Llanero Spanish
The Llanero Spanish is a variety of Spanish spoken in the Llanos region of Colombia and Venezuela. It is characterized by the mixing of elements from Old Spanish with indigenous elements.
Features
Phonetics
Characteristic features of Llanero Spanish include yeísmo, rhoticism, and final /r/ dropping infinitives.Llanero Spanish is also characterized by the articulation of the implosive /s/, the aspirated /s/, and /s/ deletion as well. Prevocalic aspiration in place of /s/ can also occur. The phoneme is even aspirated, like most of the rest of Colombia and Venezuela.
Intervocalic stops such as /b/, /d/, and /g/ weaken or disappear in llanero speech.
The dialect preserves the sound of the written "h" where other dialects have dropped this consonant. It is a feature more seen in Venezuela, Arauca and Casanare
Grammar
Llanero Spanish suppresses or weakens the final "-s" of plural nouns, loj padrino.Llanero Spanish also has a similar nominal composition to costeño dialects, e.g., pativoltiao.
Formation of past composite of subjunctive with the verb “ser”, e.g.: “Si no fuera sido por Guadalupe Salcedo…”.
Lexicon
Some lexical forms of costeño origin registered in the region are: “cautivar”, “concha”, “pollino”, and “yerna”.It also has contributions from Western Colombian as “hamero”, “choclo”, or “rabipelao”.
Substrates and contributors
Indigenous inheritance
Perhaps the most distinguishing quality of Llanero Spanish is its Indigenous inheritance.Many indigenous terms are often incorporated into Llanero speech, including:
- The names of regional plants, such as cumare, moriche, mapora, suy, yaray, bototo, etc.
- The names of indigenous cultural objects adopted by the Creole, such as chiramo, budare, mapire, chirama 'catumare, corota, etc.;
- The indigenous foods adopted into the Creole cuisine, such as majule , catibía, etc.
Internal development
Example of how the operation of the language in the peculiar conditions of Los Llanos will produce more or less specific facts is the reorganization of certain lexical microsystems. Throughout the region of Casanare “mirar” has advanced on the semantic field of “ver” almost disappeared from ordinary speech to this verb “Entonces miró el presidente Rojas Pinilla que el Llano era una gran belleza”, “¿Él no está por aquí? – No, no lo he mirao”; “Yo ya no miro pa’ trabajar esta cosa”; and the same phenomenon is starting to affect the couple “oír – escuchar” in which the latter tends to absorb at first.Is also typical of Los Llanos the classification of the grocery grown musaceae in three groups: plantains, bananas and topochos; the great importance in the life of the Llanero has this last variety makes form to it a special class.
The indigenous influence also appears in an indirect and mediated way, not in aboriginal languages, but rather because of characteristics specialties of coexistence of native and indigenous communities, characteristics that come to be very indicative of relationships among these communities, that is, between the silent struggle that continues to develop between them, phenomenas characterized by the concepts that the Creole has respect to indigenous: “tunebo” is "ranger", “guajibo”is too shy or reclusive '"; and in Puerto López, a saying that could well explain alone the struggles between the Llaneros and the Indians who caused commotion in the Colombian community was heard: "'Neither donkey is beast' 'or Indian is people', or cassava serves for provision”.
And voices of traditional Hispanic roots only common in Los Llanos or used it with a peculiar sense are, among others: “el cerro”, “cachilapero”, "cámara', “camarita”, “camazo”, “caramera”, 'guate' ", “guafa”, “magalla”, “pompo”, “saquero”, "soropo" "ensoropao" etc., etc.