"Lingüística misionera en Pampa y Patagonia (1860-1930)" ["Missionary Linguistics in Pampa and Patagonia (1860-1930)"]

From the mid-nineteenth to the first decades of the twentieth centuries, missionary linguistics in the regions of Pampa and Patagonia produced a set of materials in and about the indigenous languages spoken there. These materials are a source of knowledge of grammar, dialects and other sociolinguistic aspects. As the use of vernacular languages was necessary for communicative interaction to take place, the missionaries learnt these languages and produced basic grammars, vocabularies, phrase books, and other evangelisation tools (catechisms, confession books, and prayers). This article takes a comprehensive approach to the text corpus produced by missionaries from different orders and congregations of the Catholic and Anglican Churches, classifying the materials in terms of their purposes and production or circulation contexts. The analysis, framed within communicative practices, sheds light on the dynamics of the interaction between missionaries, natives, and the scholars who read those texts.