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abstract
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Media Lengua (Spanish for "half language" or "in-between language") is a language spoken in Salcedo, about 100 km south of Quito, Ecuador, by about 1,000 people of Native American ancestry. It is usually classified as a mixed language as it combines Spanish vocabulary with a Quechua grammatical system, most conspicuously morphology. Most of its lexemes, especially almost all content words, are of Spanish origin, only adapted to Quechua phonology, while its morphology, syntax and some particles are Quechua. It was discovered by the Dutch linguist Pieter Muysken during field work on Ecuadorian Quechua (also called Quichua). The origin of Media Lengua is in the 1920s, when young Quechua speakers from the highlands came to Quito as railway construction workers and, by this language, tried to build an identity of their own for themselves, coinciding neither with Spanish nor their native Quechua. Along with Michif, Mednyj Aleut and Mbugu or Ma'a, Media Lengua (although not mentioned in Thomason & Kaufman 1998) is one of the few widely acknowledged examples of a "mixed language" in the conventional, narrow linguistic sense (that all of these names happen to start with an "M" makes for a convenient mnemonic aid). Media Lengua could be viewed as a variety of Quechua that has replaced almost all of its content words, and even many function words, by borrowings from Spanish. This would make it relatively easy to learn for native speakers of Quechua and comparatively easy to pick up for speakers of Spanish who know at best a little Quechua; hence it is a practical compromise for cross-cultural communication. As such wholesale, systematic borrowing is known only very rarely and such an extreme case, Media Lengua is not usually described as simply a variety of Quechua, nor of Spanish. Still, cases of this kind cast an interesting light on the question what is necessary to classify a language as genetically related to a family, or descended from another language: shared lexicon, shared grammar (bound morphology in particular, as Sir William Jones argued), or both? Thomason & Kaufman argue that a mixed language, just as a pidgin or a creole language, is not directly descended from any other language at all as the chain of native speakers was broken.
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