A History of Afro-Hispanic Language: Five Centuries, Five Continents

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language The African slave trade, beginning in the ﬁfteenth century, brought African langua...

Author: John M. Lipski

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A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

The African slave trade, beginning in the ﬁfteenth century, brought African languages into contact with Spanish and Portuguese, resulting in the Africans’ gradual acquisition of these languages. In this book, John Lipski describes the major forms of Afro-Hispanic language found in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America over the last 500 years. As well as discussing pronunciation, morphology, and syntax, he separates legitimate forms of Afro-Hispanic expression from those that result from racist stereotyping, to assess how contact with the African diaspora has had a permanent impact on contemporary Spanish. A principal issue is the possibility that Spanish, in contact with speakers of African languages, may have creolized and restructured – in the Caribbean and perhaps elsewhere – permanently affecting regional and social varieties of Spanish today. The book is accompanied by the largest known anthology of primary Afro-Hispanic texts from the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and former Afro-Hispanic contacts in Africa and Asia. j o h n l i p s k i is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include Spanish phonology, Spanish and Portuguese dialectology and language variation, the linguistic aspects of bilingualism, and the African contribution to Spanish and Portuguese. He is the author of more than 200 articles on all aspects of linguistics, and his previous books include Linguistic Aspects of Spanish-English Language Switching (1983) and The Spanish of Equatorial Guinea (1985).

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language Five Centuries, Five Continents John M. Lipski The Pennsylvania State University

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521115582 © John Lipski 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2005 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Lipski, John M. A history of Afro-Hispanic language: five centuries/five continents / John M. Lipski. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–521–82265–3 (hardback) 1. Spanish language – Foreign elements – African. 2. African languages – Influence on Spanish. I. Title. PC4582.A5L56 2004 462´.496 – dc22 2004045681 ISBN 978-0-521-82265-7 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-11558-2 paperback

For Beverly, Ursula, and Michael, and to the memory of my parents, who made it all possible.

Contents

Acknowledgments Note on the Appendix Introduction

page ix x 1

1 Africans in the Iberian peninsula, the slave trade, and overview of Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts

14

2 Early Afro-Portuguese texts

51

3 Early Afro-Hispanic texts

71

4 Africans in colonial Spanish America

95

5 Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America: sixteenth to twentieth centuries

129

6 Survey of major African language families

197

7 Phonetics-phonology of Afro-Hispanic language

204

8 Grammatical features of Afro-Hispanic language

245

9 The Spanish-Creole debate

277

References Index

305 352

vii

Acknowledgments

My interest in Afro-Hispanic language was kindled many years ago by reading the superb book El elemento afronegroide en el espa˜nol de Puerto Rico by the late Manuel Alvarez Nazario, and I offer this book in his memory. This work has beneﬁted from numerous encounters with students, colleagues, research collaborators, and members of the African diaspora throughout the world. I am particularly grateful for the stimulating exchanges with my dear friends and colleagues Germ´an de Granda, William Megenney, Luis Ortiz L´opez, Matthias Perl, and Armin Schwegler. John Holm’s masterful handling of creole language studies has been an inspiration, and John McWhorter has provoked me into rethinking issues I had thought already resolved. My wife Beverly and my children Ursula and Michael have graciously and lovingly tolerated my obsessive passion for matters Afro-Hispanic. My deepest thanks to all.

ix

Note on the Appendix

The Appendix to this book is an online resource which is available at www.cambridge.org/9780521115582.

x

Introduction

Introduction From the second half of the ﬁfteenth century through the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans traveled ﬁrst to Spain, then to Spanish America. Most were slaves, taken as part of the Atlantic slave trade, which displaced millions of Africans to Europe’s New World colonies. In the major cities of Spain, particularly in Andalusia, large slave and later free black populations arose, and in some cities remained as distinct ethnic minorities until the late eighteenth century. In Portugal, black communities and neighborhoods continued to exist until the turn of the twentieth century.1 In Spanish America, Africans were found in every colony, from the highland mines of Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Honduras, to the Argentine pampas, the docks of El Callao, the port attached to Lima, Peru, and the streets of Mexico City. Although demographic merger has blurred the traces of these earliest African arrivals, whose forced immigration reached a peak in the mid-seventeenth century, Spanish America underwent a frenzied importation of African laborers at the turn of the nineteenth century, as part of the sugar plantation boom occasioned by the destruction of the world’s richest sugar producer, French SaintDomingue (soon to become Haiti), and the scramble of the Spanish colonies to enter the lucrative sugar market. In contemporary Latin America, the population of African origin is most noticeable where the last wave of slave arrivals touched shore – in the Caribbean islands, and along the Caribbean and upper Paciﬁc coasts of South America. Although living in the most humbling conditions, often physically outside the pale of mainstream Spanish society, black Africans made a lasting impression on the language and culture of the entire Spanish-speaking world. Their use of Spanish was depicted – never ﬂatteringly and often with much exaggeration – from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Black soldiers were instrumental in the American colonies’ wars of independence; black horsemen became some of Argentina’s most renowned gauchos and payadores (song improvisers). Black 1

Lipski (1994c), Tinhor˜ao (1988).

1

2

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

dances and songs were the origin for the Argentine tango, today a highly stylized European dance form. Throughout southern Spain and Latin America, free blacks for decades dominated small-scale commerce, representing the majority of street vendors and municipal maintenance employees. Descendants of Africans formed the original nuclei around which arose the Mexican cities of Acapulco, Mazatl´an, and Veracruz, and were also found in the most remote frontier outposts – from New Mexico and Arizona to Patagonia. Blacks in Spanish America fought against marauding pirates, and some chose to cast their lot with the pirates, to combat their former oppressors.2 From the R´ıo de la Plata to Cuba, carnival traditions, religious ceremonies, and vocabulary items attest to the African presence in Spanish America. And yet, despite the central importance of Africans in the development of the Spanish language and its spread throughout the Americas, the African contribution to Spanish is rarely considered on a par with more “traditional” language contact situations. At most, we ﬁnd lists of lexical items – often uncritical attributions – which in some tropical countries are conceded to be Africanisms. Latin American countries containing visible Afro-American populations tend to adopt the position that any African inﬂuence in Spanish is to be found only among the Afro-Hispanic population, in popular songs and ceremonies. Nations which currently lack an ethnically identiﬁable population of African origin, or where such groups live in remote or little-known areas, ﬁnd the notion of African contributions to Spanish preposterous. Taken as a whole, the African linguistic dimension has received little serious attention in Latin America, and almost none in Spain. Recently in Latin America, there has been an upsurge in interest in Afro-Hispanic historical and cultural events, an interest not unrelated to the fact that larger numbers of Latin Americans of African origin are receiving higher education and themselves engaging in serious scholarship. To date, the focus has been predominantly regional, and a number of excellent studies and monographs have traced the African populations throughout Latin America. In Spain as well, a series of monographs has begun to outline the full extent of the African presence in areas of Spain for which data had previously been unavailable. The present study, which adopts a comparative historical perspective, has a relatively modest goal, in comparison with the enormity of the task at hand. In the following chapters, we will trace the ﬁrst attestations of Africans learning Spanish, as the early stages of the Portuguese slave trade brought large numbers of blacks into southern Spain by the end of the ﬁfteenth century. A study of literary documents, reinforced by comparative reconstruction based on existing Afro-Iberian language forms and known facts about African languages and the historical development of Spanish, will yield a tentative model of the sort of language that might have been used by African- and European-born blacks in 2

Lipski (1982).

Introduction

3

sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Spain. Following this, the focus of attention will follow the routes of Spanish colonization of the Americas, and the development of African populations in the New World colonies. Finally, we will offer an assessment as to whether Afro-Hispanic language ever creolized (became – as a completely restructured offspring of Spanish – the native language of a signiﬁcant speech community), and what permanent imprint – other than purely lexical – the totality of Afro-Hispanic linguistic manifestations may have left upon the Spanish language in various parts of the world. The contributions of language contact to the history of Spanish Like other languages that have developed under duress and later spread across the globe, Spanish is the product of language contact. The Roman legions who carried Latin – itself already ﬂavored by Oscan, Umbrian, Ligurian, and Greek – to Hispania (as the Iberian Peninsula was known) set the language upon a course which would rapidly bring it into contact with numerous peoples and cultures. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and native Basques and Iberians began to leave their imprint on Latin before it began its gradual metamorphosis into Ibero-Romance, thence Spanish and its neighbors. Only a few centuries after the Roman domination of the Iberian Peninsula, Vandals, Suevi, and Visigoths swept down from the north; the latter group in particular had a lasting impact on the culture of what would eventually become Spain, as well as contributing several words to the emerging Spanish language. Following on the heels of the Visigoths were the moros – Arabic-speaking invaders from north Africa who continuously occupied parts of Spain and Portugal for nearly 800 years. The contact of early Ibero-Romance and Arabic gave rise to a distinctly ﬂavored Romance language known as Mozarabic, which apparently differed from Castilian in many signiﬁcant ways – in phonology, morphology, lexicon, and possibly syntax. During the reconquest of Moslem Spain by the Christian Castilians, the Castilian dialect came into contact with Mozarabic and both dialects co-existed in some communities and perhaps even among the same speakers, since Mozarabic language and culture was more prestigious and represented a more highly advanced civilization than that carried by the hard-ﬁghting but poorly educated Castilians.3 In the years following the neutralization and expulsion of the Arabs, at the end of the ﬁfteenth century, the Spanish language in Spain absorbed more French and Italian lexical items (French words in particular had begun to enter the Spanish language in previous centuries). The contribution of the Spanish Jews, a glimpse of whose language is preserved in contemporary Sephardic Spanish (known as ladino or judezmo), is also a major lacuna. Given the key roles played 3

Penny (2000).

4

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

by Jews both in Moslem-held Spain and during the early Castilian period, it is inevitable that a tangible impact on the Spanish language would ensue. Spanish Jews often spoke Arabic and used Hebrew words and expressions, and especially after being segregated into urban ghettoes, may well have developed ethnolinguistically distinct varieties of Spanish. At this point in the development of Peninsular Spanish, the study of external language contact usually stops, except perhaps to mention the sporadic lexical contributions of Roma/Gypsy cal´o, and the recent inﬂux of Anglicisms. In Latin America, Spanish came into close contact with Native American languages – contact ranging from symbiotic to cannibalistic – and considerable research has been devoted to tracing the indigenous contributions to Latin American Spanish. Although many Latin Americans reject the notion that indigenous contributions go beyond simple lexical borrowings for New World items, serious research has revealed profound and far-reaching substratum patterns in the Spanish language throughout Latin America.4 Contemporary observers frequently comment on the incursions of English, even far from the borders of the United States, while in many countries, the linguistic effects of immigrant languages upon Spanish has been noted: Italian in Argentina and Uruguay, Chinese in Cuba and Peru, English in northern Chile, German and Japanese in Paraguay, etc. And yet the picture is still not complete. Even in their totality, the above-mentioned language contacts are not sufﬁcient to explain both the diversity and the unity of the Spanish language as spoken across four continents. One of the most interesting chapters in the history of Spanish dialect differentiation is the African contribution, the byproduct of hundreds of thousands of African slaves imported ﬁrst into Spain and Portugal and then to the New World, who spoke a variety of African languages and sometimes also European languages. The African contribution to the Hispanic American lexicon is undisputed, since in addition to the hundreds of Africanisms found in the local level in dialects of Spanish throughout the Caribbean and South America, such words as marimba, mucama, guineo, congo, n˜ ame, cachimbo/a, merengue, mandinga, mondongo and possibly ch´evere are more widely used.5 More controversial are the possible African contributions to Spanish American syntax and phonetics, with the latter possibility either overlooked or overemphasized by the principal Africanist theories of Latin American dialectology. The reconstruction of early Afro-Hispanic language There exists a tantalizing corpus of literary, folkloric, and anecdotal testimony on the earlier speech patterns of Africans, in Spain and Latin America. Filling 4 5

For example Cerr´on-Palomino (2003), Granda (1979, 1988), Lipski (1994d), among many others. Megenney (1983).

Introduction

5

in the pieces of the puzzle is not only important for ethnolinguistic and language contact studies, but is vital to the tracing of the historical development of Spanish in its broadest sense. Only by fully reconstructing the speech varieties used by Afro-Hispanics during the formative periods of Latin American Spanish will it be possible to isolate and evaluate the other inﬂuences that shaped the development of Spanish on four continents. In contemporary Latin America, despite a considerable Afro-American population in many regions, and notwithstanding racial stereotypes in literature and popular culture, there is nowhere to be found an ethnically unique “Black Spanish,” comparable to vernacular Black English in the United States.6 In more recent times, the linguistic characteristics attributed to black Spanish speakers have been simply those of the lower socioeconomic classes, without any objective racial connotations. The situation was different in the past, and there exists ample evidence that distinctly Afro-Hispanic speech forms did exist. The greatest obstacle in the assessment of earlier Afro-Hispanic language is the high level of prejudice, exaggeration, and stereotyping which has always surrounded the description of non-white speakers of Spanish, and which attributes to all of them a wide range of defects and distortions that frequently are no more than an unrealistic repudiation of this group. One group that did use a “special” language were the bozales, slaves born in Africa, who spoke European languages only with difﬁculty. The word bozal originally meant “savage” or “untamed horse,” and ultimately came to refer to the halting Spanish or Portuguese spoken by Africans. This term rapidly dropped from usage in Spain once the population of African-born slaves dwindled, but it continued in the Spanish Caribbean – particularly Cuba – well into the twentieth century. Bozal language ﬁrst arose along the West African coast and in the Iberian Peninsula late in the ﬁfteenth century; the earliest attestations come from Portugal. Bozal Spanish makes its written appearance in Spain early in the sixteenth century, and continues through the middle of the eighteenth century, being especially prominent in Golden Age plays and poetry. Latin American bozal Spanish was ﬁrst described by writers like Sor Juan In´es de la Cruz, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Other surviving seventeenth-century documents demonstrate the existence of bozal Spanish in the highland mining areas of Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Guatemala. Few documents representing Afro-Hispanic speech remain from eighteenthcentury Latin America; Cuba and Mexico are among the regions so represented. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the last big surge of slave trading, spurred by the sugar plantation boom and by increased urbanization of many coastal regions, resulted in an outpouring of Afro-Hispanic literary representations. The geographical distribution of extant texts mirrors the proﬁle of the 6

Lipski (1985b).

6

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

African slave trade in Latin America. The nineteenth-century texts come principally from three regions: Cuba (with a few additional texts from Puerto Rico), coastal Peru, and the Buenos Aires/Montevideo region. The turn of the twentieth century brought a scattering of texts from coastal Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, together with a large corpus of Cuban materials. Contemporary AfroHispanic writers who have alluded to possible speech differences within the Afro-American communities come mostly from Cuba (e.g. Nicol´as Guill´en), Peru (e.g. Nicomedes Santa Cruz), Colombia (e.g. Manuel Zapata Olivella) and Ecuador (e.g. Adalberto Ortiz, Nelson Estupi˜na´ n Bass). These last generations (with the exception of the anthropological writings of Lydia Cabrera in Cuba) have not dealt with bozal Spanish, but rather with possible ethnolinguistic characteristics of Afro-Americans born and raised in Latin America.7 Some important hypotheses regarding bozal Spanish Although most bozal Spanish specimens reﬂect only non-native usage by speakers of African languages,8 data from some Caribbean texts have given rise to two controversial proposals, which are of great importance to general Spanish dialectology. The ﬁrst is that Afro-Hispanic language in the Caribbean and possibly elsewhere coalesced into a stable creole language (i.e. had consistent structural characteristics differing from those of previous varieties of Spanish and was eventually acquired natively). A corollary is the claim that this creole language had its origins in an even earlier Afro-Portuguese pidgin or creole, formed in West Africa and surviving in the contemporary creoles of Cape Verde, S˜ao Tom´e and Annob´on, and in Latin America in Papiamento (spoken in the Netherlands Antilles) and Palenquero (spoken in the Afro-Colombian village of Palenque de San Basilio). The second proposal is that this earlier Afro-Hispanic pidgin or perhaps creole language extended beyond the pale of slave barracks and plantations, and permanently affected the evolution of all Caribbean Spanish, not only contributing vocabulary items, but also touching syntax and phonology.9 The 7 9

8 Lipski (1986a, 1986f, 1998a, 1998c, 2000a). Lipski (1999d). Among the researchers supporting the notion that Afro-Hispanic bozal language was a creole and/or the universal pidgin Portuguese origin of Spanish-based creoles are Castellanos (1985), Granda (1968, 1970, 1971, 1976), Megenney (1984a, 1985a, 1985b, 1986, 1990a, 1993), Naro (1978), Otheguy (1973), Perl (1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1989d), Schwegler (1989, 1991b, 1993, 1996a, 1996b, 1999), Taylor 1971, Thompson (1961), Wagner (1949), Whinnom (1956, 1965), Yacou (1977), and Ziegler (1981). The opposite perspective, that bozal language was merely the imperfectly acquired Spanish spoken by the ﬁrst generation of African-born slaves, is taken by Laurence (1974), Lipski (1986a, 1986f, 1993, 1998a, 1998c, 1999a, 2000a), L´opez Morales (1980), Mart´ınez Gordo (1982), Reinecke (1937), and Vald´es Bernal (1978, 1987), among others.

Introduction

7

present work will draw together the available evidence on the nature of AfroHispanic language over a period of more than four centuries, in an attempt to address the questions posed by the prior creole hypothesis. The reasons for the current scarcity of Spanish-derived creole languages are the subject of debate; McWhorter (1995, 2000) has recently suggested that Spanish-based creoles did not form in Latin America because, according to his analysis, most if not all Afro-Atlantic creoles formed in slaving stations on the West African coast, most of which were controlled by the Portuguese (whence the large number of Afro-Lusitanian creoles). Laurence (1974) and others have pointed to the high demographic ratio of white native Spanish speakers to black slaves in Spanish American colonies, in contrast to French and English colonies in which creole languages developed. In recent work I have proposed that Spanish may indeed have brieﬂy creolized during the nineteenth century in some of the more labor-intensive Cuban sugar plantations, but that the subsequent abolition of slavery and the rapid collapse of the hermetic slave barracks environment precluded extension of such embryonic creoles past the ﬁrst generation of Cuban-born slaves.10 Despite the generally negative conclusions about the creolization of Spanish, there is a small but important corpus of written materials, together with ﬂeeting contemporary holdovers in isolated Afro-Hispanic communities, which contain creole-like features that are unlikely to have appeared spontaneously. Moreover, many of the features in these texts are similar or identical to combinations found in acknowledged Afro-Iberian creoles. The elusive nature of creole elements surrounded by unconvincing examples of second-language Spanish makes for a most interesting journey, and will form the basis for the ﬁnal sections of this book. Obstacles to historical reconstruction Several factors contribute to the high level of uncertainty concerning the possible African contributions to Latin American Spanish. Near the top of the list is inadequate demographic information, including the number and distribution of Africans in colonial Latin America, the languages they spoke, their interaction with native Spanish speakers, and the extent to which the speech of Africans was able to inﬂuence those around them. Population shifts of Africans from one region of Latin America to another, particularly immediately following the colonial wars of independence, is another fuzzy area, as is the true dimension of the clandestine slave and quasi-forced labor trade that ﬂourished in the Caribbean region in the mid-nineteenth century, largely drawing from New World slave 10

Lipski (1998c, 2000a).

8

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

depots such as Cura¸cao and the Lesser Antilles, and including Afro-Americans who already spoke European languages or creoles derived from them. There is even indirect evidence that during the same time period, the Paciﬁc slave raiders who carried Polynesians and Easter Islanders to coastal Peru and Chile and even as far as Guatemala and Mexico may have brought speakers of Paciﬁc languages into contact with Afro-Hispanic speakers, further complicating the picture.11 The reconstruction of early Afro-Hispanic language, from the sixteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth century, is severely hampered by two additional factors. The ﬁrst is the relative scarcity of non-literary and nonhumorous attestations, particularly prior to the late nineteenth century. Nearly all indications of Afro-Hispanic speech are embedded in humorous or satirical literature. These include the racist sainetes and entremeses (skits) of Golden Age (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries) Spain, the negrillo songs sung in “black” dialect in churches in Latin America and Spain, the Cuban teatro bufo (theatrical farces) and the negros catedr´aticos (literally “black professors,” referring to pretentious language usage). Additional examples are found in the cancioneros (song collections) and pregones (street vendors’ calls) of the nineteenth-century R´ıo de la Plata, and the hundreds of anonymous pamphlets and song sheets that spread stereotypical linguistic formulas across several continents and several centuries. Few indeed are the non-ﬁctional representations of bozal Africans’ use of Spanish, and fewer still are the accounts which did not depart from the premise of the negrito who spoke “bad” Spanish. Before the nineteenth century, purportedly objective observations of Afro-Hispanic speech can be counted on the ﬁngers of one hand, and the total amount of text amounts to a paragraph at best. Matters are little better in the nineteenth century, except for a few travelers’ accounts and a handful of dictionary entries. Work done in the twentieth century by writers such as the Cubans Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortiz based on interviews with elderly Afro-Cubans allows for a more accurate reconstruction of Afro-Cuban speech from the middle of the nineteenth century onward. The second obstacle is that Afro-Hispanic speech was never considered systematically “different” enough from natively spoken Spanish for any particular attention to be paid to this variety. Reconstruction of such creole languages as Srnan Tongo, Negerhollands, Guyanese Creole, Jamaican Creole, Haitian Creole, Papiamento, etc., is aided by the fact that (white) writers knew that the “negro dialects” were different enough from standard English, French, Dutch, etc. that materials had to be specially prepared, and fragments of speech from speakers of these emergent creoles had to be properly “translated” for European consumption. 11

Lipski (1996b, 2000c).

Introduction

9

An Afro-Hispanic overview When one society dominates and enslaves another, the languages of the enslaved group are automatically placed at a disadvantage, and can only seep into the language of the dominant society to the extent that both demographic weight (a high ratio of slaves to master class) and direct social contact make such transfer possible. Simple demographic ratios are not enough to ensure language transfer. During the early colonial period, Native Americans outnumbered Spaniards by as much as 100,000 to 1, but as long as the Spanish lived in walled cities or fortiﬁed coastal enclaves, they might as well have been living on a space station. Mexico City for example was originally walled off from the millions of surrounding indigenous residents, and Spaniards had contact with only a tiny handful of bilingual Indian or mestizo (mixed-race) intermediaries. The Spaniards did not learn the indigenous language, and most of the indigenous population learned no Spanish. The bilingual and bicultural individuals who served as bridges between the two societies allowed for a little crossfertilization, but it was only when the walls came down and a large mestizo class came into its own – and moved in among the Spaniards – that serious linguistic inﬂuence of indigenous languages on Spanish could become possible. In most instances this meant simply transfer of individual words such as chocolate, tomate, zacate, tecolote, poncho, jaguar, c´ondor, but when a bilingual population – retaining structural features of the indigenous language while speaking Spanish – became numerically and socially predominant, even monolingual Spanish usage was affected. This occurred, for example, in Paraguay and much of the Andean region, where grammatical patterns derived from the indigenous languages are used by Spanish speakers with no Native American heritage. A key factor facilitating the transfer of structural patterns from the indigenous languages to Spanish was the fact that, in a given area, a single native language predominated. Indigenous residents continued to communicate with one another in their own language, and their approximations to Spanish all shared a common basis, reﬂecting the patterns of that native language. For a variety of reasons, the relationship between African languages and Spanish in the Caribbean was substantially different than in the cases just mentioned. First, Africans in Latin America usually did not enjoy the possibility of a shared common language. More by circumstance than by deliberate design, slaving ships typically picked up loads of slaves from several West African ports before traversing the Atlantic, and a shipment of slaves could contain speakers of a dozen mutually unintelligible languages. Moreover, at least six major African language families were involved in the Afro-Hispanic mix (Atlantic, Mande, Kru, Kwa, Congo-Benue and Bantu), each of which has totally different structures, and which share almost no common denominators at all. A typical heterogeneous group of Africans acquiring Spanish could not use

10

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

loan-translations from their native languages that would be widely understood by Africans of different backgrounds. Until the nineteenth century, Africans in the Spanish Caribbean usually worked on small farms, in placer gold deposits (panning for gold in river beds), or as domestic servants and laborers in cities and towns. In the largest cities, Africans were sometimes allowed to form socio-religious societies based on membership in a speciﬁc African ethnic group, which may have facilitated retention of some African languages beyond the ﬁrst generation, but in general when Africans found themselves together in Latin America, they had to resort to Spanish. This situation predominated throughout the entire Caribbean area, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, coastal Venezuela and Colombia, and Panama, until the very end of the eighteenth century. Following the early use of Africans in placer gold mining, pearl diving, and agriculture, the importation of Africans dropped drastically in all of these areas, except for the Colombian port of Cartagena de Indias, through which nearly all slaves destined for the northwestern part of South America passed. Thus although in some regions the population of African origin was considerable, most Afro-Hispanics had been born in the colonies in close contact with native speakers of Spanish. Only in a few of the largest cities, such as Havana and Cartagena, did even a minimal amount of ghettoization take place, which may have fostered the retention of certain ethnically marked words or pronunciation, similar to inner city neighborhoods in the United States, or the townships of apartheid-era South Africa. In the remaining places, the ratio of African-born bozales – workers who learned Spanish as a second language – was always small in comparison to the native Spanish-speaking population – black and white. Matters changed rapidly following the Haitian revolution, which began in 1791. The French half of the island of Hispaniola, known as Saint-Domingue, was by far the world’s largest sugar producer at the end of the eighteenth century, and the ratio of black slaves to white masters was as high as 100:1 on some plantations. Following the revolution and the establishment of the free nation of Haiti by the 1820s, sugar production dropped almost to zero, and other Latin American countries which had previously been reluctant to compete against the French near-monopoly rushed to ﬁll the gap. This required the immediate importation of hundreds of thousands of additional laborers, the majority of whom came directly from Africa, with a considerable number also drawn from other established Caribbean colonies. The two largest participants in the new sugar boom were Brazil and Cuba. Nearly 90 percent of the total number of African slaves – a ﬁgure of between one and two million individuals – brought to Cuba arrived between 1790 and 1840. Figures are proportionally similar although smaller in absolute numbers for Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

Introduction

11

Unlike in earlier times, the last wave of Africans arriving in the Spanish Caribbean was often divided into larger groups speaking a single language. This is because only a few large slave traders remained in business, and had established themselves in ethnically homogeneous African ports. In Cuba, Yoruba speakers from southwestern Nigeria (known as lucum´ıes) represented the largest group, and provided the linguistic and cultural basis for the Afro-Cuban religion santer´ıa. Igbo- and Eﬁk-speaking carabal´ıes (from southeastern Nigeria) also arrived in large numbers, and their language contributed to the secret Afro-Cuban society known as Abaku´a. Groups of Kikongo speakers (known as congos, from modern Zaire and northern Angola) and Fongbe speakers (known as arar´as, from modern Benin and Togo) were also found in Cuba, and to this day musical, cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions from these African ethnic groups remain in Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, and other Caribbean areas. This created the conditions for wider use of African languages in the Caribbean colonies, and Africans who spoke less common languages learned major African languages such as Yoruba and Kikongo in the Caribbean, much as major regional languages are used as lingua francas throughout Africa. Pidginization of nineteenth century Caribbean bozal Spanish Equally important in the search for African roots in Caribbean Spanish is the fact that the newly arrived African workers were highly concentrated in sprawling sugar plantations known as ingenios, housed in barracks or barracones, and deprived of the broad-based contact with native speakers of Spanish that earlier generations of Africans had encountered. A description of one such estate written in 1849 by the English traveler Richard Madden (1849:156), graphically describes the living conditions: The appearance of the negroes on this estate was wretched in the extreme; they looked jaded to death, listless, stupeﬁed, haggard, and emaciated: how different from the looks of the pampered, petted, well-fed, idle, domestic slaves of the Dons of the Havana! The clothing of the Olanda negroes was old and ragged . . . they lived here in huts, near the Ingenio, but very miserable places, unﬁt for the habitation of wild beasts that it might be thought desirable to keep in health or comfort.

Newly arrived bozales rarely communicated with white plantation owners or even working-class whites, but rather with a small group of free black or mulatto foremen, slavedrivers, and overseers, known as mayorales, contramayorales, mayordomos, and capataces. These free blacks spoke Spanish natively, although given their own relative isolation from wider segments of the Spanish-speaking population, they may have used an ethnically marked variety. These large slave plantations deprived most of the African-born workers from acquiring full

12

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

native competence in Spanish, although, even with the use of some African languages, the slaves inevitably had to use Spanish with the overseers, as well as with some of the other Africans. The combination of a need to speak Spanish and the absence of sufﬁcient native speakers resulted in the formation of a pidgin or reduced form of Spanish. For more than half a century in the Spanish Caribbean, social and demographic conditions existed which necessitated the use of a Spanish-based pidgin by African-born bozales. Their attempts at speaking Spanish are well documented. What is less clear is whether bozal pidgin Spanish ever became a native language in the Caribbean, and whether subsequent reentry into mainstream regional varieties of Spanish produced a permanent African imprint. In the most isolated slave barracks of large plantations, Spanish pidgin undoubtedly became the native languages of children born in these difﬁcult conditions, and given the social isolation of black plantation laborers, a creolized Spanish may have existed for at least a generation in a few of the largest ingenios (sugar plantations). However, following the abolition of slavery in the Spanish Caribbean around the middle of the nineteenth century, even African-born bozales were placed in contact with large numbers of native Spanish speakers. If a Spanish-based creole language ever existed in the nineteenth-century Caribbean, it was a ﬂeeting occurrence in a few of the largest plantations, and quickly rejoined the mainstream of Spanish following the integration of the Afro-Hispanic population. There is less likelihood that Spanish became a creole language in the Caribbean prior to the nineteenth century, except in highly unusual cases. From the earliest colonial times, slaves often escaped and formed isolated maroon villages, where Spanish-based pidgins and creoles undoubtedly ﬂourished brieﬂy before being extinguished or re-absorbed by the dominant population. A few of these “special” forms of Afro-Hispanic language made their way into historical accounts, and in addition to fragmentary hints scattered throughout remote AfroAmerican communities in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela, at least one full creole language has survived to the present day, in the Colombian village of San Basilio de Palenque, near Cartagena. Overview of the book The following chapters contain historical data on the presence of Africans in the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America, from the middle of the ﬁfteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Considerable attention is paid to the analysis of literary texts, travelers’ accounts, and folkloric documents, these being the sole surviving evidence of Afro-Hispanic contact languages from earlier centuries. Although no single text can be taken at face value, the existence of many recurring common denominators suggests that even the most stereotyped texts contain a kernel of truth. It will be the task of the remainder

Introduction

13

of this study to weigh the evidence, qualify the validity and usefulness of written documents from previous centuries, and offer reasoned opinions as to whether Afro-Hispanic language ever creolized. The linguistic legacy of Afro-Hispanic contacts can only be fully appreciated by casting the nets wide, encompassing Spain, Portugal, West Africa, and Latin America, across nearly 400 years. The following studies represent only the ﬁrst steps on this challenging journey.

1

Africans in the Iberian peninsula, the slave trade, and overview of Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts

The Mediterranean, Spain and Africa: the ﬁrst moments Slavery existed in sub-Saharan Africa long before the arrival of Europeans, and black Africans were exported from the continent as slaves as early as the Roman Empire. At ﬁrst, the slave trade was carried out by Moslem dealers following the spread of Islam to Africa in the eighth century, and primarily focused on northeastern Africa. It is estimated that anywhere between 3.5 million and 10 million Africans were shipped northward and eastward from the eighth to the ﬁfteenth centuries. The ﬁnal destiny and the tasks performed by these slaves are only imperfectly known, but black Africans were present all across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea from the ninth century. Although the total number of slaves taken from Africa during this seven-century period is large even by conservative estimates, the annual average was only a few thousand, and this early slave trade appears to have had none of the destabilizing inﬂuences on African societies that the later Euro-Atlantic trafﬁc had.1 Slavery was a part of Europe throughout recorded history; the Greek and Roman empires made extensive use of slaves, and following the Moorish conquest of several Mediterranean islands as well as Spain beginning in 711, agricultural slavery spread to the Iberian Peninsula. Slavery was also common throughout medieval Europe, beginning with the Crusades, which put central and western European nations in contact with a variety of peoples deemed appropriate for enslavement. Genoese and Venetian traders led the way, and slaves were taken from the Balkans, Palestine, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, and especially southern Russia. The word slave itself refers to the common use of Slavic peoples – particularly Russians – as slaves. Along the northern shore of the Mediterranean, Italian and Sicilian kingdoms brought slaves from the Middle East and North Africa, as well as black Africans from points further south. In particular, the presence of black Africans in Italy and Sicily probably began as early as the thirteenth century on an occasional basis, became somewhat more common in the fourteenth century,2 and assumed signiﬁcant proportions in the 1

Klein (1986).

14

2

Origa (1955), Balbi (1966), Verlinden (1977:206), Gaudioso (1992).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

15

ﬁfteenth century. Italian and Sicilian kingdoms were importing black slaves during the early decades of the ﬁfteenth century,3 even before Portugal had begun the widespread importation of West African slaves. The kingdom of Naples also brought in large numbers of black Africans, as well as many North Africans. Sardinia took in many black slaves in the ﬁfteenth century and thereafter, primarily for use in agriculture. Venice was another large importer of black slaves, mostly of North African provenance. African slaves were also found in Bari, Florence, Umbria, Piedmont, Lombardy, and other Italian regions. Throughout the seventeenth century, slavery (mostly of North Africans) was also common in Liguria. Catalan traders were involved in much of this trans-Mediterranean slave trade, and black slaves also made their way to Catalonia and southern France.4 At ﬁrst, the two slave populations came from unrelated sources; the Italian and Sicilian slaves were largely purchased through contacts in the southeastern Mediterranean, through the use of North African and Middle Eastern intermediaries. By the middle of the ﬁfteenth century, black slaves shipped through Portugal began arriving in central Italy. A slave transshipment depot was set up in Pisa, and merchants from Florence, Rome, and other Italian cities could purchase slaves of West African origin. Genoa also contained an important slave market, where, beginning around the middle of the ﬁfteenth century, black African slaves – many of whom were obtained from Portuguese dealers – began to appear. Other northern Italian cities possessed black slave populations, including Milan, Turin, Bologna, and Genoa.5 The same slave trade extended to Valencia and the Balearic Islands, especially Majorca, where beginning around 1457 Portuguese West African traders replaced North African intermediaries as the prime suppliers of black slaves. In 1489, the arrival of a group of Wolofs is registered for Valencia, and the term bozals, used to refer to African-born slaves, makes its ﬁrst appearance in Catalan. It is estimated that nearly 2,500 Wolofs alone were taken to Valencia in the last decades of the ﬁfteenth century. Central and northern Italy thus became a crossroads for slaves from West Africa and from northeastern Africa. Given the active participation of Genoese, Venetian, and Sicilian merchants in the Mediterranean slave trade, black slaves were also sold from Italy to buyers in southern and southeastern Spain, although the total number of such sales was small compared to the Portuguese supply of slaves to Spain. To cement the Iberian-Italian slave connection even further, indigenous (Guanche) slaves from the Canary Islands were sold to Italian buyers, at roughly the same time that black Africans began to arrive in the Canary Islands.6 3 4 5

Verlinden (1977:208–09), Livi (1928:137). Lazaro (1862), Cibrario (1868), Zanelli (1885), San Filippo (1894), Massa (1908), Livi (1928), Verlinden (1977), Peverada (1981), Lucchini (1990), Bono (1993), Sepa Bonaba (1993:ch. 1). 6 Verlinden (1977). Gioffr`e (1971), Verlinden (1977).

16

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

There are other Italo-Iberian connections in play as well. From the ﬁfteenth century through the end of the seventeenth century – i.e. the time in which Portuguese slave trading in West Africa reached its apogee, there were significant cultural and commercial ties between Italian city-states such as Florence and Venice and the Iberian Peninsula. Italian expatriates were concentrated in Lisbon and Seville, and Italian merchants and scholars contributed to the political and intellectual life in these regions. These cultural and trade contacts provide additional mechanisms by means of which the language and ways of African slaves in Italy and Sicily could exert a tangible inﬂuence on the developing Afro-Iberian language of Portugal and southern Spain.7 African slaves in Italy and Sicily were ﬁrst predominantly female, used as concubines and in domestic service. Before long, the preference shifted to male slaves, used in agriculture and in domestic servitude. The living conditions and demographic proportions were similar to those found in southern Spanish cities in the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries, from which it is not unlikely that African-born slaves in Italy progressed through the same linguistic continuum – from rudimentary pidgin in the ﬁrst generation to ethnically neutral European language in subsequent generations – as occurred throughout Spain and Portugal. To date, only one literary document has come to light, a sonnet by the Florentine poet Alessandro Braccesi (1455–1503), written towards the end of the ﬁfteenth century. The poem is (Ferrara 1950): – Marta, vien su: mona Lena ti vuole. – Bienga, bagoccia! Che buoglia potrona? Ni cci o` begliuta o mangliata buocona. – Deh, vien su presto; non tante parole. – Cottio bugata: sie pa de benzuole; chientu margasse dui lina puzuona pur tella tiesse marita ﬁgliona. No puoza begnir chia buolla paiole. – Sta cheta col malanno! – Tuo pertone dui trista ﬁaccia; tu lingua cuciata! – Aspetta un poco: tu vuo del bastone. – Cassa star: io non buoglio inquestata. Preto, biagascia, tu cuorna patrone! – Vien su, che fritta ti sie la curata! Becca quella mazata, ebbram gaglioffa, troia, bulivacca! – Centu marghianni! Che cuollo te ﬁacca!

Most of the discrepancies with respect to Florentine dialect of the time involve phonetic deformations (Ferrara 1950:324): potrono for patrona, ni for nuon, 7

Albuquerque (1991), Arienzo (1991), Cardini (1991), Ferro (1991).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

17

begliuta for beiuta, mangliata for mangiata, sie for sei, ﬁaccia for faccia, biagascia for bagascia, and dui for cui. Although some of the distortions were clearly intended for comic effect and probably were not actually used by slaves of any linguistic background, other modiﬁcations are consistent with known Afro-Romance contacts. For example, in some of the local varieties of the Afro-Panamian negro congo speech, an epenthetic semivocalic /i/ (and sometimes /r/) is added to many syllables (Lipski 1989, 1997); the forms ﬁaccia < faccia and biagascia < bagascia are consistent with this trend.8 Sub-Saharan Africans in Spain: the ﬁrst contacts It is often assumed that the presence of black Africans in Spain began with the Portuguese-initiated Atlantic slave trade, in the second half of the ﬁfteenth century. Matters are more complex, however, since sub-Saharan Africans, both slave and free, were present in Spain long before the Portuguese explorations of West Africa. Little direct documentation of their life, culture and language is available, but the general facts are known.9 Arab and other Muslim traders had been involved in slave trading with subSaharan Africa since the Middle Ages, and it was the contact with this trade, 8

There is another strange anonymous ﬁfteenth century Italian sonnet, the “Sonetto di Schiavonia paisa,” in which a deformed Italian is used, possibly by slaves of African origin (Ferrara 1950: 327): – O compania, ben si la trovata; donda sta’ tu? – Da Schiavonia paisa. – Non conuscia tu me? – Che possa accisa! – Buona fe’, tu sta’ a Siena copostata. – Sci, buona fe’, e quando io me sa malata, per`o partuta sio e andata a Pisa; mo mese viena che non po’ fa spisa. – Buona fe’, tanto poco vadaniata? O compania, andamosi a taverno, e no ti cura: io voglio paga vina e faite io buona compania. Voglioti presa ancora una ﬂorina, ch’io venduto uno tassa e un laterno che furatosi io a patruna mia. Oim`e, santa Maria! – Compania, male stai? Non posso caca. – E buona fe’, io cacata tutta braca.

9

According to Ferrara (1950:321), Marta was a name frequently given to African slaves in Italy during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. He speculates (p. 323) that the slave woman may be a Tartar, although admitting the possibility that she is African. Given the time period in which the poem was written, it is more likely that a black African slave was living in Florence than a woman of Tartar origin. In any event, the deformed Florentine dialect found in the poem does not contain identifying characteristics of any particular substratum. F. Ortiz (1986:ch. VII); Seminario (1975) for an overview.

18

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

ﬁrst during the Moorish occupation of Spain and Portugal and then as a result of Portuguese contacts along the coast of present-day Mauritania, which would ultimately provide a pattern for European initiatives in the African slave trade. Most of this early slave trade was carried out through contact with powerful African city-states, including the kingdoms of Mali (centered around Timbuktu), Takrur (along the Senegal River), Ghana (at the southern edge of the Sahara), Oyo (in nothern Nigeria), Benin (closer to the Niger Delta), Kanem (near Lake Chad), and the Songhai (at the northern bend of the Niger River). Arab traders from North Africa utilized camel caravans, which went from oasis to oasis, establishing a ﬂourishing bilateral trade with sub-Saharan regions. Commodities exchanged included gold, textiles, dates, kola nuts, pepper, hides, and, to a lesser extent, slaves. In East Africa, trade took place along the Nile River, and through the Horn of Africa. The precise number of slaves exported to the eastern Mediterranean (and later to Italy, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula) via trans-Saharan routes is not known, but Austen (1979:30–32), after reviewing available data, places a low estimate of 1,000+ and an upper ﬁgure of more than 6,000 slaves per year, for the period 700–1700. Thus the most conservative estimate indicates displacement of over one million slaves – mostly from sub-Saharan regions, across the Sahara in medieval and renaissance times. In practice, these trade routes reached all the way from the Mediterranean coast of North Africa to the Bight of Benin, via a series of interlocking groups and societies. When European explorers and entrepreneurs arrived along the West African coast in the ﬁfteenth century, they were able to immediately tap into efﬁcient trade systems, which had already been supplying the same products, albeit via different routes, and did not need to set up any infrastructure in order to enter into immediate commerce. Indeed, Europeans were only able to establish the most rudimentary installations on the African coast, usually simple barracks to hold slaves and trade goods awaiting transport (although sometimes nearby villages were used for this purpose). Thus for example the Portuguese fortress at Elmina was designed to protect Akan gold shipments, but local African leaders viewed this territorial incursion with considerable ambivalence, and the Portuguese (and later the Dutch, who captured the fort) were never able to expand their presence in this region. European traders had to depend on the goodwill of their African hosts, and went to great lengths to ensure favorable treatment. Black Africans were apparently ﬁrst brought to Spain by the Moorish occupation forces, who acquired them from Ethiopia, and also from the trans-Sahara trade caravans that would later provide slaves and tropical products to Christian Portugal and Spain. Moslem residents of Arab-dominated C´ordoba protested that the royal bodyguards were mostly blacks who spoke no Arabic.10 The 10

Hitti (1963:514, fn. 6).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

19

various Arab leaders of Moslem Spain possessed quantities of black slaves, who were frequently offered as gifts to other dignitaries. Christian Spaniards ﬁrst came to possess black slaves following the reconquest of Seville in 1248, when they acquired slaves formerly owned by the Moslems. Many of the descendants of these slaves were present in Spain, some still in forced servitude, during the reign of the Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabela. By the thirteenth century, black slaves were also present in Majorca, Arag´on, and Valencia, coming largely from Italy and Sicily. Through dealings with merchants, mostly Moslems and Jews, who traded across the Sahara, residents of Catalonia possessed detailed information about sub-Saharan Africa, including the names of some principal kingdoms. According to indirect sources, blacks were so prevalent in Seville by 1401 that the ﬁrst cofrad´ıa or mutual aid society was formed in the Barrio de San Roque, called the “Sant´ısimo Cristo de la Fundaci´on” or “de los negritos,” also referred to as the “Cofrad´ıa de Nuestra Se˜nora de los Angeles.”11 In 1472, a group of black slaves petitioned the government of Arag´on to form a cofrad´ıa named “Nuestra Se˜nora de Gracia,” and to purchase a residence in Valencia. Enter the Portuguese: more blacks in Spain Despite the presence of black Africans in medieval Spain and Portugal, and a general awareness of black “Ethiopians” throughout southern Europe, direct contact between the Iberian Peninsula and sub-Saharan Africa was sporadic before the turn of the ﬁfteenth century. With the Portuguese explorations of the West African coast, beginning in the early ﬁfteenth century, black Africans began arriving in the Iberian Peninsula in ever increasing numbers. The ﬁrst large populations were found in Portugal, especially in Lisbon. The ﬁrst black Africans arriving in ﬁfteenth-century Portugal were free emissaries, but slaves were soon to follow. Despite the free status of these blacks, prejudice against blacks, based largely on vague travel accounts and semi-mythical stories of “Ethiopia,” pervaded medieval Spain and Portugal. We have no written records of how free Africans might have spoken Portuguese (and later, Spanish), although Portuguese documents written by Congolese scribes in the sixteenth century contain deviations from native usage that give hints of what was obviously a more widespread interlanguage (see chapter 2). That Portuguese did become a signiﬁcant linguistic presence in West Africa is attested by the numerous early Portuguese borrowings, in Akan, Kikongo, and later in Bantu languages from South Africa to the Horn of Africa.12 Presumably, the most ﬂuent African speakers of Portuguese (such as the Christianized Manicongo or Kongo 11 12

Gonz´alez de Le´on (1852:9–10), Bermejo y Carballo (1882:7–9, 381–99), F. Ortiz (1986:158– 59). Atkins (1953), Martins (1958a, 1958b), Bradshaw (1965), Bal (1968, 1974), Cabral (1975), Kiraithe and Baden (1976), Prata (1983), Horta (1991a, 1991b).

20

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

emperor and his ministers) spoke with the substratal features observable in the modern speech of Angolans and Mozambicans who have attained ﬂuency in Portuguese.13 Africans possessing only a passing acquaintance with Portuguese would speak a rough pidgin. However, it is only with the introduction of slaves, human entities destined to be despised, that the historical record comments on black Africans’ use of European languages. Portugal’s early explorers in Africa regarded the native populations with curiosity and amusement, but massive enslavement was not yet in the picture. When Portugal discovered wealthy and powerful African kindgoms, epitomized by the Kingdom of the Kongo, they established diplomatic relations as with a European or Asian power. African nations along the Gold Coast were also treated with some deference, and Portugal constructed the fortress at Elmina as a means of safeguarding access to these important groups. Construction and maintenance of the castle required the continuing cooperation of African leaders. When Portuguese, and then Spanish explorers reached the western coast of sub-Saharan Africa, slavery was the last thing on their minds. They encountered a number of prosperous and well-established civilizations, which were well situated to provide luxury items such as gold, ivory, and, later, spices. African leaders were glad to provide the needed commodities, in return for guns and gunpowder, and other European trade goods. Since African societies never came to produce such goods themselves, the initial barter with Europe ultimately turned into a dependency, as tribal leaders staked their fortunes on the superiority accruing to the possession and distribution of desirable European goods. When the Europeans entered into trade with West African leaders, they discovered that slavery was already a ﬂourishing industry in many African communities, and had been for centuries. Intra-African slavery was in many ways similar to practices found in imperial Rome and medieval eastern Europe. Slaves were taken en masse as prisoners of war. Some groups sold members into slavery to alleviate population pressures occasioned by crop failures or other natural disasters. Since many African societies were highly clan-oriented, this micro-ethnocentrism often permitted enslavement of non-clan members. Clan leaders derived their power from the number of clan members they could muster. Slavery provided one means of increasing the number of “honorary” clan members, thereby increasing the power of the clan chief. The differences with respect to American plantation slavery were considerable. First, slaves within Africa were more closely integrated into the societies in which they worked. Slaves were usually taken from outside the immediate ethnic group, often in response to population pressures. Some scholars have 13

Estermann (1963), Bernardes (1970), Gon¸calves (1983), Marques (1983), Silva-Brummel (1984), Perl (1989a, b, c, d), Endruschat (1990), Lipski (1994c, 1995b).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

21

referred to slavery in sub-Saharan Africa as “institutionalization of marginality.”14 Slaves usually worked alongside free community members. Under no circumstances were they conﬁned to labor gangs, whose sole function was to produce a surplus of labor-intensive energy. Within Africa, slaves enjoyed a measure of autonomy, were able to devote part of their time to their own sustenance, and could obtain their freedom much more easily than in American plantation societies. Although ethnic rivalries in Africa can create nearly impenetrable barriers among groups, the racist reaction occasioned by strikingly different physical characteristics between Europeans and black Africans did not enter into consideration. Nor was the ethnic fragmentation as massive in most cases. In European and American slaveholdings, it was usual to ﬁnd Africans from a wide variety of ethnic and linguistic groups, who had been thrown together by mere chance. Within Africa, slaves were normally acquired either from geographically adjacent regions, or by established trade mechanisms that predictably yielded members of known ethnic groups. Thus communication among slaves, and between slaves and free community members, was usually facilitated. Cultural practices could be similar or identical among slaves and slave owners. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, within Africa slaves were not held as chattels, to be bought, sold, and bequeathed without the slightest personal consideration. In Africa, slaves were not normally separated from their spouses or children, and in general their living conditions were approximately of the same order of magnitude as (at least the less fortunate) free community members. Within Africa, clear regional hegemonies existed, and certain ethnic and cultural groups were in the ascendancy before the European-American slave trade began. In many instances, some of these same structures of subordination were maintained in the slavery setting, particularly as regards linguistic usage, and religious practices. A clear case is the Kingdom of the Kongo, which had enjoyed superiority over neighboring groups for a long time, perhaps centuries, before the arrival of Europeans. Members of neighboring ethnic groups paid tribute, imitated Kongo practices, and in groups containing Africans from several regions, usually looked to Bakongo as natural leaders. Once West Africans found themselves thrown together by the slave trade, especially when Bantu speakers from the Congo Basin area were involved, leadership often naturally gravitated to Bakongos. This accounts for the prevalence of Kikongo lexical items in regions of Latin America where Bantu-speaking slaves from many regions were present, as well as speakers of other unrelated African languages. Indeed, the term congo came to be synonymous with leadership and power, particularly in the ritualistic sense. Ceremonies which ultimately derived from a wide cross-section of African traditions adopted the designation congo. 14

Rawley (1981:12).

