Literary Translingualism and Neo-Latin: the Case of Latin America

This chapter discusses how Latin was one of the languages used by translingual authors in colonial Latin America, as part of a multilingual dynamic picture of interaction between Latin, European vernacular and Native American vernacular languages that has not been sufficiently explored. It starts by pointing out how, since Antiquity, Latin was already the product of translingual processes, a situation that became even more widespread in the Medieval and Early Modern times, after Latin ceased to be a mother tongue but continued being used as a language of government, religion, science, and culture. What follows is an overview of the role Latin played in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Latin American colonies, refuting the ideas that it was marginal or unimportant, by exemplifying the rich corpus of literature produced in Latin and the dynamics of interplay between Latin and the vernaculars that co-existed in that space.