Traditionally, contact between Spanish and indigenous languages is described using stage theory. However, there are exceptions to these stages, best understood as accounts of the results of basic constraints on human cognition and the geographic and demographic conditions of contact. The exceptions in several languages of Mesoamerica and the U.S.…

Theories of human migration have been invoked to account for the difference between large-scale spread of languages and linguistic elements, as opposed to small-scale local, residual distributions. The field of dialectology understands linguistic elements as distributed across human populations, with migration as only one possible mechanism of…