Extralinguistic traces of Andean exoticness in dictionaries. References to past and society in lexicographical definitions of coca and llama

The purpose of this contribution is to explore a group of lexicographical definitions of the Andes-native words coca and llama in the Spanish language dictionaries published by the Royal Spanish Academy between the 18th and the 20th centuries. Departing from the consideration that dictionaries are, under no circumstances, ideology-neutral, but, instead, texts with particular (either covert or explicit) political agenda, language planning interests, totalitarian or partial normative objectives, etc., this paper is focused on revealing some spaces within definitions in which the ideological perspective of the lexicographers can be shown. Due to this aim, this article deals, more concretely, with deconstructing the historically oriented descriptions of the extralinguistic referents involved with the definitions under scrutiny, with the purpose of both revealing the worldviews lying beneath those (micro-)texts and, finally, summarising the most common trends that, diachronically, the analysis can provide us with.