Variation in third-person object pronouns in monolingual and bilingual Spanish in Loreto, Peru

In this paper, we draw on data collected via simultaneous film narrations of the Pear Story (Chafe, 1980) to explore the variability of direct and indirect object pronouns that has emerged in a monolingual and a bilingual variety of PAS (Peruvian Amazonian Spanish). The bilingual data are from Yagua-Spanish speakers (N=5) living in Comandancia, Peru, an Indigenous community undergoing a language shift to the dominant language of the nation, Spanish. We compare these data to two linguistic groups in Peru: a baseline group of monolingual PAS speakers (N=5) from Iquitos, Peru, the largest city in the Peruvian Amazon and the hub of the Loreto region, and a control group of speakers (N=5) from the capital of the country, Lima. Results show considerable variation in the use of object pronouns and rates of leísmo (use of le to mark direct objects), particularly in the bilingual PAS data, that are higher than that typically reported for Latin American varieties of Spanish. The influence of the substrate language, Yagua, which is typologically different from Spanish, offers only one of many possible explanations for these findings, in addition to patterns of migration, processes of second language acquisition, and contact with other monolingual or bilingual varieties of Spanish in the Peruvian Amazon.