EL CONTACTO LINGÜÍSTICO: MÁS ALLÁ DE LENGUAS, IDENTIDADES Y TERRITORIOS

The development of contact linguistics within the language sciences responded to historical circumstances and was founded upon three assumptions about language contact in the context of a multiculturalist distribution of diversity: 1) languages are pre-structured, discontinued and self-contained systems adapting to contact which is defined as the coexistence of two or more systems at the level of the individual speaker or that of society; 2) identity is a cultural trait that may be assigned to each of the languages in contact; y 3) every language is a territorialized entity within a geographical space that may be assigned to a speech community. Pivoting on the idea of border in linguistic, spatial and identity terms, the above assumptions are the foundation of a problematic equivalence among language,