A Critical Examination of Linguistic Variation in Golden-Age Spanish

It has been received knowledge that Golden-Age Spanish underwent rapid change. Contending that this notion stems from lack of proper variation studies, this book reviews the concepts of change and variation in modern sociolinguistics and then examines Golden-Age Spanish in a new light. Using a pioneering approach, which combines linguistic works from 1492 to 1625 with contemporary literature, the process of comparison and microscopic contrastive analysis that permeates this work is carried out both within and between the two sources. This book essentially highlights linguistic continuity and demonstrates that, outside the confines of written norms, most of the so-called archaisms in Spanish during that period continued to be an active part of speakers' linguistic repertoire.