Language and freedom: the lexicon of the Christian Political Catechism (1811)

Abstract

Taking as proof the Catechism of Christian politician José Amor de la Patria, is described the lexical accommodation to the new sociolinguistic contexts during the Colonial Independence. The inherent lexical variation can trace the adaptation of a language style spoken with clearly learning objectives to achieve the diffusion of Enlightenment ideology through political and social vocabulary, with terms often used in the common meaning of the new communities. The description of the general lexicon and related grammatical phenomena provides not only specific information about language preferences in these varieties, but also details of the degree of standardization and of the emerging usage of American Spanish.