ABSTRACT
Although in some places contact between Spanish and the languages spoken in America continues, in Uruguay, no indigenous language has survived. This chapter discusses the impact of indigenous languages on Uruguayan Spanish. It describes the impact of Guarani on Uruguayan Spanish, and displays a snapshot of sociolinguistic studies on the vitality of some Guarani loanwords. Regrettably, those in contact with Charruas during the 18th and 19th centuries only give subjective opinions about their language. By the 19th century, the predominant language in inland Uruguay was Guarani, mainly in the lands disputed by Spain and Portugal. Spanish contact with the indigenous American languages is 500 years old. Consequently, the history of Spanish in the New World forms part of the history of the Spanish language. Spanish borrowed words from Amerindian languages and vice versa, but the phenomenon of lexical borrowing between indigenous languages was also a common practice.