22

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

As a result of the growing trade in African slaves, Europeans came to see black Africans as nothing more than a virtually endless supply of cheap and durable labor. The events that turned the tide are not known with certainty, but several plausible scenarios can be suggested. Europeans certainly observed the already ﬂourishing African practice of slavery, traditionally involving prisoners of war. Slaves, which African groups bartered among themselves, were offered to the ﬁrst European visitors in exchange for trade goods. The Portuguese and Spaniards were all too familiar with slavery, both during the Moorish occupation and its immediate aftermath. Thus there would be no psychological or moral obstacles standing in the way of absorbing a new group of captives. At the same time, European explorers in Africa found, in addition to elaborate kingdoms, other groups of Africans who lacked the means of resisting foreign intrusions, and who lived in conditions that the Europeans could interpret as primitive. Countering the view of the Manicongo and the Gold Coast chieftains as powerful personages, came the notion of the African as savage, ﬁt only for forced labor.15 The racist reaction of Europeans towards black Africans intensiﬁed once the latter were taken out of their element. In Europe, and later in the Americas, blacks were seen as “different” and therefore – given natural human xenophobia – inferior. If they attempted to maintain their native dress and cultural patterns, their strangeness only provoked laughter, while if they adopted European styles, their attempts at cultural crossover were met with mockery and derision. Linguistic difﬁculties compounded the problem. Within Africa, although pidginized versions of European languages might be used for trade, African languages were the order of the day, and Europeans were always at a disadvantage when surrounded by an African population that could completely bypass foreign visitors by using African languages. In Europe and America, where ﬂuency in Spanish, Portuguese, etc. was tantamount to being civilized, and where such expressions as hablar en cristiano meant “to speak a European language,” hence be Christian = in possession of a redeemable soul, Africans who spoke little or nothing of these European languages were branded as bozales “untamed” and gente sin raz´on “people without reason.” Paths of Portuguese exploration and exploitation in Africa In Portugal, King Jo˜ao I began to look to North Africa as a possible zone of expansion, following the defeat of Moorish forces in Spain and Portugal. The vision of sub-Saharan Africa as a land of great wealth – in particular gold – already existed in medieval Europe. Arab trading caravans that crossed the Sahara from the grasslands and rain forests to the south often brought gold ornaments for sale to Europeans in North Africa. Moreover, some African chieftains 15

Ibid. (13).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

23

had amassed spectacular wealth, and ostentatious display of this wealth occurred on more than one occasion. For example, in 1324, Mansa Musa, the Islamic ruler of the Kingdom of Mali, made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He took with him a retinue of some 60,000 individuals, including 500 men each carrying a gold staff. Some 27,000 pounds of gold dust were taken along to defray expenses. This ﬂaunting of wealth did not go unnoticed by Europeans, and maps with an image of Musa holding a gold nugget appeared in Europe.16 The Portuguese, through the invention of the caravelle and the development of advanced seafaring prowess, were the ﬁrst European nation to directly probe for the sources of African gold by sea, and the voyages of exploration meant to secure wealth for European merchants had unforeseen consequences for Afro-Iberian relations. In 1415, Portugal successfully captured the enclave of Ceuta. King Jo˜ao’s son, Henry, was present at the capture of Ceuta, and came into contact with stories of fabulous wealth in the near-mythical city of Timbuktu, on the other side of the great desert. The Arabs often referred to the wealthy land south of the Sahara as Bilad Ghana, and told tales of a race of black people, of mighty rivers (thought to be tributaries of the Nile), and of immense quantities of gold. The latter fact could be conﬁrmed by the gold which the Arabs sold to Europeans, after having transported it by camel caravan across the Sahara. Eventually, most of the other fabulous stories told by Arab traders also turned out to be factual, although the extent of individual wealth in the sub-Saharan kingdoms was exaggerated. Prince Henry was understandably enticed by the stories he heard in North Africa. His motives for undertaking the maritime exploration of the West African coast have been disputed by historians, but a combination of religious zeal, mercenary greed, and a powerful sense of impending adventure, impelled Henry to plan and underwrite the sea ventures which were to radically change life on the Iberian Peninsula, in Africa, and in the Americas. The initial exploration of the West African coast was impeded by the superstitious fear of a boiling sea, scorching sun, and reputed dropoff of the ocean, which according to legend lay beyond Cape Bojador, in northwestern Morocco. Although no such supernatural forces in fact existed past Bojador, sea currents were fast and often violent, and both sea and winds moved in a southeasterly direction. This made it impossible for early sailing vessels to return along the coast; they would have to put far out to sea in unknown and dangerous waters in order to return to European ports. The early ships were fragile and always hugged the coast while sailing, and medieval pilots were unaccustomed to the techniques of tacking, so that the nautical barrier represented by Cape Bojador was real enough even without the mythological horror stories. In 1434, the Portuguese pilot Gil Eannes proved these stories to be false, by rounding the cape and returning 16

Bovill (1968:90), Piersen (1996:10).

24

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

home to tell of no misadventures. In the following years, Portuguese sailors would continue to inch their way forward along the Moroccan coast, without making any astounding discoveries. These feats of nautical prowess were made possible by the development of new ships and sails, which allowed ships to sail against the strong westerly winds which blow along the African coast, far into the Sargasso Sea and then northeastward toward Portugal thereby enabling a safe return to the Mediterranean. For several years, the Portuguese maintained this return route as a strict secret, to discourage other Europeans (particularly Spaniards) from dislodging Portuguese explorers from the African coasts.17 In 1441, Captain Antam Gon¸calvez decided to go ashore along the coast of what would later be the Spanish colony of Rio de Oro. Stumbling upon a group of North Africans (probably Berbers) with black captives, Gon¸calvez and his crew, together with another Portuguese adventurer who happened upon the scene (Nuno Trist˜ao), succeeded in capturing several prisoners, including one black African who claimed to be of royal blood.18 The sensation in Lisbon upon the return of these ships can scarcely be imagined, for here was tangible evidence in support of the fabulous tales that had been in circulation since the ﬁrst Portuguese presence in North Africa. Nuno Trist˜ao eventually returned the African captive to the area of Mauritania, where he was exchanged for ten black hostages, all of whom were taken back to Portugal. In 1443–44, Nuno Trist˜ao came upon Arguim Island, which was to become the ﬁrst slaving station for the European slave trade in Africa. In a series of raids on the coast and nearby inland areas, this expedition rounded up more than two hundred captives, which demonstrated to skeptical Europeans that large-scale cargoes of slaves could be obtained in West Africa. After the initial raids, Portuguese explorers discovered that it was easier to obtain slaves by barter than by capture. Europeans traded in luxury goods that had previously been obtained by trans-Sahara caravans: horses, silks, metal products, etc. At the same time, Portuguese sailors were pushing ever further along the African coast, making contact directly with black African communities and leaders, rather than with Arab and Berber traders. The ﬁrst sub-Saharan Africans brought to Portugal in quantity came with the building of the trading station on Arguim Island. Direct contact with the Senegambia region had been made the year before, but permanent mainland settlements were not established until a few years later. The Arguim station was important for the African slave trade from the very beginning, despite lying to the north of black Africa. Slaving caravans brought slaves from the Senegambia to Arguim, whence they were shipped to Portugal. By 1455, more than 1,000 slaves per year were passing through Arguim,19 so that the presence of Wolofand Mandinga-speaking slaves in Portugal did not have to wait for permanent 17

Rego (1965:19).

18

Davidson (1980:53–54).

19

Vogt (1979:5).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

25

Portuguese settlements in Senegambia. In addition to the Euro-African contacts occasioned by the slave trade, by the late 1450s Portugal was buying considerable quantities of gold from the Gambian region.20 By the early 1460s Portuguese explorers had reached Sierra Leone, and a decade later the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast (Ghana) were the subject of intense Portuguese interest. Gold-inspired trade with the latter region began immediately, and the Mina area soon became one of the Portuguese crown’s major sources of gold. Shortly thereafter the fortress of Elmina was constructed, consolidating Portuguese control in a zone that was being increasingly contested by Spain. Portuguese explorers ﬁrst arrived in the Kongo Kingdom in 1483, and speakers of Congo Basin languages were taken to Portugal in the following years.21 The Portuguese learned of the Mani Congo (Muene Kongo in contemporary Kikongo), leader of this kingdom, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century, considerable Kongo nomenclature was in circulation among those concerned with the African trade. The ﬁrst permanent Portuguese trading presence on the mainland of West Africa was in the Senegambia and Guinea-Bissau, and although the bulk of Portuguese slave trading would ultimately shift to the Bight of Benin, Congo Basin, and Angola, Upper Guinea would continue to supply slaves throughout the colonial period (Rodney 1970). The majority of slaves taken from this region ended up in Cape Verde, the Madeiras, the Canaries, and the Iberian Peninsula, which is why comparatively few slaves from this region appear in lists representing Spanish America. There is some indication that the early slave labor in the mines of Potos´ı drew heavily on Upper Guinea.22 By the turn of the eighteenth century, the French were the principal slave traders along the Upper Guinea coast, and the English also made incursions. By the middle of the century Bissau was exporting large quantities of slaves, principally to Brazil. The next coastal African area to be exploited by the Portuguese, and the one which was to become the single largest source of slaves for the Atlantic trade, was the Angola/Congo region. Luanda rose to become the principal staging area for the slave trade, followed by Beneguela to the south. The island of S˜ao Tom´e was important throughout the slave trade, but it is difﬁcult to determine how many of the slaves who apparently passed through this island (which was a major holding station) had actually spent a signiﬁcant amount of time there. S˜ao Tom´e, with its rich volcanic soil and abundant rainfall, became an important plantation colony for Portugal, surpassing Madeira in sugar production. For a while, S˜ao Tom´e was Portugal’s main source of sugar, and the planters on that island (which was originally uninhabited) had a ready source of slaves from the neighboring African coast. Much of the slave trade to S˜ao Tom´e was handled by local traders and planters, circumventing ofﬁcial monopolies. Because S˜ao Tom´e is nearly equidistant from the Bight of Benin and the Angolan coast, 20

Barry (1988:73).

21

Hilton (1985:ch. 3).

22

Rodney (1970:99).

26

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

slaves from both regions were taken to the island. The creole language that developed on S˜ao Tom´e and Pr´ıncipe, although showing more Bantu inﬂuence, also bears the imprint of Kwa languages spoken in the Benin region.23

Portuguese exploitation of the Congo Basin By the early 1460s Portuguese explorers had reached Sierra Leone, and a decade later the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast (Ghana) were the subject of intense Portuguese interest. Gold-inspired trade with the latter region began immediately, and the Mina area soon became one of the Portuguese crown’s major sources of gold. In 1482 the fortress of S˜ao Jorge da Mina (known popularly as Elmina) was constructed, consolidating Portuguese control of trade in a zone which was being increasingly contested by Spain. Portuguese explorers arrived at the mouth of the Congo River in 1482, and arrived in the Kongo Kingdom in 1483, and speakers of Congo Basin languages were taken to Portugual in the following years. After several aborted attempts at making contact with the leaders of the coastal Congo populations, Diego C˜ao ﬁnally met the Manicongo “lord of the Bakongo people,” who was residing at the inland capital of Mbanza. The Portuguese discovered a ruler seated in splendor on an ivory throne, and determined that he nominally controlled vast numbers of minions in coastal and inland regions of the Congo Basin. Diplomatic relations were immediately established between Portugal and the Kongo kingdom, in the person of the Manicongo Nzinga a Nkuwa, whom the Portuguese referred to as Jo˜ao. A few years later the Congolese leader Nzinga Mbemba was baptized as a Christian and took the name of Dom Affonso. At the turn of the sixteenth century he became the next Manicongo, and for years he carried on an intense correspondence with King Manuel and his successors in Portugal.24 During the period of nominal Portuguese recognition of the Kongo kingdom, the Manicongos sent many noble children and ofﬁcials to Portugal, for higher education and to study for religious orders. At the same time, the presence of Portuguese priests and missionaries was increased in the Congo. This accounts for the large number of Portuguese borrowings into Kikongo; in Portugal, members of the academic community often had ﬁrst-hand contacts with free Africans through the limited “student exchange.” Early literary imitations of Portuguese language and habits could therefore have some basis in fact, and the presence of free Africans of noble birth would inspire later Portuguese and Spanish writers who argued against the notion that all Africans were uneducated heathens worthy of contempt. 23 24

Ferraz (1979), G¨unther (1973), Morais-Barbosa (1963, 1975), Valkhoff (1966, 1975). Felgas (1958), Duffy (1961), Balandier (1968), Thornton (1983), Hilton (1985).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

27

The Portuguese remained in Congo/Angola from the end of the ﬁfteenth century until the second half of the twentieth century, and exported slaves from this region until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. The Portuguese presence in the former Kongo kingdom did not last as long, particularly at the northern edge of this territory, along the Congo River. In the entire region, the Portuguese fortunes rose and fell as conﬂicts with and among various African groups resulted in changing alliances. These events had profound consequences for the supply of slaves to foreign markets, and must be taken into account when attempting to determine the ethnicity and languages of Congo/Angola slaves taken to the Americas at different time periods.25 Portuguese expansion into Angola Immediately to the south of the Kongo kingdom was Dondo or Ndongo, whose ruler was known as the Ngola. Originally the Ngola was subordinate to the Manicongo, but Portuguese intervention helped break this dependency. The African leaders in turn allowed the Portuguese to establish a mainland trading settlement, in the territory that would thenceforth be known as Angola. The fort of Luanda was constructed in 1576, and became the main focus of European trade, and later the principal port of the Atlantic slave trade, with South America. To the south, the fort at Benguela was established in 1617. Eventually the Portuguese settlements at Angola, and in particular Luanda, would far overshadow the Portuguese Congo for both commercial wealth and the supply of slaves for the Atlantic trade. Portuguese slaving in the Kongo kingdom, at ﬁrst perceived as advantageous by the Manicongo, was by the middle of the sixteenth century seen to have a pernicious effect on the population of the kingdom, with the drain being particularly heavy among young males. The Manicongo Affonso I had petitioned the king of Portugal to stop the trade, but by this time the momentum had grown too powerful for any African leader to stop. Spurred on by the slave traders on S˜ao Tom´e, who took slaves from the mainland with or without ofﬁcial Portuguese permission, the slave trade continued to grow. Many of the slaves delivered by the Kongo were obtained by trade or raid from interior groups, also speaking related Bantu languages (e.g. the Teke and Mpumbu). During the initial Portuguese recognition of the Kongo monarchy, the latter kingdom also drew slaves from the tributary Mbundu people, living under the dominion of the Ngola, in the Ndongo kingdom just to the south. Thus for the majority of the sixteenth century, slaves delivered from the Congo region did not as frequently speak Kikongo (the language of the dominant group, and thus the least likely 25

Birmingham (1966).

28

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

to be found among the slaves), as related Bantu languages. Kimbundu was the foremost among these languages. By the end of the seventeenth century, matters were almost entirely reversed. Through a series of conﬂicts, the Portuguese had succeeded in nearly destroying the Kongo kingdom (although a series of powerless Kongo “kings” would continue to swear loyalty to Portugal until the early decades of the twentieth century). Portugal authorized a ﬁrst visit to the land of the Ngola in 1520, but this met with little success (the emissary was hostage for nearly six years), and aroused the ire of the Manicongo, who wished to retain his monopoly on all trade with Europe, and to completely dominate the slaving business. However, by 1550, Portuguese traders were taking slaves from Angola, although no direct relationship with the Ngola had yet been established. This contact was ﬁnally made in 1560, but relations soon degenerated, and hostilities between Portugal and a succession of Ngolas would mark the next two centuries. Once direct contact with the Ngola had been made, the proportion of Mbundu slaves taken by the Portuguese appears to have dropped, since the Mbundu were variously trade allies or adversaries who could only be captured dead.26 During the Dutch occupation of Luanda (1641–48) matters were further muddled. The Dutch tried to press their advantage with groups who were hostile to the Portuguese. They made alliances with several Mbundu leaders, and therefore received slaves speaking other Bantu languages. When the Portuguese recaptured Luanda, they launched full-scale attacks against the two principal Mbundu factions: a western group (which were ultimately referred to as “Angolas”) and an eastern group lead by the rebel queen Nzinga, who resisted Portuguese intervention. By 1671, the Angolan kingdom of Ndongo had been destroyed by the Portuguese, but the eastern group formed the powerful Kasanje kingdom, which was never fully dominated by the Portuguese. After many skirmishes, peace and sustained trade with Kasanje was only achieved in 1683. Portuguese slave sources moved ever eastward, into the Lunda empire along the Kasai River. Portuguese slavers also took ever larger quantities from Ovimbundu (Umbundu) territory to the south, and the port of Benguela, in Ovimbunduland, at times rivaled Luanda for total volume of slave exportation. Throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century, the Portuguese colony at Angola degenerated into a couple of slaving ports. This was the period of massive slave exportation to Brazil, and to a lesser extent the Spanish R´ıo de la Plata colonies, but no one ethnic group predominated. Mbundu and Umbundu (Ovimbundu) were represented, but exact proportions are not known. The Bantu languages spoken in Angola are closely related, and it is frequently impossible to assign a single language as source for Bantu elements found in Latin America. However, the nature of Portuguese trade and conquest in Angola suggest a somewhat 26

Miller (1976).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

29

lower proportion of Kikongo- and Kimbundu-speaking slaves than has been proposed by accounts which are based only on the ethnic groups living near the main slaving ports. By the eighteenth century at the very latest, Angola was supplying slaves directly to the Americas, and the Portuguese language ability of these slaves was often very rudimentary. Unlike in S˜ao Tom´e, a creole Portuguese dialect never developed in coastal Angola, principally because the majority of the African population was never displaced from original homelands, and the native languages were never fragmented through forced association with linguistically diverse slave populations. Slaves taken from the interior to be shipped from Angolan ports knew little or no Portuguese prior to arriving in the slaving ports, but acquired some basic skills on the Angolan coast or during the voyage to Brazil. This fact can be deduced not only by the indirect documentation of the sort of Portuguese spoken by Africans in Angola prior to the twentieth century, but also by the limited testimony on early bozal Portuguese in Brazil, at least some of which probably reﬂected the usage of slaves brought from Angola with some prior knowledge of Portuguese. In early colonial Brazil, literary Afro-Portuguese pidgin appears in a few texts, most from around the ﬁnal decades of the eighteenth century. By this time, Africanized varieties of Portuguese were already well established in Brazil, in many cases exhibiting signiﬁcant differences from earlier European Portuguese literary examples. The use of European-derived stereotypes in late eighteenth-century Brazil can most probably be ascribed to literary tradition, and should not be taken uncritically as a representation of how Africans actually spoke Portuguese at this time. The predominant literary model was an Africanized Portuguese pidgin formed in Portugal and West Africa, which eventually made its way into sixteenth century Spain, and the literary representations of writers like Lope de Rueda and Rodrigo de Reinosa. By the eighteenth century, however, a new Afro-Brazilian language begins to emerge, which is not simply a continuation (literary or historically accurate) of Afro-Iberian patterns, but which also points to local developments in Brazil, or along the Angola-Brazil axis. Far-ﬂung congenors of Afro-Portuguese language: Portuguese Asia There is a ﬁnal dimension to Afro-Lusitanian linguistic and cultural contexts, a complex series of demographic and ethnic contacts which were played out across a vast territory far removed from the Africa-Europe-Americas triangle which is the usual source for Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles. From the early sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, the Portuguese maintained a string of colonies in Asia, mostly along the coast of India (including Dam˜ao, Diu, Goa, Mangalore, Cochin, Tecelaria, Chevai, Chaul, Negapat˜ao,

30

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

Korlai, Bombay, and other areas), in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malacca (modern Malaysia), Batavia and Timor (Indonesia), and Macao, as well as having outposts as far up the Asian coast as Japan. In most of these areas, Portuguese-based creole languages developed, some of which lasted until the turn of the twentieth century, and a few of which survive in fragmentary form even today.27 Scholars who have studied Portuguese-based creoles agree that the Asian creoles in general are typologically different enough from Afro-Lusitanian creoles, and similar enough amongst themselves, to warrant a separate subclassiﬁcation (irrespective of whether a broad-based monogenetic theory can ultimately account for the genesis of all Portuguese-derived creoles). To name but two important differences, all Asian-Portuguese creoles use eu for the ﬁrst person singular subject pronoun, while all Afro-Iberian creoles use a derivative of (a) mim. At the same time, Asian Portuguese creoles (with the exception of Macao creole) use derivatives of Portuguese tˆem “have” as copula, while Afro-Iberian creoles use derivatives of Portuguese estar and ser (and occasionally sentar and ﬁcar).28 What is less well known is that all the Portuguese Asian enclaves, from northwestern India to Macao, Malaysia, and Indonesia, contained signiﬁcant numbers of black Africans throughout their history. Moreover, there were complex trade routes among these colonies and Portuguese-controlled areas of southeastern Africa and even with Portugal, thus setting the scene for an extraordinarily complex network of linguistic cross-fertilization which ultimately requires that all Ibero-Romance based creoles be examined as part of an all-encompassing matrix of language contact and transfer. The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama ﬁrst arrived in India at the southwestern port of Calicut, in 1498. He encountered a coastal region dominated by hostile Arabs under the leadership of the Samuri. Calicut itself was under Hindu rule, but Moslems held commercial and military power in the region.29 Between 1498 and 1505 the Portuguese realized many commercial voyages to India. In 1505, a Portuguese expedition under the command of Francisco de Almeida (who had been named a Viceroy) arrived in Cochin, and established friendly relations with the local Hindu ruler, who – perhaps in ignorance of the full consequences – was crowned by Almeida as the King of Cochin and became a Portuguese subject. The next major player in Portuguese India was Alfonso de Albuquerque, who conquered Goa for Portugal in 1510, with the help of Hindu allies. Beginning in 1518, Portuguese settlement of Goa began

27

28

Schuchardt (1883a, 1883b, 1883c, 1889b), Dalgado (1900–01, 1902–03, 1906, 1917, 1922), Rego (1943), Vermeer (1972), Hancock (1973, 1975), M. Theban (1973, 1974), L. Theban (1975, 1977), I. Smith (1978, 1979, 1984), M. and L. Theban (1980), Wexler (1983), Baxter (1988), Jackson (1990), Teyssier (1993), Clements (1996). 29 Rego (1965:25). Lipski (1999c, 2002c).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

31

in earnest, and Goa was rapidly to develop into the centerpiece of Portugal’s Asian empire.30 By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had built fortresses at Cochin and Diu, as well as settlements at Goa and Bassein, thus consolidating their presence on the western Indian coast. Beginning in 1531, intensive Portuguese settlement of the northern provinces was enacted. Portuguese contact with Ceylon was begun in 1515, and in 1518 they built a fort at Colombo. Successfully fending off several attacks by local leaders, the Portuguese continued their expansion in Ceylon, including the Jaffna region.31 During the sixteenth century, the Portuguese began to place colonies on the eastern Indian Coromandel Coast, beginning with the town of Mylapur, which the Portuguese called S˜ao Tom´e, believing that the Apostle St. Thomas was buried there. The Portuguese also established a fortress at Nagapattinam, which they called Negapat˜ao, both of which were very close to northern Ceylon, and were integrally linked with the colonization and later defense of Ceylon. In 1511, the Portuguese conquered Melaka (Malacca) on the Malaysian Peninsula, and this began a ﬂourishing trade between the Coromandel Coast and Melaka, which extended still further to include Goa (and ultimately Portugal) on the western end, and Indonesia, Macao, and – for a while – Japan at the eastern end. Melaka became the hub for further Portuguese explorations in Asia, including Macao, Japan, and Indonesia.32 The Portuguese encouraged traders from India, Indonesia, and China to settle in Melaka. For many years, the principal route was Goa-Pulicat (a town just to the north of S˜ao Tom´e)-Melaka, and back, thus beginning the commercial, cultural, and linguistic links that would ultimately lead to important structural similarities among Asian Portuguese creoles. The trade was expanded after the foundation of Macao around 1557, and regular commerce between Macao, Melaka, and Goa was the hub of Portuguese Asian commerce. Throughout much of the sixteenth century, Timor was also drawn into trade with China (including Macao) and the Coromandel coast, supplying sandalwood.33 The heyday of the Portuguese enclaves in India was reached towards the end of the sixteenth century. Less than a century later, by 1666, Portuguese possessions in India were reduced to Goa, Diu, Dam˜ao, Bassein, and Chaul. Bassein was lost in 1739.34 All the Portuguese Asian colonies contained relatively tiny Portuguese enclaves surrounded by large indigenous populations, and the latter’s degree of integration with the Portuguese and willingness to serve the needs of the colonizers varied widely. Since most of the Portuguese colonies were coastal pockets that had to depend upon the good will of the indigenous populations for 30 32 34

31 Boxer (1969:49), Silva (1972:2). D’Ayalla (1888:ch. I, III), Miranda (1863). 33 Boxer (1968). Subrahmanyam (1990:103). Subrahmanyam (1990:ch. 2), Boxer (1985:VI, 7), Pearson (1987:153).

32

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

their very survival, enslavement of the native population was less frequent than “outsourcing” of slaves from other colonies, often from southeastern Africa. Logically, many of the slaves came from the nearest region of Africa, its eastern coast (particularly from around the Portuguese settlements in Mozambique), but it is known with certainty that the Portuguese took slaves from the Gulf of Guinea, the Slave Coast (Benin/Togo and western Nigeria) and as far away as Cape Verde to ﬁll labor needs in its Asian outposts. The slave trade from Mozambique to Portuguese India and Macao began in the sixteenth century and continued throughout most of the colonial period. This became particularly intense in the late seventeenth century. Most of the slaves taken to Goa and other Portuguese Indian colonies came from the relatively nearby Mozambique, but at least some continued to come from Portuguese outposts in West Africa. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese “India” stretched from the Cape of Good Hope, through Mozambique and part of contemporary Kenya (especially the port of Mombasa), through the easternmost territories of Malacca and Macao. The administrative capital was Goa. This included twelve cities and twenty-three fortresses, of which three were in southeastern Africa (Mo¸cambique, Sofala, and Mombasa). The presence of sub-Saharan Africans in Portuguese settlements in Asia is more than just a historical curiosity, and the linguistic importance of such multilingual contact vernaculars extends beyond the domain of Asian Portuguese creoles and in fact embraces the entire Portuguese-speaking world of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Many of the Africans once held as slaves in the Asian Portuguese enclaves returned to West Africa or Portugal as (freed) members of ships’ crews, and the cross-fertilization brought by these intercontinental voyages is amply apparent in the genealogical relationships among AfroPortuguese and Asian Portuguese creoles, in the presence of bozal Portuguese songs and folktales in Asian Portuguese colonies, and in the literary representations of early Afro-Portuguese speech. Early challenges to leadership of the Atlantic slave trade Although Portuguese explorations of the African coast were the ﬁrst recorded in modern history, and laid the groundwork for the slave trade and the eventual European colonization of Africa, this initial monopoly was short lived. The fabulous proﬁts obtained by the ﬁrst Portuguese traders on the upper Guinea coast could simply not be kept secret for long. Sailors and entrepreneurs spread the word far beyond Portugal’s frontiers, aided by the fact that both in Portugal and in Spain, commercial expeditions were largely ﬁnanced by foreigners, especially Venetians. Thus, as early as 1454 (and perhaps earlier, given the sparse record-keeping), a Spanish ﬂeet set out from Andalusia to undertake their own reconnoitering of “Guinea.” Judging by all accounts, these explorers

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

33

traded successfully along the Senegambia coast, but upon their return, when they were nearly in sight of C´adiz, they were attacked by a Portuguese armada, which destroyed part of the Spanish expedition. The damage had been done, however, since once the word was out, there would be no stopping clandestine Spanish attempts to further penetrate the lucrative African coastal trade. A diplomatic incident ensued, and the kings of both Spain and Portugal threatened war. Spain pressed an improvized claim to the Guinea coast, but this was not taken seriously outside of Spain. A series of papal bulls gave increasing recognition to Portuguese monopoly in sub-Saharan Africa; the Inter Caetera of 1456 essentially conceded to Portugal all territory from Cape Bojador to the Indies, both discovered and yet to be touched. With the coming to power of the Catholic sovereigns Fernando and Isabela in the 1470s, Spanish incursions along the West African coast increased in frequency and audacity. Matters were only settled in 1480, after which time Spain ofﬁcially ceased to interfere with Portuguese trade in Africa, although unauthorized ships continued to travel between Andalusia and the Guinea coast. Beginning in 1530, the French mounted a signiﬁcant challenge to Portuguese trade in this region. By 1492, French pirates had captured Portuguese ships returning to Europe with African gold; by 1531, some 300 Portuguese ships had been raided by French privateers. In 1530, the king of France commissioned the ﬁrst ship to legally travel to the Guinea coast, and despite Portuguese protests and diplomatic pressures, French intervention continued, both trading voyages and pirate attacks. At this juncture, the French were but little interested in slaves, since slavery was not a common practice in northern Europe. Their interests in Africa were for trade goods, spices, ivory, and gold. Their advances were quickly followed by the English, beginning around 1553. Like the French, the English were not much interested in slavery, although many English travelers’ accounts document the Portuguese slave trade, as well as plantation slavery on S˜ao Tom´e and Pr´ıncipe. Enter the Dutch slave traders In 1580, the armies of Felipe II of Spain invaded Portugal, and quickly took over that country. This domination lasted until 1640, when the Portuguese were ﬁnally able to shake off the Spanish conquerors. From 1580 until 1640, the Spanish and Portuguese crowns were united, but Spain, the central source of administrative power, acknowledged the Portuguese monopoly on the Atlantic slave trade, and the Portuguese were the principal slave traders and holders of asientos, slave-trading monopolies granted by the Spanish crown. In 1640, Portugal was able to break free of Spanish domination once more (although Spain never ofﬁcially recognized Portuguese independence until 1672), but its defensive capabilities were stretched very thin, especially in its African

34

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

trading positions. The partial vacuum created on the West African coast was rapidly ﬁlled by the Dutch, who had recently become one of the world’s leading commercial and maritime powers. The Amsterdam merchants and bankers had the necessary infrastructure, as well as the motivation, for entering into the African trade, ﬁrst in natural products and then in slaves. The Dutch West India Company was chartered in 1621, signaling the beginning of an aggressive Dutch intervention in the Atlantic market. Dutch shipping and naval forces were up to the challenge, and so in the ﬁrst decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch began direct attacks on Portuguese colonial enclaves. In 1621 the Dutch displaced the Portuguese from the island of Gor´ee, off the coast of Senegal, establishing a small fort. This fort would later become famous under French control, being the point through which thousands of Africans passed on their way to the French Caribbean. The ﬁrst major assault came in 1630, on Pernambuco, the rich sugarproducing region of northeastern Brazil. Recognizing the need for a continued source of African slave labor, the new Dutch plantation owners clamored for direct Dutch participation in the slave trade. In 1637, a Dutch ﬂeet sailing from Pernambuco attacked and defeated the Portuguese garrison at Elmina, on the Gold Coast. The Dutch destroyed the Portuguese feitoria and in its place built one of the largest slaving stations in the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade. It was from this Dutch-controlled area that thousands of Minas and Arar´as were shipped to Spanish America during the seventeenth century. In 1641, the Dutch captured Luanda and Benguela, assuring control over the Angola slave market, which was considered more valuable by Dutch planters and merchants. The Dutch were ultimately expelled from Angola in 1648, but moved their slaving enterprise offshore to tiny Annob´on island, as well as to occasional coastal enclaves.35 Meanwhile in Brazil the Portuguese residents rebelled against the Dutch in 1645, and ﬁnally ousted them from Pernambuco in 1654. Many of the Dutch left for sugar-producing regions of the Caribbean, as well as for the Dutch colonies of Cura¸cao, Surinam, Essequibo, Berbice, Demerara, and St. Eustatius. A number of Sephardic Jews accompanied the Dutch exodus, settling in Cura¸cao and Surinam, and possibly inﬂuencing the development of the Ibero-Romance based creoles Papiamento and Saramaccan, respectively.36 Although the Dutch were ultimately thwarted in their attempts to take over Portuguese colonies and trading posts, their entry into the slave trade was to become permanent. At the height of Dutch presence in Africa, they controlled, in one way or another, the slave trade from Cape Verde to Angola, including the important Senegambia, Gold Coast, Benin, and Congo Basin trading posts. Due to sagacious diplomacy with African leaders, commercial and maritime 35

Postma (1970, 1972, 1975), Emmer (1973).

36

Goodman (1987a).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

35

superiority, and the establishment of strategically located Cura¸cao as a slaving depot for the entire Caribbean, the Dutch were able to continue the slave trade throughout the New World. An illicit slave trade on Cura¸cao thrived in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century.37 In 1662, Spain returned to the asiento system of slave procurement, and a Dutch company successfully won the contract. A reorganized West India Company (WIC) obtained another asiento in 1675, and held it until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when France became the ofﬁcial supplier of slaves to Spanish America. Even after this period, however, the Dutch continued to supply slaves to Spanish American colonies, both legally and clandestinely, using the depot on Cura¸cao. Over the years, the Dutch drew slaves from different areas of Africa. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the majority of slaves (nearly three quarters) were taken from the Slave Coast (Benin/Togo). Another quarter came from the Loango/Angola area, and only about 2 percent of all slaves came from the Gold Coast. In the ﬁnal decades of intensive Dutch slave trading, after 1720, the Gold Coast rose to about one quarter of the total slave population. The Windward Coast/Ivory Coast stretch, which had previously not been tapped for slaves, rose to represent half of the total Dutch slave exports; Angola represented some 30 percent, and the Slave Coast dropped to around 1 percent.38 Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese made a brief reappearance as asiento holders and principal suppliers of slaves to Spanish America. Portuguese entrepreneurs formed the Cacheu Company (based in the modern Guinea Bissau) in 1675. The company failed in a few years, and was resurrected in 1690 as the Cacheu and Cape Verde Company. Ofﬁcially, this company was to supply slaves to the ports of Cartagena, Cuman´a, Havana, Portobelo, Honduras (i.e. Puerto Caballos, modern Puerto Cort´es) and Veracruz; in practice, slaves were also taken to La Guaira (Venezuela), Riohacha (Colombia), Santo Domingo, and other Caribbean ports, together with large amounts of contraband merchandise.39 With the rise in French power, the Portuguese slave monopoly to Spanish America ended once and for all, although individual Portuguese traders continued to supply slaves until the very end of the Atlantic slaving period. French and English entry into the slave trade War with England was one of the major causes of the diminution of Dutch slave trading. Another rapidly developing sea power, England sought to repeat the Dutch successes in muscling into the Atlantic trade. English and Dutch forces engaged in skirmishes on land and at sea during much of the seventeenth 37 38

Goslinga (1979, 1990), Hartog (1961, 1968). 39 Escalante (1964:42). Rawley (1981:ch. IV).

36

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

century, and England gained footholds in the Gambia (establishing the fort of St. James at the mouth of the Gambia River in 1664), the Gold Coast (establishing a fort at Accra in 1673), and the Niger Delta area. Although the British Royal Africa Company was founded in 1672, it was not the English but rather the French who were the next major European participants in the Atlantic slave trade. During the reign of Louis XIV, France fought the Dutch and won the islands of Tobago and, on the African coast, Gor´ee and Arguin. This prompted the formation of the French Senegal Company, later reorganized as the French Guinea Company, which initially provided slaves for the newly acquired French colony of Saint-Domingue. The French began to expand the trade to the Spanish American colonies, and in 1701 they obtained the asiento for ofﬁcial slave deliveries to Spanish America. This asiento only lasted until 1713; both before and especially after this period, French slave traders primarily supplied nonSpanish colonies in Latin America, especially the sugar-growing islands of the Caribbean, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Kitts. Although some of these Africans would ultimately end up in Spanish Santo Domingo, particularly after the Haitian revolution, the direct French contribution to the slave supply in Spanish America was relatively brief, falling off sharply after the early eighteenth century.40 It was at this point that England became the last European nation to enjoy a clear supremacy in the supply of African labor to Spain’s American colonies. English ships had traded along the African coast since the middle of the sixteenth century, and English privateers had engaged in small-scale slave raiding during the entire period. However, it was not until the early decades of the seventeenth century that England began to establish permanent trading posts on the African coast, ﬁrst in the Gambia and later (ca. 1651) at the Gold Coast village of Coromantine. The Guinea Company was constituted in 1651, to be followed by the Company of Royal Adventurers (1671), the Royal African Company (1672), and ﬁnally the South Sea Company. By this time England successfully controlled several trading posts from the Gambia to the Cape of Good Hope. The typical triangular trade developed: slaves from Africa were taken to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar, which was then taken to England. The principal regions from which the English drew slaves were the Gambia, the Windward Coast (Sierra Leone), the Gold Coast (Ghana), Ardra and Whydah (Benin), Calabar (eastern Nigeria), and Angola. During the seventeenth century, the Gold Coast and Windward Coast together supplied half of the English slaves, with the Benin area supplying most of the rest; comparatively few slaves were taken from Angola or the Bight of Benin. In the eighteenth century, continuing until the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century, 40

Garc´ıa (1990:21–22).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

37

when ofﬁcial British slave trading came to an end, the demographic distribution was changed.41 The Bight of Biafra (Calabar) area provided by far the greatest number of slaves (more than 30 percent), with the Gold (17 percent) and Windward (13 percent) Coasts supplying nearly the same number. Angola supplied 15 percent, Benin 11 percent, Sierra Leone 7 percent, and the Gambia 5 percent. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, the South Sea Company held the Spanish asiento for a while, ending in 1739, and both before and after this brief interlude British participation in the supply of slaves to Spanish America was considerable. One of the areas receiving large numbers of slaves via the British trafﬁc was Buenos Aires, although this city more often tapped the Portuguese sources passing through neighboring Brazil.

The last century of the slave trade Until about 1773, the slave trade to Spanish America was successively under the control of speciﬁc nations and slaving companies: Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, etc. There was a signiﬁcant difference between the trade of the Dutch and the Portuguese on the one hand, and British, French, Danish, and other slave traders on the other hand. The Portuguese and the Dutch established stable forts and cities on the African coast and largely drew slaves through these ports and their hinterlands. This was nowhere more true than in the Portuguese settlements of Luanda and Benguela, which shipped tens of thousands of slaves speaking closely related Bantu languages and engaging in similar cultural practices. Thus, reconstructing the demographics of slaves supplied by Portuguese and Dutch traders allows for a certain degree of accuracy. The remaining European nations established fewer forts or trading posts on the African coast (the French slaving station at Gor´ee was a noteworthy exception), and in acquiring slaves preferred to send ships up and down the African coast, buying from any and all suppliers. For the last half century of the slave trade, all slave-trading powers competed in Spanish American markets without the monopolistic asiento system. Since this is the period in which many of the ethnically viable Afro-Hispanic groups arrived in the Americas, it is important to underscore the fact that no one nation or slaving company was the principal supplier of African labor to the Spanish colonies, nor did any one speciﬁc region of Africa predominate for the ﬁnal time period. In certain instances (e.g. the Angola-Brazilian connection), the supply of slaves to a speciﬁc Latin American region was quite homogeneous, but in most colonies, the ethnic and regional origins of the slaves brought in in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were as diverse as were the suppliers themselves. 41

Rawley (1981:166).

38

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

Although the Portuguese had lost the monopolistic control of the Atlantic slave trade by the middle of the seventeenth century, and never regained their former position, Portuguese traders continued to supply African slaves to the Americas until the early decades of the nineteenth century. They held no asientos after the middle of the seventeenth century, but continued to support slaving companies, such as the Companhia de Cacheu, which during the brief interval 1696–1703 supplied more than 10,000 slaves from the region of modern GuineaBissau. The majority of the Portuguese slave trafﬁc followed the straightforward Angola-Brazil route, but some also found their way into Spanish American colonies. The greatest number arrived in Montevideo and Buenos Aires via Brazil in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, providing in fact the bulk of the considerable Afro-R´ıo de la Plata population which dominated these two cities during this time period. By the second half of the eighteenth century, a time period in which many still-surviving Afro-Hispanic communities arose in the Americas, the coast of Africa was fairly regularly divided up among the major European slaving powers; the skirmishes, counterattacks, and pirate incursions of the past were over, and the African coast began to resemble a shopping mall in which traders from several nations occupied quasi-permanent positions, each supplying the same product. From Cabo Blanco to the Senegal River, as well as on Gor´ee Island, the French held the coastal slave trade. The British were established at the mouth of the Gambia, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, and in Sierra Leone. Between Sierra Leone and Cabo Palmas, a number of European nations drew small numbers of slaves, but this region was never a major source of slaves. The Dutch maintained control from Cabo Palmas to Cabo Tres Puntas, including most of the Ivory Coast, from their fort at Axim. In the short expanse betwen Cabo Tres Puntas and the mouth of the Volta no fewer than twenty-three Dutch, British, and Danish forts were founded, with the British occupying the most important posts, at Coromantine and Accra. The Slave Coast, including the kingdoms of Arda and Ajuda, was by this time shared among French, British, and Portuguese slavers, with each nation maintaining a fort at Ajuda. The British were ﬁrmly in control of the coast between Benin and Cape Formosa. Although the Portuguese still maintained slaving stations on the Congo/Angola coast, British, Dutch and French slavers also frequented this region, thus accounting for the large numbers of Congo/Angola slaves taken to all parts of the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the nineteenth century, the Atlantic slave trade was complicated by the sudden anti-slaving legislation in several European nations, followed by an active persecution of the slaving activities of other nations. In 1805 Denmark passed the ﬁrst anti-slaving law, and Britain joined in three years later. This move took many Africans by surprise, and those who had proﬁted by the sustained slave trade pleaded with British authorities to not abandon this lucrative enterprise.

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

39

The British authorities were unmoved, although British entrepreneurs continued a contraband slave trafﬁc far beyond this time. The remaining slaving nations of Europe, especially Spain and Portugal, made treaties with Britain which temporarily forestalled active British assaults on Atlantic slave ships. One such treaty guaranteed to Portugal safe passage of slaving ships south of the equator until 1839; Brazil obtained a similar concession which ran until 1845. Given the voracious demand for slaves in the sugar-producing areas of Latin America, some of the highest annual ﬁgures for slave importation came in the years following the abolition of slaving in much of Europe. Overview of slaving regions and ethnic designations in Portuguese and Spanish literature A brief overview of areas from which slaves were taken, and the designations of the regions, is a necessary preliminary to more detailed investigation of Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts. The ﬁrst area of Portuguese penetration, along the Senegambia coast, was referred to as Upper Guinea, or Guin´e de Cabo Verde, referring to the Cape Verde peninsula of modern Senegal (after which the Cape Verde islands were named). Occasionally ethnic designations such as Wolof/Jolofe/Jelofe, Mandinga, etc., were used to describe the same region. The broad area known as Lower Guinea (and, eventually, just as Guinea) was, in trade jargon, subdivided into the Grain Coast (roughly modern Liberia and Sierra Leone), the Ivory Coast (modern nation of the same name), the Gold Coast (roughly modern Ghana), and the Slave Coast (the Bight of Benin, centering around the modern nations of Togo, Benin, and extreme western Nigeria). The Grain Coast was at ﬁrst known as the Pepper Coast, or by the Portuguese term Malagueta (a spice related to pepper). British sailors began to refer to the pepper as “Guinea grains,” or “grains of Paradise,” whence the eventual name of Grain Coast. The Ivory Coast was for a time known to French traders as the Coste des Dents, referring to the trade in elephant tusks. The Slave Coast did not get its popular name until much later in the trade; the Portuguese never used this term, although one of the rivers of the Niger Delta was referred to as the Rio dos Escravos. At ﬁrst, trade was established with major kingdoms of each region, for example, the Wolof in the Senegambia, the Akan along the Gold Coast (whence the building of the trade fortress at El Mina in 1482) and the Kingdom of Benin in the Niger delta (leading to construction of a fort at Oghoton, in 1486).42 Some ethnic designations appear in Portuguese and Spanish literary documents, written in the ﬁfteenth to seventeenth centuries, and purporting to represent the speech of Africans who attempted to learn European languages. 42

Stride and Ifeka (1971), Law (1991).

40

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

The ﬁrst known written example of Afro-Portuguese pidgin is found in the Cancioneiro geral of Garcia de Resende (Chapter Two Appendix #1), published in 1516; it is a poem written by the court ofﬁcial Fernam da Silveira, and dated 1455. If this dating is accurate,43 it means that an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin was already in use only a few decades after Portugal had begun exploration of the sub-Saharan African coast. The poem imitates the speech of a tribal king from “Sierra Leone,” and contains the ﬁrst glimmerings of Portuguese-based creoles, as well as exemplifying the type of broad-spectrum interference that speakers of African languages would bring to Ibero-Romance. Gil Vicente provides the largest single corpus of early Afro-Portuguese language, in plays written in the 1520s and 1530s (Chapter Two Appendix #5–7).44 The N˜ao d’amores contains Afro-Portuguese speech by a Rei Beni, referring to the kingdom of Benin, an area currently straddling the Nigeria/Benin border, and the site of a once powerful African kingdom. After these initial indications of ethnic origins, the Afro-Portuguese corpus contains no other ethnic identiﬁcations, which would permit direct veriﬁcation of African languages in contact with Portuguese. It is not until the curious text, a letter from the “Rei Angola” to the “Rei Minas,” written in 1730, that reference to African ethnic groups reappears.45 By this time, bozal Afro-Portuguese pidgin had all but disappeared in Portugal. In Spain, the ﬁrst black Africans whose speech has been documented arrived via Portugal, coming from the original foci of Portuguese slave trading. In the ﬁrst known Afro-Hispanic documents, the coplas of Rodrigo de Reinosa (probably written at the end of the ﬁfteenth century), we ﬁnd the ethnic/regional designations Gelofe, Mandinga, and Guinea (Chapter Three Appendix #1). Although Gelofe Mandinga appears as a single designation, in reality two ethnic groups and languages are represented: Wolof and Mandinga, the latter part of a much larger group of related languages. These terms are consistent with the ﬁrst phase of the Portuguese slave trade, since they represent languages of the Senegambia region. The term Guinea is more vague; this word has been used to refer to regions of Africa from the Senegambia to the mouth of the Congo. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, Guinea referred to a region roughly between the Senegambia and Sierra Leone, but subsequently the term was used as a general reference to sub-Saharan Africa.46 In all of these instances, the 43 44 45 46

Teyssier (1959:228–29). Baird (1975), Br´asio (1944), Costa e S´a (1948), Saunders (1982:98–102), Teyssier (1959), Vicente (1834, 1912). Tinhor˜ao (1988:191). The terms guinea/guineo recur in the anonymous play La negra lectora (Chapter Three Appendix #53), in the song “¡Ah, Flansiquiya!” (Chapter Three Appendix #48) by Francisco Garc´ıa Montero Solano (1673), in the song “Negro de Navidad” by the mid-seventeenth-century composer Alonso Torices (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #6), in the song “Eso rigor e repente” by Gaspar Fernandes (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #6), and in an anonymous villancico dated 1654 (Chapter Three Appendix #54).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

41

reference is not to a particular geographic or ethnic region, but rather to a vague sense of “black Africa,” the source of musical celebration and dancing which formed an integral part of the villancicos, entremeses, and other short pieces in which bozal language predominated. Following these early ethnic terms, the Afro-Hispanic corpus contains no other veriﬁable indications of origin until the early seventeenth century. The “Entrem´es de los negros” (ca. 1602) of Sim´on Aguado (Chapter Three Appendix #14) contains the line “Dominga me yamo, Manicongo nacimo.” The same play also contains reference to “Dominga de Tumbucuto,” an area in present-day Mali which supplied some slaves to southern Spain, either via Arguim or transSahara slaving caravans. G´ongora’s sonnet “A lo mismo” [al nacimiento de Cristo nuestro se˜nor] (Chapter Three Appendix #16) contains the line “Som´eme e v´endome a rosa de Gericongo Mar´ıa,” possibly a reference to the Congo region. In the sonnet “A la ‘Jerusalem conquistada’ de Lope de Vega” (Chapter Three Appendix #18) we ﬁnd the designations morenica gelofa and Rey de Congo, as well as one of the ﬁrst references to S˜ao Tom´e: “Corpo de san Tom´e con tanta Reya . . .” S˜ao Tom´e, originally an uninhabited island far off the coast of Angola, became one of the major Portuguese slaving stations, supplying Bantu- and Kwa-speaking African slaves to southern Europe and Latin America for several centuries. Although the designation San Tom´e became as geographically nonspeciﬁc as the terms Guinea and Congo, there is reason to believe that many of the slaves so designated had indeed passed through S˜ao Tom´e.47 The term Angola is also found in several Afro-Hispanic literary representations of the Golden Age. For example, in El Santo Negro Rosambuco of Lope de Vega (Chapter Three Appendix #27), we ﬁnd the line “Samo de Santa Tam´e, de Angola samo, maluco?”48 The terms congo/manicongo are also frequent in Golden Age bozal texts. In El Santo Negro Rosambuco we ﬁnd “decimo logo a la niegra si samo de monicongo,” “en Manicongo tenemo al sol que vemo, por Dioso . . . ,” “all´a en Congo me dijeron que era Dioso el sole craros . . .” In Lope’s Madre de la mejor (Chapter Three Appendix #25) we ﬁnd “. . . hacia 47

48

Other literary works to use this term include Limpieza no manchada by Lope de Vega (Vega Carpio 1893:t. V), the song “Eso rigor” by Gaspar Fernandes (Stevenson 1975), and the anonymous fragments “Entrem´es de los negros de Santo Tom´e” and “El negro” (Cotarelo y Mor´ı ed. 1911:vol. 1). In the anonymous “La Negra lectora” (Anon. 1723) is found the lines “¿Guisadillo de Angola, neglo clima?” and “¿somo gente de Angola o de Guinea?” The villancico “Apalte la gente” of Esteban Redondo (ca. 1783) (Tejerizo Robles 1989:307) contains the verse “si no eles de colol neglo vienes de Angola tambi´en.” An anonymous song (ca. 1676), “Desde Angola benimo,” also contains reference to Angola (Bravo-Villa-Sante 1978:88–89), while in a villancico dated 1654 we ﬁnd “venimo tanta de genta de Angola y de Cabo Verde . . .” (Damasceno 1970:88– 89). The song “Eso rigor e repente” by Gaspar Fernandes (Stevenson 1975) contains the verse “Vamo negro de Guinea a lo pesebrito sola no vamo negro de Angola . . .” Finally, an anonymous villancico (ca. 1697) contains the verse “podlemos cantal tonadillas de Angola y de Panam´a . . .” (Ripod´as Ardanaz ed. 1991:215–16).

42

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

la banda del Congo . . . ,” “. . . lo neglo de Manicongo . . .” In G´ongora’s “Sacramento” (Chapter Three Appendix #15) we ﬁnd “Zambamb´u, morenica de Congo,” and “en Congo aun ser´a bien quista.” In the “Soneto Jerusal´en” (Chapter Three Appendix #18) we ﬁnd “. . . do Rey de Congo canta don Gorgorio.” The Entrem´es de los negros of Sim´on Aguado presents “Manicongo nacimo, Seviya batizamolo.” In the Comedia de los enga˜nados of Lope de Rueda (Chapter Three Appendix #6) we ﬁnd “. . . ay´a en mi terra de Manicongo . . .” The anonymous Negra lectora (Chapter Three Appendix #53) provides “Bene va, que en lo Congo bien guisamo la negla lo mondongo.”49 By the seventeenth century, the Kongo monarchs, once received with pomp and circumstance by the Portuguese, had been virtually abandoned by both religious and civil authorities, and the Kongo leaders were reduced to a miserable state. A description of the visit of Kongo monarch to Madrid in 1669 gives ample evidence of this situation:50 En esta Corte (Madrid) avia un Rey de Congo, que estuvo en una posada bien desacomodado . . . y estava toda aquella Magestade assistida de dos Negros bo¸cales, y un Mulato ladino, que era el fausto, y pompa Real suya, quando tenia en su Imperio inumerables vassalos, pero todos desnudos, y pobres como el. Era Rey coronado con numerosa multidud de vassallos, y estuvo con tan poca estimacion que apenas huvo quien le visitasse.

In their totality, the ethnic references found in Golden Age texts from Spain and early colonial Latin America do not provide an accurate demographic proﬁle of the African population, but simply represent well-known place names that were meant to connote all of sub-Saharan Africa. The true demographics of sub-Saharan Africans represented a much wider cross-section of West African ethnic and linguistic groups, as the various European slave traders roamed along the entire African coast. Proﬁle of slave trade and slave traders By the end of the ﬁfteenth century, Portuguese traders and slavers had reconnoitered the entire western coast of Africa, and black slaves were being carried to Lisbon in ever larger numbers. According to some estimates, nearly 50 percent of the population of metropolitan Lisbon was African by the end of the ﬁfteenth century; more realistically, the ﬁgure was probably 10 to 20 percent, but much higher in certain neighborhoods. By the end of the ﬁfteenth century, many Africans were being transshipped from southern Portugal to southern 49

50

The song “Con el zon” gives us Monicongo, el Chato (Bravo-Villa-Sante 1978). The “Nadadores de Sevilla” of Gil L´opez de Armesto y Castro (ca. 1674) presents “molenica di Congo” (Ripod´as Ardanaz 1991:189–97). The “Villancico cantado en el real convento de la Encarnaci´on de Madrid en los maitines de navidad” (1689) gives “¿Y vene de Congo?” (Ripod´as Ardanaz 1991:199–201). Manso (1877:251).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

43

Spain, where signiﬁcant concentrations were found in Seville, C´adiz, Huelva, C´ordoba, M´alaga, and as far east as Valencia. By the time that Spain began colonizing the New World, the idea of using Africans in forced labor was well established. Ultimately, black slaves and freedmen would be found all over Castile, from Extremadura and Valladolid to Murcia, cutting all the way across Andalusia to include Valencia. Proportionately smaller numbers were also found in places such as Ciudad Real, Burgos, Toledo, Guadalajara, Le´on, Avila, and even Galicia and the Basque country.51 In the early colonial period, Spain attempted to enslave indigenous workers, to labor in mines and on plantations. This practice was rarely successful; ravaged by European-borne diseases and prone to escaping to the hinterlands, Native Americans were exterminated in some regions, and retreated or resisted in others. By the early sixteenth century the Spanish government authorized the ﬁrst importation of African slaves to the New World colonies. Although Spain attempted direct slave trading in Africa on several occasions, the efforts were never successful, and nearly all Africans carried to Spanish America had passed through the slaving enterprises of other nations. In keeping with the complex and monopolistic Spanish bureaucratic structure, the ﬁrst African slaves had to be shipped to Seville ﬁrst, thence transshipped on ofﬁcial Spanish ships. In order to simplify this cumbersome process, the Spanish government then authorized three American ports to receive slaves: Veracruz, Cartagena de Indias, and Portobelo. Havana and several Venezuelan ports were soon added to the list. When the galleon route was established between Manila and Acapulco, slaves from East Africa, purchased from Portuguese traders in southeast Asia, entered Spanish America from the Paciﬁc. Although many contraband slaves disembarked at other locations, these ports handled the bulk of the slave trade until well into the eighteenth century, when de facto liberalization of the slave trade caused other ports to be opened, among them Buenos Aires and later Montevideo. The ﬁrst mechanism for the importation of African slaves was the licencia or individual slave-trading authorization, whereby an individual colonist or merchant paid a fee to the government in return for an authorization to import a determined number of slaves. This system began during the period 1533– 80,52 and resulted in the total control of legal slave importation by the Casa de Contrataci´on and the Consulado de Sevilla. These licencias were not exclusive, but rather were authorized through a combination of monetary payments and 51

52

Larrea Palac´ın (1952), Carriazo (1954), Chaunu and Chaunu (1955–60), Sancho de Sopranis (1958), Cort´es Alonso (1964, 1966, 1972), Pike (1967), Ndamba Kabongo (1970, 1975), Graullera Sanz (1978), Molina Molina (1978), Franco Silva (1979, 1980), Cort´es L´opez (1986, 1989), Cort´es Cort´es (1987), Fern´andez Mart´ın (1988), Pe˜naﬁel Ram´on (1992), G´omez Garc´ıa y Mart´ın Vergara (1993). Del Castillo Matthieu (1981:189).

