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During colonial times (16th–19th century) European Spanish and its innovations had an impact on Mexican Spanish due to strong trading relations between Spain and the Viceroyalty of Mexico-Nueva España. Culturally and linguistically, Mexico belongs to the Meso-American area and the area intermedia (Central America and northern South America, for example Moser 2013b, 622–623), though geographically, Mexico is a part of North America. Zimmermann 2013, 413), so Mexican Spanish coexists with ethnic varieties of Spanish spoken by the autochthonous population, speakers of Amerindian Languages and their descendants. Mexico is a multi-ethnic and multilingual country (cf. Finally, we contextualize this particular kind of language transfer and the phenomenon described here in the much wider frame of the cusqueño society and its idiosyncratic mestizo identity.

We then discuss three hypotheses on the possible origins of vuestro/a in Cusco Spanish – all of these being related to former stages of the Spanish language as spoken in Latin America during the colonial and early post-independence era – and we complete them by highlighting the role of what we define here as a discursive or " notional transfer " (from Southern Quechua to Cusco Spanish). Our analysis shows two kinds of plural vuestro/a, the second one being the most striking: a formulaic use (in expressions like vuestra atención, por favor) and a highly productive strategic use, which highlights a contrastive relationship between the actions/states of the plural addressee and those from the group in which the speaker positions himself during the conversation. As a matter of fact, it has gone mostly unnoticed by researchers so far.

In this paper, we document the use of the possessive form vuestro/a 'your-PL' in Cusco Spanish (Peru), a phenomenon that is not expected to appear in the system of personal pronouns of American Spanish (with the pronoun ustedes and the possessive su being purportedly the only systemic options).