El palimpsesto esmeraldeño. Tejidos de léxico, tejidos de historia

Esmeraldeño language was spoken along the middle and lower basin of the Esmeraldas river in the northern coast of Ecuador until the second half of the nineteenth century. The analysis of the only existing corpus of the language, collected around 1871, shows an incipient process of creolization of its lexicon and reveals a century-long history of contact between the African-population that occupied the area since the second half of the sixteenth century and several ethnic groups from the Pacific lowlands and the western Andean slopes. In this chapter, the corpus of the language is analyzed with classificatory purposes. Also, linguistic data and ethnohistorical evidence are compared in order to advance the understanding of the linguistic puzzle of the northern coast of Ecuador before the Spanish conquest.