Deslindes lingüísticos en las tierras bajas del Pacífico ecuatoriano. [Segunda parte]

The Northern Coast of the Ecuadorian Pacific Lowlands boasted important language diversity before the Spanish conquest as suggested by the large number of ethnic groups attested in the historic record. Yet, the assigning of individual languages to each of these groups without the proper evaluation of both historic and linguistic data remains problematic. While the task of identifying pre-Hispanic languages in the northern coast is made easier by the presence of living languages that can be used as a basis of comparison for onomastic data, gaps in the puzzle need to be filled in order to get a clearer view of the regional linguistic landscape. Particular attention must be paid to the so-called Esmeraldeño, a now extinct language, for being the outcome of an intense contact among different ethnic groups as well as between the Pacific lowlands and the Andean foothills. As this language was fortunately documented in 1871, a corpus is available now which can be used not only for lexical and grammatical analysis with a classificatory purpose but also for comparison with historic data about its speakers, thereby tracking the influence of languages which Esmeraldeño was in contact with until its late demise in the last years of the nineteenth century.