44

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

political favors. Although the Spanish government proﬁted by this arrangement, the number of slaves that could be imported was far lower than the demand, and the asiento system was instituted. Under this arrangement, the Spanish government contracted with an asentista, usually a trading company but sometimes an individual, to provide a certain quantity of slaves over a stipulated period. The typical asiento ran for thirty years, and many were renewed. The ﬁrst group of asentistas included Spaniards and Portuguese, as well as Italians and other Europeans. The predominance of Portuguese among the ﬁrst holders of asientos gave way to French, British, and Dutch slaving companies, as these nations moved into the African slave trade. In the past, many plantation owners had attempted to buy slaves from diverse ethnic groups speaking no common language, in order to minimize the possibility of uprisings and the formation of maroon communities. These efforts were never entirely successful, and some slave owners deliberately chose their slaves from a single group, based on that group’s reputation, e.g. for strength, resistance, tractability, manual dexterity, etc. By the end of the slave period, however, all caution was thrown to the winds, and entire shiploads of slaves from a single ethnic group were disembarked in the Caribbean. Regardless of the circumstances, religious and cultural practices, as well as linguistic differences, often kept African slaves from ﬁnding common cause. Ethnic rivalries which had seethed in Africa resurfaced in Latin America, and members of groups known as warriors and trendsetters in Africa became natural leaders in slave communities, often exerting a linguistic and cultural inﬂuence far beyond their demographic representation. Thus although hundreds of African languages were carried to Spanish America, only a handful made lasting contributions to developing Afro-Hispanic language. A summary of the principal slaving areas and languages is: S e n e g a m b i a (particularly early): Mandinga/Fula languages (Atlantic group). G r a i n C o a s t (Sierra Leone/Liberia): Vai, Mende, Temne (Kru languages). More of these were brought to the British-held Caribbean, whence to the United States. S l av e C o a s t (Dahomey/Benin): Ewe/Fon (Kwa languages). These were common throughout Latin America, as well as in Haiti and Brazil. C a l a b a r C o a s t / B o n n y (Nigeria): Yoruba (Lucum´ı), Igbo, Eﬁk, Ijo (Carabal´ı) (Kwa languages). These groups were particularly common during the late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century trade to the Caribbean, and to Brazil. C o n g o Ba s i n / A n g o l a : Kikongo and Kimbundu (Bantu languages). This area returned to prominence several times. It was ﬁrst a major area in the

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

45

early sixteenth century, then again in the seventeenth century. It supplied a majority of slaves to the R´ıo de la Plata in the late eighteenth century, as well as supplying much of Brazil. M o z a m b i q u e / E a s t A f r i c a . Languages of the eastern Bantu group. These slaves were never as common, but were found in signiﬁcant numbers in Latin America, particularly during the eighteenth century. African slavery in Spanish America How many Africans were transported to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade? What were the demographic proportions, representing the different African zones and ethnic groups? How did ethnic origin correlate with eventual destination in the Americas? The search for answers is fraught with many difﬁculties, all revolving around the sketchy and often deliberately incomplete documentation which was produced during the slave trade itself. Published estimates of the total number of slaves taken to North and South America range between 3.5 million and 25 million. The majority of studies are based on secondary sources, and there has been much perpetuation of originally inaccurate ﬁgures. Political and ideological considerations have entered into many calculations, some tending to inﬂate the ﬁgures while others have a diminishing effect. The huge but indeterminate clandestine slave trafﬁc is the single factor which renders an accurate count virtually impossible to obtain. Particularly during the nineteenth century, when slave importations into Cuba and Brazil, and to a lesser extent Puerto Rico and smaller Caribbean islands, reached a frenzied peak, laborers were scooped up from all areas of Africa, by well-established traders as well as occasional opportunists. In addition, slaves and nominally free blacks were transferred from one Caribbean territory to another, frequently in violation of the law. This demographic churning causes the potential for a slave (perhaps even born in the Americas) transferred from one island to another to be indistinguishable from a slave born in Africa. However, recent research, combining archival records, travelers’ accounts, census data, and demographic extrapolations, permit some reasonable guesswork. Some of the most thoroughly researched and carefully documented quantitative estimates of the Atlantic slave trade are found in Curtin (1969:88–89), who proposes a total ﬁgure of some 9.6 million Africans taken as slaves during the entire period of the slave trade. Of these, some 175,000 were taken to the Old World. This includes 50,000 taken to Europe (mostly Spain and Portugal), 25,000 to Atlantic islands (Canary Islands, Madeira, Cape Verde), and 100,000 taken to the island of S˜ao Tom´e. Some 651,000 slaves were taken to continental North America, 4 million to Caribbean islands, and 4.7 million to South

46

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

America. Breaking down the ﬁgures for Spanish America further, Curtin’s estimates are: Mexico: 200,000 Central America: 24,000 Dominican Republic: 30,000 Cuba: 702,000 Puerto Rico: 77,000 Argentina/Uruguay/Paraguay/ Bolivia: 100,000 Chile: 6,000 Peru: 95,000 Colombia/Panama/Ecuador: 200,000 Venezuela: 121,000 ........................................................ Total: 1,555,000 % of Atlantic trade: 16.3 Brazil: 3,647,000 % of Atlantic trade: 38.1

Rawley (1981:53), using additional data, ups the total ﬁgure for slave importations into Spanish America to approximately 1,687,000, roughly one sixth of the total volume. This increase comes from a revised upward estimate for Cuba: 837,000. Eltis et al. (1999) provides the most comprehensive database yet available on the demographics of the Atlantic slave trade, containing data on more than 27,000 slave voyages from 1595 and 1866. Although including many of the same sources as used to arrive at the estimates cited earlier, Eltis et al. makes reference to new data sources as well as extrapolative techniques; as a result this database represents the most accurate estimates currently available or likely to appear based on known documentation. This database emphasizes slaves sent to English and French colonies in the Americas, and a country-bycountry comparison with the ﬁgures cited earlier is not always possible. Some representative comparisons are: Cuba: Puerto Rico: R´ıo de la Plata: San [Santo] Domingo: Spanish-America main: Northeast Brazil: Pernambuco: Bahia: Southeast Brazil: All Brazil: Saint-Domingue:

684,000 embarked; 564,000 disembarked 11,800 embarked; 10,000 disembarked 64,400 embarked; 53,700 disembarked 6,900 embarked; 6,000 disembarked 117,000 embarked; 99,000 disembarked 26,300 embarked; 22,600 disembarked 69,000 embarked; 61,800 disembarked 251,000 embarked; 224,000 disembarked 1,171,000 embarked; 1,047,000 disembarked 1,517,300 embarked; 1,355,400 disembarked 791,000 embarked; 687,000 disembarked

These ﬁgures represent only the port of ﬁrst arrival in the Americas, and do not take into consideration the considerable transshipment of slaves, e.g. from Cura¸cao. For example, during the same period, 86,500 slaves embarked for

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

47

the Dutch Caribbean (of which nearly 75,000 disembarked), most of whom presumably went to Spanish American colonies. During the ﬁfteenth century, the African slave trade was limited in quantity. Most slaves were taken from the Senegambia region, with considerably smaller numbers from the Gold Coast, near the fort of Elmina, and from the Congo/Angola region. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the opening of the Spanish American colonies to African slave labor, the quantitative requirements were much greater, and slaves were taken from points along the entire West African coast, from the Senegal River to Angola; some Portuguese slave trading even rounded the Cape of Good Hope to bring Africans from “Mozambique,” a term used to refer to southeastern Africa in general. However, certain regions always enjoyed priority among Portuguese traders; these were areas where broad trade relationships existed with cooperative local societies, and where African slave dealers were able to supply sufﬁcient quantities of slaves to meet European needs. Some early ﬁgures from Peru (1548–60) show that nearly 75 percent of the slaves taken during that period came from the Senegambia area. Of these, some 22 percent were listed as Jelof (Wolof), nearly 9 percent as Berbesi (Serer), 19 percent as Biafara, and 11 percent as Bran. Other West African areas (the extended “Guinea Coast”) supplied 15.5 percent of the slaves, while central and southern Africa supplied 10 percent, of which 6 percent came from the BaKongo zone.53 Aguirre Beltr´an (1972:244–45) provides comparative ﬁgures for African slaves in Mexico, circa 1549. Of these, 88 percent came from the Senegambia (17 percent Wolof, 7 percent Serer, 11 percent Malinke, 28 percent Bram, 17 percent Biafada), 6 percent from other West African regions, and fewer than 5 percent from central and southern Africa. By the end of the seventeenth century, the demographic proportions had shifted considerably. All of West Africa supplied only 21 percent of the total, with no particular ethnic group standing out in this category. More than 75 percent of the total came from central Africa, with Angola providing the lion’s share, at more than 67 percent. Southeastern Africa accounted for nearly 4 percent of the total. Curtin (1969:104–05)54 has plotted percentages for regions of Africa from which (authorized) slave ships departed. This provides a rough measure of broad regional ethnic groupings. In the period 1551–1640, for example, approximately 12 percent of the ships left from Cape Verde (which also represents the mainland Senegambia/Guinea-Bissau zone), almost 25 percent from “Guinea” (presumably the remainder of the West African coast, centered around the Gold Coast), and 32 percent from Angola. Based on comparative evidence from several sources, including information on early African slavery in Bolivia and Chile, 53 54

Lockhart (1968:173). Based on data from Chaunu and Chaunu (1955–60:vol. 6, 402–03).

48

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

Curtin conﬁrms that a dramatic shift from the Senegambia to the Congo/Angola region took place early in the seventeenth century, and the change occurred ﬁrst in the South American colonies. Geographical proximity of South America to Angola was one obvious factor, particularly if the voyage was made to Brazil or (clandestinely, at ﬁrst) to Buenos Aires. Curtin also suggests that the early ﬂourishing of the S˜ao Tom´e sugar production, which drew intensively on Angola for slave labor, declined in the early seventeenth century due to competition from Brazil. This in turn made more Angolan laborers available for export to the Americas. Proﬁle of African populations in Latin America The ﬁrst large populations of African slaves in Latin America were used in highland mining operations, principally in Peru and Alto Peru (Bolivia), and in Mexico. Smaller numbers were taken to mining areas in Colombia, Honduras,55 and Guatemala.56 These early black populations were overwhelmingly male, and mortality rates were extraordinarily high in the demanding work of highland mines. Few linguistic or cultural traits remain from the ﬁrst African slave populations in Latin America, except for some seventeenth-century songs and poems surveyed in the preceding chapter, which as both linguistic documents and literary works properly belong to Golden Age Spain. Following these early hints of Afro-Hispanic language, the record is silent for more than a century and a half, with the next round of Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America not emerging until the turn of the nineteenth century. By this time, the Latin American dialects of Spanish had developed into essentially their present forms, and Afro-Hispanic language was quantitatively and qualitatively different from its Golden Age predecessors. Veriﬁcation possibilities are also enhanced for the latter period of Afro-Hispanic textual evidence, since the very end of the period overlaps with objectively acceptable anthropological descriptions, and, in a few cases, with materials transcribed from the last survivors of the bozal generation. Black Africans continued to work in mines and placer gold deposits throughout the colonial period, but the proportions dropped drastically after the sixteenth century. From the seventeenth century onwards, the only signiﬁcant groups of black slaves engaged in mining activities were found in Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil, in remote jungle areas where placer mining was handled by large labor gangs. Under these conditions, the black population – augmented by a signiﬁcant number of females – was able to maintain itself demographically, and the descendants of these laborers are still the dominant population in the Colombian Choc´o, in northwestern Ecuador, and in much of Brazil’s 55

Leiva Vivas (1982, 1993).

56

D. Palma (1974).

Africans in the Iberian peninsula

49

interior. The working conditions were difﬁcult but not impossible, and black slaves often worked side by side with white fortune seekers. Individual liberty for slaves was higher than in most other slave holdings, and rather than forming discrete maroon communities, black gold miners often drifted away from the settlements and lived off the land. This was a signiﬁcantly different arrangement than had prevailed in the early highland silver and gold mining operations, in which slaves were closely conﬁned, and it also differed from later plantation societies. With the exception of Brazil – which had been a major player in the world sugar market since the seventeenth century – the greatest use of African slaves in Spanish America from the middle of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century took place in urban labor settings. Black slaves worked as domestic employees, municipal workers, artisans, and day laborers. Many slave owners allowed their slaves to work for wages, requiring only that a ﬁxed income be returned to the owner. This gave to many slaves a relative autonomy during much of the day, and also more fully integrated blacks into all aspects of colonial Latin American society. It was impossible to exist in a colonial Latin American city without coming into constant contact with black slaves – in markets, ports, artisans’ stalls, and in private dwellings. Blacks worked as street vendors, teamsters, stevedores, tradesmen’s helpers (sometimes as apprentices and even journeymen). They had their own churches and socio-religious societies, and organized dances and processions. In many ways, the life of the urban black slave in colonial Latin America was not unlike the situation of the slave in ancient Greece and Rome. Linguistically, blacks were in constant contact with local varieties of Spanish and Portuguese, although American-born blacks may have retained certain ethnolinguistic markers as a consequence of their inevitably marginalized status. Prior to the nineteenth century, the proportion of African slaves working in agriculture was quite small, and large plantations had yet to come into existence. The exceptions were the sugar estates of Brazil, the smaller sugar haciendas of coastal Mexico and Peru, and the cacao plantations of Venezuela. Within Latin America, none of the plantations were large, with the biggest employing no more than a few dozen slaves, and the social microcosm of the gigantic slave plantation had yet to come into being. With the sharp dropoff in world sugar production following the Haitian revolution of the 1790s, Brazil, Cuba, and Puerto Rico rushed to ﬁll the gap. Cuba in particular increased its slave importations and its sugar production so as to rival the output of Brazil and Jamaica, then the world’s largest sugar exporters. Coffee, another of French Saint-Domingue’s key exports, also became an important cash crop in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil. Peruvian estate owners also increased their sugar production, and also planted thousands of acres of cotton, all of which required African slaves and indentured Chinese laborers.

50

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

Afro-Iberian language: from the ﬁfteenth century to the twentieth The cultural encounters between sub-Saharan Africans and speakers of Portuguese and Spanish gave rise to numerous contact vernaculars, ranging from rudimentary jargons and pidgins to stable creoles which continue to be spoken even today. As thousands of Africans and their descendants acquired Portuguese and Spanish in the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and particularly Latin America, they incorporated characteristics common to all second-language varieties of Ibero-Romance languages. Most of these traits did not survive as descendants of Africans acquired Spanish and Portuguese natively, but in areas of heavy Afro-Latin concentration, partial restructuring may have occurred. Linguistic evidence for earlier centuries of Afro-Iberian language contact is scarce and unreliable, consisting almost entirely of literary parodies and occasional travelers’ observations. The following chapters will survey the available evidence in an attempt to establish a reasonable baseline description of Afro-Iberian speech across time and space.

2

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

The earliest Afro-Portuguese texts The initial Afro-Portuguese linguistic contacts, and the concomitant formation of contact vernaculars, pidgins, and lingua francas, took place in West Africa, as well as aboard trading ships which plied the waters between southern Europe and the sub-Saharan African coast. Little is known about the speciﬁcs of the languages used by Africans and Europeans, but native and foreigner varieties of Portuguese were widely used throughout Africa, eventually extending along the entire Portuguese trade route, encompassing the South Asian subcontinent, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macao, Indonesia, and many Paciﬁc islands. Naro (1978) has documented the use of many forms of Portuguese beginning in the ﬁfteenth century, by ships’ crews, slave traders, African and European merchants, slaves, and so forth. Frequently Portuguese was used as a lingua franca among individuals who did not use this language natively, thus contributing to the incipient pidginization of Portuguese outside of Europe, and the widespread acceptance of pidgin Portuguese forms as part of an emerging maritime vernacular whose traces are found in creole languages and nautical jargon throughout the world. The discussion involving Naro (1978, 1988, 1993), Goodman (1987a, 1987b), and Clements (1992, 1993) provides a good survey of the issues involved, as well as of the controversy surrounding both the input and the output of these multilingual contacts. It is known through historical accounts that some Africans in coastal areas visited by the Portuguese, as well as inland in the Kongo kingdom, began learning the rudiments of Portuguese around the midpoint of the ﬁfteenth century. Unfortunately, the record is silent on the linguistic peculiarities of Portuguese as learned by Africans, although almost certainly this emergent language contained many of the same traits found in contemporary learners’ speech. The ﬁrst written attestations of Afro-Iberian language comes not from Africa but from Portugal, and not in a historical narrative but rather in a stylized literary imitation. This early text foreshadows what would become a ﬂourishing literary trade ﬁrst in Portugal and then in Spain, exploiting the attempts of Africans to speak European languages. For more than two centuries, Portuguese and 51

52

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

Spanish authors, both in Europe and in the Americas, would embellish their poems and plays with the fala de preto/habla de negros; the black character speaking broken Spanish or Portuguese became such an established stereotype that by the middle of the sixteenth century it was not even necessary to explicitly identify the language as representing the speech of blacks. In speaking of the earliest imitations of Africans’ approximations to Spanish, Johnson (1969:69) observes that “. . . the linguistic caricature here may be due to the more vital reasons than might initially be assumed. The most obvious factor was, of course, an illiterate exposure to Spanish. This would lead to phonetic and syntactic distortion in any case. What gave the bozal’s distortion its peculiar features are perhaps linguistic and artistic interferences from his origins. The Spanish caricature developed a ﬁne ear for the consequences of that interference and of oral transmission in the bozal’s disfraces negros.” For Johnson, then, there might be some element of linguistic truth in the literary stereotypes. In Spain and Portugal, these literary imitations persisted long after African-born blacks ceased to be a commonplace in the Iberian Peninsula, while in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Latin America songs imitating bozal language were sung in churches, cathedrals, and Christmas and Easter processions. In the midst of this literary underbrush comes a small number of observations written by priests, sailors, and travelers, in which Africans’ use of Spanish and Portuguese is attested. There are also a few documents written by well-trained Africans, in which occasional lapses from correct grammatical usage provide a glimpse at the sort of obstacles faced by Africans in dealing with unfamiliar languages. In the balance, Africans’ use of Portuguese and Spanish from the end of the ﬁfteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century can only be reconstructed by picking through the quagmire of parodies and stereotypes and comparing the results with independently observed Afro-Iberian contact environments. First attestations: the poems of the Cancioneiro geral; the voyages of Vasco da Gama The earliest known Afro-Portuguese text is found in the Cancioneiro geral of Garcia de Resende, published in 1516; it is a poem written by the court ofﬁcial Fernam da Silveira, and dated 1455. If this dating is accurate,1 it means that an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin was already in use only a few decades after Portugal had begun exploration of the sub-Saharan African coast. The poem imitates the speech of a tribal king from “Sierra Leone” (one of the ﬁrst West African areas touched by the Portuguese, and bearing a Portuguese name), and contains the ﬁrst glimmerings of Portuguese-based creoles, as well as exemplifying the 1

Teyssier (1959:228–29).

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

53

type of broad-spectrum interference that speakers of African languages would bring to Ibero-Romance (Chapter Two Appendix #1). This text is of interest both for the language contact phenomena it contains and for the striking absence of other processes. There is no indication of phonetic deformation (with the possible exception of the rendering of Lisboa as Lixboa, hinting at an early palatalization of preconsonantal /s/). In later Afro-Iberian texts, phonetic modiﬁcations were essential components, and although some exaggeration and stereotyping occurred, these literary manipulations provide collateral evidence of evolving sound changes in Portuguese and Spanish. The use of leyxar for deixar may constitute a scribal error in this early text, although the interchange of /l/ and /d/ is a common trait of many later Afro-Iberian texts, reﬂecting the frequent complementary distribution of [d] and [l] in Bantu languages. In sixteenth century Portuguese texts, leixar appears from time to time in the absence of known African contributions, making this attestation more believable. Silveira’s rendering of Africanized Portuguese presages many of the grammatical modiﬁcations that would become hallmarks of Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles. For example, this text uses the uninﬂected inﬁnitive nearly exclusively. Most Spanish- and Portuguese-based creole verbs are based on the IberoRomance inﬁnitive, although the third-person singular is a frequent alternative.2 This text also contains use of a mim as subject pronoun, anticipating a common event in most Afro-Iberian creoles.3 Finally, the Silveira text exempliﬁes widespread elimination of prepositions and conjunctions, relying on the simple juxtaposition of nouns, adjectives, and uninﬂected verbs to convey basic meaning. The poem provides limited opportunities for noun-adjective concord, but several lapses are noted. In general, Silveira’s poem provides a realistic sample of what the ﬁrst groping linguistic contacts between Africans and Portuguese speakers must have been like. The Cancioneiro geral contains other specimens of Afro-Lusitanian pidgin, the most important of which is a text by Henrique da Mota written perhaps half a century after Silveira’s poem. This is a humorous account in which an African pleads with a European, claiming innocence in an incident in which a jar of wine was spilled (Chapter Two Appendix #2). This text shows similarity with the earlier Silveira example, but important innovations are also present. Like Silveira, da Mota’s “African” speaker uses mim as subject pronoun, together with uninﬂected inﬁnitives. The use of augo´a < aguar “to water” hints at the eventually widespread loss of the ﬁnal /-r/ in verbal inﬁnitives, characteristic of Ibero-Romance based creoles. The most important feature of this text is the creation of the generic copula ssar, apparently a blend of ser and estar.4 Silveira’s text shows erroneous use of estar instead of ser (estar Serra Lyoa 2

Lipski (2001a, 2002d).

3

Lipski (1991a).

4

Lipski (1999c, 2002c).

54

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

< sou de Serra Leoa ‘[I] am from Sierra Leone’), but later Afro-Iberian texts often employ sar, which in Golden Age Spain at times acquired the ﬁrst person plural form samo. That this form was not just a fanciful literary creation is shown by its retention in the Afro-Lusitanian creole languages of the Gulf of Guinea, spoken on S˜ao Tom´e, Pr´ıncipe, and Annob´on. Two other very brief fragments containing purported Afro-Portuguese pidgin (Chapter Two Appendix #3–4). Teyssier (1959:230) regards these fragments as “similar” to the da Mota and Silveira texts, but in fact they are considerably less developed, and show almost no signs of consistent pidginization. Aside from the use of unconjugated inﬁnitives, the Monssanto fragment shows only use of my as subject pronoun, and estar as copula followed by a noun (vos estar diabo ‘you are [the] devil’). Also from the ﬁfteenth century comes a brief observation by a chronicler of Vasco da Gama’s trips between east Africa and India in the 1480s. According to the chronicle of Gaspar Correa, during one of Vasco da Gama’s voyages to India he picked up an Arabic-speaking Moslem, who eventually learned Portuguese and served as an interpreter. At one point, a (black) cafre, referring to the interpreter in pidgin Portuguese, stated “Senhor, este homem muito taibo”.5 In addition to the use of the Afro-Arabic word taibo ‘good’ (< Arabic tayyib), which is found in other earlier Afro-Lusitanian texts,6 this brief sentence demonstrates a zero copula, one of the many options found in bozal Portuguese. Gil Vicente: the bulwark of the Afro-Lusitanian literary corpus Gil Vicente provides the largest single corpus of early Afro-Portuguese language, in plays written in the 1520s and 1530s (Chapter Two Appendix #5–7). The crucial examples come in Nao d’amores (1527), Fragoa d’amor (ca. 1524), and O cl´erigo da Beyra (1530). Gil Vicente’s texts are important since they represent the bridge between Portugal and Spain as regards the development of Afro-Iberian language. Vicente was a proliﬁc writer who used both Portuguese and Spanish, and was familiar with language and society in the two kingdoms. All of Vicente’s “Africanized” speech is found in plays written in Portuguese (with one very short but important exception), a language which seeped into the ﬁrst purportedly “Afro-Hispanic” texts which began to appear in Spain at approximately the same time. Due to this seamless transition between Portuguese and Spanish in the representation of Africans’ speech in the early sixteenth century, a perusal of Vicente’s Afro-Portuguese examples promises to shed light on the origins of Africanized Spanish. Thornton (1992:214) asserts that Vicente’s literary language 5

Correa (1858:60), Micha¨elis de Vasconcellos (1909:134).

6

Santos Dom´ınguez (1986).

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

55

. . . is a creole rather than a pidgin and his characters can express themselves fully, suggesting that at least in Lisbon, it had reached linguistic maturity. Such maturity might never have been reached on the Atlantic coast of Africa, where conditions would not favor it being learned as a native language by anyone. However, it probably did become the language of the islands offshore, and given their extensive commerce with the mainland, including long-term settlement, probably came to be a lingua franca rather than just a contact pidgin.

In fact, Vicente’s literary jargon is not representative of a true creole, in the sense of a grammatically restructured language, formed through extensive contacts and an ever-distant native-speaker model of the lexiﬁer language. Nor does it ﬁt the deﬁnition of rough pidgin, unlike the texts in the Cancioneiro geral. Rather, Vicente’s examples show a rather wide range of dispersion, ranging from standard (sixteenth-century) Portuguese forms to drastically reduced or misinterpreted elements. Given the constant inﬂux of Africans into sixteenthcentury Lisbon, as well as the ready availability of native-speaker models (even the most socially marginalized blacks in southern Portugal were never linguistically isolated from native speakers of Portuguese), Vicente’s examples probably represent the furthest point on the road to creolization that Africans’ use of Portuguese ever attained in Europe. It was precisely in the offshore islands, such as S˜ao Tom´e, Annob´on, and the Cape Verde group that Portuguese-based creoles developed, but there is indirect evidence that some reduced and somewhat Africanized Portuguese also took root on the mainland, in the former Portuguese Congo and Angola.7 There are some differences among the texts, but nothing suggests any form of linguistic evolution, either in Vicente’s representation of Africanized Portuguese, or in the linguistic abilities of Africans resident in Portugal. Vicente’s texts provide the earliest examples of a realistic Afro-Lusitanian pidgin, complete with phonetic, grammatical, and lexical traits reﬂecting both the imperfect acquisition of Portuguese by adult speakers of other languages, and direct interference from African areal characteristics. Vicente’s texts exemplify nearly all the phonetic modiﬁcations that would characterize later more stable Afro-Iberian language. Brieﬂy, these include the following: (1) Prevocalic /d/, normally a dental stop or fricative, depending upon the phonetic environment, is reduced to an alveolar ﬂap [r], written r: rinheiro < dinheiro, rir´a < dir´a, turo < tudo(s), ﬁralgo < ﬁdalgo, vira < vida, riabo < diablo, maruro < maduro, vontare < vontade, passaro < passado, etc. This change became canonical in Afro-Iberian texts, continuing through the end of the nineteenth century. This realization of /d/ stems from the fact that the usual Ibero-Romance conversion to a voiced fricative does not occur among African languages. The resulting intervocalic stop, in rapid speech, approximates [r], and 7

Lipski (1995b).

56

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

was so depicted by Portuguese and Spanish writers. The same pronunciation characterizes Afro-Iberian speech at the present, in such regions as Angola, Mozambique, Equatorial Guinea, and Afro-Hispanic isolates in Latin America, such as the Palenque de San Basilio, the Colombian Choc´o, Villa Mella in the Dominican Republic, Afro-Peruvian villages, etc. (2) Vicente’s texts contain many examples of paragogic vowels, used to break up consonant clusters and yield a series of open syllables of the general form CV-: boso < vos, deoso < deus, Furunando < Fernando, sapantaro < espantado, senhoro < senhor, furutai < furtai, faramosa < formosa, Purutug´a < Portugal, etc. The addition of paragogic vowels became an important and longlasting feature of Afro-Iberian language, as will be seen in later discussions.8 (3) There are apparent examples of vowel harmony: boso < vos, deoso < deus, Furunando < Fernando, faramosa < formosa, Purutug´a < Portugal, etc. Vowel harmony is frequent in many Kwa languages, and in some Bantu languages. It can be found in the Portuguese-based creoles of the Gulf of Guinea, and in Papiamento. Vowel harmony, often involving paragogic vowels, is a frequent feature of later Afro-Hispanic texts. (4) The palatal lateral /λ/ is reduced to a fricative [y]: oio < olho(s), muiere < mulher, etc. In Spain, delateralization of /λ/ (ye´ısmo) began in Andalusia probably towards the end of the sixteenth century, and appears in Latin American texts beginning in the seventeenth century. There is no comparable evidence of delateralization of /λ/ in Portugal, where the palatal lateral pronunciation of /λ/ continues in the majority of dialects even today. In Brazil, however, vernacular pronunciation typically realizes /λ/ as [y], and this pronunciation is exclusive in areas of strong African inﬂuence. Delateralization of /λ/ in Brazil has been attributed to African inﬂuence, at times uncritically, but the early Afro-Portuguese texts suggest that Africans did indeed frequently realize /λ/ as [y]; naturally, an African inﬂuence is not the only source for such a pronunciation in other Spanish and Portuguese dialects. Portuguese /λ/ was almost always borrowed into African languages as [y], and reﬂexes of Portuguese /λ/ in Afro-Lusitanian creoles typically contain no lateral component. (5) Loss of ﬁnal /r/ in inﬁnitives, which became categorical in the formation of Afro-Iberian creoles, as well as in vernacular Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Hispanic speech, appears occasionally in Gil Vicente: dormi < dormir, com´e < comer, beb´e < beber, mett´e < meter, quer´e < querer, furt´a/furut´a < furtar, fart´a < fartar, traz´e < trazer, fal´a < falar, etc. (6) The Vicente texts provide the ﬁrst examples of loss of syllable-ﬁnal /s/, but with morphological conditioning: vamo < vamos, temo < temos. The issue of /s/-reduction is an important concern in Spanish dialectology, where 8

Lipski (2002b).

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

57

the possible African contribution to loss of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ in Latin America (principally in coastal regions where both African and Andalusian inﬂuence was strong) continues to be debated. Afro-Lusitanian creoles do not exhibit widespread loss of syllable-ﬁnal /s/, although inﬂectional plural /s/ is not usually present. In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, particularly in areas of heavy African presence, syllable-ﬁnal /s/ often disappears. Morphological conditioning is often present, since the ﬁrst /s/ in noun phrases usually remains to signal plural. On the other hand, the ﬁnal /s/ in the ﬁrst person plural verbal desinence /-mos/ almost always disappears in colloquial Brazilian Portuguese (that is, when this form is not replaced by the third person singular, as in n´os e´ “we are,” n´os tem “we have,” etc.). In Afro-Hispanic texts, the earliest of which coincide with Gil Vicente’s writings, ﬁnal /s/ is lost only in the verbal desinence /-mos/. This suggests that the tendency toward open syllables, embodied in the majority of African languages which came into contact with Ibero-Romance, was further accelerated by grammatically irrelevant consonants, such as the ﬁnal /s/ in /-mos/. The Vicente fragments also provide several examples of obviously plural noun phrases in which no plural /s/ appears (Teyssier 1959:243). These cases illustrate the general avoidance of inﬂectional morphology by secondlanguage learners of Ibero-Romance, especially speakers of African languages when plurality, when signalled at all, is more often realized by means of preﬁxes. Also at issue is the fact that word-ﬁnal /s/ was most frequently dropped in unstressed syllables, both noun/adjective plurals and in the ending -mos. Final /s/ in stressed syllables more often triggered a paragogic vowel, as in the omnipresent deoso/dioso < Deus/Dios. A number of grammatical modiﬁcations appear in the Vicente texts, nearly all of which are consistent with other Afro-Iberian literary examples, and are found in Afro-Iberian creoles. Use of (a) mi as subject pronoun continues the tradition ﬁrst seen in the examples from the Cancioneiro geral. Mi is also used as a disjunctive object pronoun; the Portuguese clitic pronouns rarely appear in AfroLusitanian texts. The portmanteau copula sa has become solidiﬁed in Vicente. Deﬁnite articles are rarely used, conjunctions are frequently eliminated, and noun-adjective concord is seldom found. The majority of these morphosyntactic features are typical of foreign-language varieties of Portuguese, but use of sa and subject (a) mi foreshadow the eventual creolization of Portuguese along the West African coast. Other sixteenth-century Afro-Portuguese literary texts Another key Afro-Lusitanian text is the “Auto das regateiras” (ca. 1550) by Antˆonio Ribeiro Chiado (Chapter Two Appendix #8). The lesser-known “Pratica de oito ﬁguras” by the same author (Chapter Two Appendix #9) also

58

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

contains “Africanized” Portuguese. In Chiado’s “Auto da natural invenc¸ca˜ o,” a character imitating early Afro-Portuguese pidgin says:9 Eu sam o que tenho saibo, o v´os, Senhor, sentar raybo . . .

This text makes use of the early Afro-Iberian copula senta(r),10 and contains a variant of the Afro-Arabic element taybo, with the initial consonant realized as a ﬂap. These examples continue the linguistic developments found in Gil Vicente, with almost no deviations. There are also several innovations, the most important of which are the use of sant´a(r) as copula (Prutug´a santar diabo), and the denasalization of /˜n/: seora < senhora, gallia < galinha, nigrio < negrinho, bonitia < bonitinha. Although Afro-Hispanic language frequently introduced intrusive non-etymological nasal consonants, loss of nasal elements also occurred. Portuguese borrowings into African languages typically denasalized Portuguese nasal vowels, and /˜n/ also became [y] with some frequency. Among surviving Afro-Iberian creoles, etymological /˜n/ is often represented by a nasalized glide; this is the case in Papiamento and sometimes Palenquero. The same pronunciation is also found in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, in conjunction with other phonetic features which may possibly reﬂect an African contribution. Realization of /˜n/ as a nasalized glide also occurs in Haitian Creole. The “Auto da bella menina” by Sebasti˜ao Pires is approximately contemporaneous with the writings of Gil Vicente, and provides corroborative data on the status of Africanized Portuguese of the early sixteenth century (Chapter Two Appendix #10). This fragment is considerably different from the previously considered texts, containing a greater amount of distorted and barely intelligible material. At the same time, it contains striking similarities with the Vicente and Chiado examples, including use of mi(m) as subject pronoun (alternating with eu), use of the generic copula sa, paragogic vowels, denasalization of /˜n/ and of ﬁnal nasal vowels, realization of prevocalic /d/ as [r], and use of the third person singular form of ir, bai, as uninﬂected verb, including in the inﬁnitive (pera bay a bosso merce). This invariant realization of ir has made its way into many Afro-Iberian creoles, including Cape Verdean Creole, Palenquero, and Papiamento. An anonymous text, “Auto de Vicente Anes Joeira,” appears to come from approximately the same time period (Chapter Two Appendix #11). This text, unusual in many respects, contains recurring Afro-Portuguese elements, including the generic copulas sentar and sa, uninﬂected bai, paragogic vowels, use of bare inﬁnitives as invariant verbs, and delateralization of /λ/. In this text eu is generally used as subject pronoun. 9

Chiado (1917:73).

10

Lipski (1999c, 2002c).

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

59

Afro-Portuguese texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries The next group of Afro-Portuguese texts comes from the seventeenth century, spilling over into the early eighteenth century. Most are anonymous songs and poem fragments, evidently part of a much larger corpus that was performed in musical and stage presentations. Beginning with the seventeenth century, the surviving Afro-Portuguese texts are anonymous; none of the major Portuguese writers used the l´ıngua de preto following the plays of Gil Vicente, although the parodies continued in literature aimed at the masses, and actually reached a high point around the turn of the nineteenth century, long after the Africanborn population which had inspired Vicente’s writings had been linguistically assimilated in Portugal. An early seventeenth-century Afro-Portuguese literary imitation is an anonymous song from ca. 1647, “S˜a qui turo” (Chapter Two Appendix #12). This text shows considerable phonological modiﬁcation, as well as grammatical forms found in earlier texts. These include the invariant copula sa, loss of ﬁnal /s/ in the verbal desinence /-mos/ and of ﬁnal /r/ in verbal inﬁnitives, replacement of the groove fricative [ˇz] by [z] (zente < gente, Zuz´e < Jos´e), replacement of prevocalic /r/ by [l], pronunciation of prevocalic /d/ as [r]. The shift /r/ > [l] has occurred in the Afro-Lusitanian creoles of the Gulf of Guinea, and was also widely represented in later Afro-Hispanic texts. In Latin America, the shift /r/ > [l] is frequent in Palenquero. There is also a suggestion of plural marking only on the ﬁrst word of noun phrases: huns may donzera, huns rey, huns fessa. In general, this text, which comes more than a century after Gil Vicente’s early examples, is consistent with the notion that Africans resident in Portugal would have acquired greater ﬂuency in Portuguese, with remaining problems being relegated to phonology, and to occasional grammatical lapses. The language of this song is a far cry from the broken Portuguese of the sixteenth century examples; there is a greater use of functional elements such as prepositions and articles, verbs are conjugated, and there is some noun-adjective concordance. A number of anonymous poems from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries have been published by Hatherly (1990) (Chapter Two Appendix #13–18). These poems, although apparently written by different authors over a considerable time period, share many important common features. All are found in Afro-Lusitanian creoles, particularly in the Gulf of Guinea, and most appear in earlier Afro-Portuguese texts.11 The key recurring features include replacement of prevocalic /r/ by [l], signaling of plural /s/ only on the ﬁrst element of noun phrases, paragogic vowels (particularly in boso < vos and Diozo < Deus), of sa as uninﬂected copula, magi [maˇzi], apparently derived from mas ‘but’ through 11

Megenney (1990a).

60

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

addition of a paragogic vowel, delateralization of /λ/. Similar paragogic vowels are found in the Gulf of Guinea creoles, and in the contemporary vernacular Portuguese spoken in Angola.12 A tantalizing document which purports to represent the speech of Africans in eighteenth-century Portugal is a letter apparently written in Lisbon by the “Rei Angola” to the “Rei Minas” in 1730 (Chapter Two Appendix #19). The writer and recipient would be leaders of the African cofradias or religious brotherhoods and mutual aid societies that arose whenever Africans lived in Portuguese or Hispanic societies. In cities containing large African populations, these societies were divided along ethnic lines, with the language and culture of particular African groups being partially retained in each group. In this case, the term Angola refers most probably to speakers of Kimbundu, but possibly to Kikongo, while Mina refers to members of the Akan group, from present-day Ghana (the former Gold Coast). The letter in question is an invitation to join in a religious procession, possibly during Holy Week. It is unlikely that this text was written by an African, since it was eventually published in a collection of vignettes to which black authors would have little access. At the same time, the consistent use of recognized Afro-Portuguese pidgin elements suggests that such a language was well enough known to non-African observers in Portugal as to enable a reasonably accurate imitation. If authentic, this text would demonstrate that a distinctly Africanized Portuguese existed in Portugal well into the eighteenth century, and not simply as a long-disappeared stereotype remembered only in literary documents. Even more crucially, it would demonstrate that Africans in Portugal (at least those born in Africa) used a pidgin Portuguese with consistent structural characteristics when communicating with Africans of other ethnic groups, rather than simply approximating the received language of metropolitan Portugal. The letter contains many structural elements which were present in earlier Afro-Lusitanian texts, including the lexical items seoro < senhor, vozo < vos, signaling of plurality in noun phrases only on the ﬁrst element (at times with hypercorrect /s/, as in dos may Zozefa), rendering of the groove fricative [ˇz] as [z], use of sa as copula, delateralization of /λ/, and ﬁnally signaling of future with ha de, a combination which also made its way to several Asian Portuguese creoles. The last phase of Afro-Portuguese texts: calendars and pamphlets Beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century, pidginized l´ıngua de preto or l´ıngua de 12

(Lipski 1995b).

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

61

guin´e found its most consistent manifestation in hundreds of pamphlets and broadsides, known collectively as literatura de cordel ‘literature on a string.’ Most of these texts contain a formulaic use of stereotyped elements, much as in other ethnic “eye-dialect” literature meant for out-group consumption,13 but their very persistence, side by side with the existence of a considerable black community, attests to at least some real survival of Afro-Portuguese speech forms. The most common manifestations were the equivalent of farmers’ almanacs and astrological forecasts, known as progn´osticos and lunarios. This literary form ﬁrst began in 1756, as a result of the earthquake that had devastated Lisbon a year earlier. Known at ﬁrst as Os preto astrologo, these pamphlets offered humorous comments, mostly making fun of the precarious living conditions of blacks, e.g. “Fevereiro 6 (seg.), vento e frio, coitado dos preta que n˜ao tem roupa.”14 Subsequent reincarnations of this literary form included the Sarrabal portuguˆes and Plonostico curiozo. The original pamphlets faded out after 1760, but reappeared in 1803 with the Plonostico curiozo, e lunario pala os anno de 1804, pelo pleto Flancisco Suz´a Halley. These crude broadsides were published until the middle of the nineteenth century, after which the literary use of Afro-Portuguese pidgin disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula (Chapter Two Appendix #20). Possible existence of nativized “black Portuguese” in Portugal This pamphlet literature, together with the antecedent Afro-Portuguese texts, are important from a number of viewpoints. First, although some unrealistic traits are carried over (e.g. the massive replacement of /r/ by /l/), there are also indications that a stable Afro-Portuguese speech mode was stabilizing in Portugal by the end of the seventeenth century. This is suggested by the consistent presence of ﬁnal /s/ only on the ﬁrst element of plural nouns phrases, by the almost systematic lack of gender agreement, use of invariant vai for ‘go’ and invariant copular sa. These texts are also important since they raise the probability that some identiﬁable ethnolinguistic features were retained in the Afro-Portuguese community at least until the early decades of the nineteenth century and perhaps later. Although written imitations of ethnically marked speech varieties may persist in some forms of literature long after the groups 13

14

Strictly speaking, “eye-dialect” refers to spelling alterations meant to suggest ethnic or sociolinguistically marked speech, whether or not an actual change in pronunciation would result. Thus, for example, writing English comin’ for coming and Spanish trabajao for trabajado actually represent alternative pronunciations, while writing English was as wuz or Spanish hasta as asta may visually suggest colloquial or uneducated speech, although if read aloud the “altered” variants are identical to the standard forms. Literary imitations of Africans’ attempts at speaking Spanish and Portuguese employed both techniques. Tinhor˜ao (1988:210).

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in question have ceased to use the marked forms, this is rarely the case for pamphlet literature (and such modern-day equivalents as comic books, tabloids, and trading cards), which is designed to satisfy the immediate pleasures and prejudices of the masses. In Portugal, the thriving market for the l´ıngua de preto until the middle of the nineteenth century effectively brackets the real use of some sort of ethnolinguistically identiﬁable “black Portuguese traits.” Even allowing for the exaggeration and outright misrepresentation inherent in these racist parodies, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that at least some blacks in Portugal, most notably those born and raised in that country and not inﬂuenced by foreign-born bozal speech, natively used forms which were identiﬁed with earlier Afro-Portuguese pidgin. Whether these forms were used exclusively, or in parallel with non-African Portuguese (e.g. as an in-group manifestation of ethnic solidarity) is impossible to determine from the available documentation. The preceding evidence suggests that an Afro-Portuguese pidgin was evidently used in continental Portugal at least through the early part of the eighteenth century, although the most publicly visible manifestations had disappeared nearly a century earlier. Moreover, features identiﬁable as “black Portuguese” continued to be used by the more marginalized members of Portugal’s black community well into the nineteenth century and perhaps even later. Literary representations of this speech tended to exaggerate the comic element, but the linguistic features are consistent with accurately documented Afro-Iberian language contacts. Africans taken to Brazil also spoke a Portuguese pidgin during the ﬁrst stages of their language acquisition, and many of the features of the pidgin documented for Portugal probably arose in Brazil as well. At the same time, the demographic proﬁle of Africans in Brazil quickly shifted to favor speakers from the Congo Basin, providing a more homogeneous substrate than the apparently heterogeneous mix of African language families represented in Portugal. The extent to which a Bantu-inﬂuenced AfroPortuguese pidgin permanently affected vernacular Brazilian Portuguese is still an open question, but several features, such as double and postverbal negation (of the form [n˜ao] sei n˜ao), are arguably derived from such a restructuring process. In the early twentieth century, a number of folksongs and skits were transcribed throughout rural regions of Portugal (Chapter Two Appendix #21). Some of these songs retain vestiges of an earlier Afro-Portuguese pidgin, and were sung on feast days often accompanied by “African” costumes and dances. These fragments have obviously undergone considerable distortion across time and space, and can no longer be considered as reasonable approximations to the former speech of blacks in Portugal. However, most of the basic features of Afro-Portuguese pidgin are found in these fragments.

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

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Glimpses of Portuguese as used in sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Africa Among the ﬁrst black Africans arriving in ﬁfteenth-century Portugal were free emissaries, but slaves were soon to follow. There are no known written records of how free Africans might have spoken Portuguese (and later, Spanish). That Portuguese did become a signiﬁcant linguistic presence in West Africa is attested by the numerous early Portuguese borrowings, in Akan, Kikongo, and later in Bantu languages from South Africa to the Horn of Africa. Presumably, the most ﬂuent African speakers of Portuguese (such as the leaders of the Kongo Kingdom – the Manicongos – and their ministers) spoke with the substratal features observable, for example, in the contemporary speech of Angolans and Mozambicans who have attained ﬂuency in Portuguese.15 Beginning with the ﬁrst Christianized Manicongo, Congo kings wrote extensive letters in Portuguese to the King of Portugal, to the Pope, and to other European leaders. Most of these texts, however, do not shed light on the Portuguese spoken by Africans, since they were often prepared by Portuguese-born or Portugueseeducated scribes, and are written in the ﬂowery formulaic language typical of European diplomacy in centuries past (Chapter Two Appendix #22). Africans possessing only a passing acquaintance with Portuguese would speak a rough pidgin, similar to that found in rural regions of contemporary Angola. Their language does not appear in documents of the time, but it is unlikely that this rudimentary Portuguese was much different than present-day phenomena under similar circumstances. Despite the highly artiﬁcial language of the “diplomatic” correspondence between Congo kings and the Portuguese crown in the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries, there are occasional glimpses of how Africans may actually have used Portuguese. One of the clerks of King Afonso of Congo, Jo˜ao Teixera, was himself Congolese,16 and texts authored by him contain a considerable number of pidginized elements, interspersed with the formulaic scribal language that forms the bulwark of these texts. Other African scribes also produced deviant elements. Phonological modiﬁcations such as metathesis or substitution of consonants and vowels was common. For example, in a letter from the Kongo king to the Portuguese king written in 1514 we ﬁnd espriuver for escrever (Br´asio 1952:297). A 1539 letter has autos for aptos (Br´asio 1953a:74). From 1548 comes mos praz < nos praz, exemplifying an analogical change that has occurred in other dialects of Spanish and Portuguese (Br´asio 1953a:207).17 15 17

16 Thornton (1992:213–14), Br´ (Lipski 1995b, 2000b, Perl 1989b). asio (1952:323). Among other examples, in a 1515 letter popas appears instead of poucas (Br´asio 1952:336) and celestryall for celestial (Manso 1877:32). A document from 1547 has dinas < dignas

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A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

Incorrectly conjugated or unconjugated (bare inﬁnitive) verbs also occur from time to time. For example, from the same 1514 letter we ﬁnd chamas for chama (Br´asio 1952:312), m˜adaramos and cheguar˜amos for mandarmos and chegarmos, respectively (Br´asio 1952:314).18 An early and grammatically questionable use of the progressive form of estar + g e r u n d comes in a 1550 letter: “. . . he verdade que elle vio estar fallando por muitas veses dom bastiam e dom pedro . . .” (Manso 1877:102). Deviations from normal Portuguese word order are found in several early documents written on behalf of the Kongo kings. A 1516 letter has “. . . sem ho eu ver . . .” (Manso 1877:34). In a 1516 letter we ﬁnd “. . . j´a comprey vynte e cymquo pe¸cas do dinheiro que me vossa Senhorya deu . . .” (Manso 1877: 35). A 1548 letter has “. . . como dito he logo ele ouvidor mandou a mim espriv o abaixo nomeado que fyzese este auto . . .” (Manso 1877:85). A 1550 letter offers “. . . que diese a dom pedro que se nam saise da Igreja ate lhe ele nam mandar Seu Recado . . .” (Manso 1877:105), and “. . . rogou o dito dom pedro a ele testemunha que fosse fallar a manipemba que viese a fallar com elle aqui a comguo . . .” (Manso 1877:108). In a 1610 letter we ﬁnd “. . . aonde me eu criey em companhia dos Religiosos . . .” (Manso 1877:156).

18

(Br´asio 1953a:155). A 1549 document has dynos < dignos and benyna < benigna (Br´asio 1953a:219). A 1550 document has pormjtio < permitiu (Br´asio 1953a:244). In a 1526 letter resdondesa appears instead of redondeza (Manso 1877:50). A 1535 letter has liagoa for l´ıngua (Manso 1877:65). A 1548 letter has avangelhos for evang´elios (Manso 1877:86) and Belltesar for Baltasar (Manso 1877:89). A 1550 letter has Jeshum < Jesu and ganeiro for janeiro (Manso 1877:101). The spelling Anguola for Angola also occurs, e.g. in 1558 (Br´asio 1953a:415). A 1615 document has christ´a for crist˜ao (Manso 1877:160). In 1688 a Congo king wrote cheg´a for chegada (Manso 1877:290). We also ﬁnd comiguo for conmigo, etc., in 1566 (Br´asio 1953a:545), guosto for gosto in 1530 (Manso 1877:59), catolyqua for cat´olica in 1517 (Manso 1877:44), branquos for brancos in 1548 (Manso 1877:85), lloguo for lˆogo and ﬁdallguo < ﬁdalgo (Manso 1877:103–04), comguo for Congo and soquorrer for socorrer (Manso 1877:108–09) in 1550. Another 1514 letter has cortyse for cortasse (Manso 1877:27). In another letter from the Kongo king to his Portuguese counterpart, written in 1515, we ﬁnd N´os rec¸ebam for n´os recebemos (Br´asio 1952:335), veo for vieram, dar for deram, cruc¸yﬁcado for cruciﬁcaram, recebam for recebe, dar for d˜ao, nac¸eo for nascemos (Br´asio 1952:336), passar for passado, mjnystrar for administram, tomar for tomam (Br´asio 1952:337), acudir for acudais, etc. (Br´asio 1952:338). Another 1515 letter has os gentes viveu, “as . . . ryquezas som estroyc¸am . . . ,” dar for darem, tomar for tomarem, todos naceu, and acudir for acudirdes (Manso 1877:32–33). A third 1515 letter has “. . . e a nosa gente toda estar bem com elle e elle nos ter muito bem servydo . . .” (Manso 1877:33). A 1525 letter has rec¸eba for recebam (Br´asio 1952:455), a letter of 1526 has poderam for poder´a (Br´asio 1952:459), faram for far´a, salluaram for salvar´a, desparem for desampare (Br´asio 1952:462). Another letter of 1526 has conprara for comprar (Br´asio 1952:490). A 1535 letter has emvyando for enviado and fac¸am for fac¸a (Br´asio 1953a:53–54). A 1540 letter has eu more for morra, hordenou for ordenaram and venha for vˆem (Br´asio 1953a:105). A 1543 letter has ser for sendo (Br´asio 1953a:120). A document from 1550 has ser falar for ter falado and castjremos for castigarmos (Br´asio 1953a:243). In a 1575 document escrever appears instead of escrevo (Br´asio 1953a:127). A 1550 text has ﬁze for ﬁzesse (Manso 1877:106).

