[Resumen extraído de la fuente original]

The border region between Portugal and Spain, locally known as A Raia or La Raya ‘the border, boundary’, has been an area of several Portuguese-Spanish contact situations, in some cases, for centuries. In his fieldwork along the border, Clements (2009) reports that Portuguese-Spanish bilingualism is fairly common. Barranquenho –a hybrid variety spoken in Barrancos, Portugal for atleast 150 years– emerged from the contact between speakers of Portuguese and Spanish and has received some attention from scholars dating back to the renowned philologist Leite de Vasconcelos’s monograph published in 1955. Although this and more recent work by Navas Sánchez-Élez (1992, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2001) are mostly seminal in nature, this contact situation is only now becoming known to the wider audience in contact linguistics in more recent research. In addition to several of the multiple settings in which contact varieties arise, the Barrancos situation is interesting because over the centuries the area has been claimed by both Portugal and Spain, many times, back and forth, leading to a prolonged language contact situation. There is evidence suggesting that as early as the 16th century there was Portuguese-Spanish contact in Barrancos. We review this evidence and then discuss various features that define Barranquenho, drawing on studies by Leite de Vasconcelos (1955), as well as those by Clements (2009), Clements, Amaral, and Luís (2008), Taylor (2014), Garrett (in press), all of which are based largely on a corpus of transcribed speech of 20 Barranquenho speakers. We then attempt to respond to the question about whether the details of the history of Barrancos help us define, or not, what type of contact variety Barranquenho is.