Media Lengua is one of the few widely acknowledged examples of a "bilingual mixed language" in both the conventional and narrow linguistic sense because of its split between roots and suffixes.
[5][6] Such extreme and systematic borrowing is only rarely attested, and Media Lengua is not typically described as a variety of either Kichwa or Spanish.
[1] Media Lengua was first documented in Salcedo, Cotopaxi about 100 km south of Quito, Ecuador, by Dutch linguist Pieter Muysken during fieldwork on Ecuadorian Kichwa.
[4] During Muysken's surveys of the language, he also described other highly relexified varieties of Kichwa, including Amazonian Pidgin, Kichwa-Spanish interlanguage, Saraguro Media Lengua, and Catalangu.
[1][2] The variety of Media Lengua that is spoken in Pijal appears to have emerged at the beginning of the 20th century and had its first generation of native speakers in the 1910s.
According to Muysken, Salcedo Media Lengua emerged through ethnic self-identification for indigenous populations, who no longer identified with either the rural Kichwa or the urban Spanish cultures.
[10] Dikker believes Media Lengua was created by men who left their native communities to work in urban Spanish-speaking areas.
[11] Finally, Jesse Stewart claims that Media Lengua was either brought to Pijal from Salcedo or vice versa.
[1] Most researchers agree, however, that Media Lengua developed linguistically through various processes of lexification (relexification,[4] adlexification[9] and translexification[12]) in a relatively short period of time.
[10] In the Province of Imbabura, reports[10][13] reflect that Media Lengua is still spoken in the communities of Pijal, Angla, and Casco Valenzuela.
[2] A number of lexical items in both the Salcedo and Imbabura varieties maintain Spanish preservations from the Colonial period; most notably word-initial /x/.
(*)=reconstruction IPA Chart (Imbabura Media Lengua)[1] Common allophones are marked in brackets([]) and affricates are presented under the place of final articulation.
One theory suggests Salcedo Media Lengua, like Kichwa, maintains three vowels [i], [u] and [a], with the occasional Spanish preservation of [e] and [o] in names, interjections and in stressed positions.
In the majority of a cases, an L+H* pitch accent on the penultimate syllable describes word level prosody (see example 1).
In both cases, Stewart (2015) suggests that is caused since there is no material to bear the preaccental rise, which would otherwise be realized as a typical L+H* PA.
The intonational phrase in Media Lengua (the highest level unit within the autosegmental-metrical framework [18]) is marked by a low boundary tone (L%) at the end of nearly every utterance (see examples 1, 2, 3, and 5).
[17] An exception to the configuration can be found in what Stewart (2015) refers to as clarifying utterances, which are marked with a high boundary tone (H%) (see example 4).
"Jilana in Media Lengua, Spanish, and English:[19] After we get tired of spinning, we might switch to a shirt and sew by hand.