Discourse traditions and the history of American Spanish: Social settings, contacts, ideologies and challenges

From the works of Peter Koch and Wulf Oesterreicher to the present, the concept of DTs has had an unusual diffusion and acceptance (cf. ↗7 International diffusion of the discourse traditions model; ↗4 Discourse traditions and the historicity of language: discourse traditional knowledge and discourse universes; ↗23 Discourse traditions in the history of European Spanish). There is practically general consensus today on its usefulness. However, there are still fields in which the reach of the notion needs to be further explored. One of them is the history of American Spanish. This chapter offers a general and introductory approach to the subject and points out new research paths. Although the chapter focuses broadly on American Spanish, most of the references are centered on Peru, for two main reasons: (a) Peru shares with all of Spanish America the same TDs that irradiated during the colonial period, but (b) nevertheless, Peru also differs from other spaces in that it offers documents written by bilinguals displaying the effects of contact between Spanish and Quechua within those general DTs.