Abstract
The article focuses on roles and activities of the missionary linguistics in early Spanish and Portuguese America (Conquest and Colony). In accordance with author's view the missionary linguistics appears under two basic aspects: the first one is related to the purely linguistic results (i.e. grammars and vocabularies); the second aspect is linked with missionary activities within so called "metropolitan indigenist policy" which mainly implies "difficult" relations between Spanish / Portuguese and native languages (specially Nahuatl, Quechua, Tupi and Guarani) in the field of the sacred, in the first place in the sphere of "everyday" sacred phenomena (confession or extreme function).