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

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Use of disjunctive object pronouns instead of clitics occasionally occurs in the early Afro-Portuguese texts. For example in a 1517 letter we ﬁnd “. . . o dito senhor foy mandado a mim . . .”19 Loss of ﬁnal /s/ in one or more elements of plural noun phrases, a feature of Afro-Portuguese language elsewhere, occasionally appears in scribal documents sent by Kongo kings during the sixteenth century. For example, in one 1515 text, we ﬁnd nese[s] reynos (Br´asio 1952:333). In another, we encounter tanta[s] trybu[la]c¸ es (Br´asio 1952:337) and os pedreyro[s] (338).20 Unusually, /s/ appears only on the second element of a noun phrase in a 1540 document: “. . . lhe foram tomadas por o framceses . . .” (Manso 1877:76). Hypercorrect /s/ appears in a 1532 document: “. . . dom manuell meus Irm˜ao . . .” (Manso 1877:61). The use of sam as ﬁrst person singular, a feature which was on its way out in early sixteenth-century Portugal (many ﬁfteenth-century examples occur in the Cancioneiro geral), occurs in letters written by Kongo kings. For example, in a 1516 letter (Br´asio 1952:359; Manso 1877:36–37): “. . . que me lan¸ca em rostro que se eu sam cryst˜aom e vasallo delrrey nosso Jrm . . .”21 In the third person plural, both sam and s˜ao are used. For example, from 1549: “. . . hos que bem servem sam dynos de gualardam . . .” (Br´asio 1953a:218). In another document from the same year, we have “. . . s˜ao t o desausalutos . . .” (Br´asio 1953a:226). Occasionally, sam is used where a form of estar would be expected, partially reﬂecting old Portuguese and Spanish usage, but also presaging the single copula s˜a of the Gulf of Guinea creoles. For example in a 1517 letter we have “. . . por alumiar os cegos que sam em meus Reynos . . .” (Manso 1877:44). In a 1547 letter we ﬁnd the syntactically confusing phrase “. . . como Rey christoom per direito sam obligado que eu poder a sua santidade e a seus subcesores . . .” (Manso 1877:82). The ﬁrst person plural samos also occurs; for example in a 1550 document: “. . . n´os nos dias samos muy velho pera tamto sofrermos” (Br´asio 1953a:244). The diphthong -˜ao was sometimes written -˜a, for example Basti˜a[o] (Br´asio 1953a:251, 257), in 1550. 19 20

21

Manso (1877:41). A third 1515 letter has todallas cousas boas santas sam feyta . . . (Manso 1877:31). A letter from the Kongo king in 1535 contains meus yrm˜ao and meus subceso[res] (Br´asio 1953a:39–40). A 1540 letter contains the phrase dos franc¸eis (Manso 1877:73). A 1547 document has lhe[s] dou (Br´asio 1953a:175). A 1549 document has “. . . tem r do[s] que n fyzerm . . .” (Br´asio 1953a:227). In a 1550 document we ﬁnd seus samtos m˜adamento[s] (Br´asio 1953a:244; Manso 1877:100). The opposite also occurs; in a letter from the Kongo king written in 1526, we ﬁnd reynos instead of reyno (Br´asio 1952:470). A 1587 document las “ne lhe[s] ua a´ m˜ao . . .” (Br´asio 1953b:344). A letter dated 1517 contains the line “. . . que deles se n seguja nenh prouejto, do que sam mujto desconsolado . . .” (Br´asio 1952:406). The (phonetically similar or identical) som also appears, in a letter from the Kongo king written in 1530 (Br´asio 1952:540): “. . . por que de sua comver¸cassam som muyto comssollado . . .” A 1547 document has “. . . como Rey christ o per direito sam obrigado que eu poder a sua santidade e a seus subcesores . . .” (Br´asio 1953a:175). A letter from a Kongo king in 1575 has “[eu] S˜ao imformado que pera comserua¸c o do Reyno de Comguo . . .” (Br´asio 1953b:125).

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Kikongo (the native language of the Kongo kings and their scribes) and Kimbundu (the native language of the Luanda area of Angola) do not contain the liquid /r/, do not distinguish /r/ and /l/, and exhibit phonological alternation between [l] and [d]. Bantu inﬂuence on early Portuguese and Spanish bozal speech involved the change of /r/ > [l], as typiﬁed by the Spanish humorist Quevedo. There are many examples of this shift in early Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese literary imitations, as well as in the Portuguese-based creole languages of S˜ao Tom´e, Pr´ıncipe, and Annob´on, in which the Bantu contribution was signiﬁcant.22 A reasonable extrapolation of Bantu phonotactics would suggest that the change /r/ > [l] would be a common occurrence among Kikongo and Kimbundu learners of Portuguese. This fact notwithstanding, in contemporary Angolan Portuguese (largely characterized by a Kimbundu substratum, together with related Bantu languages), the shift of /r/ > [l] is very rare, while the opposite change of /l/ > [r] occurs rather frequently. In the early Portuguese texts written by Kongo scribes, the change of /l/ > [r] does occur from time to time, while the opposite change of /l/ > [r] is also quite common; one example is the ambiguous gualardam < guardarem (?) in a 1549 letter (Manso 1877:91). Also, a document from 1547 has pruuica < p´ublica, showing metathesis as well as liquid neutralization (Br´asio 1953a:153). In a letter of 1535 we ﬁnd decrarar < declarar (Br´asio 1953a:54). A 1540 letter has craro < claro (Br´asio 1953a:101). Another 1540 letter has lear < leal (Br´asio 1953a:103), fraldas < faldas, natarar < natural (Br´asio 1953a:105). A 1548 document has groria for gloria, contrairo for contrario and decrarado for declarado (Manso 1877:85). A 1549 letter has comfrimar < conﬁrmar (Manso 1877:92). Neutralization without metathesis is found in pubryco < p´ublico in 1550 (Br´asio 1953a:244, 248–49). Also found in 1550 is decrarrou < declarou (Br´asio 1953a:24, 257–59). Direct testimony as to Africans’ use of pidginized Portuguese during the seventeenth century comes in a curious document written by Joseph de Naxara, a Spanish Capuchin priest, who lived in Allada (Ardra, later Whydah, along the coast of modern Benin) in 1659–60 (Naxara 1672). Naxara describes an African who spoke Portuguese and understood Spanish, and gave an example of his use of Portuguese (1672:239): N˜ao me chegu`e a` e` la, porque sa Ramera . . . e` meu Pai me votar`a a` o` tronco, se sabe que mi fal`e co ela . . . e` mais, que mi non quero chegar a` ela, porque sa Ramera . . . [I didn’t go to her because she is a harlot . . . my father would beat me if he knew that I talked with her . . . and moreover I don’t want to go to her because she is a harlot]

The use of sa is unique in coming neither from Portugal nor from the Angola/Gulf of Guinea region, but rather from the Portuguese Slave coast, 22

Schuchardt (1888), Vila (1891), Barrena (1957), Valkhoff (1966, 1975), G¨unther (1973), Ferraz (1979, 1984), Bartens (1995:113–27), Post (1995).

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

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where Kwa languages (e.g. Ewe/Fon) are spoken. There is no indication that Naxara was simply imitating literary examples of the period; indeed, since he spent much of his missionary career in Africa, it is not known how much of the rather frivolous Spanish and Portuguese literature in which “Africanized” language occurred he was familiar with. Naxara also gives an example of Africans’ use of Spanish in Ardra; the brief glimpse is much more broken than the Portuguese example, containing principally unconjugated verbs (1672:239): Espa˜nol est´a tanto mal Christiano, tiene una Margarita en Madrid, otra en Cadiz, otra en las Indias; mi, no tener mas que vna Margarita en Olanda, y auer treinta a˜nos que me cas´e, y no aver conocido otra Margarita . . . [Spaniards are bad Christians; they have one woman in Madrid, another in C´adiz, another in the Indies, I only have one woman in Holland and I am married to her for thirty years and have known no other woman]

Early Afro-Brazilian literary texts In comparison with the vast outpouring of Afro-Hispanic literary language from colonial Spanish America, only a couple of colonial Afro-Brazilian texts have come to light. This is also rather unusual, given the liklihood that vernacular Brazilian Portuguese of many regions was permanently affected by the early bozal African presence, probably via restructuring or “semicreolization” in the sense of Holm (1988:9) rather than passing through a stage of true creolization. Literary representations of “Africanized” Portuguese continued well into the eighteenth century in Portugal, and in Brazil appear to have been used until the ﬁnal decades of the eighteenth century. By this time, Africanized varieties of Portuguese were already well established in Brazil, in many cases exhibiting signiﬁcant differences from earlier European Portuguese literary examples. The use of European-derived stereotypes in late eighteenth-century Brazil can most probably be ascribed to literary tradition, and should not be taken uncritically as a representation of how Africans actually spoke Portuguese at this time. One interesting Brazilian document is a fragment of “O preto, e o bugio ambos no mato discorrendo sobre a arte de ter dinheiro sem ir ao Brazil,” published in 1789 (Chapter Two Appendix #23). This example contains most of the key elements identiﬁed in earlier Afro-Lusitanian texts, including use of (a) mim as subject pronoun, paragogic vowels, including the pronouns nozo and vozo, shift of prevocalic /r/ > [l], loss of ﬁnal /r/ in verbal inﬁnitives, signaling of plural /s/ only on the ﬁrst element of noun phrases (together with some hypercorrect /s/), delateralization of /λ/, and realization of prevocalic /d/ as [r]. Missing in this text is the key use of sa as copula; otherwise, the example could have come from the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

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In colonial Brazil, literary Afro-Portuguese pidgin appears in a few texts until the ﬁnal decades of the eighteenth century. A few other purported Afro-Brazilian texts have come to light, none of which may be taken at face value (Chapter Two Appendix #24). A very curious text claims to represent a Portuguesebased indigenous interlanguage of the early seventeenth century,23 but in fact the linguistic features are those commonly associated with Afro-Portuguese pidgin; moreover, the text contains references to blacks (Chapter Two Appendix #25). This text contains use of copular sa(r), paragogic vowels, and a number of other phonological and grammatical modiﬁcations acknowledged for AfroPortuguese pidgin. Several folkloric fragments collected in the early part of the twentieth century in Brazil also contain vestiges of earlier Afro-Brazilian pidgin (Chapter Two Appendix #26–27). Both poems exhibit loss of nominal and verbal agreement; the second text also makes extensive use of paragogic vowels. Afro-Portuguese texts from Asia Most attributions of African inﬂuence in Asian-Portuguese creoles must be done through inference and comparative reconstruction, since primary texts are all but nonexistent. An important exception to this lack of documentation comes from the colony of Dam˜ao in Portuguese India (Chapter Two Appendix #28). In a song formerly used by black slaves on the feast of St. Benedict, beginning in the seventeenth century, we ﬁnd examples of Afro-Portuguese pidgin similar to those attested for Europe. This text also gives evidence of having been inﬂuenced by the Indo-Portuguese creoles, in particular use of the preverbal particle ta. The Dam˜ao text gives an inkling that Afro-Portuguese pidgin followed the trade routes of the Portuguese empire, perhaps leaving traces (long since disappeared) in other regions as well. Schuchardt (1883a:13) gives an example of nineteenth-century songs collected in Diu and attributed to blacks (Chapter Two Appendix #29). Schuchardt gives no analysis of these texts, but the language is notably simpler than the established Portuguese creole of Diu, suggesting a reasonable approximation to an earlier unstable Portuguese pidgin spoken by black slaves taken to the Portuguese fort at Diu. Schuchardt (1883b:11–12) gives examples of Afro-Portuguese songs from the former Portuguese Indian colony at Mangalore (Chapter Two Appendix #30). Again, the texts are presented without analysis, but they suggest that Africanized Portuguese songs and dances were not uncommon in the Portuguese Indian colonies, with the last memories of these song fragments persisting well beyond the actual African slave populations. 23

Silva Neto (1963:35–39), Silva Neto (1940:93–96).

Early Afro-Portuguese texts

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African slaves were also taken in large numbers to the Portuguese colony at Macao, beginning in the sixteenth century.24 In general, Macao creole Portuguese bears the strongest resemblance to Papia Kristang of Malacca.25 It is known that Malay/Malaccan natives formed the largest foreign-born population during the formative period of Macao creole Portuguese, and it appears likely that Malay settlers brought to Macao at least the rudiments of the Portuguesebased creole formed in Malacca. Batalha (1974:21) believes that Macao creole Portuguese was “uma linguagem j´a para aqu´ı trazida em pleno desenvolvimento.” Macao was also home to settlers from Portuguese colonies in south Asia, where Portuguese-based creoles also arose. However, the African cultural and linguistic contribution was also important; Batalha (1974:24) explains: Havendo entre eles muitos ind´ıgenas africanos . . . isso explica em parte certas semelhan¸cas, a` primeira vista surpreendentes, entre o velho crioulo de Macao e os crioulos afro-portugueses, sobre tudo os de Cabo Verde. Explicar´a at´e algumas coincidˆencias com o falar popular do Brasil, uma vez que este pa´ıs . . . recebeu ao tempo da sua coloniza¸ca˜ o grande contingente de m˜ao-de-obra africana.

The author adds the following clariﬁcation: Mas em parte . . . porque certos fen´omenos que se repetem em v´arios crioulos n˜ao viajaram, mas resultam de leis psicol´ogicas em todos os povos idˆenticos, como seja a tendˆencia para a simpliﬁca¸ca˜ o. N˜ao e´ , pois, necessariamente de origem africana a redu¸ca˜ o de verbos, em Macao, a uma s´o forma que serve para todas as pessoas grammaticais (do tipo de eu sabe, n´os sabe, eles sabe), ou a forma¸ca˜ o de per´ıfrases para substituir os tempos verbais simples (como t´a vai paro o presente, logo vai ou lˆo vai para o futuro e j´a vai o j´a vai j´a para especiﬁcar a ac¸ca˜ o passada). (1974:24–25)

These comments add to the already growing evidence of an African-South Asian connection in the development, evolution, and spread of Portuguesebased creoles. The presence of s˜a in Macao also reﬂects an African carryover; this copula is not present in any other Asian Portuguese creole, but is found in the Gulf of Guinea creoles, currently as denasalized sa (or xa in Annbonese) but previously also as nasalized sam. The latter spelling is also found in early Macao texts, as well as s˜ao, and sang.26 Azevedo (1984) also notes that Macao was for a long period administered and supplied directly from Goa; he also gives examples of linguistic elements possibly transferred straight from Goa to Macao. Thus some form of Indo-Portuguese creole may have arrived in Macao from Goa, in addition to the indirect inﬂuence through Malaccan Papia Kristang. The presence of the copula sa in the Naxara text is revealing in both its geographical location and 24 25 26

Batalha (1974), Teixeira (1976), Amaro (1980). Chaves (1933), Rego (1943), Hancock (1973, 1975), Wexler (1983), Baxter (1988). Schuchardt (1888:196), Fran¸ca (1897:201), Coelho (1967:62), Batalha (1974:26), Ferreira (1978:28), Azevedo (1984:55).

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the time period for which it is attested, and may provide a clue as to the presence and absence of sa in Afro-Iberian creoles. The data surveyed to this point provide a puzzling distribution of the invariant copula sa: it is present in the Gulf of Guinea creoles, but not in Palenquero (with strong Bantu roots), nor in any known variety of Angolan Portuguese. It is also absent from the Portuguesebased creoles of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. At the same time, sa makes its appearance in literary texts early in the sixteenth century, beginning with Gil Vicente. Finally, this element is present in Macao Portuguese creole, having skipped over the intervening Asian Portuguese creoles. Everything points to the Bight of Benin/Slave Coast as the origin of sa in pidgin Portuguese, whence it was taken to Portugal and Spain and reproduced by early writers such as Gil Vicente and Lope de Rueda. The Gulf of Guinea creoles (S˜ao Tomense in particular) contain approximately equal proportions of linguistic material from the Slave Coast and from Bantu languages of Congo/Angola, while the obviously Bantu-inﬂuenced Palenquero contains few if any Kwa-derived elements. The copula sa could have been taken to Macao directly from the Bight of Benin by African slaves. This is a more likely source than S˜ao Tom´e, since no other features of the latter creole appear in Macaense. Amaro (1980) has discovered similarities between traditional board games formerly played in Macao and similar games in West Africa.

3

Early Afro-Hispanic texts

The ﬁrst Afro-Hispanic texts, sixteenth century: Rodrigo de Reinosa In Spain, the literary representation of “Africanized” Spanish began early in the sixteenth century, although it is conceivable that some non-surviving texts might have been produced in the late ﬁfteenth century. The earliest examples show the deﬁnite traces of the already established Afro-Portuguese language produced by such writers as Gil Vicente. This fact is unremarkable in light of the slave trade from Portugal to southern Spain, in the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries, although some investigators (e.g. Granda 1969) claim that most Afro-Hispanic literary language, including the earliest texts, stems from direct contact between Spanish and native Africans, without the mediation of pidginized Portuguese. Among the earliest Afro-Hispanic texts are some coplas by Rodrigo de Reinosa (Chapter Three Appendix #1). The poems in question are contained in pamphlets or literatura de cordel, and do not carry a date. Russell (1973) uses indirect evidence to suggest that these coplas may have been written in the last decades of the ﬁfteenth century; in any case, they were written no later than about 1510, which makes them the oldest Afro-Hispanic texts discovered to date. Nothing is known about the life of Rodrigo de Reinosa. Weber de Kurlat (1968) surmises that the “Africanized” coplas were written after the publication of the Cancioneiro geral in 1516. Men´endez y Pelayo surmised that Reinosa was a monta˜ne´ s, from the highlands of modern Santander (Cantabria) province, an idea echoed by Coss´ıo (1950). Little substantive evidence supports this claim, but it is obvious from the coplas that Reinosa had indeed experienced AfroIberian pidgin language, most probably in person. Cabrales Arteaga (1980:25) suggests that Reinosa may have spent time in Seville, since he was obviously familiar with the speech of several marginalized groups that were found in urban Andalusia. If the late ﬁfteenth-century dates proposed for his coplas are accurate, Reinosa could not have been inspired by the Cancioneiro geral, nor by the writings of Gil Vicente, both of which were to appear several decades later. Although Reinosa’s own coplas were apparently only published as literatura de cordel pamphlets, there is some indication that these seminal Afro-Hispanic 71

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texts were the source of direct inspiration, if not imitation, by some of the ﬁrst Spanish writers to make use of Afro-Hispanic pidgin. The coplas are ostensibly directed to blacks living in the already large black community of Seville. This fact is important since, although the pamphlets were clearly directed at least in part at the literate white public (or at least that subclass which routinely read the humorous pamphlets sold on the street), there is at least some indication that Africans themselves were contemplated among potential readers. That black slaves might be literate at a time when literacy was a skill not enjoyed even by many members of the aristocracy is not entirely impossible, since the majority of blacks in Seville at the turn of the sixteenth century were employed as domestic servants. Africans were often entrusted with raising the children of afﬂuent families, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that at least some of the more favored servants and slaves might have been taught to read, at least simple texts. The existence of cofrad´ıas among the African community would ensure that group members who were literate might read these simple texts to illiterate compatriots. However, the crude and vulgar language of the coplas makes it more likely that a white working-class readership (or listenership) was the intended audience. Referring to the language of the coplas, Coss´ıo (1950:lxxvii) speaks of “. . . la imitaci´on convencional de su lenguaje, y aun m´as de su fon´etica.” This is a surprising afﬁrmation in light of the fact that Reinosa employs virtually no phonetic deformation, other than the use of some Portuguese rather than Spanish forms. Russell (1973) categorically describes Reinosa’s habla de negros as “pidgin Portuguese” and “Afro-Portuguese pidgin.” He observes (1973:237) that ‘there are a good many occasions . . . where normal Spanish words are used in their normal phonetic forms, either because Reinosa did not know the pidgin versions or, more probably, because of the need to achieve a measure of intelligibility for a Spanish-speaking audience.” This is unlikely, since most of the Portuguese words employed by Reinosa are transparently cognate with their Spanish counterparts. If any aspect of the coplas would produce confusion in the Spanish reader, it was the grammatical distortions, which, however, constitute the essence of the habla de negros. Cabrales Arteaga (1980:232–33) analyzes ‘phonetic’ aspects of Reinosa’s bozal language, most of which can be attributed to vernacular Portuguese or sayagu´es of the early sixteenth century. Weber de Kurlat (1962a:385, fn. 17) suggests that Reinosa may have read Silveira’s poem in the Cancioneiro geral, which would place Reinosa’s writings well into the sixteenth century, and would also cast some measure of doubt on the authenticity of the language as used by Africans in Seville. Russell (1973:228–29) disputes this assertion, insisting that the structures used by the two writers are sufﬁciently different as to preclude a simple copy of Silveira by Reinosa. The base language of the coplas is clearly Spanish, but unmistakable Afro-Lusitanian elements are also found:

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(1) use of terra instead of tierra, ferro instead of ﬁerro/hierro, esterco instead of esti´ercol, preto for prieto, bon/bona for buen/buena, porta for puerta, vejo for viejo, with non-diphthongized vowels (2) use of falar ‘to speak’ (3) use of ollo (Portuguese olho) instead of ojo ‘eye’ (4) use of muyto ‘much’ (5) use of ir embora ‘go away’ There are also consistent traces of Afro-Iberian pidgin, as well as simple deformations inspired by foreigners’ difﬁculties in acquiring Spanish. Among the more consistently pidgin traits are: (1) Use of (a) m´ı as subject pronoun, alternating with yo. (a) m´ı as subject pronoun occurs only in the earliest Afro-Hispanic texts, disappearing by the middle of the sixteenth century, while this pronoun was used as subject in Afro-Portuguese texts until the eighteenth century. (2) There is considerable confusion of ser and estar, although the hybrid AfroLusitanian verb sa(r) has yet to make an appearance. (3) Most verbs are left in the inﬁnitive; occasional defective attempts at conjugation (e.g. sabo) also occur. The verb juro is the only correctly conjugated form. Reinosa’s texts mix Afro-Portuguese and foreigner-talk Spanish. To the extent that these coplas possess any historical and linguistic authenticity, they indicate that the ﬁrst African slaves arriving in Seville via Portugal had acquired at least the rudiments of a Portuguese pidgin, but rapidly acquired Spanish lexical overlays. Most phonetic deformations can be attributed to Portuguese. However, there is one example of eta, apparently derived from esta, which Cabrales Arteaga (1980:232) analyzes as loss of preconsonantal /s/. The form Jes´u could be a Portuguese form, or a shortened version of Jesucristo; there are no other examples of loss of ﬁnal consonants in Reinosa’s coplas. Palatalization of preconsonantal /s/ appears in moxquito and moxca, but these forms were common in sayagu´es of the time period, and cannot be taken as embodying African phonetic interference without further substantiation. The farsas of S´anchez de Badajoz Following Reinosa, another Spanish writer to make abundant use of “Africanized” Spanish was Diego S´anchez de Badajoz, in a series of farsas, including the “Farsa teologal,” “Farsa del moysen,” “Farsa de la hechicera,” and “Farsa de la ventera.” All were apparently composed between 1533 and 1548, which, extrapolating backwards, would place the dates of the language just past the examples of Reinosa (Chapter Three Appendix #2–5). Diego S´anchez was born near the city of Badajoz, probably in Talavera la Real, a few kilometers away, and almost on the Portuguese border. His date of birth is not known, but was

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probably in the last decade or two of the ﬁfteenth century. S´anchez was proud of his title of bachiller, but it is not known for certain what university he attended. The most likely choice is Salamanca, in which case he would have been exposed to the writings of Juan del Encina and Lucas Fern´andez, who were active in Salamanca at that time.1 At almost any university of the time, S´anchez would have encountered the works of Gil Vicente, and signiﬁcant parallels between the two writers are not difﬁcult to point out. In all of his dramatic writings, Diego S´anchez demonstrated a keen awareness of popular speech. The African characters who appear in S´anchez’s plays derive their pidginized language as much from the rustic vernacular as from the learned Spanish of their masters, and the “African” component of their language must be evaluated against the backdrop of these nonstandard rustic variants. S´anchez de Badajoz’s African characters also employ a certain number of Portuguese linguistic traits, as do some of his rustic characters. This element must be treated cautiously, since already by the the early sixteenth century the use of vernacular Portuguese in Spanish plays was becoming a comic stereotype. The fact that Diego S´anchez lived and worked only a few miles from Portugal is also not irrelevant in his choice of vernacular language.2 Finally, it is almost certain that S´anchez based at least part of his “Africanized” Spanish on the language of African slaves living in the area. Although it is possible that S´anchez derived the inspiration for the use of African characters speaking pidginized language from early writers such as Gil Vicente and Lope de Rueda, the fact remains that the local church audiences who appreciated S´anchez’s plays were presumed to already be familiar with the mannerisms of African slaves. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, southern Extremadura had a small but important African slave population, most of whose members worked as domestic servants in afﬂuent families. In the sixteenth century, the slave population of southern Extremadura was at times as high as 7 percent.3 Some of the slaves had arrived directly from Africa, perhaps after spending time in other regions of Spain, but a significant proportion had come from Portugal, where they may have acquired at least some pidginized Portuguese. For the seventeenth century, Cort´es Cort´es (1987:145) shows that more than 30 percent of the slaves imported into southern Extremadura came from Portugal, some 20 percent arrived from Andalusia, and more than 40 percent came from other parts of Extremadura. Among the latter group, a Portuguese origin is certain for at least some. In the sixteenth century, when Portugal still effectively controlled the African slave trade, the proportion of slaves arriving from Portugal would have been even higher. Despite this fact, S´anchez de Badajoz’s habla de negros is not a simple Afro-Portuguese pidgin; in fact the quantity of Portuguese elements is surprisingly small, and many 1 2

L´opez Prudencio (1915:52). Weber de Kurlat (1968, 1971, 1974).

3

Cort´es Cort´es (1987:96–97).

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can be attributed to the prevailing sayagu´es ﬂavor of S´anchez’s marginalized characters. Nor is the Afro-Hispanic pidgin a simple literary invention, devoid of linguistic reality, as some have afﬁrmed.4 L´opez Prudencio (1915:147–48) refers to this language as “una incomprensible algarab´ıa” and “la acaso arbitraria monserga.” Weber de Kurlat (1968:350) observes that among authors of the early sixteenth century, “Lo que interesa es dar impresi´on de portugu´es: no preocupa la ﬁdelidad o la precisi´on o el hacer gala del conocimiento de una lengua extranjera, sino la presencia, tampoco sistem´atica, de unos pocos rasgos muy caracter´ısticos.” The linguistic characteristics of S´anchez’s “Africanized” Spanish is consistent with foreign learners’ attempts to speak Spanish, and reveals several African areal characteristics that recur in later examples. S´anchez’s farsas contain a language which is indisputably pidginized Spanish, in which Portuguese elements are minimal, and those few possibly Portuguese traces which do occur may well reﬂect regional rustic dialects of Spain (e.g. Sayagu´es and Extreme˜no), following well-established trends in Spanish theatre. Thus, the diminutive bonino suggests Galician/Asturian, as do the non-diphthongized verbs quere (Portuguese quer), bene (Ptg. vem), etc. The use of bona instead of buena, corpo for cuerpo, morrer for morir, etc. may reﬂect Galician/Leonese, or may be legitimately Portuguese incursions. In any case, it is clear that S´anchez de Badajoz was not blindly imitating literary models formed in Portugal, and available through the works of Gil Vicente and the Cancioneiro geral. S´anchez de Badajoz evidently was exposed to true pidginized Spanish, formed spontaneously as Africans in Spain attempted to produce comprehensible utterances in this new and hostile language. S´anchez de Badajoz’s examples provide the ﬁrst attempt to portray the phonetic characteristics of Afro-Hispanic speech. Most of the traits had already surfaced in Afro-Portuguese texts, given the cognate nature of Spanish and Portuguese, and the predictable interference of areal characteristics among the principal African language families. S´anchez de Badajoz’s characters use a modiﬁed pronunciation consistently, in combinations which suggest formation in situ, rather than imitation of Afro-Portuguese speech. Among the salient phonetic traits are: (1) Realization of prevocalic /d/ as [r] (2) Realization of fricative [ˇz]/affricates [ˆj] and [ˇc] as [s] (ses´u < Jes´us, museres < mugeres, v´ırsen < virgen, nose < noche) (3) Denasalization of /˜n/ (siora < se˜nora) (4) Interchange of /d/ and /l/ (lesa < deja, lesila < decidlo) (5) These texts provide the ﬁrst apparent cases of loss of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ in Afro-Hispanic language, and not involving the verbal desinence /-mos/: etar < estar, pator < pastor, Fransico < Francisco, trequilado < tresquilado, apueta < apuesta, etc. These early examples are important in dating the 4

E.g. Barrantes (1882), D´ıez Borque (1978:95–96).

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reduction of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ in Andalusian Spanish. The next convincing set of examples of /s/-reduction in Afro-Hispanic language (other than in the verbal desinence -mos, and in the frequent pronunciation of Jes´us as Jes´u, possibly inﬂuenced by Portuguese) do not come until nearly a century later. (6) These texts also provide the ﬁrst Afro-Hispanic examples of loss of preconsonantal /r/: mueto < muerto. As with loss of ﬁnal /s/, loss of word-ﬁnal /r/ is a typically Andalusian characteristic, which may be traced in AfroHispanic texts in the frequent loss of ﬁnal /r/ in verbal inﬁnitives. Andalusian Spanish usually retains word-internal preconsonantal /r/ (and also realizes preconsonantal /l/ as [r]). (7) The pronunciation of madre as magre is also found in contemporary AfroHispanic language, e.g. in Palenquero, in the Colombian Choc´o, in parts of the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. This pronunciation, however, pertains to rustic Spanish in general, and is widespread in rural areas with no African substrate. The farsas also demonstrate grammatical modiﬁcations, most of which are characteristic of second-language varieties of Spanish. These include verbs in the uninﬂected inﬁnitive form, defective subject-verb concordance, and unstable noun-adjective concordance. Despite the occasional presence of elements of Portuguese origin, S´anchez de Badajoz’s habla de negros bears the earmarks of a spontaneously formed Spanish pidgin, representing the speech of African bozales who encountered European languages for the ﬁrst time in Spain. Although they must be treated with care, these texts can tentatively be labeled as corroborative evidence that at least some Afro-Hispanic language arose spontaneously in early sixteenth-century Spain without a prior pidgin Portuguese basis. The peak of sixteenth-century habla de negros: Lope de Rueda The best-known examples of sixteenth-century literary habla de negros come from Lope de Rueda, in plays written in between 1538 and 1545 (Chapter Three Appendix #6–8). Rueda evidently had ﬁrsthand knowledge of the speech of Africans in Spain, and it has been suggested that he himself may have played the part of Africans in productions of his plays. “Africanized” Spanish occurs in the Comedia de los enga˜nados, the Comedia de Eufemia, and the Comedia de Tymbria. Together, the three plays provide a high degree of consistency in the use of Afro-Hispanic pidgin, which makes these texts among the most important early literary documents. Of all the early Spanish and Portuguese writers, Lope de Rueda was in the best position to accurately describe the language of African bozales residing in Spain. Rueda was born and apparently raised in Seville. After trying his hand at various trades, he formed a theatre company in which he was one of the

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principal actors, an expert at portraying the linguistically and culturally marginalized characters which ﬁll Spanish Golden Age theatre. As in the majority of Spanish drama, the negros in Rueda’s plays are always cast in comical roles, are nearly always women, and stand out by their wildly improbable malapropisms, incoherent asides, and constant preoccupation with food, drink, love, and dancing. The texts contain such a density of mocking humor and crude puns that it is easy to dismiss the entire corpus as xenophobic rambling. Veres (1950:207) says that the jerga de los negros: “. . . presenta caracter´ısticas m´as arbitrarias todav´ıa y es dif´ıcil deducir qu´e es lo que puede haber de realidad en la transcripci´on de esta habla jergal; encontramos vulgarismos comunes en varias regiones dialectales, al mismo tiempo que otros fen´omenos dif´ıciles de explicar fonol´ogicamente.” While Veres is correct in noticing the use of rustic and dialectal forms in Rueda’s literary “Africanized” language, he apparently was not familiar with African areal characteristics that might have inﬂuenced bozal Spanish; this stands in contrast to Veres’ analysis of the jerga de moros. Cotarelo y Mor´ı (1908:312) dismisses the “formas caprichosas que de seguro no usaban las interesadas, y que aunque as´ı no fuese, en nada pueden ilustrar el idioma, porque eran tan variables como distintos los individuos.” Sarr´o L´opez (1988:610), on the other hand, believes that Rueda made use of actually existing linguistic modalities; she distinguishes (i) normal sixteenthcentury Spanish; (ii) vulgar or rustic language of the time; and (iii) a possibly Portuguese-inﬂuenced Afro-Hispanic pidgin. Other investigators, e.g. Chasca (1946), Weber de Kurlat (1962a), have focused only on the phonetic component of these and other Afro-Hispanic literary texts, concluding that at least some African areal characteristics are in evidence. Close inspection of Lope de Rueda’s habla de negros reveals complete consistency with Afro-Iberian texts from all time periods, as well as the ﬁrst inklings of phenomena which became common in later texts. Rueda’s examples give the ﬁrst convincing evidence that something resembling a coherent Afro-Hispanic pidgin might once have been spoken by ﬁrst-generation Africans in Spain. Excluding phenomena which are simply the results of foreign-talk Spanish (e.g uninﬂected inﬁnitives, lack of agreement, loss of prepositions), the recurring pidgin traits, almost all of which can be independently veriﬁed, include: (1) loss of /s/ in the verbal ending -mos. This compares to the nearly categorical retention of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ in other contexts. The use of apu´e < despu´es may also represent systematic loss of /s/ in this near-automatism. Veres (1950:212) dismisses this loss of /s/ as a “rasgo completamente convencional, ya que Lope de Rueda hace hablar continuamente a sus negras articulando la -s ﬁnal.” This observation fails to note the particular morphological conditioning of loss of ﬁnal /s/ in these early texts. Later (1950:215) Veres returns to cases of loss of ﬁnal /s/, describing them as “simples fen´omenos fon´eticos.” Weber de Kurlat (1962b:161) recognizes the clear

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morphological conditioning of the loss of /s/ in -mos and also in nouns in which the ﬁnal /s/ is lexicalized, and is not part of the singular-plural opposition (e.g. Jes´us, m´as, etc.). The pronunciation Jes´u for Jes´us was found among non-African rustic characters of the time period, and cannot be taken as evidence of Africans’ pronunciation of ﬁnal /s/. Rueda’s Africanized imitations contain a few other possible instances of loss of preconsonantal /s/. For example Celetinas < Celestina, in the Comedia de Eufemia, and refriados < resfriado in Tymbria, may be metathesis (as in the frequent preterite forms dijites < dijiste, hablates < hablaste, etc., found in many Mexican-American dialects) or a true case of loss of /s/, combined with insertion of hypercorrect /s/ at the end of the word.5 In the Comedia de los enga˜nados, the African character Guiomar uses jam´ın < jazm´ın, another isolated instance which is set against the general retention of ﬁnal /s/ by all of Rueda’s characters.6 Rueda’s African characters also exhibit many instances of hypercorrect ﬁnal /s/. Rueda’s texts do not give evidence of widespread loss of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ in sixteenth-century Andalusia, even among Africans, so the hypercorrect [s] which appears in the habla de negros is more likely due to Africans’ unfamiliarity with Spanish (sufﬁx-based) inﬂectional systems, and the consequent haphazard use of ﬁnal /s/, felt to be authentically “Spanish” without regard for its grammatical function. (2) Use of sa (with rare variant san) as uninﬂected copula, replacing both ser and estar. The occasional samo also occurs. Veres (1950:216) attributes use of san as ﬁrst person singular to confusion with the third person plural. He seems to concede little linguistic importance to this verb, which is in fact a key common element in most Afro-Iberian texts, dismissing it as a “pintoresca conjugaci´on de las negras.” (3) Intrusive nasalization, usually before obstruents: dalen diabro, tan diabro, por an mar, Punto Rico, etc. These literary representations usually represented either a prenasalized stop or a nasalized vowel, both transcribed as an intrusive nasal consonant by Spanish writers. Rueda was the ﬁrst Spanish writer to accurately observe the full range of nasal phenomena in Afro-Hispanic pidgin.7 (4) Delateralization of /λ/ is the rule among the African characters, while not yet attributed to rustic or Andalusian Spanish. In the Comedia de los enga˜nados, 5 6

7

N´un˜ ez Cede˜no (1986, 1987a). Sarr´o L´opez (1988:606) believes that many of the instances of ﬁrst person plural forms are in fact singular in reference, suggesting an incipient grammaticalization of this form as an unmarked and uninﬂected verb in early Afro-Hispanic language. Some examples are clear; for example in the Comedia de los enga˜nados, Guiomar says “. . . ya tenemo un prima m´ıa . . .” and “yo, si˜nor, queremos muntipricar mundos.” In Tymbria, Fulgencia says “¿No mira que samo refriados y pechigona?” This would correspond to use of invariant am in early Black English of the United States, a phenomenon apparently more frequent in literary imitations than in actual usage. Dunzo (1978), Lipski (1992b).

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we also ﬁnd the Portuguese-derived forms trabaiar < trabalhar, ﬁyo < ﬁlho. (5) As in most contemporary Afro-Hispanic texts, prevocalic /d/ is realized as [r]. (6) In the Coloquio de Tymbria, a local rustic, playing the role of simple, refers to his lord as se˜nor mosamo; this is strikingly similar to the use of misuamo in later Afro-Hispanic texts, particularly in the Caribbean, and hints that the bozal expression may not result from simple analogy and wrong division, but rather from an already existent vernacular combination in use among peasants. Lope de Rueda’s Africanized Spanish texts are undoubtedly the most complete, most consistent, and arguably most authentic to come out of sixteenthcentury Spain. They give evidence of the incipient formation of a stable pidgin, although not with the degree of consistency that could eventually coalesce into a creole. Africans in sixteenth-century Spain never lived in such isolation from native speakers of Spanish, nor did large groups of Africans sharing no common language gather together. The pidginized language depicted by Rueda and other early dramatists was quite rudimentary, but common elements did tie these speakers together. In the seventeenth century, many of the original common elements, some of which may be of Afro-Portuguese origin, vanished from Afro-Hispanic speech. The resulting language was at the same time more random in its departures from Spanish usage, and more Spanish-like in its morphology and syntax. In some cases, this may signal that the habla de negros was no longer as common in the streets of southern Spain, and that the remaining literary stereotype was losing continuity with the original model. In other instances, it appears that fewer bozal Africans were arriving in Spain, and that blacks born in Spain either acquired regional Spanish with no ethnolinguistic traits, or retained at most a phonetic accent, while using reasonably standard Spanish grammar. There is no question that, especially after Lope de Rueda (and, in Portugal, Gil Vicente), the literary stereotype of the habla de negros became a stock in trade, which needed no introduction. Thus for example in Gil Vicente’s play Floresta de enganos (1536), a doctor (who is having an affair with a married woman), reverts to the habla de negros in front of her husband. This language is immediately recognized by the audience, despite there being no other ethnic references: Porque vos, mia Senora, estar tanto destemplada? Ya tudo estar peneirada, que bradar comigo aora? Que cosa estar vos hablando? A m´ı llama Caterina Furnando, nunca a m´ı cadela nao.

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Minor ‘Africanized’ texts from the sixteenth century A number of minor texts from approximately the same time period give brief examples of the early habla de negros in Spain. For example, Juan Pastor’s “Farsa de Lucrecia, tragedia de la castidad” (ca. 1529) provides a few instances (Chapter Three Appendix #9). This curious fragment, although too short to probe for consistent pidgin traits, shows some Afro-Portuguese characteristics, including non-diphthongized forms (dente, quere, bona, be, vene), some apparently Portuguese words (fogir, meyior < melhor), and two instances of the copula sa. The fragment also uses uninﬂected inﬁnitives, confuses ser and estar, and shows some phonetic modiﬁcation (e.g. delateralization of /λ/, and the unusual change of /s/ > [y] in yi˜nor < se˜nor). It is possible that the author had a vague awareness that blacks in Spain spoke a highly broken language with some Portuguese elements thrown in, and that he created such a concoction without ever having heard Africanized Spanish ﬁrsthand. A very brief fragment of Afro-Hispanic imitation appears in the Retrato de la loc¸ana andaluza by Francisco Delicado, ﬁrst published in 1528 and evidently written between 1513 and 1527. The work was ﬁrst published anonymously, and authorship was not determined until the nineteenth century. A single copy of the work survives, and contains the following brief fragment:8 – Xe˜nora llamar. – ¡O qu´e linda tez de negra! ¿C´omo llamar t´u? ¿Conba? – No, llamar Penda, de xe˜nora. – Yo dar a ti cosa bona. – Xe˜nora, x´ı. Venir, venir, xe˜nora dezir venir.

In this brief exchange between the “esclava” and Lo¸cana, the former begins by speaking normal Spanish (e.g. “Se˜nora, all´ı est´a una gentil muger, que dize no s´e qu´e de vuestra madre”), then switches to pidginized Spanish (with more “Moorish” and Lingua Franca characteristics than sub-Saharan African traits) when Lo¸cana addresses her in broken Spanish. This fragment is principally of interest for sociolinguistic reasons, hinting that Spaniards may have deliberately spoken Spanish “baby talk” to African slaves without regard for the latter’s achievements in Spanish. Little is known of Delicado’s life or of the circumstances in which he may have been exposed to Africanized Spanish. Belonging to a Jewish converso family, Delicado (born ca. 1480 around C´ordoba) left for Italy by the end of the ﬁfteenth century, and it may have been in this country that he acquired familiarity with the Italianized Mediterranean Lingua Franca that appears to permeate his “African” Spanish imitation. Indeed, most of the Loc¸ana is set in Rome, and the characters speak a ﬂuid mixture of Spanish and Italian, together with fragments of Portuguese, Catalan, and Latin. Men´endez 8

Damiani (1974:21), Mor´ua Delgado (1975:199–200).

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y Pelayo9 stated that this work “far from being written in ‘very lucid Castilian’ as the frontispiece announces, is written rather in that Lingua Franca or ItaloHispanic jargon used in Rome by the Spaniards of the lowest classes who had been residing there a long time, and who, without really having learned the foreign language, muddled their own language with all types of Italianisms . . .” The Italo-Spanish fragments which pepper the Loc¸ana presage the hybrid cocoliche language which became popular in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century. Thus, Delicado’s representation of “Africanized Spanish” may well have been intended to depict a more Italian-based Lingua Franca used by the not-inconsiderable black slave population of Italy during the sixteenth century. Two of the spinoffs of the Celestina also contain brief fragments of putatively Africanized Spanish. The Segunda Celestina (1534–36) of Feliciano de Silva provides several examples (Chapter Three Appendix #10). Despite the assertion that this is the speech of blacks in Spain, these fragments show characteristics of “Moorish” or Arabic-inﬂuenced pronunciation (especially the writing of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ as x, which represented the sound [ˇs]). Arabic words are also included, e.g. gual´a < wa allah “by Allah”.10 Most of the features are not typical of the sub-Saharan African speech found in earlier works, but given that black Africans in southern Europe had often arrived overland through Arabicspeaking North Africa, the text may not be totally irrelevant.11 The remainder of the features are unremarkable: unconjugated inﬁnitives, vocalic instability, defective concordance. Only the use of (a) m´ı as subject pronoun provides a link with other legitimately Afro-Iberian texts. The Tercera parte de la tragicomedia de Celestina, by Gaspar G´omez de Toledo, was written at about the same time (ca. 1536). In this work, a few brief fragments of presumed bozal Spanish are found (Chapter Three Appendix #11). The replacement of syllable-ﬁnal and syllable-initial /s/ by x [ˇs] is part of the “Moorish” literary stereotype, and is unlikely to have represented legitimate Afro-Hispanic speech of any time period.12 Nor can this be uncritically attributed to an early Portuguese palatalization of syllable-ﬁnal /s/, which did not emerge in Portugal until some two centuries later (although occasional hints of palatalized /s/ appear in the earliest Afro-Portuguese texts). Rustic characters in sixteenth-century Spain occasionally palatalized syllable-ﬁnal /s/; in Lope de Rueda’s works, for example, the pastores use such forms as oyxte < oiste, moxquito < mosquito, etc. Of the latter form, Cotarelo y Mor´ı (1908:324) states that it was common at the time, and suggests that the Andalusian pronunciation with aspirated preconsonantal /s/ derived from this pronunciation (see Walsh [1985] for a more recent version of such an approach). On the other hand, the 9 11

Cited by Damiani and Allegra in Delicado (1975:83). 12 Barrick (1973:22, 447–48). Sloman (1949).

10

Silva (1988:127).

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use of a m´ı as subject pronoun falls more in line with Afro-Iberian pidgin, not with Arabic-inﬂuenced speech. The same holds for the shift /d/ > [r] (e.g. vira < vida) and delateralization of /λ/ (cayar < callar). In sum, this text is a rather confused example of “alien” Spanish, evoking the speech of foreigners who were not held in repute, but unlikely to be an accurate representation of any particular group. The remainder of the sixteenth century gives few Afro-Hispanic texts of note. Jaime de Guete’s Comedia intitulada Tesorina contains a few brief examples (Chapter Three Appendix #12). This is a strange text, vaguely resembling earlier imitations of African and Moorish speech, but consistent with no other purported “Africanized” speech. The palatalization of /s/ harks back to moro imitations, the uninﬂected inﬁnitives are common to all foreign imitations of Spanish, as is the confusion of ser and estar. Yo and m´ı are both used as subject pronouns (this is one of the last times that use of m´ı as subject pronoun appears in Afro-Hispanic language), and few of the phonetic modiﬁcations point unequivocally to an African substrate. A manuscript dated 1590 and containing an Africanized romancerillo rounds out the picture for sixteenth-century Spain (Chapter Three Appendix #13). This poem offers no new insights into early Afro-Hispanic language. The majority of the departures from standard Spanish involve phonetic deformations, including loss of ﬁnal /r/ in the inﬁnitive, and apparent loss of preconsonantal /s/ (paqua < pasqua, and piritu < esp´ıritu). The turn of the seventeenth century: Aguado’s Entrem´es de los negros The turn of the seventeenth century brought a ﬂourishing of the habla de negros as a viable literary device in Spain, and the greatest writers of the Golden Age were quick to join the tradition. The ﬁrst well-known seventeenth-century representation of Afro-Hispanic speech is the Entrem´es de los negros of Sim´on de Aguado (Chapter Three Appendix #14; ca. 1602). This is also the ﬁrst play in which Africans, and their pidginized speech, rise to become main characters. Many of the stereotypical names, words, and phrases which became associated with the literary habla de negros make their ﬁrst appearance in this skit. The pidginized language of the black characters reveals a much closer approximation to normal Spanish than most of the preceding examples, as well as a wide range of phonetic and morphological distortions. Most pidgin forms continue those of earlier texts: paragogic vowels (siolo/si˜nolo < se˜nor, dioso < Dios), the copulas sa(r) and samo; loss of ﬁnal /s/ in the verbal sufﬁx –mos; interchange of /l/ and /r/ in onset clusters (plinga < pringa); intrusive nasalization before (usually voiced) obstruents (e.g. a Dios > an dioso > an dioso), delateralization of /λ/, and ﬂap pronunciation of prevocalic /d/. There is also frequent hypercorrect ﬁnal [s], although loss of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ in other contexts does not occur.

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The earlier cases of apparent loss of preconsonantal /s/, e.g. in Lope de Rueda, may be sporadic aberrations; on the other hand, early bozal speech, with minimal accommodation of Spanish phonotactic patterns, may have resulted in Africans’ failure to pronounce ﬁnal [s], which was still strong in local varieties of Spanish. By the time Aguado wrote his skits, a native-born black population was in existence, and while most if not all spoke Spanish with no “African” characteristics, those ethnolinguistic traits that did remain evidently did not include widespread loss of /s/. Among the stereotyped expressions are the use of primo as a term of address among blacks, and the lament aunque negro, samo honraro. Variants of this refrain would be used in imitations of Afro-Hispanic speech until the end of the nineteenth century.13 G´ongora weighs in Just a few years after the Entrem´es de los negros, two of the most prominent writers of the Golden Age turned their hand to imitations of “black” Spanish; G´ongora in poetry, and Lope de Vega in drama. G´ongora mocked Afro-Hispanic pidgin in the poems “En la ﬁesta del Sant´ısimo Sacramento” (1609), “A lo mismo [al nacimiento de Cristo nuestro se˜nor]” (1615), “En la ﬁesta de la adoraci´on de los reyes” (1615), and the sonnet “A la ‘Jerusalem conquistada’ de Lope de Vega” (1609). In the last-mentioned poem, G´ongora trades blows with Lope de Vega, continuing a long-standing polemic (Chapter Three Appendix #15–18). Luis de G´ongora (1561–1627) was a native of C´ordoba, where he lived for the better part of his life. He subsequently traveled to Seville and Madrid on several occasions, and thus was exposed to writers who were employing the habla de negros, as well as possibly coming into contact with speakers of Afro-Hispanic pidgin. G´ongora’s parents and uncle owned slaves, so perhaps he observed this language at close range.14 The mocking tone of his verses leads us to believe that he did not always take this challenge very seriously. The least convincing example is the satirical sonnet “A la ‘Jerusalem conquistada’ de Lope de Vega,” where G´ongora takes a cheap shot at Lope de Vega, using only the most hackneyed stereotypes. Ciplijauskait´e (1976:273) describes the language as “escrito imitando el dialecto que hablan los negros de las colonias portuguesas . . . en varias composiciones de verso menor usa este dialecto, que no hemos logrado descifrar.” Jammes (1980:180), speaking of the other poems, observes “numerosos lusismos, como en las dem´as poes´ıas de G´ongora en que intervienen esclavos negros.” In reality, the Portuguese element is minimal (except for isolated passages, such as se chora o menin Jes´u), in comparison to earlier Afro-Hispanic texts, and the language is easy to 13 14

Jammes (1980:154) traces this stanza back to the Cantar de los cantares. Jammes (1967:241).

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comprehend, despite the phonetic and morphological modiﬁcations. G´ongora’s habla de negros contains a handful of well-established traits, which had become incorporated as stock literary devices: dropping of /s/ in the verbal sufﬁx -mos, use of the copulas sa/samo, chaotic use of paragogic vowels, unstable concordance and ﬁnal vowels of nouns, etc. In the 1615 poem “A lo mismo,” we ﬁnd por en Diosa, indicating a prenasalized consonant. G´ongora may actually have heard this common variant, or may have copied this particular combination from earlier writers. It is virtually certain that G´ongora actually heard bozal Spanish, and his imitations cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. The master of seventeenth-century habla de negros: Lope de Vega By far the most proliﬁc user of literary “Africanized” Spanish was Lope de Vega, in numerous major and minor dramatic works. In many of Lope’s plays, black characters speak standard Spanish, but Afro-Hispanic pidgin appears in the following works, written in the general time period 1602–18: El amante agradecido, El mayor rey de los reyes, La siega, Vitoria de la honra, Madre de la mejor, El negro del mejor amo, El Santo Negro Rosambuco, La limpieza no manchada, El capell´an de la virgen (Chapter Three Appendix #19–27). Lope de Vega was born and raised in Madrid, and lived in that city for most of his life. He also lived for shorter periods in Valencia and Salamanca. His literary career took him to many other parts of Spain, including Seville, where the largest black population of Spain was to be found, and where the pidginized Spanish attributed to Africans in Golden Age drama was most likely to be encountered. Prior to writing the plays in which Africanized Spanish occurs, Lope took part in two military campaigns that may have put him in close contact with AfroPortuguese pidgin. In 1583, after enlisting in the armed forces, he took part in a campaign to suppress an insurrection in the Azores. In 1588, Lope joined the Spanish Armada, via a considerable stopover in Lisbon. This was the time period in which Lisbon was teeming with African-born slaves and workers, many of whom undoubtedly worked on and for the ships which were preparing to sail. Taken together with G´ongora’s poems, Lope de Vega’s representations of bozal Spanish represent the most complete statement on the state of AfroHispanic language in the early seventeenth century. Like his contemporaries, Lope de Vega made abundant use of vulgar puns and linguistic stereotypes that were unlikely to have represented the speech of Africans in Spain. The use of cagayera for caballero was becoming a stock device, as was the pronunciation neglo. In the latter case, although /r/ in onset clusters was indeed shifted to [l] in some Afro-Iberian varieties (e.g. S˜ao Tom´e creole), a more common strategy, which can still be observed in regions where Spanish and Portuguese are in contact with African languages, is elimination of the liquid; thus negro > nego.

