We know that after the discovery of America, the Spanish language immediately began developing in harmony with the total disparity and constant change within the atmosphere of the conquered land, and with their new incentives and needs. These changes, perceptible in every level of analysis, are most obvious in their vocabulary and have to be interpreted as a natural consequence of every language, according to a postulate of general validity from Jose Marias (1965): “When a language is ‘transplanted’ from one society to another, when it is spoken by distinct people, its original manor undergoes modifications and inflexions, which can be very deep and which go to different directions”.
These different directions, as far as the Spanish-American glossary is concerned, were shown in the first documents about the discovery of America, and they answer certain factors that Mr Alvar, in1972, had summarized in a very lucid way in a classic book in the studies about the American Spanish language: “When moved from its world, the language needed to get acclimatized and to adapt to its adopted country. The man who used it found himself obliged to change it into a means of new expression, and the crossing, the contact with reality, everything has made the speaker change his perspective”.

From this point of view, we can emphasize, on one hand, the importance of the new reality in the adaptation of the lexical background, and on the other hand, the contact with the local native language, which explains the transfer of indigenous words to the Spanish that was brought by the colons to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. But we need to take into account other circumstances which contribute as well (maybe more inadvertently) to the formation of the Spanish-American vocabulary: A. Alonso, in 1967, pointed out that the Spanish language that came to America was already a new Spanish, since the first confrontation between men from different areas results in the derivation of assimilation of numerous sail terms which leave their print in the New World; at the same time must have started a simultaneous linguistic harmonisation of all the different local dialects, which was going to allow the diffusion of words from distinct areas of Spain and Canaries. And we cannot ignore either the source of Afro-Caribbean dialogue has made the Spanish language richer through the black population who settled on the American soil as slaves.

So to summarize the basis which supported the eccentricity of the Spanish-American vocabulary; but the modifications which affect the lexicon of this side of the Atlantic Ocean don’t finish during the colonisation period, but continue until now: the indigenous languages still have an influence through contact with bilingual areas; the adaptation of the vocabulary hasn’t stopped yet, as shown by the modern neologisms and even the number of regionalisms could increase because of the recent settlement of new waves of Spanish people in America.
In this listing, we also have to take into account the differences which result from the adoption of words from different countries: French, mostly during the 18th and 19th centuries; English more recently and with more intensity in the areas more linked to the United States.

Linguistic contacts

It is obvious that the mix of people is one of the fundamental reasons for the evolution of languages. Through the history, migrations, colonisations, cultural dependence, etc., resulted in the linguistic exchange of different communities.
In the case of contact between differentiated linguistic systems, the consequences answer a varied typology, in a way in which several concepts have accumulated, such as the creation of mixed systems, the extinction of one of the languages, and we could also add other possibilities such as the ones represented by the exchange of codes or the variety of frontiers. The concrete changes of the Spanish language in America are especially the result of the transfer of characteristics from languages it has or is still mixed with.