Trends in the use of lexical indigenisms in Mexican texts: contributions from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA)

Abstract

The ways in which indigenous lexical items have been incorporated into the Spanish of America have been investigated by different means: through dictionaries, dialectal surveys and searches in different text types (fiction compared with non-fiction). This article investigates texts to detect the presence of indigenisms and to determine the possible trends by using the Corpus de Referencia del Espanol Actual (CREA 2015-0.1). To this end, an empirical research study was designed to complement Lope Blanch's investigation (1979) to recognize how indigenisms appear in the texts and to study the suitability of the CREA 2015-0.1 for this kind of research. The results reveal that 13.14% of the indigenisms are used in fiction, 7.05% of the indigenisms are used in non-fiction, 47.76% of the indigenisms are documented in both categories, and the rest do not appear. Our conclusions show the possible contribution of this database in determining the propensity of indigenisms in Mexican texts between 1975 and 2004.