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The latter development, prominent in contemporary Afro-Iberian dialects, was never used by Golden Age writers, suggesting that the facile stereotypes often took precedence over observable Afro-Hispanic language. Lope de Vega was clearly aware of intrusive nasalization, more so than any other Golden Age writer except Lope de Rueda. His plays contain clear indications of prenasalized consonants (e.g. ens´a, en samo [El Santo Negro Rosambuco]). Lope is also the only Golden Age writer to indicate progressive nasalization in nenglo < negro (Vitoria de la honra, El Santo Negro Rosambuco). Half a century later, Sor Juana In´es de la Cruz would present the same pronunciation in the Spanish Caribbean, and nasalized variants such as nengro, nengre, nengue, nenglo, etc. abound in later Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America. That these were not just fanciful literary inventions is demonstrated by the survival of similar forms in several Caribbean creoles, e.g. Sranan Tongo and Saramaccan. Lope de Vega’s texts show frequent use of ﬁrst-person-plural verb forms with singular meaning, although this usage is suspect as a stock stereotype. It is possible that African bozales occasionally hit upon the longer plural forms, in view of the prominent verbal afﬁx lacking in most other verb forms, but the main preference was for the third person singular as the most unmarked verb, followed by the inﬁnitive, tendencies that can be observed today in many language-contact situations. In other respects, Lope’s bozal language is a continuation of earlier traits: use of invariant sa as substitute for both ser and estar, loss of /s/ in the verbal ending -mos and loss of /r/ in verbal inﬁnitives, sporadic errors of concordance. Like G´ongora, Lope de Vega had abundant opportunities to experience Afro-Hispanic language of the time, and several innovative features of his literary imitations indicate that he was often a good listener. On the other hand, Lope’s near-obsession with Africans as buffoons (a view shared by nearly all his contemporaries) increases the likelihood that his writings are padded with established stereotypes that may not have accurately represented Afro-Hispanic language in the early seventeenth century. Less authentic seventeenth-century “Africanized” language After these early seventeenth-century examples, changes in the literary representation of Africans become evident, although some later texts continue to duplicate earlier patters, well into the eighteenth century. In general, grammatical deformations become less frequent, except for stereotyped morphological distortions such as diosa < Dios. Greater emphasis is placed on phonetic patterns. Taken at face value, this would indicate that by the middle of the seventeenth century, “black Spanish” in Spain was mostly a phonetically inﬂuenced “accent,” comparable perhaps to Black English in the United States, rather than constituting the pidginized speech of foreign-born slaves. There is abundant evidence that by this time, several generations of native Spanish-speaking blacks

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had been born in Spain. Nearly all were freeborn, and many worked as artisans, soldiers, and entrepreneurs. To the extent that they were at least partially integrated into Spanish society, a grudging acceptance of blacks as unremarkable human beings began to occur. Spanish writers began to differentiate between European-born blacks, whose speech was usually rendered in standard Spanish, and (African-born) slaves, who continued to speak a pidginized Spanish, sometimes laced with Portuguese elements. A good example of the contrast is El valiente negro en Flandes, by Andr´es de Claramonte (ca. 1640; Chapter Three Appendix #28). The protagonist of the play, Juan de M´erida, is a freeborn black from a town which gave Latin America some of its conquistadores. He speaks in sublime, oratorical Spanish, far superior to the rustic speech of white peasants and soldiers. Throughout the play, he reafﬁrms that blacks are at least the equal of whites, and offers his services to the Duque de Alba, at war in Flanders. The Duke acknowledges Juan’s valor and gives him several promotions, which infuriates the bigoted white soldiers. In the end, Juan is triumphant over his adversaries, and his point is driven home. The other black character, Ant´on, is a slave, and judging by his speech, is a true bozal. His language reﬂects the usual comic devices, including cagayera for caballero and the oath jurandioso. He apes Juan’s words, translating them into bozal language, and is more preoccupied with his next meal than with his honor. In this role, Ant´on fulﬁlls the destiny of the buffoon, the role assigned to all blacks in earlier works. In El valiente negro en Flandes, however, the dual perspective begun by Lope de Vega in El santo negro Rosambuco (where pidgin-speaking blacks are contrasted with the impeccable Spanish of the African king) is continued. “Black” Spanish was becoming the language of foreign-born slaves, and as the latter group shrank in size and importance, the literary habla de negros remained behind as a folkloric memory, ever distant from linguistic reality, but which was to endure in poetry, drama, and music for another century and a half. The seventeenth century saw several other plays and skits in which bozal language was used. Many were patent imitations of earlier works which had achieved popularity. Lope de Vega’s El negro del mejor amo gave rise to at least two offshoots. The ﬁrst, with the same title (Chapter Three Appendix #29), is attributed to Antonio Mira de Amescua 1574?–1644), although Cotarelo y Mor´ı (1931:167–69) rejects this authorship. Many critics attribute the play in question to Luis V´elez de Guevara, whose Negro del seraph´ın (1643) is nearly identical (Chapter Three Appendix #30). A glance at the two texts sufﬁces to demonstrate that one has been copied from the other, or both from a common source. It is unlikely, however, that both were written by the same author, since no other Golden Age writer who used habla de negros so drastically changed the linguistic features of this stage dialect from one work to another; the possibility that printers’ errors or modiﬁcations lie behind the

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systematic differences between the two texts is very remote. Moreover, Spanish playwrights did not publish essentially identical plays under different titles, although it was not uncommon for plays by the same author to share great plot similarities. Both the second Negro del mejor amo and the Negro del seraph´ın fall in line with other seventeenth-century portrayals of Afro-Hispanic pidgin. Both exhibit a greater attention to phonetic modiﬁcation, together with a closer approximation to standard Spanish grammar and morphology. Of the two plays, the Negro del seraph´ın exaggerates the phonetic distortion beyond all reasonable expectations; the bozal character combines c¸ec¸eo, ye´ısmo, paragogic vowels, replacement of virtually all /r/ and /d/ by [l], and all the standard puns and key words. At the same time, this play consistently uses the copula sa/samo, has more examples of plausible intrusive nasalization, and exhibits use of ﬁrst-person-plural verbs with singular meaning (e.g. yo tambi´en me persinamo). Both plays eliminate the ﬁnal /s/ of -mos; in El negro del seraph´ın, the ﬁnal /s/ of second-person verb forms is also variably elided. Neither play shows other examples of /s/-reduction where no morphological conditioning is involved, e.g. in word-internal preconsonantal position, or ﬁnal lexical /s/. Since the authors of both plays were mimicking Lope de Vega’s play, written several decades before, it is possible that neither of the later playwrights had ﬁrsthand experience with bozal language, which by all indications was fading out by the middle of the seventeenth century. By this time, the accumulated intertext of habla de negros, in drama, poetry, and music, was so considerable, that writers could and undoubtedly did invent passages in this dialect without ever having heard an African speak Spanish. The same of course holds for the imitations of Gypsies, Moors, and shepherds who used sayagu´es. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Pedro Calder´on de la Barca included brief passages of bozal Spanish in several skits written between about 1650 and 1670 (Chapter Three Appendix #31–35). The plays in question are La rabia – primera parte, Las carnestolendas, La pandera, and La casa de los linajes.15 Another brief fragment comes in the play La sibila de oriente y gran reyna de Saba. Calder´on did not place the same emphasis on stage dialects as Lope de Vega, and his literary attempts at imitating Africanized Spanish are hardly to be taken as accurate specimens of Afro-Hispanic speech in the second half of the seventeenth century. As in other plays of the later seventeenth century, his African characters’ speech is principally conﬁned to phonetic modiﬁcations. They also use the zezeo which is in fact modern seseo (merger of all sibilants to a non-apical [s]), a trait by that time not conﬁned to literary representation of Gypsies’ speech, but becoming the norm for Andalusia. In sharp contrast to the generally correct verb conjugations, including use of subjunctive, past, and perfect forms, Calder´on employs the copula za to occasionally replace both ser 15

Lobato (1989).

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and estar. It is hard to imagine that Africans who so deftly handled Spanish verb morphology would at the same time use this pidgin form. Several poems, plays and skits of approximately the same time period round out the use of Africanized Spanish in seventeenth-century Spanish drama. One is the “Entrem´es s´eptimo: de los negros de Santo Tom´e,” appearing in an early volume of Lope de Vega’s plays and attributed to him by some scholars (Chapter Three Appendix #36). Ana Caro de Mall´en used brief fragments of habla de negros in her writings (ca. 1639; Chapter Three Appendix #37), as did Avellaneda in the “Negros,” Agust´ın Moreto in the “La ﬁesta de palacio” (ca. 1658), Antonio de Sol´ıs, in the “Entrem´es del ni˜no cavallero” (1658), and a number of others. The language is unremarkable, continuing the stereotypes found in other texts of the time period. Indirect accounts of Golden Age literary production reveal that literally hundreds of short pieces containing imitations of Africanized Spanish were written; past a point, most writers simply learned this language as a stage device, completely removed from reality. Afro-Hispanic language as phonetic distortion: Quinones ˜ de Benavente Afro-Hispanic language took on a new turn in several of the entremeses of Luis Qui˜nones de Benavente, the master of the Spanish short skit. Bozal language appears brieﬂy in El borracho and in the Sacristanes burlados; a considerable use of pidginized Spanish occurs in El negrito hablador, y sin color anda la ni˜na (Chapter Three Appendix #38–40). Qui˜nones, a native of Toledo, wrote the works in question during the 1640s, following on the heels of Lope de Vega’s success with the habla de negros, as well as many other contemporary plays in which this literary device was increasingly familiar. In his many entremeses, Qui˜nones also employed sayagu´es, Basque-inﬂuenced Spanish (the vizca´ıno), thieves’ jargon (lenguaje de german´ıa), and the rambling asides typical of the dimwit or bobo. It is obvious that Qui˜nones was adopting for his own use literary tools which had already become well established in the seventeenth century, and which the theatre-going public expected in large quantities. Given the facts of Qui˜nones’ own life, inasmuch as they are known, his contact with Africanized Spanish was most probably conﬁned to second-hand imitations by other writers, although in Madrid he could have encountered legitimate bozal speakers. A glance at his imitation of this language shows both similarities and some differences, in comparison with the by now canonical patterns set down by Lope de Rueda, Lope de Vega, and other earlier writers. Bergman (1965:97, fn. 3) feels that Qui˜nones’ habla de negros scarcely goes beyond Quevedo’s formula of exchanging /l/ and /r/.16 A better way of putting 16

The seventeenth-century Spanish satirist Francisco de Quevedo (1988:127) once joked in the Libro de todas las cosas, that “sabr´as guineo [= bozal Spanish] en volviendo las rr ll, y al contrario: como Francisco, Flancico; primo, plimo.”

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the matter would be that phonetic modiﬁcations predominate over grammatical distortions. There is a much higher degree of correct verb conjugation and noun-adjective concord. Gone are the uninﬂected inﬁnitives, the hybrid copula sa, use of ﬁrst person plural with singular meaning, and wildly improbable malapropisms. Qui˜nones’ negrito uses seseo and ye´ısmo, traits also attributed to Andalusians and Gypsies. The shift /d/ > [r] is found in other Afro-Hispanic texts, and in Qui˜nones de Benavente we ﬁnd the highest proportion of shift /r/ > [l]. Qui˜nones breaks from most earlier writers by also indicating lateralization of /r/ in preconsonantal and word-ﬁnal position: impeltinensia, goldos, cuelpo, pielnas, etc. This change is much more Hispanic in character, occurring nowadays in the vernacular speech of several Caribbean dialects, as well as in parts of the Canary Islands and occasionally Murcia. It is hard to take Qui˜nones’ bozal language seriously, since the known facts of Spanish-African language contacts do not support the notion that a speaker who so accurately commands Spanish verb, noun and adjective morphology (typically among the most difﬁcult for the foreign language learner) would so completely mispronounce the language. Literary leftovers: eighteenth-century habla de negros in Spain During the course of the eighteenth century, bozal language continued to appear in plays, songs, and poems, in Spain, Portugal, and sporadically in Latin America, following the same basic patterns established during the Golden Age. In addition to the Portuguese examples discussed earlier, several Spanish skits carry the Golden Age habla de negros well through the eighteenth century, although it is all but certain that legitimate Afro-Hispanic pidgin had long disappeared from Spain by this time. One eighteenth-century play employing Afro-Hispanic language, written around 1762–63, is the anonymous “Un vizca´ıno, un indiano, un gallego, un mercader, una tapada y un negro.” Another is “El indiano de la oliva,” by Pedro Antonio Gonz´alez Rub´ı, written during the last third of the eighteenth century. Around 1792, Luis Monc´ın published “El chasco por el honor o el indiano escarmentado” (Chapter Three Appendix #41–43). None of the texts departs signiﬁcantly from earlier examples, showing great similarity with fragments written as much as 200 years previously. By this time, the literary habla de negros was not only a stereotype, but was so far removed from daily reality in Spain that few if any living authors had ever heard such language. The bozal language is limited to phonetic deformations, including loss of /s/ in the ending -mos, ye´ısmo, seseo, rather haphazard replacement of /r/ by /l/, and hackneyed lexical items such as siolo, Dioso, etc. Pampagaya < papagayo in “El indiano de la oliva” demonstrates prenasalized consonants, but this is the only suggestion of legitimate Afro-Hispanic language. In “El chasco por el honor . . . ,” for example, the “African” character of the language consists of formulaically

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replacing all instances of /r/ by /l/, following Quevedo’s maxim, and producing the effect of a speech defect rather than a foreign accent. In 1764, Manuel Vicente Guerrero published his Comedia famosa: el negro valiente en Flandes, segunda parte, following the tradition of writing sequels to well-received plays by other authors. The plot is similar to the original work by Claramonte, although the linguistic details are somewhat different. The play has two black characters, Don Juan de Alba, a caballero, and Antonillo, a “negro gracioso.” Don Juan generally speaks high-sounding Spanish, while Antonillo oscillates between a stereotypical bozal speech and standard Spanish. It is this alternation which makes his speech at once questionable as an approximation to actual Afro-Hispanic pidgin, and potentially important as a sociolinguistic commentary on the speech of the native black population in early eighteenthcentury Spain. Most of Antonillo’s deviations from standard Spanish come in the form of isolated words, particularly sioro, plimo, juro an Diosa, neglo, and the quintessential Afro-Hispanic stereotype cagayera [caballero], which Antonillo utters in his ﬁrst sentence. There are also several instances of intrusive nasal elements in determiners, suggesting prenasalized consonants (an Diosa, lon diabla, den miedo tirito, Jesun Crisa, men daba dulce, vengo an siora, yo non puedo, cangayera). Throughout his lines, Antonillo omits the ﬁnal -s of the ﬁrst person plural verb endings in -mos. At one point, Don Juan dresses as an aguador (water carrier), and enters into a dialogue with Antonillo. Don Juan lapses into “black” dialect at several points, especially leaving off the -s of -mos verbal endings: “Vamo, que tambien le comeremo mermelada, cangalona, lo chorizo”; “ya, plimo, andamo severo.” He uses the shibboleth words siora and plimo to underscore his disguise; when speaking to Do˜na Leonor, he says: “Aunque moreno, torpe, bozal, de rustiqueces lleno, ver´a todo lo mundo a´ tu defense lo que ahora, siora, en m´ı no piensa . . .” Although the second Valiente negro adds little to the literary dimension of the Spanish Golden Age, it suggests that as late as the eighteenth century, a nativized “black Spanish” may have existed in Spain, in which certain ethnolinguistic markers such as sioro and neglo coexisted with relatively standard nativized Spanish. Literary habla de negros in the musical tradition Another rich source of literary imitations of Africanized Spanish in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the Spanish musical repertoire. Curiously, for the modern reader, the most fecund source of “black” language was the church and cathedral performance, where villancicos and other songs of a religious nature were routinely performed on key feast days. Literally hundreds of songs were composed and performed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in all the major cathedrals of Spain, as well as throughout Spanish America. In the colonies, for example, “Africanized” villancicos cast in the

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Golden Age mold were produced and performed in great numbers in the cathedrals of Lima, Cuzco, La Paz, Bogot´a, Mexico City, Puebla, Guatemala City, etc. Even the songs composed on American soil bear the indelible mark of Spanish Golden Age literature; many of the composers had been born in Spain, and all were familiar with the “Africanized” villancico and the bailes de negros of the Peninsular literary tradition. One of the major composers was Alonso Torices, whose musical activities reached their peak around the middle of the seventeenth century. He worked in M´alaga and Zaragoza, and apparently later moved to Spanish America, where his works were performed at the Bogot´a cathedral, and perhaps elsewhere.17 Gaspar Fernandes (1546–1629), another composer who liberally used “Africanized” language in his songs, was born in Portugal. He rose to become choirmaster in Portugal, and later in Mexico; his songs reﬂect both Spanish and Portuguese elements. Juan Bautista Comes, a mid-seventeenth-century Spanish composer, also wrote a number of Africanized songs.18 Many anonymous villancicos were found in the cathedrals of Madrid, Huesca, Zaragoza, Granada, etc. (Chapter Three Appendix #44–45). The music of the villancicos is typical of Renaissance and Baroque choral style; there is nothing “African” about the melodies, and in performance these pieces are indistinguishable from the standard choral repertoire, except by paying close attention to the lyrics. A modern spectator may ﬁnd it difﬁcult to comprehend how crudely humorous dialect poetry, mocking the halting speech of slaves and servants who spoke Spanish as a second language, could ﬁnd a place in the midst of a religious ceremony, and even be performed in cathedrals as part of the most revered rite, the mass. During the Spanish Baroque period, a much different attitude was taken toward sacred objects and celebrations. Statues of the Virgin Mary and saints were often dressed in costumes more appropriate for a wedding or a costume ball than for a church,19 and street processions during Christmas time, Holy Week, All Saints Day, etc., were accompanied by carnivalesque dancing, mime, and music. The poems of G´ongora and Sor Juana, meant to be sung during religious festivals, give testimony to the merging of sacred and profane, and underscore the fact that a writer with profound religious sentiments could make use of barroom humor, including parodies of socially marginalized groups. The language of the “Africanized” villancicos is in no way different from the remainder of the Golden Age corpus, and the pieces composed in Spanish America are identical to those written and performed in Spain, with all the aforementioned stereotypes ﬁrmly in place. 17 18

19

Claro (1974). Comes (1977), L´opez-Calo (1983:118). Other villancicos include (Tejerizo Robles 1989) “¡Ah Flansiquiya!” by Francisco Garc´ıa Montero Solano (1673), “Aquellos negros que dieron,” “Qu´e gente, plima, qu´e gente?,” and “Az´ı Flaziquiya” by Alonso de Blas y Sandoval (1694–1701), “Los narcisos de Guinea,” by Antonio Navarro (1717), “Apalte la gente branca” and “Los negrillos esta noche,” by Esteban Redondo (ca. 1783), etc. Crow (1985:232).

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The Golden Age in the colonies: Afro-Hispanic texts from seventeenth-century Latin America In Latin America, several seventeenth-century writers and composers continued the Spanish tradition of using bozal language. Some were undoubtedly inﬂuenced by the speech of Africans whom they actually encountered in the New World setting, while others merely continued traditions learned in Spain. Since nearly all the writers in question were born in Spain, or had received higher education in the Iberian Peninsula, it is not feasible to consider most of the seventeenth-century Afro-Latin American texts as constituting a substantially different corpus from the Peninsular materials. The fact that virtually none of the linguistic traits represented in these early Afro-Latin American texts can be independently veriﬁed, for example in surviving Afro-Iberian creoles or vestigial Afro-Hispanic isolates, places additional constraints of credibility on these Latin American Baroque texts as anything other than imitations of literary stereotypes transported from Spain along with printing presses and paper. The only well-known seventeenth-century Latin American writer to use bozal Spanish was Sor Juana In´es de la Cruz, in several villancicos written around 1676 (Chapter Three Appendix #46).20 The similarities between Sor Juana’s poems and earlier Peninsular texts is too great to be due to chance, even assuming that such language was actually used by Africans as late as the end of the seventeenth century. Jim´enez Torres (1998:281) refers to Sor Juana’s bozal imitations as “un pseudodialecto afro-hispanoportugu´es, recreaci´on po´etica del habla de los negros de la Colonia, que aunque no corresponde exactamente a un dialecto real . . . procede de la observaci´on de las variantes dialectales del habla de los negros de la e´ poca.” Some inconsistencies in the text (for example the alternation of Dios and Dioso) are due to metrical considerations. Zielina (1998) examines the serious and rather complex nature of the black characters in Sor Juana’s villancicos, who stand in sharp contrast to the humorous linguistic simpliﬁcations attributed to their speech. Many of the puns, and the stereotypical names, are identical. There are some innovations in Sor Juana’s writings, which hint at an ongoing evolution of Afro-Hispanic language in the Latin American setting, where it would soon evolve into patterns never attested for the Iberian Peninsula. In Sor Juana’s writings, loss of preconsonantal /s/ is still very sporadic, with only a handful of cases in her entire Afro-Hispanic corpus: Flasica [Francisca], ﬁeta [ﬁesta] (alongside ﬁesa and ﬁesta), naquete [en aqueste], etc. In Sor Juana, we ﬁnd some of the ﬁrst consistent cases of another example of morphological conditioning of /s/-reduction: loss of plural 20

Gabriel de Santillana also wrote almost identical verses, including the “Villancico de San Pedro, 1688” (Chapter Three Appendix #47).

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/s/ in nouns when preceded by a plural article in which /s/ is generally retained: las leina [las reinas], las melcede [las mercedes], lus nenglu [los negros], lo billaco [los bellacos], las paja [las pajas], etc. This conﬁguration, where plural /s/ appears only on the ﬁrst available position of a NP, is typical of vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, and is found in many basilectal varieties of Latin American Spanish, particularly those with a strong African connection, in the Dominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador, and in the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea. Final assessment of Golden Age habla de negros The last of the Golden Age imitations of Africanized Spanish were written nearly three centuries ago, during a time in which no independent veriﬁcation of Afro-Hispanic speech existed. Given the high degree of parody and plagiarism evidenced by Golden Age habla de negros texts, the issue of their usefulness to the linguistic reconstruction of Afro-Hispanic pidgin becomes crucial. A comparison of bozal texts representing more than three centuries of Afro-Hispanic contacts suggests that these documents may, if used with caution, represent a key component in the assessment of the African contribution to Spanish dialect differentiation. Although bozal characters became frozen as a literary stereotype, authors’ depictions of Afro-Hispanic pronunciation continued to evolve in parallel with regional language. To this end, several observations combine to justify a cautious consideration of Golden Age literary texts as sources of evidence on earlier Afro-Hispanic speech. First, although no single text can be taken as a faithful transcription of bozal language, most of the early texts contain phonetic and morphological traits which are empirically documented in existing Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles, or which are logical extensions of African areal characteristics. Second, the African traits found in the literary habla de negros has no obvious non-African source; the remaining dialect imitations found in Golden Age literature (e.g. of Moorish, Basque, Galician, Gypsy, Sayagu´es, Italian, etc.) are not only internally consistent and compatible with actual instances of contact with the languages in question, they also differ qualitatively from all but a handful of habla de negros imitations (i.e. those which are clear parodies of Moorish speech). Such phenomena as massive conversion of prevocalic /r/ to [l], intrusive nasalization, use of (a) m´ı as subject pronoun, invariant copular sa, and ﬂapping of prevocalic [d] are found in existing Afro-Iberian creoles, and (with the exception of the last trait, found in nearly all non-native varieties of Spanish) are not attested for other contact varieties of Spanish. Finally, the historical and social circumstances surrounding key authors and texts indicate likely familiarity with Afro-Hispanic pidgin, not only among a select group of writers, but also by the general public, who

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enjoyed – and more importantly, comprehended – plays, songs, and religious processions containing imitations of Africanized Spanish. When combined with Latin American bozal texts from later centuries, the Golden Age Afro-Iberian documents offer a useful tool in reconstructing the ﬁrst approximations to Spanish and Portuguese by speakers of sub-Saharan African languages.21 21

Vodovozova (1996) provides a thorough and useful linguistic analysis of bozal language in numerous villancicos from Golden Age Spain and colonial Latin America.

4

Africans in colonial Spanish America

This chapter will present historical data on the most signiﬁcant African populations in Latin America, beginning with the areas in which the largest and linguistically most important concentrations were found during colonial times. These are the regions for which the greatest amount of written descriptions of Africans’ speech is available. Africans in colonial Peru African slaves and their descendants were found in Peru from the earliest colonial periods to well into postcolonial independence, but the demographic distribution and geographical location varied across time, as did the interaction with speakers of Spanish.1 The use of African slaves had already been authorized for other areas of Spanish America, to replace dwindling indigenous workers, and African slaves were carried to the highland mines of Bolivia and Peru.2 Few demographic traces remain of these ﬁrst African arrivals for several reasons. Nearly all were adult males, who were deprived of opportunities for procreation. Mortality rates were extremely high; the combination of altitude, cold temperatures, inadequate nourishment and harsh working conditions ravaged the slave population. At the same time, more stable nuclei of Africans began arriving in Cuzco and other developing colonial centers such as La Paz. As in other colonial towns, African slaves worked as domestic servants and artisans’ assistants, living patterns which were conducive to learning Spanish, and to leaving some linguistic and cultural legacy. A small but interesting collection of songs and indirect descriptions of Africans’ dances and language, to be analyzed in the following chapter, survives as testimony of a much larger cultural patrimony. As occurred, for example in Mexico and central Colombia, 1 2

Lipski (1994b). Harth-Terr´e (1971, 1973), Millones Santagadea (1973), Bowser (1974), Crespo (1977), Pizarroso Cuenca (1977), Portugal Ortiz (1977), Cuche (1981), Frisancho Pineda (1983), Aliaga et al. (1991), Aguirre (1993, 2000), Tardieu (1993, 1997, 1998), Lipski (1994b), Bridikhina (1995), Gobierno Municipal de La Paz (1993), Luciano Huapaya (1995), Luciano and Rodr´ıguez Pastor (1995), Angola Maconde (2000), Delgado Aparicio (2000), del Busto Duthurburu (2001).

95

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the population of African descent blended into the overwhelmingly mestizo population. No documented permanent linguistic phenomena can be attributed to this earlier African population, but the data provided by the early language samples gives a ﬁrst glimpse into language in early seventeenth-century Peru. Later African arrivals in Peru were concentrated along the coast, particularly in Lima, where the increasingly afﬂuent lifestyle of the city’s elite permitted the use of slaves as household servants.3 In other coastal regions, African slaves and free laborers worked in agriculture, including sugar and cotton plantations, and Afro-Peruvian communities are still found along the coast.4 The full extent of Afro-Hispanic cultural remnants preserved by these groups has yet to be determined.5 Although Peru was not the scene of massive slave importation during the nineteenth century, such as occurred in Cuba, African-born slaves were still to be found throughout the century, and in some instances even American-born blacks retained African languages. Rossi y Rub´ı (1791) gave ample evidence of the use of African languages in late eighteenth-century Lima. Santa Cruz (1982:70) reproduces a poem in Kikongo composed in 1812 in honor of a colonial ofﬁcial. In one of his own poems, “En la era colonial,” Santa Cruz (1982:434–35) gives examples of the African-based cal´o used among Peruvian slaves. The primary mechanism for the concentration and retention of African languages in colonial Peru were the societies formed by members of the same African ethnic groups. As in other Latin American cities with large African slave and free populations, Africans in colonial Lima formed cofrad´ıas or brotherhoods, ostensibly religious organizations that served as mutual aid societies and cultural gatherings. Each society was formed by the members of a single naci´on or ethnic group, and was associated with a particular parish and church. Rossi y Rub´ı (1791), in describing Afro-Peruvian cofrad´ıas, refers to several by name. A number of these names appear elsewhere in Latin America, and can be identiﬁed with speciﬁc linguistic and ethnic groups in West Africa: Lucum´e, Mandinga, Cambunda (Kimbundu), Carabal´ı, Cang´a, Terranovo, and Congo. A Spanish ofﬁcial, military or religious, was nominally in charge of each African society, but internally the groups were ruled by hierarchical structures modeled on African patterns. Within these societies, African languages were spoken during many ceremonies, together with whatever Spanish was known by the participants. For example, speaking of funeral ceremonies, we have:6 “Los condolientes saltan, y dan vuelta al rededor, par´andose algunas veces para murmurar en voz baxa algunas preces seg´un su idioma nativo y sus ritos.” There 3 4 5 6

Flores Galindo (1984:chap. IV), Romero (1987), Blanchard (1992), H¨unefeldt (1992). Romero (1904), MacLean y Esten´os (1947), Centuri´on Vallejo (1954), Cushner (1980), Arroyo (1981), Aranda de los R´ıos (1990). Cuche (1981), Tompkins (1981), V´azquez Rodr´ıguez (1982), Feldman (2001). Rossi y Rub´ı (1791:123).

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is no indication of the languages used by these cofrad´ıas, but given the names of the naciones involved, at least Kikongo, Kimbundu, Yoruba, Akan, Igbo, Ewe/Fon, and Mandinga can be supposed. Africans in colonial Mexico At various times and places during the colonial period, the African population was equal to or greater than the white European population, a proportion which rises even more when the mulatto population is taken into account.7 Veracruz was one of the three ports authorized to receive African slaves during much of the Spanish colonial era,8 and once trans-Paciﬁc trade with the Philippines was established, Africans also entered Mexico through the ports of Campeche and Acapulco.9 Africans worked in mines and agriculture, and then in cities and towns throughout Mexico, from the Gulf of Mexico to areas which are now part of the United States.10 In some areas, the African presence is noticeable even today, in regional music, folklore, and cultural practices.11 Palmer (1976:3) divides African slavery in Mexico into three periods. The ﬁrst period extends from 1519 (the date of the ﬁrst slave arrival) to 1580, the end of an epidemic which devasted white, African, and indigenous populations. The second period extends from 1580 to 1650, and represents the heyday of Mexican slavery. It was during this period that Mexico was the second-largest slave importer in Spanish America (second only to Peru), and the period in which Africans greatly outnumbered Europeans in much of Mexico. The ﬁnal period, stretching from 1650 to the ofﬁcial abolition of slavery in 1827, was marked by a rapid decline in slave importation, the development of an Afro-mestizo class with increasingly weaker cultural ties to Africa, and the absorption of much of the African population into the mestizo classes of Mexico. It is impossible to know how many African slaves were taken to Mexico during its colonial history; ﬁgures of 200,000 have been suggested,12 but the true facts will probably never be known. At the beginning, Africans in Mexico worked primarily in domestic servitude, with a few working in small-scale agriculture. Slaves were found primarily in urban areas, and were a status symbol for families who could afford them. Mexican society reproduced patterns found in contemporary Spain, particularly Seville. As the number of large estates, ranches and haciendas grew, so 7

8 9 11 12

Mendoza (1956), Aguirre Beltr´an (1958, 1972), Brady (1965) Carroll (1991), Brading (1971), Mayer (1974), Naveda Ch´avez-Hita (1979, 1987), Guti´errez Avila (1988), Herrera Casas´us (1989, 1991), Vald´es and D´avila (1989), Serrano L´opez (1993), the articles in Mart´ınez Montiel and Reyes (1993), and Mart´ınez Montiel (1995). Carroll (1991), Winﬁeld Capitaine (1993). 10 Palmer (1976). Ngou-Mve (1994:150–52), Aguirre Beltr´an (1972). E.g. Guti´errez Avila (1988), Aparicio et al. (1993), Mart´ınez Maranto (1995). E.g. Palmer (1976:3).

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did the number of African slaves who worked in rural settings. As in Spain, many slave-owners allowed their slaves to rent themselves out to others for a wage or jornal, most of which was passed on to the owner. By the eighteenth century, the black population in Mexico was largely concentrated in the sugar plantations of Veracruz state: in Jalapa, C´ordoba, and Veracruz.13 These plantations continued to buy some slaves from Africa, but for the most part relied on an already existing Mexican-born black population. For all intents and purposes, following the middle of the seventeenth century, the presence of African-born bozales in Mexico was a rare occurrence. This partially explains the lack of identiﬁable vestigial Afro-Hispanic linguistic traits even in isolated Afro-Mexican villages; the absence of an African substrate has characterized these regions for several centuries. Muhammad (1995:175) observes that “the language of Afro-Mexicans is sometimes said to be ‘unintelligible Spanish . . . this unique Spanish dialect . . . developed because maroon communities were isolated from the rest of the country.’ ” In reality these modern Afro-Mexican dialects are in no way “unintelligible,” but merely show the signs of isolation and lack of prestige.14 Beginning with the ﬁrst stages of colonial slavery, Africans in Mexico rebelled against their captors and escaped bondage. As early as 1560 – only a few decades after the initial colonization of Mexico – bands of escaped blacks were attacking travelers around Guanajuato. Earlier accounts of such bands had come from Nueva Galicia (around Zacatecas) in 1549. Mexico was also home to numerous maroon communities, the most famous of which was named after the Maroon slave leader Yanga in the early seventeenth century. The village survives today in the state of Veracruz, and while few Afro-Mexicans live in Yanga, there are several small afromestizo communities in the surrounding area. Cuajicuinalapa (Cuijla) was another palenque (Maroon village) formed in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Vestigial Afro-Hispanic language and culture are found in this and other nearby towns in Guerrero and Oaxaca states. Two other maroon communities straddled the boundary between modern Oaxaca and Veracruz states: Amapa and Mandinga. The latter community survived well into the nineteenth century, providing a safe haven for the last of postcolonial Mexico’s black slaves. Smaller maroon communities existed throughout the country, particularly during the height of the African slave trade to Mexico, in the early seventeenth century.15 13 14 15

Carroll (1979, 1991), Naveda Ch´avez-Hita (1979, 1987), Mart´ınez Maranto (1995). Aguirre Beltr´an (1958), Althoff (1994). Powell (1952:62), Cruz Carretero et al. (1990), Laurencio (1974), Corro (1951), Aguirre Beltr´an (1958), Davidson (1973), Carroll (1977). It is even conceivable that the once sizable AfroMexican population contributed to the weakening of syllable- and word-ﬁnal /s/ in some parts of the country; see Lipski (1994d) for some ideas.

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Afro-European creole languages in Mexico Africans in colonial Mexico usually arrived directly from Africa, via the port of Veracruz and later Campeche. There is little documented evidence of the arrival of Caribbean creole languages in Mexico, unlike what occurred in the nineteenth-century Spanish Caribbean. There are a few isolated instances, however, where such contacts may have brieﬂy affected Afro-Mexican speech. In the early 1800s, a group of Gullah-speaking Afro-Seminoles migrated southward from Texas and the Oklahoma Territory and founded the village of Nacimiento de los Negros, near Melchor M´uzquiz, Coahuila.16 This group had been forcibly relocated from the southeastern United States at the end of the eighteenth century. Immigration from Bracketville, Texas continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing in modern varieties of English, but, particularly in religious contacts, some Gullah (known locally as “Seminole”) was retained. Today, all speakers in Nacimiento, most of whom retain some African physical traits, speak the regional dialect of Spanish with no distinguishing characteristics, but it is likely that earlier generations spoke with the secondlanguage traits found, for example, among the black English-speaking residents of the Saman´a Peninsula in the Dominican Republic. Strictly speaking, the AfroAmerican population of Nacimiento does not ﬁt the traditional Afro-colonial pattern, but at the time the town was founded, black Afro-Mexican descendents of colonial slavery were still to be found in this part of northern Mexico, and some cross-fertilization may have occurred. In the mid-nineteenth century, during the Cuban sugar plantation boom and as the African slave trade was gradually abolished, Cuban planters brieﬂy imported Mayan Indian laborers from the Yucatan;17 their approximations to Spanish were even documented by the lexicographer Esteban Pichardo (1849). Less well known is the fact that a group of rebellious Afro-Cubans were exiled to the Yucatan region in 1795, following the Haitian slave uprisings.18 The black Cubans were relocated in a settlement known as San Fernando Ak´e, near Tizim´ın. This location was chosen since it was far from both M´erida and Campeche, and its isolation would prevent any further uprisings by its residents. Although the climate and working conditions evidently precluded a signiﬁcant population increase, blacks from other areas eventually made their way to Ak´e. At the high point of population, in the early nineteenth century, the town contained Mandingas, “Senegales,” Congos, “criollos de Santo Domingo,” and (presumed free blacks) from Charleston, New York, and Jamaica. The principal language of the community was reported to be “French,” but given the makeup of the community it is more likely that Creole French was in use. Further 16 18

17 Men´ Gavald´on (1970), Hancock (1980, 1986) . endez (1928, 1932). Fern´andez Repetto and Negroe Sierra (1995:54–57).

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research may reveal the true nature of this transitory Afro-creole community in the Yucatan. Blacks in colonial Argentina and Uruguay The second largest corpus of Latin American bozal language comes from the R´ıo de la Plata zone of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Until the middle of the nineteenth century these urban areas contained some of the largest black communities in all of Latin America. In the ﬂourishing literary environment of nineteenth-century Argentina and Uruguay, imitations of bozal speech proliferated. In a few instances, such texts were evidently written by blacks themselves, and the tone of many of the other texts is not as mocking and exaggerated as found in texts from Spain and other Latin American areas. This fact, combined with the very high degree of internal consistency among Afro-R´ıo de la Plata texts allows for a relatively high degree of linguistic credibility to be assigned to this corpus.19 During much of colonial and early postcolonial period, the population of African origin represented a signiﬁcant demographic proportion in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, approaching 40 percent of the total in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Argentines and Uruguayans of African descent fought in the wars of colonial liberation, contributed to the Gaucho lifestyle and culture (particularly to the payada song tradition), and ﬁgured in the political and literary life of the R´ıo de la Plata nations. The tango, enjoying worldwide fame and intimately part of the R´ıo de la Plata cultural tradition, almost certainly received a strong African contribution, and several words of African origin ﬁgure prominently in the porte˜no lexicon. When remembered today, however, the Afro-Hispanic contribution is usually limited to Carnival comparsas (the groups presenting individual carnival ﬂoats), and many mistakenly feel that the only African presence in Montevideo and Buenos Aires represents a recent contribution from Brazil. African slaves were brought to the R´ıo de la Plata colony at Buenos Aires throughout the colonial period, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. At ﬁrst, there was little need for slaves in Buenos Aires, whose residents did not enjoy a degree of afﬂuence that would permit slaves to be used in large quantities. Most Africans arriving at Buenos Aires were shipped to the hinterlands, including Paraguay and Bolivia.20 When the Banda Oriental colony at Montevideo was settled from Buenos Aires, beginning in 1726, few Africans were found on either side of the R´ıo de la Plata, but the black population of Montevideo rose 19 20

Lipski (2001c). Masini (1962), Sempat Assadourian (1966), Zaval´ıa Matienzo (1973), Mayo (1980), Rojas (1985).

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sharply in the course of the eighteenth century, peaking at ﬁgures estimated at between 30 percent and 40 percent for the turn of the nineteenth century.21 In both Montevideo and Buenos Aires, black slaves worked as domestic servants and as laborers. As the free black population grew, many Africans themselves became artisans, others became itinerant vendors, water-carriers, camungueros (emptiers of chamber pots), chimney-sweeps, lamplighters, coachmen, pest exterminators, and household servants. Black women worked as itinerant washerwomen, as well as in private homes. With the coming of independence, black soldiers fought against Spain, then in the myriad civil conﬂicts marking the ﬁrst half century of the postcolonial R´ıo de la Plata. The role of African soldiers has been acknowledged in poems such as “Los negros federales” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #8), and in military and social records of the time. Despite the disproportionately high representation of black soldiers in these wars, the promised liberation from slavery and discrimination was long delayed, and many Afro-Argentines and Afro-Uruguayans felt completely betrayed by their white compatriots. As happened in the American West, many Africans in the R´ıo de la Plata chose the Gaucho life, some escaping slavery and others, already free, opting for greater personal freedom in an arena where individual prowess was valued over racial stereotypes. During the early part of the eighteenth century, the majority of Africans in the R´ıo de la Plata were still bozales, speaking African languages and little or no Spanish. A Spanish missionary arriving in Buenos Aires in 1730 observed that most Africans spoke no Spanish.22 Noticing that the majority of the Africans were from “Angola, Congo y Loango,” he was forced to learn “la lengua de Angola,” presumably Kimbundu, but possibly Kikongo. Well into the nineteenth century, interpreters were required for African-born slaves who spoke no Spanish,23 and African languages continued to be spoken in Buenos Aires and Montevideo past the middle of the nineteenth century. Some form of bozal Spanish was also in existence well into the second half of the nineteenth century. For example Wilde (1960:126), writing in 1881 and describing earlier decades of Buenos Aires life, speaks of meetings among members of candombe groups, commenting that “era digno de presenciarse las discusiones all´ı sostenidas y de o´ır perorar en su media lengua al se˜nor presidente y a los se˜nores consejeros.” Elsewhere (128), Wilde describes conversations among Afro-Argentine hormigueros or pest exterminators: “pero el inter´es del espectador y oyente aumentaba cuando se juntaban dos profesores, y en los casos dif´ıciles, ten´ıan una consulta, en castellano chapurreado.” In Montevideo, Magari˜nos Cervantes 21 22

Pereda Vald´es (1937, 1941, 1965); for modern Uruguay Graceras (1980), Monta˜no (1987), Porzecanski and Santos (1994). 23 Fontanella de Weinberg (1987a:85). M¨uhn (1946:153).

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(1878:387), commenting on the bozal representations by the poet Acu˜na de Figueroa, declares: “El Canto de los Negros ofrece una curiosa muestra de la especie de dialecto inventado en nuestro continente por los africanos bozales . . . nuestros nietos ya no oir´an hablar esa graciosa jerga . . .” The media lengua (“half speech”), jerga (“jargon”), and castellano chapurreado (“broken Spanish”) refer to bozal Spanish pidgin. Residents of Montevideo and Buenos Aires were aware of the general characteristics of Afro-Hispanic bozal speech during the period in which these texts were produced, which ensures a certain measure of accuracy in the literary representations, which were meant to be understood and appreciated by residents of the two cities. In Afro-American religious ceremonies, including Afro-Brazilian Yoruba cults transplanted to the R´ıo de la Plata,24 vestigal remnants of African languages could even be found in the twentieth century, but an Afro-Hispanic linguistic contact could no longer be postulated. In view of the demographics of the African population in the R´ıo de la Plata, it is doubtful that a coherent bozal Spanish was found in Montevideo or Buenos Aires much before the second half of the eighteenth century, although individual African slaves would speak a rudimentary approximation to Spanish when ﬁrst learning this language. By the end of the eighteenth century, AfroHispanic speech in the R´ıo de la Plata was more than a minimal pidgin, and appears to have had some consistent traits which were recognized by native Spanish speakers and used in literary representations of bozal speech. AfroRioplatense texts, mostly representing Buenos Aires and Montevideo, recur throughout the nineteenth century and continue into the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century, representing little more than a century of Afro-Hispanic language, during which time little evolution can be noted. By the end of this period, only a few true bozales remained in the R´ıo de la Plata, but given de facto social and cultural segregation of the black population in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, it is conceivable that second-generation Afro-Americans in these cities exhibited speech patterns that did not entirely coincide with those of white criollos (colonists of European descent). In urban areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, blacks in the postcolonial era lived predominantly in poorer areas such as conventillo tenement housing, retaining an ethnic unity well past the abolition of slavery and postdating the arrival of bozales from Africa.25 Although it is unlikely that a stable “black Spanish” was retained more than a single generation beyond bozal Africans who learned Spanish as a second language, collective awareness of bozal and neo-bozal language was tenacious among both black and white residents. For whites, as in other Spanish-speaking areas, imitation of bozal speech was mostly frequently employed in humorous, condescending portrayals of blacks. These 24

Moro and Ram´ırez (1981), Pallavicino (1987).

25

Luz (1995, 2001).

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representations, even if well-meaning, often create an image of buffoonery and mental incompetence by drawing too close a parallel between Afro-Rioplatense Spanish and baby-talk or deranged rambling. Available documentation on the African slave trade to Latin America suggests that most African slaves taken to the R´ıo de la Plata came from the Congo Basin or Angola,26 although Andrews (1980) claims that at least 25 percent of the Africans in Buenos Aires came from West Africa and Mozambique. In 1787, the cabildo (municipal government) of Montevideo authorized the construction of a large walled-in area just outside the city limits of the time, known as the Caser´ıo de Negros.27 This zone was to serve both as a quarantine zone for disease-ridden slaves, and as a holding station from which slaves would be sent to their eventual destination within the city or in rural regions. The Caser´ıo was in operation for several decades, bringing together Africans of various ethnic groups, among which prevailed slaves from the modern countries of Congo/Zaire and Angola, with Kikongo and Kimbundu being the major languages. The ethnic proﬁle of Africans in the R´ıo de la Plata is reﬂected by the names of the principal naciones or mutual aid societies, among which the most promiment were the Congo, Angola, Lubolo, Benguela and Cambund´a, all representing groups from the Congo-Angola region. Among the smaller societies, other regions of Africa were represented: Mina, Mozambique, etc.28 Early slave arrivals were mostly from the Windward Coast, ranging from contemporary Senegal to Sierra Leone. The Slave Coast (Togo and Benin) was important throughout the slave trade, as was the Bight of Benin and Niger Delta regions. Among the principal African groups in the R´ıo de la Plata were the “Congos,” a term usually applying to speakers of Kikongo but sometimes also encompassing Kimbundu and other Angolan languages, although the ethnic designation Umbundu does not appear as frequently as Congo, Mandinga, Mina, etc., except in Brazil. Slaves taken from the Kimbundu-speaking region of Africa were more frequently referred to as Angolas, although the latter designation occasionally applied to speakers of other languages. Africans in Cuba Figures regarding the total number of African slaves imported into Cuba vary widely, as do claims as to the relative proportions of various African ethnic groups and languages found among Cuban slaves. Humboldt (1956:218–23) estimated that some 644,000 Africans had been taken to Cuba up until 1853. This number is not signiﬁcantly different than the ﬁgure of 684,000 embarked and 564,000 landed offered by Eltis et al. (1999). Aimes (1907:264), adding up 26 27

Scheuss de Studer (1958), Molinari (1944). 28 Andrews (1980:144). Pereda Vald´es (1965:41–42).

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approximate annual ﬁgures, came up with a total of around 528,000 Africans brought to Cuba up until 1865. According to P´erez de la Riva (1974a:78–79; 1979:41–44), up until 1761, approximately 60,000 African slaves had been taken to Cuba. Between 1762 and 1780 some 20,000 more slaves were imported. From 1780 to 1820 the number jumps dramatically: more than 310,000 African bozales arrived during this period, bringing the total number of slaves taken between the ﬁrst colonization and 1820 to around 390,000. By 1861, this number had jumped again, to an astonishing 849,000, which means that nearly 86 percent of all slaves taken to Cuba arrived during the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. Extrapolating to allow for underreporting and clandestine trafﬁc, P´erez de la Riva estimates a total of 1,310,000 African bozales taken to Cuba during the entire slave trade. Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:137) use somewhat lower ﬁgures, suggesting that between 850,000 and 921,000 black Africans arrived in Cuba during the slaving period. These ﬁgures demonstrate that there was a large number of bozales in Cuba during the nineteenth century, a fact reﬂected in the many appearances of bozal language in Cuban literature of the time. However, slave mortality was relatively high, and once importation of slaves from Africa ceased for all intents and purposes, the number of bozales fell off dramatically. For example in 1873 it is estimated that there were some 136,000 African-born blacks in Cuba; by the end of the century this number had dropped to 13,000, and by 1907 there were fewer than 8,000 native Africans in Cuba.29 Blacks in colonial Cuba were drawn from all parts of Africa, as well as from other Caribbean territories, but at least during the nineteenth century, the majority of the bozal population came from a handful of well-delimited geographical and ethnic regions of Africa. Curtin (1969:247) gave the following proportional breakdown for slaves imported into Cuba in the period 1817–43, which represents the most intense period of slave importation in the entire history of Spanish America:30 Bight of Benin (Yoruba, Fon, etc.): Mozambique (Macu´a, etc.): Northern Congo: Angola/Congo: Bight of Biafra (Igbo, Ijo, etc.): Sierra Leone: 29 30

31.1% 29.5% 13.0% 11.3% 9.9% 3.3%

P´erez de la Riva (1979:38–39); also Franco (1985). Curtin’s ﬁgures are a bit strange, especially the reference to Mozambique, which according to his data supplied nearly 30 percent of the slaves imported to Cuba during the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century. It is known that towards the end of the slave trade, Mozambique and other east African venues rose in importance in supplying the Atlantic slave trade, particularly to Portuguese possessions, but there is no evidence that such a high proportion of southeast African slaves ever arrived in Cuba. In particular, the linguistic panorama is quite bare as regards the possible inﬂuence of Mozambican languages in the development of bozal Spanish in the Caribbean.

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Eltis (1977:419) gives a somewhat different breakdown:

1821–25 1826–30 1831–35 1836–40 1841–43

West Guinea

Bt. of Benin

Bt. of Biafra

North Congo

Angola

SE Africa

27.9 34.8 18.7 28.8 34.0

26.8 20.9 18.7 24.3 36.0

45.4 44.2 46.2 21.9 3.1

— — 6.6 6.5 22.0

— — 9.8 3.5 —

— — — 14.9 5.0

Moreno Fraginals (1978, vol. II:9) estimated that during the period 1850–60), bozales on Cuban sugar estates represented the following ethnic divisions, according to Cuban usage: Lucum´ı: Carabal´ı: Congo: Gang´a: Mina: Bib´ı: Other groups:

34.52% 17.37% 16.71% 11.45% 3.93% 2.84% 13.18%

African ethnic designations in colonial Cuba require some comment, since not all coincide exactly with established African linguistic and cultural boundaries. The major terms, and the corresponding linguistic and cultural referents, are as follows: L u c u m ´ı . This term was invariably applied to Yoruba-speaking Africans from present-day Nigeria, but the origins of the term itself are unclear.31 One plausible etymology comes from the Yoruba salutation oluku mi “my friend.”32 In Cuba, the term lucum´ı was used by whites and blacks alike, while the term yoruba referred only to the language. The Yoruba language in Cuba represents a conservative and archaic form of varieties currently spoken in Nigeria. In this respect, it is similar to vestigial forms of Yoruba spoken in Trinidad and Brazil.33 A r a r a´ . This term is apparently derived from the historical area of Ardra, in Dahomey (modern Benin). In Cuba, this term was usually applied to speakers of Ewe/Fon, and mixture with the dominant lucum´ı/ Yoruba culture was frequent.34 C a r a b a l ´ı . This term derives from Calabar, the eastern coastal region of modern Nigeria. The linguistic referents of this term are not as clear. In contemporary Africa, the term refers to a dialect zone of Ijo., a language 31 33 34

32 Law (1991:23). Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:28–30). Olmsted (1953), Silva (1958), Warner-Lewis (1971, 1982), Yai (1978). Ortiz (1916), Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:31), Vinueza (1988).

