The subsistence of the verb haber is existential as impersonal in the Spanish of El Salvador

This study addresses the variation between an impersonal and a pluralized form in Salvadoran Spanish existential sentences with the verb haber. In spite of the frequency of pluralization in many regions of the Hispanic world, prescriptive grammar condemns its use. Formal linguistic studies usually suggest that existential sentences in Spanish are changing from impersonal to pluralized, assuming that the impersonal use is the preferred form. This study finds that in Salvadoran Spanish pluralization is overwhelmingly recurrent in vernacular speech while the impersonal use only occurs under certain circumstances. This work demonstrates that we are dealing with a case of non-pluralization (and not one of pluralization). Data are taken from written surveys, oral interviews and corpora from Old and Modern Salvadoran Spanish.