Chota Valley Spanish

Sandro Sessarego.

Chota Valley Spanish is an Afro-Hispanic language of Northern Ecuador spoken by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work on Jesuit sugarcane plantations during colonial time. Based on fieldwork research carried out in Choteño communities, the current book provides a linguistic description of this language by exploring several aspects of its lexicon, morphosyntax, phonetics and phonology. This work also assesses the origin of Chota Valley Spanish and draws attention to its implications for the study of Afro-Hispanic contact varieties in the Americas.

Sandro Sessarego is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He works primarily in the fields of contact linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax. He is the author of Introducción al idioma afroboliviano: Una conversación con el awicho Manuel Barra and The Afro-Bolivian Spanish Determiner Phrase. He is co-editor, with Melvin González-Rivera, of Current Formal Aspects of Spanish Syntax and Semantics.