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important in the formation of Berbice Dutch creole,35 and carabal´ıes were found throughout Spanish America. Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:35) suggest that the term referred to a heterogeneous mix of ethnic groups from southeastern Nigeria, including Igbo, Ibibio, Ijo., and possibly Eﬁk, quoting the remark of the Colombian priest Sandoval who as early as 1627 remarked that “los caraval´ıes son incontables y no se entienden unos a otros, ni hablan lenguas mutuamente inteligibles . . .” In Cuba, carabal´ı culture gave rise to the religious and social ceremonies known as abaku´a and n˜ a˜niguismo.36 M a n d i n g a . This is one of the most widely used and imprecise terms in all of Afro-Hispanic literature. Objectively, this term currently refers to a well-delimited group speaking Mandinkan languages, generally professing Islam, and living in the Senegambia region. However, since earliest colonial times, Mandinga was loosely used to designate any black from northwestern Africa. In Cuba, the term usually referred to black practitioners of Islam, from the Senegambia region, but not limited to the Mandinkan languages and cultures; speakers of Bambara and Diola were also included.37 C o n g o . This is another term which has enjoyed a long history of vague and often contradictory reference to African ethnic and linguistic groups. In Cuba, congos were deﬁnitely Bantu speakers, most of whom spoke Kikongo and related languages from the northern Congo (former Portuguese Congo) region. The religious and cultural practices of the congos were known variously as regla de congo, palo monte, or mayombe, and are described by Cabrera (1979), as well as by many earlier travelers and even participants, such as the former slave Esteban Montejo.38 Together with Yoruba, Kikongo is one of the few African languages which survived past the last bozal generation in Cuba, largely in the form of religious rituals and songs.39 M i n a . This term usually referred to members of the Akan group (Asante, Fanti, Twi) from the former Gold Coast (modern Ghana), particularly those from around the old Portuguese fort at Elmina. G a n g a´ . This term was used frequently in colonial Cuba, and according to Moreno Fraginals (1978 vol. 2:9), gang´a slaves represented some 11.5 percent of the workers on Cuban sugar estates during the period 1850–60. 35 37 39

36 P´ Robertson (1979), Smith, Robertson and Williamson (1987). erez et al. (1982). 38 Barnet (1966). Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:30). Gonz´alez Huguet and Baudry (1967), Garc´ıa Herrera (1972), Granda (1973b), Garc´ıa Gonz´alez (1974), Vald´es Acosta (1974), Garc´ıa Gonz´alez and Vald´es Acosta (1978), Perl (1984). In ﬁeldwork carried out in Cuba in late 2002 Armin Schwegler (personal communication) discovered at least one Afro-Cuban able to converse in Kikongo, thereby indicating that this language may still survive in more than ritualistically fossilized form.

Africans in colonial Spanish America

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For many Cubans, the term gang´a was synonymous with black Africans, in the same category as Mandinga, Congo, Lucum´ı, etc. Unlike the remaining ethnolinguistic designations used to describe Africans in Cuba, gang´a does not derive directly from the name of any speciﬁc African ethnic group, nor apparently to any single region of Africa. Slaves designated as gang´a did not participate in recognizably unique cultural or religious practices, nor was a particular language or group of languages ever associated with this group.

Afro-European creole languages in Cuba By the ﬁrst few decades of the nineteenth century, anti-slavery movements in Europe were strong, and slaving ships en route to the Americas were routinely intercepted and conﬁscated. The African slave trade could not provide sufﬁcient workers to satisfy Cuban demands, and laborers from all over the Caribbean were sought. A burgeoning contraband labor trade ensued, and the Dutch station at Cura¸cao was instrumental in making up the difference between the slaves coming from Africa and the total needs of the Spanish colonies. For much of the colonial period, the Dutch had maintained an asiento or franchized slave market on Cura¸cao, from which slaves were reshipped to Spanish, French, and English possessions in the Caribbean. The asiento was revoked in 1713, but clandestine trafﬁc from Cura¸cao and St. Eustatius continued past this point, transshipping Africans throughout the Caribbean. For nearly two centuries, the Dutch depot at Cura¸cao supplied both authorized and clandestine slave trafﬁc to Cuba and, on a much reduced scale, to Puerto Rico. The participation of Cura¸cao in the labor trade to Cuba added the already established creole language Papiamento to the mix of languages present in Cuba.40 Papiamento is documented for Cuba, by both residents and visitors. For example, in the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century, the Dutch traveler Gerardus Bosch (1836:226) encountered Papiamento speakers in Cienfuegos.41 According to Granda (1973a), Bosch’s previous knowledge of Papiamento as spoken in Cura¸cao would assure that he was not mistaking a local Afro-Cuban creole or pidgin for legitimate Papiamento. Hesseling himself did not rule out the possibility that Bosch was confusing the Dutch-based creole Negerhollands with Papiamento, although according scant probability to such a hypothesis. Other, briefer, descriptions document the presence of Papiamento speakers in other parts of Cuba. Papiamento was rarely commented on by Cubans themselves; those few who had ever heard the language referred to it as espa˜nol ara˜nado. Given Cubans’ negative attitudes toward the speech of Africans, it is unlikely that most observers had either 40

Lipski (1993, 1996a, 1998a, 1998c, 1999a).

41

Also Hesseling (1933:265–66).

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A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

the experience or the inclination to differentiate the halting pidgin spoken by African-born laborers from the well-established Afro-Iberian creole in use on Cura¸cao. In addition to the well-organized slave and plantation laborer supplies offered by commercial traders, Cuba attracted thousands of workers from throughout the Caribbean, who emigrated to Cuba voluntarily and individually. The largest contingent came from Haiti and settled in eastern Cuba. This immigration began in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but in the early decades of the twentieth century the Cuban and Haitian governments entered into accords which guaranteed a steady annual supply of Haitian contract laborers, not only in Oriente but also in the sugar-growing areas of central Cuba. The plight of these hapless workers is documented in Alejo Carpentier’s ﬁrst novel, EcueYamba-O. Another major source of laborers for eastern Cuba was Jamaica, although the Jamaican contingents in Cuba were never as numerous as in the Dominican Republic.42 In Cuba, the heaviest Jamaican immigration occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century, and coincided with the inﬂux of Haitian cane cutters. Smaller numbers of laborers came from the Virgin Islands and from the lesser Antilles. Of all the Spanish Caribbean, nineteenth-century Cuba was also the largest recipient of non-black plantation laborers, in the form of Chinese recruits. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Cuba received at least 150,000 Chinese laborers, known as cul´ıes (English coolie), who worked in the sugar plantations and mills as virtual slaves, side by side with Africans and workers from other Caribbean islands. The linguistic conditions surrounding the lives of Chinese laborers in Cuba closely parallels that of African bozales, and, according to available evidence, Chinese workers’ acquisition of Spanish followed similar paths. Moreover, the linguistic model for Chinese workers was frequently the speech of bozales who had already learned some Spanish, as well as the Spanish spoken as a second language by workers from Caribbean territories, who spoke other creole languages. Finally, since most of the Chinese were recruited through the Portuguese colony of Macao, where a Portuguese-based pidgin and creole was spoken among the native Chinese population, there exists the possibility that some of the Chinese workers added their knowledge of a Portuguese creole to the already rich mix of creole and creoloid elements present in nineteenthcentury Cuba. Macao creole Portuguese shares many of the patterns common to Afro-European creoles implicated in the formation of Afro-Lusitanian varieties in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean, including Cape Verdean, Papiamento, Palenquero, and more distantly S˜ao Tomense and Annobonese. There are also noteworthy parallels with Haitian Creole, Jamaican Creole, Negerhollands and other creoles known or suspected to have been spoken in nineteenth-century 42

Serviat (1986:ch. 6), Alvarez Est´evez (1988).

Africans in colonial Spanish America

109

Cuba. The implications for the study of bozal Spanish are immediate and far-reaching, for if it can be demonstrated that Chinese workers in Cuba brought with them, at least some fragments of Macao creole Portuguese, and added it to the linguistic mix in which bozal Spanish was formed in the Caribbean, this provides yet another route of entry of certain creoloid constructions in attestations of Afro-Cuban Spanish. Such a demonstration – whose full realization is as yet beyond the grasp of currently available documentation – would not invalidate claims that bozal Spanish derives from an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin originally formed in West Africa and used throughout the Atlantic slave trade. It would, however, reduce the necessity of such a hypothesis. In comparison with Africans in Cuba, the number of Chinese was small indeed, although once the Chinese moved to urban environments, their pidginized Spanish became nearly as familiar to middle-class Cubans as the speech of African bozales. So familiar was the habla de chino to the average Cuban, that a literary stereotype quickly developed, almost always portraying the Chinese in a somewhat comical but never totally unfavorable light. As with bozal literary texts, even some transparently derivative literary texts depicting pidgin-speaking Chinese characters show substantially the same linguistic characteristics as authenticated instances of Chinese interference in Spanish.43 Some of the features include the change of /r/ to [l] in nearly all prevocalic positions, loss of word-ﬁnal /s/, and some in situ questions (of the sort ¿t´u fuiste d´onde? “where did you go?” in which the interrogative word has not been moved to the beginning of the sentence. Throughout Latin America, the stereotype of the habla de chino is the change of /r/ > [l], and the occasional change of /d/ > [l], as commented early on by the nineteenth-century Cuban lexicographer Pichardo (1849: liv): Los Chinos o´ Asi´aticos, que ya superabundan principalmente en La Habana, no han formado dialecto, ni el vulgo les ha pillado m´as que alguna rara palabra . . . ellos pronuncian con claridad las Vozes Castellans que aprenden pronto, aunque con el acento criollo como los Yucatecos, y trocando rr y a veces la r y la d por la l, cuyo u´ ltimo sonido prodigan exesivamente diciendo, (v.g.) “luce de sopa bolacha; al´o con ﬂijole:” Dulce de sopa borracha: arroz con frijoles.

A number of pidgin or creole English elements in Cuba may have come directly from West Africa, via a number of unsuspected routes. For example, the Cuban folklorist and anthropologist Fernando Ortiz (1916:238–39) registered such items as tiﬁ-tiﬁ ‘to steal,’ chapi-chapi ‘to chop weeds,’ luku-luku < look ‘look, see,’ n˜ ami-˜nami < nyam ‘to eat,’ etc. Although these items have cognate variants among Caribbean English creoles, they appear in this case to come directly from West African Pidgin English, which has been in existence at 43

Lipski (1998b, 1999e, 2000c).

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A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

least since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Ortiz claimed that Pidgin English items formed the true lingua franca used by slaves while acquiring Spanish on Cuban plantations. If true, this considerably antedates the arrival of free creole-English-speaking laborers from other Caribbean islands. There are two known routes of arrival of Pidgin English in nineteenth-century Cuba. The ﬁrst is coastal Nigeria, where Pidgin English was already ﬂourishing in the nineteenth century, and whence came the largest number of slaves brought to Cuba in the ﬁnal stage of the slave trade. The second is a more indirect route, via the West African island of Fernando Poo. In the 1860s, the Spanish government deported white Cuban revolutionaries to this distant land, together with some rebellious Afro-Cubans. Many languished and died from tropical diseases, some eventually emigrated to Spain, and others ﬁnally made it back to Cuba. By this time, West African Pidgin English was already well-established on Fernando Poo, being the lingua franca of most of the African-born population. This in turn is due to the fact that England had been using the island as part of its antislaving activities, and had recruited Pidgin-English-speaking Africans from Liberia and Sierra Leone to work in their colony. It is very likely that at least some West African Pidgin English entered nineteenth-century Cuba through returning exiles.44 There are also reports of isolated black English speakers in rural southern Cuba. Such groups were attested on the Isle of Pines (Isla de la Juventud) in early decades of the last century.45 In Cuba, French Creole speakers were more common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, forming a signiﬁcant portion of the population of eastern Cuba, including Santiago.46 (Creole-) French-speaking blacks in Cuba even organized into musical societies known as the tumba francesa.47 These societies still exist, and although many of the musicians are no longer completely ﬂuent in Haitian Creole, some of the songs mix Spanish and Haitian Creole.48 These texts cannot be confused with bozal Spanish, but rather constitute Spanish-Haitian code switching. In earlier periods, however, native speakers of Haitian who arrived in Cuba and learned Spanish as a second language spoke with many of the same traits documented for the Dominican Republic. Haitian is noted for use of a sort of double negation, combining the usual preverbal pa with cliticized phrase-ﬁnal -non (ending afﬁrmative sentences with cliticized -wi is an even more common strategy). Some of the modern Cuban tumba francesa songs exmplify this:49 44 45 46 47 48

Balmaseda (1869), Saluvet (1892), Gonz´alez Echegaray (1959:22), Le´on (1976), LinigerGoumaz (1988:25), Sarracino (1988), Fayer (1990), Sundiata (1990), Lipski (1992e). Carlson (1941), Mart´ınez Gordo (1985b), Castellanos and Castellanos (1988), Perl and Vald´es (1991). E.g. Wallace (1898:14). Franco (1959:76–77); Mart´ınez Gordo (1985a, 1985b, 1989); Al´en Rodr´ıguez (1986, 1991); Betancur Alvarez (1993:43–48). 49 Al´ Al´en (1986), Mart´ınez Gordo (1989:18). en (1986:57).

Africans in colonial Spanish America yo di mu´e contan mu´e pa capa contan no . . . mu´e pa capa ri no

111

‘they say I am happy’ ‘I can’t be happy’ ‘I can’t laugh’

Given that Spanish no is cognate with Haitian non, while Spanish no occupies the same syntactic position as Haitian pa and is easily acquired by speakers of the latter language, the pathway to the formation of double negation in HaitianSpanish contact situations is straightforward. The songs and poems characteristic of these groups combine Spanish and Haitian Creole in a fashion reminiscent of texts produced in the Dominican Republic, and without proper context could be confused with earlier bozal language in which no Caribbean creole language served as intermediary between Africa and the Americas.

Africans in the Dominican Republic Among the Latin American nations whose Afro-Hispanic populations form a major part of the national proﬁle, no country ﬁgures more prominently than the Dominican Republic, and yet to date not a single example of true bozal language has been found in the Dominican literary and folkloric corpus, despite the abundant documentation of Dominican popular culture, in the form of stories, songs, poems, legends, and the like, and the equally rich tradition of negrista literature in the Dominican Republic.50 This startling gap in an otherwise welldocumented Afro-Dominican cultural tradition should arouse inquiry, but in fact the topic has been scarcely mentioned. In the Dominican Republic, although African-born bozales were still found in the nineteenth century, they were proportionately few in comparison to criollo blacks (born in the colonies), and no veriﬁable corpus of Dominican bozal language is known to exist. Moreover, many remnants of highly non-standard language among contemporary Afro-Dominicans are much more likely to derive from contact with Haitian or varieties of English than to represent a direct continuation of earlier bozal Spanish.51 Following the initial importance of Santo Domingo as Spain’s front door to the New World, the Spanish colony rapidly declined in both prosperity and population. Small gold deposits discovered by the ﬁrst Spanish explorers were soon exhausted, and the discovery of fabulous wealth in Mexico and Peru enticed colonists away from the Antilles. On the French side of the island, the proportion of African slaves grew astronomically, and blacks came to far outnumber whites at an early period in the history of Saint-Domingue. The French were aware of the potential danger in such a demographic imbalance, 50

Caama˜no de Fern´andez (1989).

51

Lipski (1994a).

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A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

and Spanish observers at the other end of the island grew increasingly uneasy at the prospect of a large-scale slave revolt that might overrun the entire island. Slave uprisings had already occurred in Spanish Santo Domingo; the ﬁrst reported revolt occurred in 1521 when the slaves on Diego Col´on’s sugar plantation rebelled.52 Beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing for two centuries thereafter, rebellious slaves or cimarrones escaped to fortiﬁed villages known as manieles. As early as the seventeenth century, maroon communities were found along the northern coast, including the Saman´a Peninsula.53 Spanish fears of even larger uprisings, if the proportion of Africans to Europeans were to attain the levels found in the French colony, were in large measure responsible for the Spanish reluctance to import African slaves in quantities similar to those found in French Saint-Domingue. Ultimately, however, it was the economic marginality of Spanish Santo Domingo, and the inability to prosper under the Spanish monopolistic system, which dictated the patterns of slave importation. As a consequence, the proportion of blacks in Spanish Santo Domingo never came close to the ﬁgures found in French Saint-Domingue. Bozal importations in the Spanish colony slowed to a trickle by the eighteenth century, and although African-born slaves could still be found in Santo Domingo well past the time of independence, they did not form a large proportion of the population, unlike Cuba and Saint-Domingue during the same time period. Of equal importance is the fact that at no time in earlier colonial history did African-born bozales (the group most likely to permanently affect the developing Dominican Spanish dialect) represent a very large or sociolinguistically prominent segment of the Dominican population. Beginning with the Haitian revolts of the late eighteenth century and continuing through the nominal transfer of Santo Domingo to French and then Haitian control, the population of the Spanish colony dropped drastically. Thus from a high of some 120,000 residents in Spanish Santo Domingo registered in 1782, and the approximately 180,000 residents found in the last decade of the eighteenth century, a census of 1819 revealed only 71,000 people in the Spanish colony. By 1844, i.e. the end of the Haitian occupation, the population had risen to 126,000; in 1863 the population was 207,000, and in 1887 more than 380,000 residents of the Dominican Republic were counted. Jos´e Alvarez de Peralta, visiting Santo Domingo in 1860, estimated (probably too high) a total population of 400,000, of which 200,000 were white or mestizo, 70,000 were black, and the remainder mulatto.54 Most of the repopulation which occurred during the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century was the result of settlement by Haitians. This is amply documented in testimony from the time period. To cite but a single example, in 1884 the statesman Pedro Bon´o commented that the southwestern 52

Deive (1989a:33).

53

Ibid. (80).

54

Rodr´ıguez Demorizi ed. (1970:162).

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border region of the Dominican Republic was “expuesta a una invasi´on perenne y progresiva de poblaci´on extranjera (haitiana), que hace desfallecer cada d´ıa m´as el elemento dominicano, el cual, desarmado y exhausto, desaparecer´a por completo de esa region.”55 Toward the end of the century, occasional immigration from Cuba and Puerto Rico occurred, following aborted independence movements in those colonies. This was also the period when Sephardic Jews and traders from Cura¸cao, Chinese, Syrians, and other groups immigrated to Santo Domingo. Afro-European creole languages in the Dominican Republic Spanish Santo Domingo never experienced the last-ditch importation of sugar plantation laborers from all over the Caribbean, as occurred in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Eltis et al. (1999) document only 6,000 African slaves sent directly to Santo Domingo during the colonial period. As French Saint-Domingue became the world’s richest sugar colony, the Spanish side of the island could not compete, and instead Dominican farmers devoted themselves to supplying meat, hides and other agricultural products to French planters. Following the Haitian Revolution, Spanish planters were not inclined to repeat the mistakes that had led to the destruction of the French sugar colony. The Spaniards had already experienced smaller-scale slave revolts, and invasions by Haitian troops were already on the horizon. There were probably a few speakers of Papiamento in Santo Domingo, since a number of merchants and traders, largely Sephardic Jews, arrived from Cura¸cao, and lived in a neighborhood called Punda, recalling a similarly named neighborhood on Cura¸cao. However, in the Dominican Republic, these (presumed) Papiamento speakers formed part of the urban bourgeoisie, unlike in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where Papiamento-speaking laborers worked in the caneﬁelds side by side with African- and American-born workers. There is little likelihood that Papiamento ever affected Dominican Spanish. The major extra-Hispanic inﬂuence on nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Dominican Spanish was Haitian Creole, carried ﬁrst by invading Haitian armies, then by settlers who arrived from the western end of the island during the Haitian occupation, and in the twentieth century by migrant sugar plantation laborers. It was during the period 1822–44, more so than in earlier decades, that the deﬁnitive Haitian-Dominican linguistic and cultural contacts were ﬁrmly cemented.56 It is impossible to precisely date the emergence of Haitian as a stable creole language systematically different from French, but a date somewhere towards the end of the seventeenth century does not appear unreasonable. 55 56

Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (ed.) (1964:280); also Hoetink (1972:63–64). See Granda (1991) for some additional thoughts.

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By the middle of the eighteenth century, Haitian was an established language, and when Moreau de Saint-M´ery visited French Saint-Domingue (Moreau de Saint-M´ery 1958) in 1783, he observed a language which does not greatly differ from contemporary Haitian (e.g. Carden and Stewart 1988). Illiterate slave leaders such as Boukman, as well as the former slaves who became incorporated into Toussaint’s army, presumably spoke only Haitian Creole. In his reconstruction of the Dominican resistance to Haitian occupation, Henr´ıquez Ure˜na (1951:236) observed that “en todo el occidente de la isla la gran mayor´ıa del pueblo s´olo habla patois o cr´eole . . .” The Saman´a Peninsula, scene of earlier French attacks, received a predominantly Haitian-speaking population; as early as 1862, a document describing Saman´a states that “la poblaci´on la supone de 2.000 almas, entre franceses, canarios, negros de la Florida y Haitianos . . .” The Spanish language has survived unchallenged as the ofﬁcial language of the Dominican Republic, as well as the de facto language in all urban and most rural regions, but Haitian Creole has always maintained a vigorous presence in rural villages, and has affected regional varieties of Spanish as well. Only the effects of an improved educational system, better means of transportation and communication, and an effective network of radio broadcasting, have purged the traces of Haitian Creole from all but the most marginalized varieties of Dominican Spanish.57 United States Black English also made its way into the nineteenth-century Dominican Republic. The presence of black Americans began with the Haitian occupation, part of an ambitious plan initiated in 1824 by Haitian president Boyer to create a settler-state of dispossessed blacks from throughout the Americas, who would owe unswerving allegiance to the Haitian revolution.58 Although today the only speakers of black English are found in Saman´a, the Afro-Dominican village of Villa Mella was also the scene of immigration of speakers of United States Black English. A more recent source of creole English in the Dominican Republic arrived through the importation of workers from the British West Indies, especially Barbados and Jamaica. In the Dominican Republic, these workers are usually referred to as cocolos, and although they often work together with Haitians (referred to as congos or ma˜ne´ s), the West Indian laborers enjoy greater freedom and a higher standard of living. West Indians’ approximations to Spanish, however, are scarcely distinguishable from Haitianized Spanish. This language, 57 58

Hoetink (1972:ch. 2), Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1973:333), De la Cruz (1978:30), Moya Pons (1978), Mar´ın˜ ez (1986). Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1973, 1975), Puig Ortiz (1978), Tejeda Ortiz (1984). For recent linguistic observations, Benavides (1973, 1985), Poplack and Sankoff (1980, 1987), DeBose (1983, 1992, 1995), Tagliamonte and Poplack (1988), Poplack and Tagliamonte (1989), Tagliamonte (1991, 1997).

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spoken by socially stigmatized foreign laborers, is unlikely to have permanently inﬂuenced Dominican Spanish, but it does form a prominent part of the Dominican linguistic landscape. As the children of these workers grow up in the Dominican Republic, there exists a potential for subtle transfers from the pidginized Spanish of their parents to the most marginalized sociolects of Dominican Spanish. Africans in Puerto Rico The history of black slaves in Puerto Rico is rather similar to that of Santo Domingo. Puerto Rico remained as a backwater during most of the Spanish colonial period, and slave importation only became important towards the middle of the nineteenth century, as Puerto Rico took a small piece of the sugar plantation boom that followed the uprising in French Saint-Domingue. According to Alvarez Nazario (1974:72–77), some 6,000–8,000 African slaves were taken to Puerto Rico during the sixteenth century, some 8,000–12,000 in the seventeenth century, between 20,000 and 30,000 in the eighteenth century, and between 20,000 and 30,000 in the nineteenth century, for a maximal total of 75,000 African slaves taken to Puerto Rico. Eltis et al. (1999) documents only 10,000 African slaves arriving in Puerto Rico, with the majority disembarking between 1780 and 1840. The African population in Puerto Rico came from various African ethnic and cultural groups, basically following the patterns found elsewhere in Latin America. Wolofs (Jelofe), Biafras, Fulas, Mandingas, and other slaves from the Senegambia region were represented among the earliest slaves taken to the island. In the eighteenth century, British slavers brought Mende-speaking slaves (known in Puerto Rico as gang´a) from the Windward Coast of Sierra Leone. The Portuguese also brought in slaves from the Gold Coast (Minas), and when the French became established in Dahomey (Whydah), Yorubas and other Kwa-speaking groups were sent to Puerto Rico, together with Carabal´ıes (Igbo- and Eﬁk-speaking Africans from the Calabar Coast of Nigeria). Finally, slaves from the Congo and Angola region arrived in large numbers in Puerto Rico.59 In Puerto Rico it is still possible to ﬁnd African cultural remnants, but there is none of the ethnically homogeneous ceremonies and songs, found for example in Cuba, where Yoruba, Eﬁk, and Kikongo carryovers survived slavery to form the basis for Afro-Cuban religious practices. The demographic ﬁgures tell the story: there was never a large enough number of African bozales, much less a group of slaves from a single ethnic or linguistic area of Africa, for an African culture to be transplanted to Puerto Rican soil. 59

Alvarez Nazario (1974:44–47), Gir´on (n.d.), Sued Badillo and L´opez Cantos (1986).

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Afro-European creole languages in Puerto Rico In San Juan, during the nineteenth century most slaves were Puerto-Rican born, but there were signiﬁcant numbers from Martinique, Cura¸cao, St. Martin, Haiti, Guadalupe, and St. Thomas, with Guadalupe being the largest non-Puerto Rican supplier from the Caribbean.60 Among free foreigners living in nineteenthcentury Puerto Rico, signiﬁcant numbers came from Antigua, Barbados, Cura¸cao, Denmark (via the Danish Virgin Islands), Dominica, Guadaloupe, Haiti, Holland (through Dutch Caribbean colonies), Martinique, St. Kitts, St. Barts, St. Eustatius, St. Croix and, in greatest numbers, St. Thomas.61 These facts are important since many of these individuals brought with them slaves from their respective islands. The greatest concentrations of foreigners were in San Juan and Ponce; Fajardo also contained numerous natives of the Virgin Islands, while Carolina was home to many natives of Antigua. In 1872 the British consul afﬁrmed that 90 percent of the population of Vieques consisted of British (e.g. West Indian) contract laborers.62 Many were from nearby Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. In 1878, there were more than 100 contract laborers from Antigua alone working in Puerto Rico.63 Earlier in the century, many residents were “Danes” (i.e. from the Danish Virgin Islands).64 In addition, western Puerto Rico received numerous slaves from Cura¸cao, as well as from the Danish colony in the Virgin Islands, and from St. Barthelmy, Martinique and Guadeloupe.65 Both during and after the slaving period, the greatest number of non-Spanish speaking blacks in Puerto Rico came from the neighboring Virgin Islands, a fact with some linguistic consequences for reconstruction of Afro-Puerto Rican speech. While the islands were still a Danish slave-holding territory, slaves frequently escaped to the Puerto Rican islet of Vieques,66 which is easily reached by swimming. Following the aboltion of slavery in the Virgin Islands, social and economic upheavals caused large numbers of Virgin Islanders to seek work in Puerto Rico, and the trend continues even today. During the early nineteenth century, slaves on St. Croix and St. John mostly spoke the Dutch creole Negerhollands; English-based creoles later came to dominate the Virgin Islands. During the nineteenth century Negerhollands was still the principal language of the black population, and was also spoken by a not inconsiderable proportion of the white population. After the abolition of slavery and the dismantling of 60 62 63 65

66

61 Cifre de Loubriel (1962), Marazzi (n.d.). Carbonell Fern´andez (1988:26–27). Brau (1912), Carrillo de Carle (1974:16), Ramos Mattei (1981:134). 64 Langhorne (1987:33). Ramos Mattei (1981:138). Morales Carri´on (1978:39), D´ıaz Soler (1981). Echevarr´ıa Alvarado (1984:74) partially attributes the origin of the Puerto Rican musical form the plena to nineteenth-century Ponce, in particular some musicians descendent from Virgin Islanders or natives of St. Kitts. Westergaard (1917:160–64), Hall (1992:126–28).

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large plantations, many Negerhollands-speaking Virgin Islanders emigrated to other islands in search of work; some went to Cuba, and an even larger number arrived in nearby Puerto Rico. Although to date there is no direct evidence of Negerhollands being used in Cuba and Puerto Rico, it should be noted that the grammatical structures of this quintessential Afro-Atlantic creole coincide with those of other creole languages used in the Caribbean, and the traces of a former Negerhollands presence could not always be distinguished from the remnants of better-known creoles. A speaker of Negerhollands, upon encountering varieties of Spanish already inﬂuenced by other Caribbean creoles, would ﬁnd the structural patterns to be identical, and even some core vocabulary would be recognized, especially if, as suggested by Hesseling, Negerhollands already bore the earlier imprint of contact with Papiamento. Hesseling (1933) analyzed many features of nineteenth-century Negerhollands as bearing the earlier inﬂuence of Papiamento, stemming from a time when the Dutch also controlled parts of the Virgin Islands, and transfers of Africans from Cura¸cao to St. Thomas and St. Croix were frequent. During the twentieth century, groups of Haitians have always been present in Puerto Rico, but their numbers are small in comparison to the Haitian presence in Cuba and especially the Dominican Republic, and their linguistic impact is negligible. Beginning toward the end of the nineteenth century and continuing through the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century, Atlantic creole-speaking laborers from many Caribbean islands began to migrate in signiﬁcant numbers to Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico to work in the sugar harvests. Although by this time bozal Spanish had nearly ceased to exist, the presence of these creole speakers who acquired the rudiments of Spanish in plantation-like conditions reinforced vestigial Afro-Hispanic language throughout the Spanish Caribbean. Emigration from St. Martin to the Spanish Caribbean began around 1890. Arubans migrated in large numbers to Cuba but also to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, where a small group of Arubans remains in Cata˜no, near San Juan.67 Emigration from Cura¸cao, an island which had already supplied laborers to nineteenth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico, and whose Papiamento language had contributed to bozal Spanish, intensiﬁed in the early twentieth century.68 The numbers are not large, but illustrate the continuing linguistic impact of creole-speaking immigrants among the most marginalized Afro-Hispanic populations of the early twentieth-century Caribbean. 67 68

Hartog (1961:230), Pietersz (1985:57–59), Sypkens Smit (1995:126). As an example, in 1917 144 workers from Cura¸cao and seventy from Aruba migrated to Cuba; by 1919 the annual ﬁgures were 1,405 and 1,321, respectively; just in the period 1917–20, more than 2,400 residents of Cura¸cao and more than 2,800 from Aruba went to Cuba; smaller numbers arrived in Puerto Rico (R¨omer 1981:95).

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Africans in colonial Ecuador The contemporary Afro-Ecuadoran component may be as high as 25 percent of the national total, and was higher during the colonial period.69 The majority of the black and mulatto population is concentrated in the northwest sector, principally in Esmeraldas province, where over 80 percent of the residents are of African origin. Guayaquil once contained a large black population,70 although subsequent events changed the demographic proﬁle of that city. Even Quito contained a considerable black population, not only in the early colonial years, but through the end of the eighteenth century.71 Smaller African populations were found in other highland towns, such as Loja.72 The origin of Ecuador’s black population is surrounded by some controversy and doubt, since although it is evident that black Ecuadorans arrived from the north, dates of arrival and region of origin have yet to be determined satisfactorily. One theory, as yet unproved,73 maintains that the ﬁrst permanent black residents arrived on the Ecuadoran coast as the result of a shipwreck at the end of the sixteenth century, and of another in l600, although it is known that the ﬁrst blacks arrived in Ecuador in l533–36. Von Hagen (1940:282) believes that the blacks of Esmeraldas come from a shipwreck that took place off the coast in 1650. Whitten (1965:22–24) reviews some of the competing accounts for the black presence in Esmeraldas, some of which verge on modern myth. West (1957:106) traces the black population of Esmeraldas to the last hundred years, particularly following colonial independence in Colombia, as well as of blacks from the highlands to the coast. In highland Ecuador, blacks are documented as early as 1550, but little is known as to how they arrived there. Subsequently, the Jesuits were responsible for large-scale importation of black slaves to work on plantations both on the coast and in the central highlands, and this example was followed by other planters and landowners, since indigenous labor was scarce in certain areas and rebellious in many others. Early in the nineteenth century, the wars of colonial liberation brought contingents of black soldiers to Ecuador, coming substantially from Colombia, and when manumission of slaves came to Ecuador in 1852, many of these black subjects remained in Esmeraldas province. Yet another group of black citizens arrived in the late nineteenth century, when some 4,000–5,000 Jamaican laborers were brought to work on plantations and on construction projects; this was the last signiﬁcant migration of Afro-Americans to Ecuador. Other scholars have maintained that the black population of Esmeraldas province results from the immigration of laborers from plantations 69 70 71 72

Rout (1976:211, 232), Preciado Bedoya (1995), Whitten et al. (1995). Garay Arellano (1988a, 1998b, 1992), Jurado Noboa (1990a). Jibaja Rubio (1988, 1990), Castro Chiriboga (1990), Garc´ıa (1990), Lucena Salmoral (1994). 73 Toscano Mateus (1953:19–20), Estupi˜ Anda Aguirre (1993). na´ n Tello (1967:45–48).

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in the central highlands;74 this theory, however, is difﬁcult to reconcile with the historical and demographical facts of colonial and postcolonial Ecuador.75 In the highlands, the predominant racial type is the indigeneous or mestizo conﬁguration, together with the small European population, and black or mulatto residents are quite rare in highland Ecuador. The one exception to this demographic trend is the Chota river valley and its environs, in northcentral Ecuador in the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi. This valley, formerly known as El Valle Sangriento and Coangue, is a tropical lowland surrounded by Andean uplands, and the population of the Chota region is almost entirely black with some mulattoes, in contrast to the exclusively indigeneous/mestizo population of neighboring areas.76 The origin of this singular black population in highland Ecuador is surrounded by a great uncertainty; some investigators have suggested that chote˜nos are descended from freed or escaped slaves from the coastal province of Esmeraldas, but it appears that most of the blacks in Imbabura and Carchi provinces are descendents of slaves held by the Jesuits on their extensive plantations. Another fact shrouded in intrigue is the establishment of black slave breeding centers owned and supervised by the Jesuits in the highland areas, with the aim of maintaining an adequate slave population while improving racial properties whenever possible. It is difﬁcult to uncover accurate documentation of this enterprise, which is nonetheless well-attested both in oral tradition and in historical references, but the fact is that when the Jesuits left Ecuador, behind them stayed a considerable group of slaves, freedmen and cimarrones, all of whom gradually came to form the uniﬁed population nuclei of the Chota valley. It has even been claimed that much of the black population of Esmeraldas province derives from chote˜nos who immigrated to the coast, but this remains to be demonstrated conclusively.77 On the Ecuadoran coast, the population of African origin is concentrated in the northwestern province of Esmeraldas, although smaller numbers of AfroEcuadorans can be found all along the coast. For most Ecuadorans, Esmeraldas is synonymous with black culture; this province is also the home of the indigenous Cayapa and Colorado peoples, whose life has been even more marginal than that of black Ecuadorans. The ﬁrst black slaves in Esmeraldas arrived early in the sixteenth century, as Spaniards were attracted by the emeralds that gave the province its name.78 The number of African slaves brought to work on this enterprise was probably quite small. During the seventeenth century, slaves escaping from the Colombian mines at Barbacoas arrived in Esmeraldas; according to Jurado Noboa (1992a:33), these included Mandingas, Congos, and 74 75 76 78

Wolf (1892:525), West (1957:106). Franklin (1943:269), Pe˜naherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego (1959), Whitten (1965:22–25). 77 Estupi˜ Klumpp (1970). na´ n Tello (1967:49). Jurado (Noboa 1992a); Rahier (1985:30–32); Savoia (1988).

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Angolas. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, some small gold mines were opened in Cachav´ı, Playa de Oro and Uimb´ı (Jurado Noboa 1992a:37; Savoia 1990), in which some African slaves were taken to work. The total number of African slaves taken to the villages of Esmeraldas in the eighteenth century did not exceed a few hundred (Jurado Noboa 1992a:38), but given the even smaller white population and the subsequent abandonment, the population of African origin increased rapidly, creating a predominantly black coastal strip (but also including considerable mixture with the local indigenous groups). Early descriptions of Esmeraldas, dating from the eighteenth century, already describe the province in terms of its heavy African concentration. A description written in the later decades of the eighteenth century by a Jesuit priest afﬁrmed that:79 . . . los negros venidos de la Africa retienen la lengua de su Guinea. Esta hablan entre s´ı, con ella se entienden y de ella retienen sus cantinelas, y aunque se les procura imbuir el castellano, en que muchos con el tiempo se hacen muy ladinos, pero los m´as de ellos se mantienen muy bozales toda la vida, de manera que le pronuncian muy truncado y lleno de barbarismos.

These descriptions say nothing of the languages spoken by the Africans in Esmeraldas; in the eighteenth century, a high proportion of Bantu-speaking Africans from the Congo/Angola region is to be suspected, although the Spanish of even the most isolated areas of Esmeraldas province shows few deﬁnitive Africanisms. Following the independence of Colombia and Ecuador, black Colombians – principally from Barbacoas – continued migrating to Esmeraldas.80 Many of the d´ecimas (improvised ten-line songs in verse) which form part of the Afro-Ecuadoran folk tradition in Esmeraldas make reference to Colombian towns and villages. For this reason it is difﬁcult to separate authentically Ecuadoran Afro-Hispanic remnants which may shed light on earlier bozal language in this region from late nineteenth-century Afro-Colombian Spanish, natively spoken by ex-slaves and their descendants and carried southward to Ecuador. Africans in colonial Colombia The port of Cartagena de Indias was the principal entry of African slaves to much of South America during the Spanish colonial period, and Colombia itself received a large number of slaves. Other important Colombian ports were Portobelo (in what would later become Panama), R´ıo de Hacha, and Santa Marta. The earliest slave arrivals worked in highland mines and placer deposits, in Popay´an, the Choc´o, around Bogot´a, and in other interior areas. The 79

Savoia (1992:19–20).

80

Rahier (1985:38–39).

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Caribbean coast was always home to large numbers of Africans, especially Cartagena, which grew and prospered as the Spanish colonial enterprise in South America took hold.81 A large proportion of the slaves in Cartagena is presumed to have come from Angola, especially during the seventeenth century, when Portugal still controlled the slave trade to Latin America. Many of these slaves made their way to mines in Zaragoza and Antioquia.82 Escalante (1964:chaps. 9–10) has demonstrated that slaves from all the major slaving regions of West and Central Africa arrived in Colombia, with differing groups predominating at any given time, due to the asiento system of slaving monopolies. During the ﬁrst Portuguese asientos, slaves from the Senegambia, the Windward Coast, and the Gold Coast predominated. Africans from the Slave Coast and Nigeria entered the mix by the seventeenth century, and later in the century, slaves from the Congo/Angola region arrived in large numbers. The funeral rites of the former maroon village of San Basilio de Palenque recall the people from Congo, Loango, and Angola,83 and toponyms from all major coastal African areas are found throughout Colombia. Slaves taken to Colombia worked in both agriculture and in mines. The latter were located both in coastal regions and in the interior. Placer gold extraction was also a frequent occupation of slaves, in the Cauca Valley and in the Choc´o. Some of the richest gold deposits were found in Popay´an, which received the greatest number of African slaves of any interior area of Colombia. The mines of Bucaramanga in Santander were also productive, and even far-ﬂung Boyac´a, on the Venezuelan border, had gold mines worked by African slaves. The mining town of Barbacoas was also a heavy consumer of African slave labor. The ﬁrst slaves in this region were evidently from the Congo/Angola region. In later years, many of the slaves were supplied from Guayaquil, whence some had arrived from Africa, while others were American-born. In the eighteenth century, many minas were taken to this region, in the belief (real or imagined) that they possessed previous experience in placer gold mining. African slaves also worked in haciendas and mines around Cali; from this town, many slaves also passed in to the cuadrillas of the Choc´o. In the Choc´o, there was a dramatic increase in the number of African slaves in the eighteenth century. Maroon communities or palenques were found throughout highland and coastal Colombia during the colonial period, and allowed for many African cultural retentions and – in such places as San Basilio de Palenque – for the formation and retention of creole languages. In the cities, black slaves formed cabildos, ethnically based cultural and religious societies that were reluctantly tolerated by the ruling classes. Cartagena contained cabildos based on the 81 82

Friedemann (1992, 1993), Friedemann and Arocha (1995). 83 Schwegler (1996b). Toribio Medina (1978:60–61), Wade (1993:75).

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Carabal´ı, Arar´a, Angola, Mandinga, Mina, and other ethnic/linguistic groups,84 and cities with smaller black populations had fewer such organizations. African languages were still present in Colombia throughout the colonial period, especially in Cartagena, although blacks born or raised in the colonies often learned only Spanish. For instance, a 1693 document refers to a black slave named Francisco G´angora . . . “que es de Guinea y vino peque˜no, le llamavan sus amos el Congo no save lengua . . . ,”85 meaning that he did not speak an African language. Sandoval (1956:335), writing in the late seventeenth century, noted that “la diﬁcultad est´a en que de ordinario sus amos no tienen int´erpretes ni se les da nada por buscarlos; y nosotros parece moralmente imposible que aprendamos todas estas lenguas por ser tanta su multitud y no haber alguna general, como por no haber quien pueda ense˜narlas ni ser la comunicaci´on que con los negros tenemos la que baste para peg´arsenos naturalmente,” a clear admission that most bozales in Cartagena spoke no Spanish or Portuguese. Further on (338), Sandoval reiterates: “. . . tambi´en conviene advirtamos la diferencia de castas que hablan algunas, para que as´ı una pueda servir por muchas y ahorrar trabajo y molestia. Y porque as´ı como las lenguas e int´erpretes ladinos suelen hablar varias lenguas, as´ı los negros bozales tambi´en las suelen hablar y entender . . . ,” one of many references to the use of African lingua francas. Sandoval (1956:60) gives Cacheu, in modern Guinea-Bissau, as the principal port in “Guinea,” as West Africa was still called. He indicates (90) that most slaves arriving in Cartagena came from Cape Verde, Cacheu, S˜ao Tom´e, and Angola. He notes (94) that from Cape Verde and S˜ao Tom´e came bozales (who speak no Portuguese or Spanish), ladinos raised on the islands, “que hablan lengua portuguesa,” and naturales, born on the islands and baptized as children (and also speaking Portuguese). Blacks from Guinea, according to Sandoval (1956:64), “aun estando en su gentilidad, suelen los principales preciarse de aprender nuestra lengua . . .” Referring to the Kongo kingdom, he notes that “. . . las mujeres de los grandes se precian mucho de saber leer y o´ır misa cada d´ıa” (86) evidently in Portuguese. He makes reference to the Angolan use of the term encombo for cattle (88), a term which survives as ngombe in the lengua of San Basilio de Palenque. On several occasions, Sandoval makes reference to the diversity of African ethnic groups and languages spoken on S˜ao Tom´e. For example (83): “De aqu´ı [ = S˜ao Tom´e] . . . salen al rescate de todas las varias naciones que desde la sierra Leona hemos referido y demarcado en este y aquel cap´ıtulo.” He also states (94) that “los negros de la isla de San Thom´e (que es como puerto de donde salen los nav´ıos para el rescate de los negros que com´unmente decimos venir de San Thom´e, y no son sino de la tierra ﬁrme, reinos y puertos que hemos dicho, donde los espa˜noles van a su rescate) son de menos que ley que los que hemos nombrado venir de los r´ıos de Guinea, y de menos 84

Arr´azola (1970:163), Wade (1993:88).

85

Arr´azola (1970:233).

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valor . . . las castas que de ordinario traen de aquellas partes son minas, popoos, fulaos, ardas or araraes, que todo es uno, offons, tambi´en casta arda; lucumies o terranovas; barba, temnes, binis, mosiacos, agares, gueres, zarabas, iab´us, caravalies naturales o puros que decimos . . .” On another occasion (347) Sandoval refers to “los que vienen de la isla de San Thom´e, araraes, lucumies y caravalies puros . . .” Yet again (379): “Si son de San Thom´e, ardas o araraes, caravalies, lucumies, minas y otras innumerables castas que de aquella isla vienen . . .” S˜ao Tom´e even served as a transshipment point for slaves from East Africa and India: “En estas embarcaciones de San Thom´e suelen de ordinario venir algunos negros de los reinos y naciones que tratamos de la Etiop´ıa Oriental, sobre Egipto, como son mozambiques, melindes, etc., y tambi´en de all´a de la India, como ceilanes . . .” Africans in colonial Panama Politically, Panama was part of Colombia until the early twentieth century, but historically it was isolated from the remainder of Colombia and enjoyed de facto autonomy during the colonial period. Panama was the site of one of the most prolonged Afro-Hispanic demographic contacts, since almost all slaves destined for the Paciﬁc coast of Spanish America passed through Panamanian ports. With Balboa’s discovery of the narrow crossing to the Paciﬁc Ocean in 1513, the slender isthmus of Panama immediately became important to the Spanish colonial effort. To reach the wealthy colony of Peru, it was more feasible to land on Panama’s Caribbean shore and transport goods overland to the Paciﬁc coast than to travel around the tip of South America. On the return voyage, ships laden with Peruvian gold and silver sailed to the port at Panama City. The treasure was unloaded and carried overland by mule train and then along the Chagres River to the Caribbean shore, reloaded onto waiting Spanish vessels, and shipped to Spain. The ﬁrst Spanish port on the Caribbean side was Nombre de Dios, but this village lacks a good natural harbor, and frequent pirate attacks forced the treasure-shipping operation out of the area. The next Spanish port was established at Portobelo, on a deep bay providing an excellent natural harbor. Once a year ships from Spain docked at Portobelo, to receive the treasure and to sell goods from Spain and other Latin American colonies. This event drew citizens from all over Panama, and grew into a festive feria, the memory of which is still preserved in local folk traditions.86 Reﬂecting its colonial and postcolonial history, modern Panama has a large population of African origin. Afro-Panamanians descend from two different groups. Spanish-speaking Afro-Panamanians, referred to in anthropological documents as afrocoloniales, descend from slaves held during the 86

E.g. of the negros congos; Drolet (1980a, 1980b), Joly (1981), Lipski (1989), (1997).

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colonial period.87 Although found throughout Panama, the largest concentrations are along the Caribbean coast, particularly in the towns of Portobelo and Nombre de Dios. These Panamanians speak only Spanish, of the rural variety, with only a slightly higher proportion of African lexical items than found elsewhere in the country. Part of regional Afro-Panamanian culture are the negros congos, community members who participate in folkloric rituals during the annual Carnival season, and which is a partial reproduction of the life of slaves in colonial Portobelo, during the annual feria or trade fair. As part of the congo ritual comes a special way of speaking, the hablar congo, which local residents claim is derived from the earlier Afro-Hispanic pidgin or bozal speech.88 During the construction of the Panama Canal, thousands of black West Indian laborers were recruited, most of whom spoke creole English.89 Many subsequently obtained jobs in the US Canal Zone, due to their ability to communicate in English and the perception that, as “foreigners,” their loyalties would not be challenged by Panamanian nationalism. This in turn caused resentment among the remaining Panamanian population, which had already borne the brunt of American racial discrimination, and resulted in a backlash against the chombos, a derogatory term applied to the afroantillanos. The latter retreated to the English language, learning Spanish only imperfectly and continuing to identify with the West Indies rather than with Panama. Eventually, frictions were ameliorated, Afro-Antilleans were granted Panamanian citizenship, and many have risen to positions of prominence in both the US Canal Zone and in Panamanian governmental and private sectors. Most younger Afro-Antilleans speak Spanish natively, although English continues to be used frequently when speaking to community members.90 A smaller but also signiﬁcant number of workers were brought to Panama from the French Antilles, particularly Martinique and Guadaloupe, beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when a French company attempted the construction of the ﬁrst interoceanic canal. In the single year 1906–07, for example, more than 2,800 workers from Martinique and more than 2,000 from Guadaloupe arrived in Panama.91 These workers spoke the French-derived creoles of their home islands (these creoles were referred to as patois by other Panamanians), and most eventually settled on the Caribbean coast, in and around Col´on.92 87 88

89 90 91

Castillero Calvo (1969), De la Guardia (1977). Research by Lipski (1989) indicates that this assertion has a basis in historical fact, although the congo speech has largely degenerated into an inventive play language with deliberate distortion of words taking precedence over historically accurate retentions from Afro-colonial speech. See also Drolet (1980a, 1980b), Joly (1981). Westerman (1951), D´ıez Castillo (1968), Davis (1980), Conniff (1985), Lewis (1980). Cohen (1971, 1976b), Fuentes de Ho (1976), Jones (1976). 92 Ibid. (35–39). Marrero Lobinot (1984:24).

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The black population of colonial Panama was frequently as large or larger than the white population, and the latter was never very large in this colony, which served only as a way-station for trafﬁc to South America. The ﬁrst slaves were acquired in small numbers; later, the asiento or slaving monopoly brought hundreds of African slaves through the port of Portobelo, originally one of the three points ofﬁcially designated as slave entry ports (together with Veracruz and Cartagena de Indias). Determining the total number of Africans imported into Panama is rendered difﬁcult by the fact that most of the African slaves listed as arriving at Portobelo were destined for transshipment to South American destinations. Some approximate ﬁgures have been obtained, however, which demonstrate that throughout most of the colonial period, until the last decades of the nineteenth century, Panama’s black population was at least equal to the population of European origin. In the decade 1703–13, the French asiento brought nearly 7,000 slaves to Panama. The subsequent British asiento brought nearly 16,000 slaves between 1718 and 1726. More than 2,000 slaves arrived in Panama in 1734–38; the following decade brought some 1,600 more. Between 1743 and 1757, some 7,200 black slaves were legally imported into Panama; the true ﬁgures were higher. The remainder of the century saw some 5,000 African slaves arriving, and by 1803 the slave trade to Panama had effectively ended. The number of slaves using Panama as a zone of transit was much higher, at least by a factor of ten. The African origins of the Panamanian slaves are equally uncertain.93 The terms Guinea and Congo were used in Panama with the same vague reference as in the rest of Spanish America. As the major crossover point for slaves destined for western South America, Panama received the full crosssection of slaves sent to other colonies, and the demographic proﬁle changed over time as the Spanish obtained slaves from various European traders, dealing respectively with different areas of the West African coast. For example, Guzm´an Navarro (1982:ch. 2) feels that many of the slaves who arrived during the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century were supplied by the French, through slaving stations in the Senegambia, particularly Gor´ee. During the English period, lasting through the middle part of the eighteenth century, slaves were taken principally from the Windward Coast and the Gold Coast, although some Senegambians also arrived at this juncture. In the latter years of the eighteenth century, the Compa˜n´ıa Gaditana was authorized to import slaves, mostly from sources in the New World. This included slaves transshipped from Cartagena, Havana, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and French Antillean ports. By the end of the eighteenth century, importation of slaves from Africa had all but ceased in Panama, although thousands of slaves still remained, and new arrivals from Caribbean ports were to continue during the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century. De la Guardia (1977) provides a variety of documents 93

Fortune (1993:219–36).

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showing that slaves in colonial Panama represented the same basic crosssection of African ethnic and linguistic groups as were found in other Spanish American areas. These include Vai, Mina, Lucum´ı, Carabal´ı, Congo, Mozambique, Mandinga, Wolof, Arar´a, Biafra, Pop´o, Angola, Cuango, Fula, etc. However, this scanty documentation, consisting of a name here, another name there, does little toward resolving the issue of demographic proportions. Africans in colonial Venezuela For most of the colonial period, Venezuela imported African slaves, but it was never a major agricultural producer, nor did it have large urban centers to absorb the huge quantities of slave laborers found in such cities as Lima and later Buenos Aires and Havana. African slaves were ﬁrst brought to Venezuela in the early sixteenth century as pearl divers around Margarita Island. Africans also worked in agricultural production, including cacao, tobacco, coffee, sugar cane, and other products, but no large-scale plantation agriculture was found. Indeed, more than a single coherent colony, Venezuela was in reality a series of mini-colonies, each centered around a developing city (Cuman´a, Caracas, Maracaibo, etc.), and with local commercial and agricultural interests. Although Venezuela was ofﬁcially prohibited by Spanish monopolistic practices from selling its products to other colonies, with the help of Portuguese intermediaries, Venezuelan cacao was sold in large quantities to Mexican buyers. The seventeenth-century cacao “boom” resulted in the largest importation of African slaves to Venezuela. By the end of the century, the coastal area around Caracas contained a majority black and mulatto population. Social and economic distinctions between most whites and most blacks in Venezuela were not as marked as in wealthier colonies, and racial mixture was immediate and continuous. There were some maroon (cimarr´on) communities formed by escaped slaves, but those Africans who remained in the colonial labor force – including African-born bozales – were not as segregated from native speakers of Spanish as in the large plantations of Cuba, Brazil, and Peru.94 The distribution of African slaves in Venezuela was well delimited, with the overwhelming majority concentrated in the coastal strip on either side of Caracas.95 Smaller but signiﬁcant numbers were found in the interior of Miranda state, in Cotro, and along the eastern and southern shores of Lake Maracaibo. The total number of slaves and their descendants present in Venezuela at any given time has never been accurately calculated. The explorer Humboldt calculated some 60,000 slaves in Venezuela at the beginning of the nineteenth century,96 but this ﬁgure is at best a rough approximation. What 94 95

Wright (1990:16–17), Berm´udez and Su´arez (1995). 96 Acosta Saignes (1967:178). Acosta Saignes (1967:104).

