The pre-Hispanic American society was a conglomerate of different people and languages that politically turned to be part of the Spanish Empire under a common language. The American idiomatic diversity was so strong that some authors estimate that this continent is the most fragmented one in terms of linguistics, with about 123 language families, lots of those, in their turn, have tens or even hundreds of languages and dialects. Amongst these, it’s important to quote some of the main indigenous languages, in terms of speaking people and their contribution to Spanish language which are Náhuatl, Taíno, Maya, Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní and Mapuche.

The Spanish language arrived in the American continent through the following travels of Christopher Columbus and afterwards with a wave of colonizers that were looking for new opportunities in America. In their attempt to communicate with the Native people, they tried using at first gestures and later on European interpreters or captured indigenous, which could allow the exchange between cultures so different from each other. Furthermore, in several cases, the conquerors and missionaries boosted the use of those languages, that for their wide number of speakers and their acceptance as common way to communicate, were used by different villages, e.g. for commercial means as it happened with the Náhuatl in Mexico and the Quechua in Peru.

The process of transmitting and acquiring the Spanish culture, customs and language (hispanización) in America effectively started to develop only through the coexistence between Spanish and Indigenous people, the teaching of catechism and most of all the “Mestizaje.