Origins of contact varieties are at the center of language contact research, focusing on the dynamics between the population structure’s social ecology and the linguistic phenomena that emerge. This chapter proposes an alternative hypothesis to the emergence of Andean Spanish, a macro-dialect spoken in several countries in western South America and product of contact between Spanish and Andean languages, particularly Quechua, the most spoken in the Americas. It argues that contrasts between the linguistic evidence present in colonial documents authored by Indigenous individuals and those present in the speech of Andean Spanish speakers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveal different types of contact phenomena. The colonial data include linguistic evidence of lexical borrowing (primarily cultural) and grammatical phenomena proper of second language speakers (e.g., number and gender agreement, vocalic alternation). The post-colonial data include evidence of grammaticalization phenomena, revealing a case of contra-hierarchical grammatical influence (from the minoritized Indigenous language to the hegemonic language). The contrast between these two historical periods’ internal social ecologies reveals specific (types of) social conditions that help explain the focusing and emergence of the contact (macro-)dialect known as Andean Spanish.

As Spain expanded its colonial empire, Spanish language and culture were introduced throughout the colonies. In this contribution, Ithe author explores the socio-historical factors that led to Spanish becoming a global language. From an evolutionary perspective, it is proposed that the arrival of an Old World cultural and linguistic community to the New World was the introduction of an invasive cultural and linguistic community into a new environment not equipped to handle it. This collision of cultures and languages led to an unintended result, the large-scale decimation of the indigenous communities, described by Diamond (1999: 354) as the ‘largest population replacement in the last 13,000 years'. Another, related consequence was that the Spanish language dominated during the colonial period, and since has continued to be the de facto main or exclusive language as the colonies became nation states. It has also been instrumental in a wide variety of political movements, as well as in the development of cultural expression. While being the second most widely spoken world language, Spanish regional varieties have emerged that reflect the local linguistic ecologies of areas where they are spoken.