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is known is that a signiﬁcant proportion of Africans in colonial Venezuela – perhaps as much as one third at times – lived in maroon communities known as cumbes or quilombos, creating the possibility for the retention of African linguistic and cultural elements beyond the usual period of transculturation and assimilation which affected Afro-Venezuelans living in constant contact with the white population. Given the heavy African presence in much of coastal Venezuela, particularly in the eighteenth century, Venezuelan Spanish absorbed some African lexical items, as well as cultural and musical practices.97 There is a rich Afro-Venezuelan linguistic, literary, and folkloric tradition, which is not widely known outside of the immediate area. For example, the festivals of San Juan and San Pedro, celebrated in June along the coastal region to the east of Caracas, typify the Afro-Hispanic syncretism found in much of Venezuelan culture. At the southern end of Lake Maracaibo, the festival of San Benito, celebrated in December particularly in the town of Bobures, involves the chimb´angueles, a word which refers to the musical groups which perform during the ﬁesta, and to the drums which they play.98 The religious cult of Mar´ıa Lionza (a syncretic accretion based originally on indigenous legends), prominent among the working classes throughout Venezuela, represents syncretic aspects of contact among Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans. On December 28, many Afro-Venezuelan communities celebrate the locaina, wild dances and festivals which date back to early slave-owning days when masters permitted their slaves certain days in which the usual rules of Christian conduct were temporarily suspended.99 The arrival of African slaves into Venezuela began during the sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth century was a regularly established practice. According to Acosta Saignes (1967:33–34), during the ﬁrst century and a half of slave trading in Venezuela, slaves predominantly came from West Africa, including the Senegambia, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast. During the eighteenth century, the numbers of African bozales introduced into coastal Venezuelan cities, from Cuman´a to Maracaibo, became signiﬁcant enough to raise the possibility of longer-lasting linguistic inﬂuences. Well into the eighteenth century, the principal slave-trading group in Venezuela was the French Guinea Company, who drew slaves mainly from the Senegambia. By 1713, the ofﬁcial monopoly on slave trading in Venezuela had passed to the British West Indies Company, which was drawing slaves from the Windward and Gold Coasts. Many slaves were also transshipped from Barbados, where some might have already acquired the English-based creole that had developed on that island 97 98 99

Sojo (1943), Ram´on y Rivera (1971), Pollak-Eltz (1972), Megenney (1979, 1980, 1985c, 1989a, 1990c, 1999), Mart´ınez Su´arez (1986b), Alvarez (1987). Mart´ınez Su´arez (1983, 1994), Salazar (1990). Pollak-Eltz (1991:64). Other aspects of Afro-Venezuelan culture and folklore are covered by Pollak-Eltz (1972, 1991) and Brandt (1987).

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prior to the eighteenth century. Later in the eighteenth century, slaves were also taken from British Trinidad to Venezuela; once more, it is uncertain whether these slaves spoke the English- and French-based creoles of that island. By the end of the colonial period, around 1800, Venezuela still had a population 18 percent slave, and as much as 60 percent of the remaining population had some African blood.100 The Venezuelan-Trinidad linguistic connection extended well into the postindependence period, particularly in the mining town of El Callao in Guayana province and the Paria Peninsula. The former town was founded around 1850 by gold-seekers, and brought in English and French creole-speaking Trinidadians to work in the newly opened mines. The mines were soon closed, but the workers remained, speaking vestiges of creole English and French patois.101 In G¨uiria, in the Paria Peninsula, creole-English-speaking residents continue to maintain family ties with Trinidad and St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. Calypso music predominates in this region, including many innovative songs mixing Spanish, Antillean English and French creole. Although certain well-deﬁned African areas predominated in the slave trade to Venezuela, due to the shifting alliances with European slaving companies established at particular points along the African coast, Venezuela eventually received Africans from most major linguistic and cultural groupings.102 Few well-deﬁned cultural traits from speciﬁc African ethnic groups survived in Venezuela, with the exception of some Loango ceremonies.103 100 102

101 Pollak-Eltz (1991:80) Llorente (1994, 1995). Brito Figueroa (1961:32). 103 Dom´ınguez (1989). Acosta Saignes (1967:95–106).

5

Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America: sixteenth to twentieth centuries

The Afro-Latin American bozal corpus Although Afro-Hispanic language was originally forged in West Africa, Portugal, and southern Spain, it was in Spanish America that successive generations of African-born slaves and free laborers acquired the Spanish language in the most diverse circumstances, and impressed those around them by their approximations to natively spoken Spanish. The earliest Latin American bozal texts come from highland mining regions in Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, and Colombia, and probably owe more to imitation of the already well-established stereotype of the habla de negros in Spain than from actual observation of Africans’ speech in the colonies. By the end of the eighteenth century, poets, playwrights, short-story writers, and novelists had accumulated sufﬁcient observational evidence on Afro-Hispanic language as to incorporate plausible (although probably exaggerated) imitations in their literary works. Occasional travelers’ accounts, court transcriptions, legal documents, military reports, and sundry letters and testimonies provide non-literary corroboration of bozal language. The trickle of texts antedating the nineteenth century quickly became a torrent of literary, musical, and folkloric production during the nineteenth century, as thousands of Afro-Argentines, Afro-Uruguayans, Afro-Peruvians, Afro-Puerto Ricans, and especially Afro-Cubans took their places in poems, songs, stories, and novels, reﬂecting demographic events which brought large numbers of African-born slaves to these regions in a relatively short period of time. The present chapter surveys the most salient Afro-Latin American bozal texts as well as various less easily classiﬁable linguistic byproducts of the African diaspora in Spanish America. The data will be presented in the same country-by-country order as in the preceding chapter.

The Afro-Peruvian linguistic corpus To date, the limited but signiﬁcant Afro-Peruvian bozal corpus has not been drawn into a wider perspective; the only linguistic studies are Romero (1987, 129

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1988) and Lipski (1994b). The African population in highland Peru reached its height in the mid-seventeenth century, diminishing rapidly thereafter due to a combination of high mortality, minimal reproductive possibilities, and intermingling with the indigenous population. There are, however, important documents which purport to represent the speech of bozal Afro-Peruvian speech of this time. These are primarily songs or poems associated with religious services. Particularly popular was the villancico, especially Christmas songs based on the birth of Christ and the arrival of the Reyes Magos. One text comes from Juan de Araujo (1646–1712), apparently written in the second half of the seventeenth century. This song was performed in Cuzco and possibly elsewhere, and claims to portray the speech of African bozales in seventeenth-century Peru (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #1). Another song from the same time period comes from the Cuzco seminary (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #2). Possibly also composed in the same time period, but not performed in Cuzco until 1753, is the anonymous “Pasacualillo” (Chapter Five Appendix AfroPeru #3). These early texts exemplify many key bozal features well attested in Afro-Hispanic literature from other regions. Imitation of Peninsular models was frequently at work, given the close contact between the Cuzco clergy and their counterparts in Spain. At least one example supports this notion, the song “Negro de Navidad” (text #6) by the mid-seventeenth-century Spanish composer Alonso Torices, who lived in M´alaga and Zaragoza, then apparently in many areas of Latin America. The manuscript in question was found in the Bogot´a cathedral, but apparently was also performed in Peru. Most of the Afro-Peruvian texts do not support the hypothesis of direct imitation, since the recurring traits are found in nearly all Afro-Hispanic linguistic encounters of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The degree of consistency among these bozal texts is worth considering systematically, since it suggests a relatively high degree of authenticity of the early Afro-Peruvian texts, and helps provide a picture of the language used by Africans in the ﬁrst two centuries of Spain’s wealthiest colony. Early Peruvian bozal texts show little resemblance to any contemporary Spanish dialect, but share many similarities with Afro-Hispanic language of other regions and time periods. Grammatically, there are no signs of stable creolization; common to all contact varieties of Spanish is instability of agreement, including subject-verb and noun-adjective inﬂectional agreement. Similar features are found in contemporary Peru, among Spanish-recessive bilinguals in the Andean region. There is no indication that syntactic features of early bozal Spanish survived past the ﬁrst generation. The phonological similarities with other forms of Afro-Hispanic language are more signiﬁcant, since in some regions transfer to local Spanish varieties spoken natively has been postulated. Noteworthy throughout the bozal texts is the representation of intervocalic /d/

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as r (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #18-1). In contemporary Peru, stop /d/ is found only in areas characterized by Spanish-recessive bilingualism;1 in coastal regions where an Afro-American population still remains, loss of intervocalic /d/ (presumably following an intermediate fricative stage) prevails.2 In some areas, however, the change of /d/ > [r] is found, together with the opposite shift of intervocalic /r/ > [d] (e.g. quiero > quiedo); this is exampliﬁed for the Afro-Peruvian population of Chincha by the stories of G´alvez Ronceros (1975, 1986),3 and in folkloric texts from the Ica region (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #16). Although most coastal areas of Peru ultimately adopted the “lowland/Andalusian” weakening and loss of /d/, vestiges of the occlusive or ﬂap articulation have survived vestigially among Afro-Peruvians. This suggests an accurate representation of early Afro-Hispanic pronunciation in Peru. Found throughout the early Afro-Peruvian texts is the loss of the /λ/-/y/ opposition. In modern Peru, the palatal lateral /λ/ still exists as a separate phoneme in most of the Andean highlands, including Cuzco and Puno. The phoneme /λ/ is retained in all of Bolivia. Along the Peruvian coast, /λ/ has merged with /y/, a change that began in the sixteenth century. Texts from the seventeenth-century Peruvian writer Juan del Valle Caviedes are often cited as among the ﬁrst indications of ye´ısmo in either Spain or Latin America,4 suggesting that Lima may have been in the vanguard in the loss of /λ/. The Afro-Peruvian texts are of particular importance, since most other bozal texts come from regions where ye´ısmo already affected the surrounding Spanish dialects. In the early Afro-Peruvian texts, lateralization of /r/ to [l] occurs in two contexts not found in any former or contemporary dialect of Spanish, but which are found in the majority of Afro-Iberian languages and dialects. The ﬁrst is in prevocalic environments (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #18-2). The same texts show lateralization of /r/ as the second member of o b s t r u e n t +l i q u i d onset clusters (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #18-3).5 Among seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian texts, some lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ is found. No Andean dialect of Spanish lateralizes syllableﬁnal /r/; assibilation is the only commonly occurring modiﬁcation of /r/. Coastal Peruvian dialects, even those in predominantly Afro-American areas, often elide ﬁnal /r/, but lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ is vanishingly rare. 1 3 4 5

2 Mendoza (1976, 1978). Mendoza (1976:71–81), Escobar (1978:35–36). Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #17, also Cuba (1996). Alonso (1953:247–51), Guitarte (1971), Lapesa (1980:571), Rivarola (1990:54–55). In modern Andalusia the change of /r/ to /l/ in onset clusters is occasionally found (Salvador 1978). The opposite change, of /l/ to /r/ in onset clusters, is documented for Galician and some Leonese dialects, and occurs in early Peninsular Afro-Hispanic imitations.

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Highland Spanish in Peru and elsewhere in the Andean zone is noted for the extreme resistance of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ to erosion, unlike Peruvian coastal dialects, which pattern with Caribbean and Andalusian varieties. In seventeenthcentury Afro-Peruvian bozal texts, the limitation of /s/-reduction to verb forms in -mos suggests more than just an unprincipled elimination of /s/ by Africans whose native languages did not permit this consonant in syllable-ﬁnal position (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #18-4); in such a situation, one would expect a more randomly distributed pattern of /s/-reduction, rather than the tightly constrained category which actually occurs. The conclusion to be drawn is that in regional Spanish of the time (a strong component of which was derived from Andalusia), word-ﬁnal /s/ in the weak unstressed syllable of -mos was already perceptually imprecise. Bozal speakers, acquiring Spanish under far from ideal conditions, failed to perceive the weakened sound (probably an aspiration alternating with occasional [s] as well as total elision), and pronounced no /s/ at all. After the seventeenth century, the locus of bozal Spanish in colonial Peru shifted from the highland mines and the settlements at Potos´ı and Cuzco to the coastal areas centering on Lima. The documentation of Afro-Peruvian language is not continuous; following the seventeenth-century texts, no bozal examples are found until the very end of the eighteenth century, although indirect evidence of Afro-Hispanic speech for Lima and its environs appears earlier in the eighteenth century. By the ﬁnal decades of the colonial period, Africans worked throughout Lima, as domestic servants, in public works, as street vendors, as teamsters and laborers. Under these circumstances, Spanish speakers would be in frequent contact not only with Africans and Afro-Americans, but also with their speech patterns. For instance, street vendors or pregones developed characteristic chants to sell their wares.6 Each vendor used some form of Africanized Spanish, ranging from rudimentary bozal speech to more ﬂuent varieties, but the fact that citizens could remember these chants decades after the vendors had disappeared is testimony to the deep-seated penetration of bozal speech patterns (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #15). Indirect comments on the speech, music and other behavior of Africans in nineteenth-century Peru permit some conclusions as to bozal language at this time.7 Beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century, a new group of bozal Peruvian texts emerges, representing a more evolved Afro-Hispanic language, concentrated in coastal regions. The nineteenth-century Afro-Peruvian texts bear a much closer resemblance to contemporary vernacular speech of the Peruvian coast, as well as to Afro-Hispanic dialects elsewhere in Latin America. The ﬁrst surviving text from the second period of Afro-Peruvian documentation is actually from a highland region, an anonymous entrem´es from 1797 (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #7). The “Entrem´es del Huamanguino entre un Huantino 6

Ayarza de Morales (1939).

7

Estenssoro Fuchs (1988).

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y una Negra para la Navidad en el Monasterio del Carmen de Huamanga, a˜no de 1797” was signed by “una R. R. Madre del Monasterio de Santa Teresa para su representaci´on en la Navidad del a˜no 1797.” If this attribution is correct, then at least some Peruvian nuns were engaged in literary pastimes similar to those of Sor Juana, in another American colony, a century earlier. Unfortunately, nothing is known about the author of this work, or the circumstances of its composition. The Quechua of the Huamanguino is accurate, as is the intercalation of Spanish and Quechua segments in the speech of the indigenous characters. Neither the indigenous characters nor the Negra are portrayed ﬂatteringly, but neither does the play contain the crude stereotyping and puns of the Golden Age habla de negros. The linguistic characteristics of bozal speech are all found in independently veriﬁed specimens of Afro-Hispanic speech, and the black woman’s use of occasional Quechua elements is consistent with the living patterns of black servants and slaves in highland areas. In the balance, this text provides an important insight into a period of Afro-colonial history that is scarcely represented by other documentation. The other highland Afro-Peruvian language fragment comes from the “Entrem´es para la Navidad que se ha de representar en el Monasterio del Carmen, siendo recreacionera la se˜nora Sor Manuela G´alvez” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #8). This play was written in 1828 in Ayacucho, and is linguistically very similar to the play from Huamanga. Despite the apparent attribution of authorship, this text is essentially as anonymous as its predecessor, since nothing is known about “Sor Manuela G´alvez.”8 In this entrem´es, the black character speaks much more Quechua, but a broken Quechua that can be reconstructed by contemporary speakers only with some difﬁculty. The language, although not as highly deformed as in the Huamanga text, is consistent with other reproductions of Afro-Hispanic pidgin, which lends credence to the author’s depiction of the black servant’s broken Quechua. The authors of both plays were evidently Quechua-Spanish bilinguals, who found Africans’ limited proﬁciency in either language amusing and worthy of inclusion in their literary texts. Presumably, these two surviving plays are merely part of what was once a much more widespread literary production, more of which may come to light one day. In these texts, the black characters shift into Quechua, thus constituting the only known Afro-Hispanic texts which document what must have been a much more widespread phenomenon, the use of indigenous languages by African slaves. The remaining Afro-Peruvian texts represent the speech of coastal regions, mostly Lima. One of the most proliﬁc sources of Afro-Peruvian language was Felipe Pardo y Aliaga, a satirical writer who also imitated the speech of indigenous Peruvians. Pardo did not portray Africans in a favorable light, but his 8

In fact, Ugarte Chamorro (1974:lxxxvivi–vii) disputes this authorship.

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purported imitation of Peruvian bozal Spanish of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is completely consistent with independently veriﬁed AfroHispanic texts from other regions. Any exaggeration or distortion is probably in the area of lexicon and plot, rather than syntactic and phonological structure. Pardo employed bozal language in several texts, including the skit “Frutos de la educaci´on” of 1829, and some humorous poems (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #9, #11). Pardo was born in Lima in 1806, of a Galician father and a Peruvian mother. Shortly after his birth his family moved to Cuzco, where Felipe spent the ﬁrst years of his life. In 1815 the family temporarily returned to Lima, and in 1821, after San Mart´ın’s declaration of independence, the Pardo family traveled to Madrid. Felipe Pardo y Aliaga continued his education in Spain until his return to Peru in 1828. The young Pardo was variously a teacher and a lawyer, and began his literary activities immediately upon arriving in Lima. He was editor or publisher of several important newspapers, the most famous of which is the Mercurio Peruano. Throughout his career, Pardo was a keen observer of social and political life in Lima, and his satirical remarks rarely missed their target. His satirical writings reached their culmination in El espejo de mi tierra, a collection of local-color articles which ﬁrst came out in 1840. The Afro-Hispanic language of the poem “Mi amo se˜no´ Benarito,” as well as other satirical pieces in El espejo de mi tierra prompted the acerbic reply in the pamphlet Lima contra el espejo de mi tierra, by Bernardo Sofﬁa (1840). Pardo replied with “El tamalero” in the next number of the Espejo (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #10). This would be the last time he would use bozal language in print. Pardo was clearly in the right place at the right time to observe the ﬁnal half-century or so of Peruvian bozal language, as well as the possibly nativized Afro-Peruvian language which persists vestigially even today. Moreover, the itinerant steeet vendors typiﬁed by “El tamalero” were usually blacks, and following the abolition of slavery often were free bozales who could ﬁnd no better work opportunities. The Diccionario de peruanismos of Juan de Arona (1883:469) deﬁnes tamalero as “el vendedor ambulante (generalmente un negro bozal montado a burro) de tamales,” and cites Pardo’s poem as representative.9 In those few works in which Pardo uses bozal language, the purpose is not to ridicule the African characters in question (a servant in Frutos de la educaci´on and a street vendor in “El tamalero”), but merely to add realism to the crosssections of Peruvian life that had become his stock in trade. The longest single running text of Afro-Peruvian bozal language comes in the poem “La libertad,” by Manuel Atanasio Fuentes (born 1820), evidently written in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century (perhaps between 1840 and 1850) (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #12). This is a satirical poem mocking the 9

Mongui´o (1973:423).

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aspirations of blacks freed by abolition and the wars of colonial independence: Yo quiele s´e diput´a . . . lo blanco a tir´a calesa . . . neglo ser´a presilente, and similar lines, reveal the author’s scorn. Born in Lima of upper-middle-class parents, Fuentes was for a time the proteg´e of important politicians. Throughout, he was involved in polemical and satirical wars of words with other writers. Fuentes’ portrayals of black Peruvians’ speech in “La libertad” is far from ﬂattering, and the prevalence of the shift /r/ > [l] combined with relatively standard grammar arouses the suspicion of a crude literary stereotype. However, the poem does contain some elements that coincide with Afro-Hispanic texts from other regions (e.g. the invariant copula s´o, corresponding to the use of invariant son in Cuban bozal Spanish), use of the third person singular as invariant verb form (yo quiele, etc.). Like Pardo y Aliaga, Fuentes was in the right place at the right time to have observed authentic Afro-Peruvian speech, the last generation of bozales who still worked as street vendors and servants, and his racist parody cannot be dismissed out of hand as linguistically irrelevant. Another work providing fragments of Afro-Peruvian speech, El gran doctor Copaiba: protom´edico de la Lima jaranera, by Eudocio Carrera Vergara (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #13), was apparently written in the early years of the twentieth century, although it was not published until 1943. The author was from Ica, a region of heavy Afro-Peruvian presence, and the home to some of the last twentieth-century vestiges of Afro-Peruvian language. His literary activities were concentrated in Lima, but the solitary example of AfroPeruvian language in El gran doctor Copaiba occurs in a scene set in Ca˜nete, another region of heavy black population. The brief bozal passage in El gran doctor Copaiba is not proferred by a bozal speaker, since presumably at the time setting of the novel (apparently late nineteenth or early twentieth century), few bozales remained in Peru. Rather, the words were embedded in a song. This brief passage contains unmistakable signs of earlier Afro-Hispanic language, including reduction of onset clusters (negrito > neguito), ﬂapping of intervocalic /d/ (demonio > remonio), use of subjunctive instead of indicative (sargano for salimos), intrusive nasalization or prenasalization (de > den), etc. The grammatical underpinning of this phrase is essentially Spanish, and this passage is consistent with other two- and three-sentence fragments of AfroHispanic language which have been collected in Ica and other Peruvian regions with a signiﬁcant rural black population. The text gives ample evidence of the author’s intimate knowledge of the folklore and customs of Ica and Ca˜nete, and it is likely that this bozal morsel is more than a mere literary invention. Another brief glimpse into what might have been Afro-Peruvian bozal language in the nineteenth century comes in the neo-realist novel Matalach´e, by Enrique L´opez Alb´ujar (1872–1969). L´opez Alb´ujar was born in the coastal Peruvian city of Chiclayo, and from 1873 until 1886 he lived in Piura, a city to which he would continue to return, and which forms the setting for Matalach´e.

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The novel is set in the early nineteenth century, beginning in 1816, when a slave-fed plantation society still prevailed in Piura and other coastal areas of Peru. The title comes from the nickname given to Jos´e Manuel, a mulatto slave that L´opez Alb´ujar (himself a mulatto) partially modeled after himself. Like so many other literary works dealing with Afro-Hispanic populations, Matalach´e deals with illicit cross-racial intimacy during the most strictly enforced racial separation of the slaving period. Perhaps because of his own racial background, L´opez Alb´ujar does not treat this theme as luridly as in the writings of many other Latin American authors; instead, he seeks to make Matalach´e an extension of his entire literary production, designed to portray all aspects of the Peruvian population. Although Afro-Peruvian speech does not ﬁgure prominently in this novel, several key characters are made to speak in fashions differing from the neutral language of the narration and of the white characters. Jos´e Manuel himself speaks a vernacular coastal Spanish, replete with lost consonants and contractions. This is not “Afro-Peruvian” language except inasmuch as it represents the most colloquial speech of the lower classes on the coast, among which Afro-Americans are disproportionately represented. A bozal slave (a “congo”), speaks with deﬁnitive Afro-Hispanic pidgin traits (Chapter Five Appendix AfroPeru #14). In other works, L´opez Alb´ujar proved to be an accurate and careful observer of indigenous-inﬂuenced highland Spanish, and given his personal background, the reader will not suspect him of overt racism and facile stereotyping in his historical portrayal of the Peruvian bozal population. The history of African slavery in Peru did not experience the sudden infusion of African-born laborers at the end of the eighteenth century, such as happened in the Caribbean as a result of the sugar plantation boom. By the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century, African-born bozal Peruvians were increasingly scarce. In some isolated cases, Africans, free and slave, retained some aspects of bozal language beyond the ﬁrst generation, but approximation to local Spanish dialects was increasingly close. Given the high density of native Spanish speakers as compared to the small number of bozales, the latter had more opportunities for acquiring typical Spanish phonological patterns. Africans in Lima absorbed linguistic features of the lowest working classes, some of whom worked in the same professions, while Africans working as domestic servants often acquired an incongruous overlay of aristocratic expressions and mannerisms, giving rise to the habla palangana,10 the Peruvian equivalent to the Cuban stereotype of the negro catedr´atico. Acquisition of Spanish grammatical structures, in particular morphological agreement and syntactic patterns involving prepositions, articles, and relative pronouns, lagged behind pronunciation in the development of bozal language. Afro-Peruvian language of the nineteenth century contains 10

Romero (1987:159–60).

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frequent grammatical distortion, but even the order of major syntactic constituents and overall complexity of sentences is closer to Spanish than in the seventeenth-century examples, with truncated sentences and limited syntactic complexity. The Afro-Bolivian corpus The African population rapidly dwindled in modern Bolivia (known in colonial times as Alto Per´u), although an identiﬁable Afro-American population still remains in the Yungas to the east of La Paz.11 It is difﬁcult to distinguish those early colonial Afro-Hispanic texts from Bolivia and those from the remainder of Peru. Only two anonymous seventeenth-century songs, both written in the Peninsular habla de negros, can be traced to Bolivia. One is the bozal song “Esa noche yo baila” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #4). Yet another anonymous text from Alto Per´u, apparently written in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, is the villancico “Afuela apalta” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #5). These songs are identical to those from seventeenth-century Peru and Spain, and do not warrant a separate analysis; indeed, imitation of Spanish models is the most likely source for these “Bolivian” documents. Following these early examples, which suggest no independent Afro-Hispanic language in Bolivia, but rather the literary imitation of established Peninsular stereotypes, the AfroBolivian corpus is nonexistent until the beginning of the twentieth century, when a few stories representing the late nineteenth century uncritically attribute to black Bolivians a language which contains some bozal characteristics (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Bolivia #1). Most of the features represent the speech of the Bolivian lowlands or llanos, including aspiration/loss of ﬁnal /s/ and diminutives in -ingo, but a few cases of intervocalic /r/ > [l] as well as the extent of phonetic erosion may reﬂect a legitimate Africanized Spanish, perhaps spoken natively by descendants of slaves in isolated Bolivian villages. The contemporary Afro-Bolivian population has intermarried with the Aymaras, most speak Aymara as well as Spanish, and identify themselves as more Aymara than black. The preceding examples contain legitimate eastern Bolivian regional characteristics. Within the central Yungas valleys, however, reduction of /s/ is not a normal concomitant; in fact this region shares with the Bolivian Altiplano a very resistant syllable-ﬁnal /s/. Among the remaining features of the Afro-Bolivian texts, few are typical of Aymara interference, which is usually characterized by reduction of the Spanish 5-vowel system to three vowels, a tendency towards OV word order, pleonastic or non-agreeing direct object lo in combination with inanimate object noun phrases, and a wide gamut of lapses in subject-verb and noun-adjective agreement. This is 11

Leons (1984a, 1984b).

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exempliﬁed in a Bolivian story (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Bolivia #2), whose black character speaks “en su castellano peculiar y tonadeante que pos´ee esta raza de color” (Pizarroso 1977:111), but which is in reality an Aymara-based interlanguage. Despite these examples, Spedding (1995:324) asserts that AfroBolivians “speak a dialect of local Spanish with an acent and styles of expression different from those used by Aymara-Spanish bilingual speakers,” while the language of the Afro-Bolivian community of Chicaloma is described as “. . . el aymara y el castellano con ciertas variantes fonol´ogicas.”12 Angola Maconde (2000) also gives some brief examples of contemporary Afro-Bolivian speech (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Bolivia #3). Conversion of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ to /l/ does not normally occur anywhere in Bolivia, while the shift /r/ > [l] in onset clusters and the change of intervocalic /d/ to [l] are exclusively Afro-Hispanic phenomena, documented since the early seventeenth century. It would appear that some form of Africanized Spanish characterized by these phonetic traits may have at the very least persisted in isolated Bolivian areas at least through the end of the nineteenth century. The Afro-Mexican linguistic corpus The African presence in Mexico has been the subject of intense research, beginning with the superb study of Aguirre Beltr´an (1972; ﬁrst edn. 1946), and scholars continue to delve into this little-known dimension of Mexican history. In the linguistic realm, however, there has been surprisingly little work done on what was once a rich mosaic of Afro-Hispanic contact phenomena. In fact, with one exception, the only “Afro-Mexican” linguistic studies have focused on contemporary manifestations of Afro-mestizo culture in Mexico: Aguirre Beltr´an’s (1958) ethnographic study of the Afro-mestizo town of Cuajicuinalapa makes brief mention of vestigial Afro-Hispanic language; Althoff (1994) describes the contemporary speech of this area, in which nearly all the most un-Spanish traits have disappeared, but in which the suprasegmental characteristics still sound remarkably like vernacular Caribbean Spanish, with a strong African background.13 One of the early Afro-Mexican texts discussed by Megenney (1985b) contains clearly Portuguese elements (Chapter Five Appendix AfroMexico #1). The reference to S˜ao Tom´e is relevant, since the Portuguese slaving station on that island reached its peak around 1640, and slaves who had been held on that island would be expected to speak a Portuguese-based pidgin or 12 13

Gobierno Municipal de la Paz (1993:6). Aparicio Prudente et al. (1993) provide a glossary of Costa Chica Afro-mestizo lexical items. Afro-mestizo musicology and culture is also described by Guti´errez Avila (1988) and P´erez Fern´andez (1990). The language of earlier generations of Africans is covered only in the groundbreaking work of Megenney (1985b), which brings to light several previously unknown AfroMexican texts. Zimmermann (1993, 1995) provides additional commentary on Afro-Mexican texts. Mendoza (1956) contains other unanalyzed Afro-Mexican texts.

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creole, possibly even as a native language. The remaining bozal texts from colonial Mexico are indisputably Spanish. The principal Afro-Mexican bozal texts are all anonymous songs, whose time and place of composition can only be approximately determined. One is a song, apparently from Puebla, which once had the second-largest black population of Mexico, after Mexico City (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #2). There is no date of composition for this song, but the language is both modern and devoid of the most non-Spanish bozal characteristics. Most verbs are nearly or totally conjugated in accordance with normal Spanish usage. Noteworthy above all is the loss of word-ﬁnal /s/ and /r/, typical of coastal Caribbean pronunciation as well as earlier bozal language but not found in any interior region of Mexico, where ﬁnal consonants are tenaciously retained. Another song (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #3) is apparently from Morelia, Michoac´an, where blacks once worked in mining and domestic servitude. There is no date for this text, but the language is identical with that of seventeenth-century Spanish Peninsular habla de negros, with the addition of a few possibly Portuguese items (home < homem for hombre, quere < quer for quiere, etc.). It is possible that blacks in early colonial Mexico once spoke in this fashion (Sor Juana’s villancicos, if accurate, would point in this direction), but given the formulaic repetition of elements found in Golden Age literary parodies, the text is suspect. Coastal Oaxaca state in Mexico still contains the last remnants of the Afromestizo population, and one surviving text purportedly from Oaxaca contains phonetic deformations typical of the rural coastal speech which exists even today along the coasts of Oaxaca and Guerrero (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #4). As with the song from Puebla, this text is probably a reasonable approximation to Afro-Mexican speech sometime during the eighteenth century. Most of the modiﬁcations are phonetic and consistent with prevailing tendencies in this region. The remaining Afro-Mexican bozal texts consist of Baroque villancicos, following Peninsular patterns, and which represent at best a highly exaggerated version of the Spanish pidgin spoken by bozales in seventeenth-century Mexico (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #5). The pronunciation Zuz´e for Jos´e in (#5) suggests a Portuguese inﬂuence, as does the mention of the Afro-Brazilian musical instrument birimbao (berimbau). Thus this text may not represent Mexico at all, even though performed at times in that colony. In the early seventeenth century, the composer Gaspar Fernandes (1585–1629) (born in Spain but living in Antigua, Guatemala and then Puebla, Mexico) wrote “Eso rigor e repente” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #6). This song is cast in the Peninsular habla de negros mold, and contains no elements suggestive of a developing Afro-Mexican language. From 1653 comes the song “A siolo Flasiquiyo” by Juan Guti´errez de Padilla (Chapter Five Appendix AfroMexico #7); as with the other seventeenth-century “Afro-Mexican” texts, the

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verses typify the Peninsular stereotypes.14 Although following in the established Golden Age pattern, these texts contain demonstrably Afro-Hispanic elements, such as magre < madre, pagre < padre also found in Palenquero, as well as in some vernacular varieties of Spanish. From the seventeenth century come some anonymous songs (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #10). By far the most extensive “Afro-Mexican” songs are the villancicos of Sor Juana In´es de la Cruz and Gabriel de Santillana (Chapter Three Appendix #46–47), written in the 1670s. The early Afro-Mexican corpus contains several phenomena which are typical of Afro-Hispanic language elsewhere, albeit not surviving to the present in any non-creole dialect of Spanish. The ﬁrst involves the frequent shift of intervocalic /d/ to [r] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-1), conversion of prevocalic /r/ to /l/) (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-2), and in onset clusters (e.g. negro > neglo) (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-3). Among phonetic modiﬁcations which are still to be found among Spanish dialects, albeit not in highland Mexico, early Afro-Mexican texts demonstrate lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ > [l] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-4). Erosion of ﬁnal /r/ is commonplace, not only in inﬁnitives but also in words ending in – or (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-5). Among the ﬁrst Afro-Mexican texts, loss of /s/ was primarily found in the verbal desinence /-mos/, following the patterns established in Golden Age Spain and found in contemporaneous bozal texts from Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-6). A few of the Afro-Mexican texts from later periods reﬂect a more systematic loss of ﬁnal /s/, in which the original morphological conditioning is disappearing. For example, from Puebla comes la mujere; from the Costa Chica de Oaxaca come adi´o, vite, pu´e, que baila este son, langohta, mihtequito, Di´o, eta, cota. The texts in question are apparently from the eighteenth century, and contain other examples of a more Caribbean/coastal pronunciation, including loss of ﬁnal /r/ and occasional elision of /d/. Although today the Costa Chica exhibits high rates of weakening of /s/ and word-ﬁnal /r/, as does the speech of Veracruz at the lower-working-class level, Puebla is noted for its strong retention of /s/ and /r/ in all positions. Finally, a few early Afro-Mexican texts show paragogic vowels instead of ﬁnal consonant loss (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-7), following trends found in other seventeenth- to eighteenth-century bozal examples. A couple of more modern texts also present vestigial or remembered AfroMexican speech. A son jarocho from Veracruz state (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #12) is primarily in standard Spanish, except for the elimination of ﬁnal /r/ in verbal inﬁnitives. However, in the ﬁrst line, “Jes´us Mar´ı que me espant´a,” the unconjugated inﬁnitive is clearly a bozal carryover. Most 14

Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #8 contains other songs by Gaspar Fernandes.

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modern imitations of Afro-Mexicans simply make use of phonetic traits such as aspiration of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ and loss of word-ﬁnal /r/, for example in a couple of stories from Colima, on the Paciﬁc coast of Mexico (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #13). Much more signiﬁcant as a linguistic and cultural document is the Guaranducha of Juan de la Cabada (1980), a musical drama meant to be a comparsa from the Campeche carnival (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #11). Most of the characters are black, and they alternate between regional coastal Spanish (with much loss of /s/, /r/, and /d/), “African” speech (including some elements recognizably Yoruba or pertaining to other Afro-Cuban rituals), and bozal Spanish. Little is known about this work, which depicts Afro-Mexican carnivals which survived until the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century. The author declares that the work is based on his memory of comparsas which he witnessed during his childhood: “Para entonces, en la ciudad de Campeche, los participantes no eran negros. Vecinos de los barrios de Santana, San Rom´an, San Francisco, Santa Luc´ıa, se pintaban para ﬁgurar serlo alg´un mulato, uno que otro cuarter´on, mestizos claros, mestizos con mayor dosis de sangre maya.”15 Found in the play are the following bozal or post-bozal traits: (1) unconjugated inﬁnitives (lacking ﬁnal /r/) as invariant verb: Ay, mi se˜nora, de tanto que yo te am´a . . . ¿Que yo lo ten´e econd´ıo, Candemo? ¿Y a’onde nangand´a t´u? (2) Use of unconjugated inﬁnitives with auxiliary verbs, similar to creole p a r t i c l e +v e r b constructions: no me siga’ mole’t´a. (3) Reduction of onset clusters: record´a que yo te comp’´a tu sombrerito T´u quer´ıa un neguito (4) Use of inﬁnitive with explicit preverbal subject, a combination virtually nonexistent in Mexican Spanish: ahora ver´a pi˜no´ n de la mata pa yo cur´a . . . (5) Use of the portmanteau article/determiner nan. This element was sometimes included as a preﬁx to nouns and verbs, possibly suggesting prenasalized consonants; it dœs not appear to be related to the portmanteau item lan/nan found in Golden Age and some nineteenth-century Caribbean bozal texts:16 preguntando po’ la casa ’e nan Figueremo. Pu´e’ nanaita, se˜no´ ’ ju´e’, que ya nanans´e tr´e’ d´ıa se sal´ı’ nanchiquit´ın de nancasa. Ese mero nandi-quer´ıa yo dec´ı’, se˜no´ . Bueno’ d´ıa’ nanpapa´ıto. Bueno’ d´ıa’, nanchiquit´ın. ¿Y a’onde nangand´a t´u? Nanpasiando. 15

De la Cabada (1980:9).

16

Lipski (1987c, 1992b).

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(6) Use of voseo verbs ending in dithongs -ai and -ei. These forms were found by Aguirre Beltr´an (1958) for the Afro-Mexican village of Cuijla, although they have since disappeared:17 Ora recordai que tenei padre. Although the bozal population has long since disappeared from Mexico, the isolated Afro-mestizo communities of the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxaca and the existence of former maroon villages such as Yanga and its environs are receptacles of language which differs subtly but noticeably from the remainder of Mexican Spanish dialects. The existence of plays and carnival songs from less than a century ago in which unmistakably Afro-Hispanic language appears unglossed suggests that the trail may not be entirely cold, and it is not inconceivable that additional Afro-Mexican linguistic data will be uncovered. Afro-Argentine and Afro-Uruguayan linguistic texts An intriguing corpus purports to depict the speech of African bozales in Buenos Aires and Montevideo from the middle of the eighteenth century to the midnineteenth century. A few Afro-Porte˜no (Afro-Rioplatense) texts give an idea of what native-born Afro-Hispanic language may have sounded like in the late nineteenth-century R´ıo de la Plata zone.18 Many of these texts are humorous or even derisive, and must be utilized with the same caution which applies to any materials claiming to represent the speech of socially marginalized groups.19 The earliest known bozal texts from the R´ıo de la Plata come from the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century, which, extrapolating backwards, can be taken to represent Afro-Rioplatense speech of the ﬁnal decades of the eighteenth century. In view of the demographics of the African population in the R´ıo de la Plata, it is doubtful that a coherent bozal Spanish was found in Montevideo or Buenos Aires much before the second half of the eighteenth century, although individual African slaves would speak a rudimentary approximation to Spanish when ﬁrst learning this language. By the end of the eighteenth century, Afro-Hispanic speech in the R´ıo de la Plata was more than a minimal pidgin, and appears to have had some consistent traits which were recognized by native Spanish speakers and used in literary representations of bozal speech. Afro-Porte˜no texts recur throughout the nineteenth century and continue into the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century, representing little more than a century of Afro-Hispanic language, during which time little evolution can be noted. By the end of this period, only 17 19

18 Lipski(2001c). Althoff (1994). Despite the large Afro-Porte˜no corpus, and the importance of this area for Afro-Hispanic studies, prior to the insightful study of Fontanella de Weinberg (1987b), the Afro-Rioplatense bibliography consisted only of speculative lexical lists of putative Africanisms (e.g. Pereda Vald´es 1965:181–86), together with a handful of amateurish surveys (e.g. Car´ambula 1952b). Young (1990) offers a penetrating analysis of several Afro-Uruguayan literary texts. Britos Serrat (1999) offers a list of putative Africanisms in Uruguayan Spanish, some of which are of questionable authenticity.

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a few true bozales remained in the R´ıo de la Plata, but given de facto social and cultural segregation of the black population in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, it is conceivable that second-generation Afro-Americans in these cities exhibited speech patterns that did not entirely coincide with those of white criollos. Afro-Hispanic language in the R´ıo de la Plata exhibits several phonological traits not found in any contemporary variety of Argentine or Uruguayan Spanish, but which are typical of bozal texts from other Latin American areas (e.g. Peru, Mexico, the Caribbean), from Golden Age Spain, and from existent Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles. These include conversion of prevocalic /d/ to [r] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-1), shift of word-initial and intervocalic /r/ to [l] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-2), and in two-element syllable-initial consonant clusters (Chapter Five Appendix AfroRioplatense #16-3), lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-4). There is some textual evidence that interchange of syllable-ﬁnal /l/ and /r/ may once have been more common in the R´ıo de la Plata in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,20 but the examples adduced as evidence are common in nonstandard Spanish worldwide, and may be archaisms, the results of dissimilation, or non-Castilian survivals. A number of such words appear, for example, in Mart´ın Fierro, the quintessential representation of rustic Argentine speech. In none of the non-African texts does a categorical /r/ > [l] shift appear; liquids interchange almost randomly and quite often represent the change /l/ > [r]. Examples of syllable-ﬁnal liquid neutralization in Afro-Rioplatense bozal texts invariably favor /r/ > [l], the same as found in other positions, reinforcing the consistency of the literary representations and the likelihood that a high degree of phonetic accuracy is involved. Also found in Afro-Rioplatense bozal texts is the loss of word-ﬁnal /r/, especially in verbal inﬁnitives and in forms ending in – or (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-5). Afro-Rioplatense texts show widespread loss of ﬁnal /-s/, particularly in the verbal desinence /-mos/, where loss of /s/ in AfroHispanic texts was common since the latter decades of the sixteenth century in Spain and Latin America (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-6). In Afro-Rioplatense, elision of /s/ is also found when -/s/ signals nominal or adjectival plural, and much less frequently in word-internal preconsonantal position. None of the cases of loss of ﬁnal /s/ would be out of place in contemporary vernacular R´ıo de la Plata speech, but two centuries ago it is likely that ﬁnal /s/ received a stronger articulation in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Complete loss of preconsonantal /s/ is rare today even at the vernacular level, and was certainly not typical of received R´ıo de la Plata speech of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Afro-Rioplatense bozal texts, while reducing /s/ in the same environments where /s/-reduction occurs in popular R´ıo de la Plata 20

Fontanella de Weinberg (1987a:57–58, 100–01).

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speech, carried the reduction to far greater extremes than the pronunciation of any known dialect of Spanish in Argentina or Uruguay. Afro-Rioplatense bozal imitations show a few instances of paragogic vowels (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-7). The items shicoba and seclava, embodying metathesis, are almost identical to the form taken by the cognate Portuguese words in Kikongo. Since the Congo naci´on was the largest and most organized in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the proposed legitimacy of Afro-Rioplatense bozal texts as linguistic reﬂections of the time is reinforced.21 In Afro-Rioplatense bozal documents, although the /s/ of verb forms in -mos is routinely lost, paragogic vowels are found when ﬁnal /s/ follows a stressed vowel, which suggests a differential interpretation of Spanish /s/ by Africans, depending upon the prosodic structure of the word. The Afro-Rioplatense data permit the inference that /s/-weakening was already well underway in the R´ıo de la Plata area by the end of the eighteenth century, but affected principally preconsonantal /s/. Linguistic transculturation of Africans in the R´ıo de la Plata was rapid, with “Africanized” registers of Spanish not surviving beyond the ﬁrst generation of American-born blacks. As a consequence, the proportion of Afro-Hispanics in Buenos Aires or Montevideo who spoke any type of bozal Spanish would be quite limited at any given time period. Judging both by the data on the slave trade and on written attestations of Afro-Rioplatense language, the bozalspeaking population reached its peak at the turn of the nineteenth century, with the last large importation of slaves coming directly from Africa, or via Brazil. In earlier centuries, African-born slaves must have spoken bozal Spanish, but their numbers were small enough and acquisition of Spanish was rapid enough as to preclude any literary representation. The last wave of African slaves, coming at a time when literary representation of vernacular language was very intense, gave rise to a ﬂeeting moment of bozal language immortalized by observers of the time. Several factors combined to thrust the language of these newly arrived Africans into a position of prominence transcending the demographic strength of the African-born population. One was the frequent employment of Africans as pregones or street vendors, shouting their services and bringing their version of the Spanish language from house to house.22 Another was the important role played by black soldiers in the wars of independence and in the internecine wars in Argentina and Uruguay. The voice of the black soldier was imitated, sometimes in expressions of admiration and gratitude, sometimes with scorn. These conﬁgurations brought to the attention of the general public some aspects of Afro-Rioplatense bozal speech, which at this time was not demographically predominant in any region of the R´ıo de la Plata. 21 22

Lanuza (1967), Pereda Vald´es (1965), Rodr´ıguez Molas 1957, 1961). E.g. Car´ambula (1952a, 1952b).

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Afro-Rioplatense bozal speech began its decline even before the AfroAmerican population of Montevideo and Buenos Aires started on the road to ethnic oblivion. The “window of opportunity” for observation of bozal language is the turn of the nineteenth century, although the black population of the R´ıo de la Plata continued to be a signiﬁcant demographic and political force through the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, bozal language and Afro-Hispanic cultural patterns have faded from memory, and even the last cultural remnants no longer bring before the public the sociolinguistic reality of a century and a half ago. The Buenos Aires Carnival is no more, and the “African” comparsas of the Montevideo Carnival have more white than black participants.23 Citizens of Argentina and Uruguay are often unaware of an earlier Afro-Hispanic linguistic and cultural presence in their nations, and few would link features of contemporary R´ıo de la Plata Spanish and any type of African speech. That Afro-Hispanic language was once prominently, if not frequently, heard in Buenos Aires and Montevideo has been obscured by political and demographic events that have profoundly changed the character of R´ıo de la Plata society and language. The Afro-Cuban bozal corpus By far the greatest number of Afro-Hispanic bozal representations come from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba. The literary outpouring of Cuban costumbrista literature, together with travel narratives, anthropological works, popular songs, and even a few religious texts, placed the speech of Cuban bozales in a prominent position. Brief fragments of Afro-Cuban language occasionally appeared in stories, newspaper articles, and travelers’ descriptions.24 A representative selection of these texts is found in the appendix; several of the most important texts will be analyzed in this chapter. The accuracy of many of the texts is questionable, but the common denominators are also many, and given the high degree of consistency among the texts, as well as the possibility of verifying some of the linguistic traits in vestigial Afro-Hispanic language of the twentieth century, it appears that at least some Cuban authors gave a reasonable approximation to bozal language. The ﬁrst known explicit reference to Cuban bozal Spanish comes in one of the most curious linguistic documents of all times, the Explicaci´on de la doctrina christiana acomodada a la capacidad de los negros bozales, written by Nicol´as Duque de Estrada and published in 23 24

Ayestar´an (1990). Among the latter, the Puerto Rican journalist Luis Bonafoux, upon a visit to Havana in the late 1800s, remarked on a black calling out “agua y duse,” presumably agua de dulce (Bonafoux 1990:390). While not clearly pertaining to bozal language rather than to phonetically reduced vernacular Cuban Spanish, this cry ﬁts in with the calls of pregones in nineteenth-century Cuba, Peru, Uruguay, and Argentina, many of whom were black bozales or ladinos.

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1797, with a second edition published in 1818, and a third (upon which nearly all subsequent studies have been based) published in Havana and Bologna in 1823. Duque de Estrada was a Cuban priest in the Havana diocese, and in contrast to most Cubans of the time – including the clergy – he felt that bozal Africans were not only in urgent need of Christian redemption, but were mentally and morally ﬁt to receive catechism. The premise of his pamphlet was that any priest could teach the Catholic catechism to the rudest bozal, if only the language and style were simpliﬁed, and the arcane metaphors and allegories of the Bible replaced by commonplace situations found in the Cuban ingenios. Much of the text in effect constitutes a training manual for Cuban priests: instructions on the proper method of imparting Christian doctrine to African slaves are interspersed with sample sermons and explanations. By today’s standards, Duque de Estrada was a racist who adopted a condescending and paternalistic stance toward Africans, and who was cruelly indifferent to the onerous labor performed by blacks on Cuban sugar estates, and indeed tacitly accepted slavery itself. Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:101) note that the book “reﬂeja una insensibilidad aterradora hacia los derechos m´as elementales de los esclavos. Jesucristo . . . es un mayoral bueno . . . la obligaci´on del siervo, si quiere salvarse, es trabajar intensamente para el amo, pues tal era la voluntad de Dios . . .” For the period, however, Duque was ahead of his time in his notion that Africans could receive the most subtle forms of religious instruction, and deserved such training. It is not clear how carefully Duque had observed bozal speech as used by blacks in Cuba. The author describes bozal speech as “aquel lenguaje de q. usan ellos sin casos, sin tpos., sin conjunciones, sin concordancias, sin orden . . .”25 This general characterization is similar to later accounts by Pichardo, Bachiller y Morales, and other observers of Afro-Cuban speech (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #65). The Doctrina contains only a single purported example of bozal language as used by Cuban blacks: “pa nuetro ta seno cielo.”26 The phonetic deformations are consistent with Afro-Hispanic pidgin of other areas, but when Duque de Estrada offered examples of sermons which might be offered to Cuban bozales in a contrived version of their own speech patterns, there are no phonetic modiﬁcations, only the most general grammatical reductions (use of third person singular as invariant verb stem, loss of articles, and very simple phrase structure), e.g.: “yo soi un pobre esclavo, yo tiene dos gallinas no m´as, gente tiene suelto su cochino, cochino come mi gallina. Yo ya no tiene con que comprar tabaco ni nada . . . yo va andando en cueros?”27 In the balance, the Duque de Estrada text is more important for the elements which are lacking, rather than for the presence of deﬁnitive bozal characteristics. A careful perusal of the Doctrina reveals no hint – direct or indirect – that anything remotely resembling a stable creole was used by Cuban blacks as of the end of the eighteenth century. 25

Lavi˜na (1989:67).

26

Ibid. (75).

27

Ibid. (119).

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One of the earliest surviving bozal texts from Cuba is an anonymous eighteenth-century canto de cabildo (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #1). In addition to exhibiting many vernacular Cuban phonetic traits, including gemination of obstruents following the reduction of syllable-ﬁnal liquids, this text gives the ﬁrst hint of what was to be a commonly recurring feature of Cuban bozal Spanish, the use of so(n) as an uninﬂected copula. In this example, no creoloid features appear. Evidently written in Havana around the turn of the nineteenth century,28 during the Napoleonic period, comes the mysterious document “Proclama que en un cabildo de negros congos de la ciudad de La Habana pronunci´o su presidente, Rey Monfundi Siliman” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #2). For Alvarez Nazario (1974:137), this document is the oldest specimen of Afro-Antillean Spanish, but the format of this pamplet, giving a pidginized Spanish version “en dialecto natural y propio de ellos” in one column and an en face translation in Spanish in a parallel column, casts some doubt on the authenticity of the examples, or at the very least of the authorship, since the text appears to have been written by a white native speaker of Spanish, rather than by a true Congo, whether bozal or ladino. The language of the text bears a striking resemblance to the pseudo-bozal writings of Creto Gang´a (Jos´e Crespo y Borb´on) a few decades later, although the humorous and self-mocking tone is absent. In the “Proclama” the supposed author exhorts other Afro-Cubans to join in the defense of Havana against the armies of Napoleon, based on loyalty to Spain. In addition to the serious tone of the document, the text contains none of the word-play or outrageous distortion of elements found in other putative bozal examples, and which often represent white speakers’ crude parodies of secondlanguage Spanish. Among the authentic elements of the “Proclama” that can be veriﬁed with other authenticated specimens of Afro-Hispanic language are the following: (1) Intrusive nasalization. This occasionally takes place word-internally (mingo < amigo, unt´e < usted, traind´o < traidor), but more often signals the prenasalization of word-initial obstruents, a process common in many AfroHispanic idiolects for several centuries: graciandio < gracias a Dios, ingrit´a < gritar, ancant´a < cantar, anbail´a < bailar, lan grecia < la(s) iglesia(s), lan pare < lo(s) padre(s), lan Vrige < la Virgen, lan dinela < el dinero, lan crabo < el esclavo, endice < dice, and others. (2) Use of the bare inﬁnitive as invariant verb form instead of conjugated verbs: ven´ı [venimos, hemos venido], ingrit´a [gritaba(n)], curr´ı [corr´ıa], sab´ı [saben], mat´a [matan/han matado] etc. The bare inﬁnitive was one of the manifestations of the Afro-Hispanic verb, together with the invariant third person singular form, also manifested in the “Proclama”: save [saben], jase [hacen], dice [dicen], mila [miran], etc. 28

Alvarez Nazario (1974:137) gives the date as 1808.

