# Lexical loans  
The lexicon is regarded as the most obvious testimony of the contact between languages, since it records its speakers' possible linguistic and cultural contact. We should not only take into consideration loans from the African language that we find in the Spanish and Portuguese spoken in Latin America today, but also endeavour to understand the relevance and vitality of African words that have stood the test of time for over four centuries. Even in countries with a smaller population of African descent, such as Argentina, terms of African origin have been identified that are still in current use, such as candombe, marimba, tango, matungo, mandinga, mucama, mondongo, pachanga, malambo, among others (Buffa and Bezerra, 2014, p. 179). In Uruguay, vocabularies and glossaries have been found (Pereda Valdés, 1965; Laguarda Trias, 1969) that record the presence of words of African origin in the lexicon of the local Spanish. In a recent study, Magdalena Coll published work on the lexicon of African origin found in the tales of José Monegal (1892-1968), depicting a rural world situated on the Uruguayan-Brazilian border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose protagonists are popular human types, many of African descent. The author states that the words used by Monegal 'are not words taken from dictionaries, grammars or orthographies. They are words heard by someone who knows how to listen', such as batuque, bombear, bunda, cachimba, cacunda, cafondó, candombe, capanga, catinga, mandinga, marimba, mulambos, muleque, quilombo, quitandera and yimbo (Coll, 2015, p. 237). All these terms are of Bantu origin and all but the last are common to Brazilian Portuguese.