How Canarian Spanish Began to Be Studied
The previous article on Portuguese contact in Canarian Spanish explains one major historical layer in island speech. This article looks at a different question: how knowledge about that variety was built. The study of Canarian Spanish began before modern dialectology, in scattered notes, dictionaries, word lists, and collections of popular usage[1].
From Scattered Notes to the First Word List
Before Canarian speech became a central object of study, its words appeared as notes inside historical, ethnographic, or scientific works. Carmen Díaz Alayón highlights, for example, José de Viera y Clavijo’s interest in recording provincial words, the geographical distribution of certain forms, and hypotheses about their origin in his Diccionario de historia natural. These observations were not yet autonomous linguistic research, but they preserved valuable material on how island vocabulary was perceived between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries[1].
The first decisive step came with Sebastián de Lugo, whose Colección de voces y frases provinciales de Canarias was drafted around 1846. Díaz Alayón presents it as the first lexical repertory of the island varieties and one of the early testimonies of Spanish dialect vocabulary. It was not extensive or philologically ambitious, but it did something important: it made Canarian vocabulary the main object of description rather than a marginal note[1].
Repertories with an Island Perspective
During the nineteenth century, other authors expanded that line of work. José Agustín Álvarez Rixo prepared a collection of provincial words, phrases, and proverbs that distinguished Castilian, Portuguese, pre-Hispanic, and Berber elements. He also paid attention to linguistic geography, noting uses restricted to particular islands. That island perspective mattered: it treated Canarian Spanish not as a single uniform block, but as a set of varieties with internal distributions[1].
Elias Zerolo and Benito Pérez Galdós added further repertories around the turn of the twentieth century. Zerolo argued that the academic dictionary should admit well-formed words used in important regions of the Spanish-speaking world; Galdós gathered hundreds of lexical entries, although many had brief or no definitions. Together, these works show a growing concern with recording words before they disappeared and debating their place within general Spanish[1].
Correction, Memory, and Philology
Not all repertories had the same purpose. Juan Reyes Martín, for instance, produced a work aimed at correcting what he regarded as barbarisms, solecisms, or provincial usages in Tenerife speech. His approach was normative and often suspicious of traditional vocabulary, but the material he collected remains useful for understanding living popular forms. In a different register, Luis and Agustín Millares Cubas published Léxico de Gran Canaria in 1924, also as a record of how earlier generations spoke[1].
The classification used by the Millares Cubas brothers is revealing because it organized words by origin: archaisms, altered Castilian forms, Castilian words with local meanings, Galician-Portuguese forms, Guanche terms, Americanisms, seafaring vocabulary, and other groups. Although the authors did not present themselves as philologists, that urge to classify anticipated later questions: where words came from, how they were distributed, and what historical layers island speech preserved[1].
The Specialized Stage
From the 1940s onward, studies of Canarian Spanish entered a more specialized phase. Research on pre-Hispanic words advanced through the work of Juan Álvarez Delgado, Gerhard Rohlfs, Dominik Josef Wölfel, Max Steffen, and Manuel Alvar. This line of research helped distinguish generally distributed terms, words restricted to one or two islands, and forms with different degrees of vitality. It also forced scholars to correct earlier errors, since some words once treated as pre-Hispanic turned out to be Romance in origin[1].
At the same time, research on western Iberian forms and Portuguese loanwords intensified. Scholars such as Juan Régulo, Max Steffen, and José Pérez Vidal examined fields including agriculture, weather vocabulary, plant and animal names, and maritime terminology. The change was not only a matter of collecting more words, but of analyzing them through historical, phonetic, geographical, and comparative criteria[1].
An Archive of Living Speech
Díaz Alayón’s overview shows that Canarian Spanish was not studied all at once or from a single discipline. It began as learned curiosity, became lexical repertory, then popular memory, and finally a field of linguistic research. That history explains why vocabulary has such weight in the study of the islands: words were the first doorway to recognizing a distinctive, changing variety connected to many layers of Atlantic history[1].