grammatical category. In the sociolinguistic context that concerns us, marked by Arabic-Romance interference and representative phenomena of ethnolinguistic acculturation and hybridization, the documented list of variants and subvariants (e. g., ajo(a)lá, ajolai, ajollá, ajualá, ajuola, anjolá, aojalá, enjualá, ojalai, ojalás, ojalay, ojolá, ojolai, ojualá, ojualán) provides evidence that linguistic variation takes place at all levels of the system from the phonetic to the lexical level. Regarding the diatopic distribution of the peninsular variety of this Arabism, the documentary sources especially attest to its presence and vitality in Western Ibero-Romance to be later imported into the American variety. However, unlike other words of Arabic origin used in certain European languages ​​as interlinguistic synonyms, the pan-Hispanic Arabism ojalá did not spread beyond the Peninsula in Romance times, except in its Canarian version.