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(3) Use of other inappropriately conjugated verb forms or innovative creations: viti [han visto], me vita [he visto], tingue [tiene], vite [han visto]. These deformations are not commonly attested in other written imitations of Afro-Hispanic language, but are frequent, for example, in the speech of the negros congos of Panama.29 (4) Use of so(n) as invariant copula. This form has been attested in AfroCuban texts, and is also found in some Afro-Puerto Rican specimens, as well as in Chinese pidgin Spanish examples from Cuba, the Spanish spoken by descendants of black Americans in Saman´a, Dominican Republic, and very occasionally in Afro-Peruvian and Afro-Uruguayan texts):30 “. . . rice que son su mrec´e una larron.” (5) Use of the pidgin English verb tiﬁ-tiﬁ “to rob” (< English thief ), an early manifestation of the presence of West African pidgin English (presumably brought from the coast of Nigeria, by Yoruba-speaking lucum´ıes and Eﬁk-, Ijoand Igbo-speaking carabal´ıes), later documented by Ortiz (1916) for the early twentieth century. The presence of this item in the “Proclama” is particularly signiﬁcant since the pamphlet was presumably written at the beginning of the period of intensive slave importation from Nigeria, and may suggest an even earlier pidgin English presence in Cuba than has previously been acknowledged. (6) Change of intervocalic /d/ to [r]: jur´ı [jud´ıos], trair´o [traidor], rise [dice], marita [malditos], Romingo [Domingo], etc. (7) Shift /r/ and /rr/ > [l] in intervocalic position and in onset clusters: bolacha [borrachos], ﬂanc´e [franceses], bandela [bandera], palente [parientes], Flancico [Francisco], dinela [dinero], mil´a [mirar], picalo [p´ıcaro], belaco [berracos], and many others. That this was not a simple stereotype is reﬂected by the many remaining instances of [r] in the text, including dir´e, se˜nore, Carabal´ı, pareci, quiere, and negro, the latter being the item most frequently stereotyped as neglo in literary texts far removed from actual speech. This change, welldocumented for Golden Age bozal texts, is indicative of the Bantu inﬂuence, since this language family does not distinguish /l/ and /r/ and normally instantiates the sole liquid phoneme as [l], often alternating allophonically with [d]. Later Afro-Cuban bozal texts do not as frequently exhibit this change, reﬂecting the predominance of Kwa/Congue-Benue languages (e.g. Yoruba, Igbo, Eﬁk) which routinely distinguish /l/ and /r/. The appearance of the /r/ > [l] shift in a document attributed to “Negros Congos” (i.e. speakers of Kikongo or related Bantu languages) suggests an authentic rendering of this group’s phonetic approximations to Spanish. The “Proclama” also contains several instances of /l/ > [r] in onset clusters, a shift which harks back to early Afro-Portuguese texts, and which indicates that neutralization of liquids in Afro-Iberian speech

29

Lipski (1989).

30

Lipski (1999c, 2002c).

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was not a unidirectional affair: crabo [esclavo(s)], brancos [blancos], diabro [diablo], jabran [hablen], diabrura [diabluras], etc. (8) The “Proclama” contains several examples of the invariant third-person pronoun eye, widely found in Afro-Cuban texts and still used by some elderly Afro-Cubans in isolated areas.31 At times eye is used as a disjunctive object pronoun instead of the usual object clitics, similar to vernacular Brazilian Portuguese: para quit´a eye su tierra ‘to take their land away from them,’ da eye copeta ‘give them muskets,’ da eye tambo ‘give them drums.’ (9) The text embodies the word jurumiga [hormigas], containing an otherwise unattested epenthetic vowel, also found in the word jurumingue of the negros congos of Panama and in the Afro-Venezuelan dances tamunangue and jurumung´a.32 (10) The “Proclama” offers several examples of metathesis involving o b s t r u e n t +l i q u i d combinations: from´a [formado], mrec´e [merced], jrocao [ahorcado], proqu´e [por qu´e]. These are frequent in the rustic vernacular Spanish that often provided the input for bozal language, but Afro-Iberian language frequently extended methathesis even further, as evidenced by many Papiamento words. (11) There are instances of /b/ > [m], a change not unheard of in vernacular Spanish of other regions, but particularly characteristic of the interface with African languages which prefer initial prenasalized obstruents over simple voiced stops: Manapate [Bonaparte], matis´a [bautizada]. (12) Omission of deﬁnite articles. There are several examples of this trait, common to many contact-varieties of Spanish and Portuguese: quema [los] conuco[s], por [la] boca [del] mor[r]o. (13) Defective noun-adjective concord and faulty morphological endings. The text abounds in such discrepancies, including la nav´ıo [el nav´ıo], la jento [la gente], la brancos [los blancos], caballere [caballeros], bolacha [borrachos], la ﬂanc´e [los franceses], la pa˜no´ [los espa˜noles], una larron [un ladr´on], la belaco [el berraco], la Santa Romingo [el Santo Domingo], lan dinela [el dinero], yo mima [yo mismo]. (14) The substitution of caballere for caballeros is attested in other AfroCuban texts, such as Villaverde’s Cecilia Vald´es: g¨ueve [huevos], dinere [dinero], bonite [bonito], jierre [hierros]. The same shift is found in the writings of the Dominican satirist Juan Antonio Alix, in his imitations of Haitians’ pidginized Spanish: le mime diable [el mismo diablo], and so forth. An early imitation of Haitians’ Spanish (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #1) also contains examples such as un cose [una cosa], while in the Dominican novel Over by Marrero Aristy (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #4), a Haitian refers to la dominicane [los dominicanos] (although conceivably referring to 31

Ortiz L´opez (1998).

32

Lipski (1997).

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la Dominicanie, “Dominican Republic” in Haitian Creole. the novel Jengibre by Pedro Andr´es P´erez Cabral (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #8) contains items like papasite [papacito], attributed to Haitians, while the mocking poem “Rabiaca del haitiano que espanta mosquitos” by the Dominican Ram´on Sur´o (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #9) provides examples like maldite moquite [malditos mosquitos]. Data collected by Ortiz L´opez among contemporary Haitian L2 speakers of Spanish in the Dominican Republic conﬁrm that the neutralization of Spanish morphological markers -o and -a to -e does indeed occur, although not to the extent found in some literary imitations.33 Given the frequency of Spanish plurals ending in -e(s) in the Caribbean, a model already existed upon which caballere could be constructed. The next explicit commentary on Cuban bozal language comes in the preface to one of the ﬁrst dictionaries of Cuban Spanish, the Diccionario provisional casi-razonado de vozes cubanas, by Esteban Pichardo. The ﬁrst edition of the Diccionario was published in 1836, but the remarks in question do not appear until the second edition, of 1849. In speaking of Afro-Cuban language, Pichardo remarked:34 Otro lenguaje relajado y confuso se oye diariamente en toda la Isla, por donde quiera, entre los Negros bozales, o naturales de Africa, como suced´ıa con el Franc´es Criollo de Santo Domingo: este lenguaje es comun e id´entico en los Negros, sean de la Naci´on que fuesen, y que se conservan eternamente, a m´enos que hayan venido mui ni˜nos: es un Castellano desﬁgurado, chapurrado, sin concordancia, n´umero, declinaci´on ni ¯ la E por conjugaci´on, sin R fuerte, S ni D ﬁnal, frecuentemente trocadas la Ll por la N, la I, la G por la V &; en ﬁn, una jerga m´as confusa mientras m´as reciente la inmigraci´on; pero que se deja entender de cualquiera Espa˜nol fuera de algunas palabras comunes a todos, que necesitan de traducci´on. Para formarse una ligera idea de esto, vertiremos una respuesta de las m´enos dif´ıciles: “yo mi n˜ ama Frasico Mandinga, neglito reburujaoro, crabo musuamo n˜ o Mingu´e, de la Cribaner´ı, branco como carabon, su˜na como nan gato, poco poco mir´a ot´e, cribi papele toro ri toro ri, Frasico dale dinele, non gurbia dinele, e laja cabesa, e bebe guariente, e coje la cuelo, guanta qui guanta” . . . los negros criollos hablan como los blancos del pa´ıs de su nacimiento o vecindad: aunque en la Habana y Matanzas algunos de los que se titulan Curros usan la i por la r y la l, v.g. “poique ei ni˜no puee considerai que es mejoi dinero que papel” . . .

These remarks have been taken by some later investigators as evidence that Cuban blacks spoke a systematic Afro-Hispanic creole, despite the fact that Pichardo explicitly attributes such language only to African-born bozales. Pichardo’s “rendering” of bozal Spanish is inherently suspect, given the crude stereotypes and locker-room humor exempliﬁed in this fragment. This fact notwithstanding, all of the deviations from monolingual Cuban Spanish found in Pichardo’s imitations can be independently veriﬁed for Afro-Hispanic pidgin, 33

Ortiz L´opez (1999a, 1999b, 2001).

34

Pichardo (1849:iv–v).

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both in Cuba and in other regions, so even Pichardo’s obvious scorn for bozal blacks and their speech did not impede him from including a reasonable linguistic facsimile. An important if somewhat obscure literary text that attempts to portray nineteenth-century Cuban bozal Spanish is the “Exclamaciones de un negro en las ﬁestas efectuadas con motivo de la inauguraci´on del patrono de este pueblo San Marcos, el d´ıa 25 de abril de 1857” by the poet Manuel Cabrera (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #3). Cabrera was born in 1824 in Artemisa, and died in 1872. He wrote d´ecimas (ten-lined poems meant to be sung) that described life on the hacienda San Marcos. Little is known about the life of this poet, most of whose verses have not been published, except that he was “un vate incorrecto, precario en concepciones y hasta poco original; pero de estro felic´ısimo y muy ingenioso, para poner en verso, a usanza de la e´ poca, el acaecimiento m´as insigiﬁcante.”35 Manuel Cabrera apparently offered an accurate description of the religious ceremonies which took place in Artemisa each year, and given the large number of black slaves who worked on the nearby plantations, he had intimate knowledge of bozal speech. Although his text contains many comically grotesque modiﬁcations of standard Spanish, his writing is not the mindless parody of the negrito that so frequently appeared in texts produced by urban writers. The linguistic features of this text are consistent with other observations of bozal Spanish. There is considerable use of the inﬁnitive as invariant verb, alternating with the invariant third person singular. There is some use of the construction ta + Vinf , the most creoloid of all bozal features and the one that links some Afro-Cuban texts to a wider Afro-Iberian creole lineage. In Manuel Cabrera’s poem this construction alternates with the progressive in -ndo, suggesting phonological erosion of the gerund rather than the inﬁnitive as the source of the verbal stem combined with the particle ta. Other pan-bozal features include unstable non-adjective agreement, incorrect assignment of grammatical gender, pleonastic clitic lo, the invariant third person pronoun neye, omission of deﬁnite articles, redundant use of the subject pronoun yo, use of invariant son as copula, and lack of any plural marking on nouns and adjectives. A favorite butt of literary humor in nineteenth-century Cuba was the negro catedr´atico, the presumptuous Afro-Cuban who wildly concocted eruditesounding nonsense words, or used real Spanish words in grotesquely improbable fashion. Catedr´aticos were not usually portrayed as bozales (although some bozal characters used similar malapropisms), but were supposed to be native or near-native speakers of Spanish, whose ﬂowery language resulted from a combination of insecurity and pomposity. That some such ﬁgures really 35

Guerra (1938:9).

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existed is beyond doubt; in all language contact situations where a subordinate group is struggling to attain social and economic legitimacy through education and self-realization, linguistic over-extension is a frequent concomitant. Among Afro-American societies in the Caribbean, the United States, and elsewhere, “fancy talking” is also a highly esteemed trait, and every community has acknowledged experts, whose “performances” are marked by improvizations based on real or invented words used with the intent to verbally dazzle, rather than to communicate a speciﬁc message (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #29, #47). One of the most extensive – and most controversial – sources of nineteenthcentury Afro-Cuban bozal language comes in the writings of Bartolom´e Jos´e Crespo y Borb´on, who under the pseudonym Creto Gang´a, wrote newspaper columns and plays in a literary version of bozal language. Crespo y Borb´on was a Spaniard, who spent most of his adult life in Cuba and who fully assimilated Cuban culture and language. Jose Bartolom´e Crespo y Borb´on was born in Galicia in 1811. Twelve years later Crespo y Borb´on moved with his family to Havana, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. By the end of the 1830s, he began writing satirical letters and poems in local newspapers. Although Crespo y Borb´on was not yet using his self-assigned African designation, there are several early attempts at using bozal language in these poems, which in comparison to his later writings, reveal him to have already listened very carefully to the speech of the Afro-Cubans that surrounded him. Cruz (1974:49) suggests that he may have worked in a sugar mill inﬁrmary; in any case, his working-class life in Havana, as well as his tendency to associate with progressive young writers and activists, virtually guaranteed that he would be in contact with Cuban bozal language. As an outsider, whose own form of Spanish was – and still is – the butt of jokes and bufo comedies in Cuba (in the stereotyped gallego ﬁgure), Crespo y Borb´on would be naturally sensitive to questions of language usage, and to the power inherent in accurate imitations of particular social and cultural groups. One of Crespo y Borb´on’s pre-Creto Gang´a writings, the L´atigo del Anﬁbio, contains a dialogue between an aristocratic white woman and her black slave. The former speaks in meaningless vacuities, while the latter gives pithy responses in bozal language (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #4). The same collection contains the “Serenata del negro Pascual a Francisca,” set in a sugar mill, which is the ﬁrst of many such “dialogues” which punctuate Creto Ganga’s writings (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #5). In 1846, after the famous escalera conspiracy in which hundreds of supposedly seditious blacks were killed or deported, Crespo y Borb´on published a series of d´ecimas entitled “Laborintos y trifucas de Canav´a,” purporting to be “. . . veraero hitoria en veso de lo que pas´a en la m´acara a yo Creto Gang´a y nengrita m´ıo Frasica lucum´ı,

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cuent´a po yo memo”.36 This humorous writing was immediately picked up by the newspaper La Prensa, and thus began a long-running series of newspaper poems, articles, “reviews,” and commentaries by Creto Gang´a. The literary bozal Gang´a quickly acquired a newspaper rival, “Francisco Carabal´ı,” writing in the Faro Industrial de la Habana. It appears that Crespo y Borb´on was also the author behind Francisco Carabal´ı, although the two “Africans” at times adopted somewhat different linguistic styles. The newpspaer La Prensa, on April 11, 1849, stated that “El escritor que se ﬁrma Creto Gang´a es una verdadera especialidad en su g´enero, en ese dialecto gracioso y oportuno para expresar cosas que de otro modo ser´ıan duras de decir y m´as duras aun de escucharse . . .”37 Calcagno, in his literary dictionary, noted that “. . . bajo el seud´onimo de Creto Gang´a [Crespo y Borb´on] comenz´o una serie de s´atiras en el lenguaje llamado bozal, y bien que el uso de esa gerga semib´arbara le acarre´o una cencerrada period´ıstica, no puede negarse que por medio de ella dijo verdades que s´olo con tal disfraz pudieron haber escapado a la r´ıgida censura.”38 Although Crespo y Borb´on showed no obvious hostility toward Cuban blacks, and in fact appears to have regarded them with considerable feelings of sympathy and solidarity, there is no a priori guarantee that his use of bozal language is to be trusted. Alzola (1965:98) indicates that “representar el habla de los negros en Cuba no fue un tema festivo, sino un inter´es nacional. Tras el habla deformada de Creto Gang´a se ocultaba el peninsular . . .” Cruz (1974:56) notes approvingly Gang´a’s “supresi´on de preposiciones en determinados casos y los cambios morfol´ogicos que recoge ﬁelmente de la expresi´on bozal.” At another point (58) she states that “. . . Crespo, blanco, escog´ıa el habla de la clase humillada del pa´ıs, la ‘media lengua’ de los esclavos bozales . . .” Is this assessment accurate? If so, it would place Crespo y Borb´on in a relatively privileged position among Cuban writers – indeed among Spanish authors in general – in providing a reasonable version of bozal Spanish free of contamination from ideological burdens or racist stereotypes. The Havana newspapers of the 1840s contained other articles and commentaries written in bozal language, at least some of which were probably also written by Crespo y Borb´on, using other pseudonyms. In other instances, it appears that his Creto Gang´a prompted other Cuban writers to also try their hand at bozal language and humor. One of the most accomplished characters was “Ciriaco Mandinga,” who in the pages of El Faro Industrial de la Habana sustained a long literary dialogue with Creto Gang´a. Although some observers feel that Crespo y Borb´on was responsible for both characters, Cruz (1974:167–68) documents a number of signiﬁcant linguistic differences between the two “Africans” that make us strongly suspect two authors (or else a Crespo y Borb´on 36

Cruz (1974:49).

37

Ibid. (192).

38

Ibid. (94).

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with a much more sophisticated grasp of linguistic variation and Afro-Hispanic peculiarities than is revealed in the remainder of his writings). These differences are partly orthographic (biyete vs. villete, mug´e vs. muj´e), occasionally lexical (macho vs. bar´on), but mostly deal with subtle morphophonological differences that bespeak of true variation in Afro-Cuban bozal language. For example, for Creto’s ahuora Ciriaco has uhora. The ﬁrst is clearly more reminiscent of Papiamento awor (Lipski 1993, 1999b), while the second appears to be a simple vocalic transpostion of the Spanish word. The same holds for Creto’s ahuoy (similar to Papiamento awe) vs. Ciriaco’s uhoy. There are other apparently legitimate differences among bozal speakers (some of whom were evidently serving as linguistic models for Crespo y Borb´on and for the author behind Ciriaco Mandinga). This includes Creto’s iguariente, atrise, sintimao, dineru, and t´ıguere to Ciriaco’s goriente, tri, sitimao, ninero, and t´ıguire, respectively. Both writers use the portmanteau form nelle, but for Creto Gang´a the term refers only to simple pronouns (´el, ella, la, los, las, etc.), while Ciriaco also extends the term to cover the equivalent of de e´ l, de ella, de ellos, etc. Finally, where Creto uses the preposition in/en (e.g. en e´ l), Ciriaco uses ne < en e´ l. In this case, Ciriaco’s choice ﬁts more closely with Afro-Iberian creoles (especially Papiamento) than does Creto’s pure Spanish form. This type of variation is consistent with other observations of bozal Spanish; nearly all the variants used by Creto Gang´a and Ciriaco Mandinga are well attested elsewhere in the AfroHispanic corpus. This fact in itself does not prove that the writers involved were accurately imitating the speech of Afro-Cuban bozales, but given both internal consistency and systematic differences between the two writers, we are led to ascribe a high level of credibility to the overall imitation. Crespo y Borb´on’s literary imitations come closest to being believable when he creates conversations (or written exchanges) between two bozales. Despite the raucous parodies contained in these dialogs, it is in conversations among pidgin speakers that the greatest deviations from the target language are typically observed. A relevant comment on Afro-Cuban Spanish comes from Antonio Bachiller y Morales, a Cuban writer whose life spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century. In the late 1800s the German pioneer creolist, Hugo Schuchardt, began to investigate several forms of hybrid contact languages based on Spanish and Portuguese, including what he called “Malayo-Spanish” (i.e. Philippine Creole Spanish or Chabacano), “Negro-Portuguese” (S˜ao Tomense), and so forth. In order to gather information on what were at the time exotic linguistic phenomena, Schuchardt carried on an extensive correspondence with linguists and writers around the world. Many of Schuchardt’s long-distance investigations were subsequently published and form part of his extensive bibliography of creole studies. Around 1880 Schuchardt became interested in the possibility that a “Negro-Spanish” – pidgin, creole, or contact language – might exist somewhere in Latin America, and he focused on the area whose social history made the

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likelihood of an Afro-Hispanic contact language greatest: Cuba. Schuchardt was apparently unaware of Papiamento, which for later investigators would be the quintessence of “Negro-Spanish.” At this point, he elicited the help of Bachiller y Morales, as regards the speech of blacks in late nineteenth-century Cuba. Schuchardt never incorporated this correspondence into his writings, but Bachiller y Morales (1883) included some of the results he had gleaned for Schuchardt in a much-cited article appearing in Cuba. In the course of the article, he afﬁrmed that bozal Spanish could never be confused with the speech of Cuban-born blacks or criollos, nor with the (natively spoken) Afro-Cuban jive talk of Havana, spoken by the negros curros. In his response to Schuchardt and in the subsequent article published in the Revista de Cuba, Bachiller y Morales commented extensively on the linguistic and musical traditions of blacks in Cuba. For example (98–99): La mayor parte de los negros conservan los cantares de su tierra, con los aires y lenguas respectivas: pero los congos por lo com´un se un´ıan a los criollos y la letra de sus tangos en las ﬁestas de campo . . . era en el castellano que hablaban. Cuando los amos asist´ıan a sus ﬁestas era un medio de hacerles s´uplicas y pedirles justicia. Si el mayoral era malo, los cantores hac´ıan acompa˜nar a los ecos de sus tambores palabras signiﬁcativas: <<mayor´a come gente>> – <<mayor´a so malo>>, etc.

Bachiller y Morales continues (99): Pero es singular que las modiﬁcaciones de la lengua, al aceptarla el negro, no fuesen las mismas para el bozal o africano que para sus descendientes, y que estos introdujesen otras sobre las que la gente menos culta, especialmente de las provincias de fuera de Cuba ya hab´ıan generalizado. El negro bozal hablaba el castellano de un modo tan distinto al que sus hijos usaban, que no hay o´ıdo cubano que pudiesen confundirlos. No era s´olo la expresi´on trastornada, sino aun la inﬂexi´on el dejo especial de cada interlocutor: a oscuras, con los ojos cerrados, de cualesquiera modo podr´ıa conocerse a ese negro y si era bozal ladino o criollo. Dif´ıcilmente podr´ıa explicarse por qu´e el bozal empleaba la o y la u supliendo otras vocales . . .

Bachiller y Morales cites an anonymous mid-ninteenth-century text as an example of the bozal speech of his time; this text reveals few consistent creole features, but is rather an example of second-language Spanish (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #6). Indeed, this example is far less removed from non-African Spanish than Pichardo’s text, despite the fact that both represent the same time period. The example cited by Bachiller y Morales (published in Matanzas earlier in the nineteenth century) contains only two elements which cannot be analyzed as simply imperfectly pronounced Spanish minus a few connecting words: the element tempo instead of tiempo, contains a nondiphthongized root homologous with Portuguese and Papiamento. Bachiller y Morales also revealed his familiarity with Golden Age habla de negros imitations – citing in particular Lope de Rueda – as well as with the bozal

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renderings of his contemporaries. He conceded that the imitations were rarely motivated by the desire for linguistic accuracy: “Algunos escritores del pa´ıs, no con objeto ﬁlol´ogico sino en agradables burlas, imitaron su lenguaje corrompido en poes´ıas populares, como lo hicieron los espa˜noles en sus piezas dram´aticas que reﬂejaban las costumbres, y los portugueses que antes llenaron de negros a Lisboa” (99) . . . “Varios escritores han empleado en sus horas de buen humor el lenguaje de los bozales ladinos y el de los criollos negros . . .” (100). Interestingly, Bachiller y Morales, examining both the Lope de Rueda examples and nineteenth-century Cuban bozal language, suggested that certain deviations from Spanish usage could be attributed to Portuguese: “Si se han copiado con ﬁdelidad las escenas aludidas, se ve que los negros en Espa˜na a la h la convert´ıan en f . . . y esto me parece que ven´ıa de Portugal, pues fueron los importadores portugueses, que hacen lo mismo y han dado origen a fetizo en vez de hechizo . . .” (99) . . . “Rep´arese que lo mismo ha sucedido para el africano ladino en Cuba. Ha suprimido las eses ﬁnales; ha convertido a la h de los portugueses en f, como aqu´ı la j de los andaluces; ha suprimido y maltratado la palabra despu´es: y la l de platos se vuelve r.” (100). He thus indirectly anticipated later claims of an Afro-Lusitanian basis for Caribbean bozal language, although not through reference to monogenetic theories of creole formation, which were not to appear until more than half a century later. His description of the difference between bozal and ladino Afro-Cuban speech is therefore of considerable importance: No es posible confundir un lenguaje con el otro: la supresi´on de letras, la conversi´on de otras, no es peculiar de todo negro: la i ﬁnal por la l, propiedad del criollo, es lo esencial que le toca; la o por la u en combinaci´on al principio de la palabra y el trastorno de los pronombres y los sexos en ellos, predominan en el africano. Por lo dem´as, tiene que confesarse que una gran parte de sus alteraciones las inicia la generalidad de la gente del pueblo, con especialidad la del campo. Fueron andaluces los m´as de los pobladores, y sigu´eronles los isle˜nos, los catalanes, y otros malos hablistas, que dejaron huellas, que van desapareciendo, aunque no tanto como deb´ıa esperarse, en las clases m´as desatendidas. (101)

Another key ﬁgure in the study of Afro-Cuban language and culture is Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969), the Cuban anthropologist and ethnographer who studied Afro-American groups in Cuba in the early decades of the twentieth century. Few actual examples of bozal language appear in Ortiz’s writings, but his works are ﬁlled with examples of words and phrases used by the AfroCuban population, as well as extensive accounts of cultural and religious practices. His principal Afro-Cuban works include Los negros brujos (1906), Los negros esclavos (1916), Glosario de afronegrismos (1924), La african´ıa de la m´usica folkl´orica de Cuba (1950), Los instrumentos de la m´usica afrocubana (1952–55), and the posthumous Los negros curros. He was also co-founder of Estudios Afro-Cubanos, Archivos del Folklore Cubano and other seminal

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journals. Ortiz was born in Havana in 1881, and a year later his family took him to Minorca, and later (1901) to Madrid. In the latter city he undertook university studies, while from 1902–05 he traveled back and forth between Europe and Cuba. His ﬁrst anthropological work, Los negros brujos (hampa afro-cubana) was ﬁrst published in Madrid, and was intended as much as a work on criminology as an ethnographic study. This is a surprisingly mature work (although based on the racist premise that black Africans harbor innate criminal tendencies), and was but the ﬁrst of many treatises, whose linguistic high point came in the masterful Glosario de afronegrismos, ﬁrst published in 1924 and revised subsequently. By the standards of today’s etymological and lexicological research, the work is ﬂawed, since many items are uncritically attributed to African etymologies. At the time, this dictionary was revolutionary, for, instead of simply cataloging oddities and barbarismos, the author undertook a serious valoration of Afro-Cuban speech. In this respect, the Glosario is diametrically opposed to Pichardo’s dictionary, which although generally based on sound linguistic principles, reveals the author’s prejudices as regards Afro-Cuban language. In other works, Ortiz cataloged Afro-Cuban musical, religious, and cultural traditions, at times giving brief fragments of songs, dances, poems, verbal games, and religious ceremonies. These fragments, although short, are crucial to the understanding of Afro-Cuban bozal language in that they are authentic transcriptions by the author, and not literary inventions (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #7). These texts give some idea of the type of language retained in songs and dances from the bozal era, but still in use in Cuba well into the twentieth century. A brief fragment of nineteenth-century Cuban bozal language comes in the travel narrative of Mar´ıa de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, the Condesa de Merl´ın. Mar´ıa de las Mercedes was born in Cuba, the daughter of a wealthy aristocratic family that owned plantations and slaves. She spent her ﬁrst twelve years in Cuba, before her family took her to Madrid, where they maintained contacts with the best families of Spain and France. In 1809, she married a French general who had once been Joseph Bonaparte’s aide de camp; the new Condesa de Merl´ın then moved to Paris with her husband, and began a literary and cultural career based on the French language. Her husband died in 1839, and in 1840 the condesa fulﬁlled a long-standing dream and returned to Cuba for a visit. Although her stay was a brief two months, she subsequently described her trip in a book, which provides a dual perspective of a woman who was simultaneously Cuban and foreign, familiar with and shocked by Cuban culture and life. On two occasions, she gave brief descriptions of the speech of bozal slaves: ¿Su melc´e dar´a pa tabaco a nego viejo, mi ama? A m´ı no bebe aguariente, mi ama.

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These two sentences are hardly signiﬁcant in themselves as specimens of bozal language, but when inserted into the entire Cuban bozal corpus, they acquire some importance. The Condesa de Merl´ın had originally been raised in a slaveowning society, and presumably shared the generally low opinion of black slaves with other aristocratic Cubans of the time. However, her long stay in Europe had rendered the slave society of the Spanish Caribbean exotic and foreign, and her description of other observations suggests a high degree of detached objectivity. There is nothing in her writing to suggest that she would deliberately distort the speech attributed to Cuban blacks. The second sentence is also of importance since it is one of the few instances in Latin American bozal Spanish of a m´ı being used as a subject pronoun, instead of the more usual yo. Variants of bozal language appear in several nineteenth-century Cuban novels, most of which were written as anti-slavery documents. By far the most famous is Cecilia Vald´es, by Cirilo Villaverde (Chapter Five Appendix AfroCuba #9). Of the many Cuban anti-slavery novels, Cecilia Vald´es has received the highest literary acclaim, and takes its place among the foremost works of Cuban literature, irrespective of theme. Cirilo Villaverde was born in 1812 in Pinar del R´ıo province, western Cuba, moving to Havana in 1823. After several minor literary contributions, he produced a ﬁrst – and very rough – version of Cecilia Vald´es in 1839. In this early novel, all characters spoke a uniformly homogeneous Spanish, from slaves to aristocrats. The deﬁnitive version of the novel was not to be ﬁnished until 1881, and the changes were considerable. Most noteworthy is the author’s incorporation of different linguistic registers for the various groups of characters, including bozal and criollo slaves, peasants, Spaniards, etc. In the intervening years, Villaverde wrote and published proliﬁcally, and was also active in Cuban politics. He conspired with Narciso L´opez (the ﬁlibustero whose plans included annexation of Cuba to the United States), was jailed for his participation, escaped jail and ﬂed to the United States where he worked as a journalist and Spanish teacher. He eventually received amnesty and returned to Cuba, only to establish residence in the United States once more. Still active in the various Cuban independence movements, Villaverde spent most of the rest of his life in the United States, where he died in 1894. From a linguistic point of view, the representation of known entities (Cuban peasants and aristocrats, immigrants from various parts of Spain) are accurate, although at times there are inconsistencies or overgeneralizations. Rodr´ıguez Herrera (1982:157) notes that “se observa . . . que siempre las imitaciones no fueron del todo correctas o felices, sobre todo trat´andose del lenguaje de los negros bozales . . .” However, he concedes (158) that Villaverde “ten´ıa de modo igual buen o´ıdo para captar palabras y reproducirlas exactamente de acuerdo con la fon´etica de las mismas, en lo cual no han acertado siempre todos los que han tratado de imitar el extra˜no lenguaje de la gente inculta o extranjera, en

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relaci´on con el habla com´un de determinado pa´ıs.” Comparing the bozal speech of Cecilia Vald´es with Lope de Rueda’s plays, he (158) declares that “. . . las negras Eulalia y Guiomar trataban de hablar como los espa˜noles de su tiempo, pronunciando eses que jam´as se han o´ıdo en boca de los negros cubanos. Y Villaverde sab´ıa distinguir el entoav´ıa o entuav´ıa de un bozal del entodav´ıa ultracorrecto uso por n˜ a Chepilla y Menesia, para luego escribir todav´ıa por propia cuenta . . .” Some inconsistencies remain, however: “. . . a veces falla al poner en boca de algunos esclavos palabras como Cruz, dispu´es y otras, en vez de Cr´u y dispu´e o dimpu´e, como se advierte en algunos pasajes.” Villaverde was in a position to closely observe different varieties of Afro-Cuban speech (De la Torriente 1946:74–96), and indeed he based his black characters on individuals whom he had known personally (Deschamps Chapeaux 1982; Luis 1990:104–05). He was also sympathetic to the situation of Cuban blacks, and did not seek to ridicule any of his characters through use of language. We may therefore tentatively take the bozal imitations in Cecilia Vald´es to have at least some basis in observed reality. Villaverde’s use of bozal language in Cecilia Vald´es can be compared with the less ﬁctional Excursi´on a Vuelta Abajo (1842). In this text, Villaverde also describes the speech of bozal blacks he encounters, and the linguistic structures are similar to those of Cecilia Vald´es (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #10). Another well-known Cuban abolitionist novel is Francisco, by Anselmo Su´arez y Romero, originally published in 1839. Most of the characters are house slaves, speaking unremarkable Spanish, and only a few instances of examples of purported bozal language creep in (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #11). The protagonist, Francisco, is described as an African-born negro de naci´on, but as Williams (1994:79–81) observes, “although Francisco’s stated identity as a ‘tribal black’ presupposes his being born into an African language, his speech bears no trace of his foreignness, despite repeated references throughout the novel to the distinctiveness of slave speech. In describing the slaves’ return from the ﬁelds, for example, the narrator points out that they were . . . hablando un guirigay a su manera, ininteligible (Su´arezy Romero 1947:65) . . . the phonological and syntactical irregularities that mark the text are conventional strategies for signaling the alien status of blacks in Hispanic literature. The loss of ﬁnal consonants and ﬁrst syllables from certain words, the elision of prepositions, and the improperly conjugated verbs are all linguistic markers of foreignness, which were often invoked for comic effect . . . .” Francisco speaks only standard Spanish, in contrast to the language used by certain slaves. Like Villaverde, Su´arez y Romero was both sympathetic to the plight of Cuban slaves and in a position to observe their speech. The language of these fragments is nearly identical to the other nineteenth-century Cuban writers surveyed above, and reinforces the notion that the basics of Cuban bozal Spanish were reasonably approximated at least by the core of abolitionist writers.

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Mart´ın Mor´ua Delgado, another nineteenth-century Cuban abolitionist writer, employed bozal language in his novels Sof´ıa (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #12) and La familia Unz´uazu (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #13). Sof´ıa is generally considered to be a rewriting of (the ﬁnal version of) Cecilia Vald´es, a novel that Mor´ua Delgado found meritorious but stylistically ﬂawed. Sof´ıa was written in the period 1888–90, i.e. well after the abolition of slavery in Cuba, while the author was living abroad. It was published in 1891. La familia Unaz´uazu was ﬁnished in 1896, and was published in 1901. These novels thus come at the end of the string of abolitionist novels. It was also written more than half a century after the African-born bozal had begun to become a less common ﬁgure in Cuba by an author whose own family had experienced slavery ﬁrst-hand. Mor´ua Delgado was born in Matanzas in 1857, of a Basque father and an African gang´a mother. In theory, his mother was a bozal, although little is known about her life or linguistic proﬁciency in Spanish. From available information, it appears that Mor´ua Delgado’s mother was a house servant for a well-to-do family, and within the family received a reasonable education. It is possible that his own mother’s speech retained some bozal traits, and Mor´ua Delgado’s work in Matanzas brought him into close contact with African-born blacks. In his novels, he gives accurate linguistic imitations of the speech of gallegos, andaluces, and working-class Cubans. Coupled with the facts of his own background, this makes for a high degree of credibility for Mor´ua Delgado’s brief but tantalizing bozal fragments. There are several linguistic features of Mor´ua’s use of bozal speech that coincide with the proposed reconstruction of nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban language, and which contain peculiarities not derivable from simply producing “broken Spanish.” One is the use of the undifferentiated pronoun nelle/neye, which ﬁgures prominently in many Afro-Cuban texts. Another feature is the use of son as uninﬂected copula, another common trait in Afro-Cuban speech, and not found elsewhere in the Afro-Hispanic bozal corpus. There is also the use of yijo for hijo, a variant which may be related to Papiamento yiu, and which does not appear in Villaverde’s novel. Cecilia Vald´es does contain examples of elle, and one example of son used incorrectly, but corresponding to the ﬁrst person plural, rather than the more common third person singular, which became nearly categorical in Cuban bozal language: “Mosotro no son cas´a por le iglese.” It is of course possible that Mor´ua Delgado simply copied such constructions from earlier writers such as Creto Gang´a, whose proliﬁc newspaper outpourings he must certainly have seen. The fact remains that Mor´ua’s two novels contain brief but credible bits of bozal language, and do not suggest that the linguistic examples are derived entirely from imitation. A few nineteenth-century Cuban novels contain only tiny fragments of bozal language. For example, Francisco Calcagno’s Romualdo: uno de tantos (ﬁrst

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published in 1881, and written some time before) contains only the word pori´o for por Dios, and the phrases: e´ se no son la jijo franc´e, e´ se viene langenio chiquitico . . . no quiere la mayor´a. no quiere cadena on maza.

Even this glance at Afro-Cuban language contains the undifferentiated copula son, as well as the frequent use of the feminine la as generic undifferentiated article. Calcagno also spoke of bozal language in his lesser-known Los cr´ımenes de Concha (1887), ﬁnished in 1863. In speaking of the protagonist, he states (7) “. . . la inﬂuencia pecuniaria del amo, con cuya l´ogica por otra parte no puede luchar el lenguaje bozal en que cuenta sus miserias.” Of another African-born character, Calcagno says (21) “. . . a despecho de sus muchos a˜nos pasados en Cuba, no hablaba sino bozal: espa˜nolizaremos su lenguaje para evitar al lector ese enojoso trabajo de traducci´on.” One of the characters states that “. . . dej´o un piquinini en Africa . . . ,” using a Pidgin English word which made its way to Cuba in the nineteenth century. Despite his intentions to spare readers extensive passages in bozal language, Calcagno offers one example (34), when an African-born slave attempts to describe the location of a farm: “Ya no sabe si˜no´ , mu lejo, rio taa all´ı, mata grande, tabaco mucho, la suelo coror´a, buj´ıo guano.” In chapter IX of the novel, the author describes n˜ a´ n˜ igo and lucum´ı words and ceremonies in detail, giving evidence of close observation. Another abolitionist novel is Jos´e Antonio Ramos’ Caniqu´ı (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #14). This novel is set in the slaving area of Trinidad, Cuba, in the 1830s, but it was written a century later, in a modern Cuba where slavery was but a distant echo of the past. From a linguistic standpoint, the few bozal fragments of the novel are much more “Spanish” than the examples culled from nineteenth-century novels. The author’s main deviations from popular (monolingual) Cuban Spanish is the use of third person singular as invariant verb (e.g. yo mata), occasional loss of articles (e.g. Yo mimo saqu´e bridio y pone telara˜na), occasional loss of copula (e.g. ni˜na asust´a), and some incorrect noun-article pairs (camina po lo suelo). The majority of the deviations from standard Spanish merely involve “eye-dialect” representations of uneducated Cuban Spanish. This provides indirect evidence that by the early decades of the twentieth century, bozal language was fading from the memory of most Cubans; although African-born blacks could still be found, nearly all were elderly individuals who were not in constant linguistic contact with middleclass Cubans, as in earlier times when African-born slaves and workers worked commonly in homes, stores, and on the streets of Cuban cities. Similar conclusions hold for nearly all twentieth-century literary creations that attempt to imitate nineteenth-century bozal language, particularly those written in the second half of the century. Thus for example, we have the novel Quiquirib´u Mandinga (se lo llev´o el diablo), by Ra´ul Acosta-Rubio, and

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published in 1976 in the Miami Cuban exile community (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #15). This novel presents a rather stereotyped view of Cuban bozales, together with abundant literary imitations of Afro-Cuban speech. Despite the author’s apparent lack of personal familiarity with earlier bozal language, the imitations coincide in large measure with nineteenth-century examples. This language, which contains such “authentic” bozal phenomenon as uninﬂected inﬁnitives as invariant verbs, invariant copular son, and many discrepancies of noun-article and subject-verb agreement, bears a close resemblance to the writings of Creto Gang´a and some nineteenth-century authors of teatro bufo. These rudimentary pidgin forms alternate with correct Spanish conjugations (e.g. past subjunctive forms), as in Gang´a, and given the late date of publication of this novel, it is obvious that the author has based himself principally if not exclusively on earlier literary imitations of bozal speech. In the phonetic dimension, the imitations are a little closer to contemporary reality, especially as regards gemination of consonants following absorption of syllable-ﬁnal liquids: pogque, sinvegg¨uenza, etc. Another twentieth-century novel containing even more questionable examples of bozal language is M´as all´a de la nada by Armanda Ru´ız Garc´ıa (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #16). This author uses invariant inﬁnitives and invariant copular son, together with phonetic modiﬁcations typical of vernacular Cuban Spanish. Also used very frequently is the archetypal creoloid verb construction based on ta + Vinf . However, the text contains a chaotic mixture of uninﬂected inﬁnitives, verbs of the form ta + Vinf and correctly conjugated verbs, a mixture scarcely likely to have been used by either bozal or criollo Afro-Cubans. If the author had intended to represent a true creole using preverbal ta as particle, this usage would have been consistent (e.g. as in Papiamento, Palenquero, and Cape Verdean), whereas a true bozal speaking hastily acquired Spanish would not combine two well-established verb systems (one based on particles and one based on sufﬁxal inﬂection) with the stop-gap measure of throwing in an uninﬂected verb. In addition to the questionably accurate linguistic traits, the novel also contains a plot line replete with facile stereotypes and romantic exaggerations, which renders the entire creation suspect as a source of information on earlier bozal language. An even more sensationalistic twentieth-century Cuban novel to make use of purported bozal language is Yamba´o, by Julio Alba. This novel uses a formulaic set of transpositions, most prominent of which is the widespread use of ta + Vinf verbal constructions: “m´ı t´a sab´e que t´u no t´a quer´e a la negra Yeye,” etc. (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #17). Unlike what occurs in legitimate Afro-Hispanic creoles, the bozal characters in Yamba´o even use ta as part of the hybrid copula ta s´e. The use of m´ı as subject pronoun coincides with earlier stereotypes of Afro-Hispanic pidgin of the “Tarzan-talk” variety, but is not in accordance with known facts of nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban usage

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(except in isolated instances, when contact with Papiamento, Jamaican Creole, or possibly Negerhollands occurred). There are several shorter examples of bozal language scattered throughout Cuban literature written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most come in novels and short stories, but non-ﬁctional descriptions also contain brief fragments. Mar´ıa de Santa Cruz’s Historias campesinas provides several interesting examples of bozal language (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #18).39 Little is known about the author, or the composition of the historias. The bozal fragments are important, however, because they exhibit in a single text a cluster of traits which appear to reﬂect contact with speakers of Papiamento: (1) verbal constructions based on ta + Vinf ; (2) use of ag¨ue for hoy (Papiamento awe); (3) use of bisa for decir “to tell, say”; (4) use of disjunctive m´ı as subject and object pronoun; (5) possibly g¨uet´a. Another source of examples of nineteenth-century Cuban bozal language is the novel En el cafetal, by Domingo Malpica La Barca (1890) (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #19). Little is known of this author, but the bozal examples are quite realistic. The use of third person singular for invariant verb stem is a well-attested trait of Afro-Hispanic pidgin, while the use of cosa as interrogative word corresponding to qu´e is found throughout Iberian-based creoles, including Papiamento (kiko < qu´e cosa/coisa) and Philippine Creole Spanish. Of all the Latin American writers whose works have been taken as central to the debate concerning the nature of Afro-Hispanic bozal language and its possible creolization, Lydia Cabrera’s works form the centerpiece of virtually all arguments, both pro and con. For example, Granda (1971:483) offered the claim that “. . . Cuba ha pose´ıdo y posee a´un entre su poblaci´on negra rastros y manifestaciones ling¨u´ısticas ‘criollas’ . . . uni´endose as´ı al ‘papiamento’, al ‘palenquero’ . . . y a las manifestaciones puertorrique˜nas en la formaci´on de un ‘corpus’ dialectal ‘criollo’ de superestrato espa˜nol . . .” To prove his case, Granda made ample use of El monte by Lydia Cabrera (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #38), originally published in 1954, an anthropological text containing data on religious beliefs among Afro-Cubans, and which includes extensive imitations of bozal Spanish. Granda unquestioningly accepts the accuracy of Cabrera’s imitations, given her high reputation in other linguistic and folkloric matters, and suggests that such language, “caracterizadores de una estructura ‘criolla’ de lengua, persist´ıan en el ‘registro’ hablado de negros cubanos . . . como continuaci´on de la modalidad ling¨u´ıstica adoptada por generaciones anteriores de esclavos . . .” In this article, Granda did not explicitly link the putative Afro-Cuban creole to the monogenetic Portuguese pidgin hypothesis, but this claim was eventually made in Granda (1976). Lapesa (1980:560) believes that “las postreras supervivencias del criollo espa˜nol parecen ser el 39

This is not the same Mar´ıa de Santa Cruz as the Condesa de Merl´ın.

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habla ‘bozal’ que se usaba entre negros de Puerto Rico en el siglo pasado y todav´ıa entre los de Cuba a mediados del actual . . .” Cabrera’s extensive writings, particularly El monte, have ﬁgured importantly in most subsequent writings on a putative Afro-Cuban creole. Otheguy (1973) adds to the list of creoloid traits mentioned by Granda, and claims that Cabrera’s work demonstrates the prior existence of an Afro-Hispanic creole in the Caribbean. Perl (1982:423–24) also refers to El monte, as well as to the brief bozal fragments from Miguel Barnet’s Autobiograf´ıa de un cimarr´on (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #68). Perl asserts that “. . . the Cuban ‘habla bozal’ was no idiolectally determined jargon of the Blacks in the nineteenth century but a social variety of Spanish comparable with other varieties of Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles.” With respect to a possible extra-territorial origin, Perl suggests that “. . . especially the morphosyntactic features of the ‘habla bozal’ are very suitable for demonstrating the relations to other Iberian-based creoles and the embedding of the ‘habla bozal’ within the Creoles and the ‘intermediate varieties’ in the Caribbean area.”40 Why is Lydia Cabrera (1900–91) considered to be the “best” source of accurate information regarding Cuban bozal language? The answers are as complex and varied as the elusive personality of this remarkable writer. Lydia Cabrera was born in Havana in 1900, one of eight children in an upper-class intellectual family. In her earliest childhood years, she was attended by a black aya, a situation typical of upper-class children of the time. From this earliest contact with Afro-Cuban society, Lydia probably derived some preliminary notions of the beliefs, attitudes, and cultural practices of black Cubans, and when she ultimately began to explore Afro-Cuban culture in earnest, she at least had some point of reference. Lydia Cabrera’s father was a writer and political activist, and the Cabrera house was always ﬁlled with writers, philosophers, and literati of all sorts. Lydia, the youngest daughter, was reputedly her father’s favorite, and she led a capricious childhood. In one area, however, Raimundo Cabrera y Bosch would not yield: Lydia was not allowed to attend high school or university. By age fourteen, Lydia was already escaping from the house to attend art classes, but her frustration mounted, until in 1920 she threatened to commit suicide if her father did not send her to France and let her study at the Sorbonne. Lydia Cabrera was not to arrive in France until 1927, but she was to remain in Europe (except for a brief visits to Cuba in 1930 which led to several more trips over the years) until 1938. During her years in Paris, Lydia Cabrera encountered the budding n´egritude movement in Europe, which had repercussions for both art and literature. Expatriate Latin Americans, typiﬁed by Miguel Angel Asturias, were “rediscovering” that not all of Latin America’s roots lay in Europe. Lydia Cabrera recalled 40

This line of approach is extended in Perl (1985, 1987).

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the powerful African presence in Cuba. Although she lived in Paris for many years, her several trips to Cuba were the time when she began to explore the hitherto distant Afro-Cuban culture, beginning in the Pogolotti neighborhood of Marianao, in greater Havana. She sought the aid of a seamstress who had previously worked for the family; the woman’s name was Teresa M., and her lucum´ı designation was Om´ı Tom´ı. Om´ı Tom´ı in turn introduced Lydia to Calixta Morales, also known as Oddedei, and the two elderly Afro-Cuban women gave Lydia her ﬁrst initiation into Afro-Cuban religious rituals.41 The three-month sojourn in the company of these women gave Lydia enough material to enable her to begin writing on Afro-Cuban themes upon her return to Paris. During this time period Alejo Carpentier was collecting materials for his ﬁrst novel, the Afro-Cuban Ecue-Yamba-o; he later remarked that around 1927 “tropec´e con Lydia Cabrera en un juramento n˜ a´ n˜ igo celebrado en plena manigua, en las cercan´ıas de Marianao.”42 If these recollections are accurate, it would indicate that Lydia Cabrera had begun her ethnographic explorations of Afro-Cuban culture at a very early age, although the ﬁrst fruits of these contacts were to appear in stylized ﬁction. Some thirty years later, Cabrera was to bring these contacts with secret Afro-Cuban brotherhoods into sharper focus, in the monograph La sociedad secreta abaku´a. In the 1920s, however, Lydia Cabrera was still somewhat of a dilettante, and the lighthearted way in which she dismissed her anthropological inclinations, both at the time and in later decades, has caused many critics to assume that her entire corpus of writings is but the product of a fertile imagination enriched by the Afro-Cuban environment, but devoid of any value as legitimate ethnographic research. In fact, Lydia Cabrera’s writings show a steady progression toward an ever more accurate depiction of the most intimate details of Afro-Cuban culture, but she never abandoned her sense of literary creation, her picaresque sense of humor, and her loving embrace of Afro-Cuban life as the most magniﬁcent form of magical realism to be found in all of Latin America. It is this mixture of fact and fantasy, and her refusal to be classiﬁed as an anthropologist, which is the root of the great ambivalence with which Cabrera’s books have been treated by scholars in various disciplines. Her ﬁrst book, Cuentos negros de Cuba (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #39) was not intended to be a landmark in Afro-Cuban literature, but merely an attempt to draw upon materials that were familiar to the writer in her foreign setting, and even which might be considered attractively “exotic” to a French-speaking readership which was fascinated by African and Native American cultures, provided that they were safely grafted onto a familiar European cultural and literary trunk. Things were to change, however. In 1940, after Lydia Cabrera had returned to Havana to live, she was visited by Gabriela 41

Perera (1971:21–22).

42

Soto (1988:38).

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Mistral, who expressed her disappointment at ﬁnding Cabrera to be very bourgeois.43 These criticisms stung Lydia, and perhaps as a result she began to write more intensively. A ﬂurry of books followed, and her literary and anthropological writings continued throughout the rest of her life – half a century. Por qu´e: cuentos negros de Cuba was published in 1948 (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #32). El monte, the massive treatise on folk medicine and folk practices among various Afro-Cuban naciones, and which many researchers consider to be Cabrera’s premier Afro-Cuban study, appeared in 1954 (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #38). The humorous and whimsical Refranes de negros viejos came out the next year (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #31). Anag´o, a glossary of lucum´ı [Yoruba] words used in Cuba was published in 1957. In 1958 Cabrera published La sociedad secreta abaku´a, a stunning testimony to the talent of this amateur anthropologist to penetrate a hermetic and secretive all-male Afro-Cuban group (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #37). Twelve years were to pass before Cabrera’s next book, Ot´an iyebiy´e: las piedras preciosas, dealing with magical properties of rocks and minerals. Rapidly following are Ayap´a-cuentos de Jicotea (1971; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #36), Yemay´a y Och´un (1974) – dealing with santer´ıa rituals (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #34), Anaforuana (1975) – another book dealing with Abaku´a rituals (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #67), Francisco y Francisca: chascarrillos de negros viejos (1976) – a book of humorous anecdotes (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #30), and the important Reglas de congo, palo monte, mayombe (1979) – a major treatise on cultural and religious practices of Bantuspeaking Afro-Cuban groups (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #64). Most of the above-mentioned texts contain examples of Afro-Cuban bozal language, sometimes inserted with no preamble, and at other times explicitly attributed to particular groups or speech communities. Several minor books also appeared during this time period. In the last decade of her life, Cabrera published several more books, including La medicina popular en Cuba (1984), but there were no more fragments of bozal language. The bozal language in Cabrera’s apparently non-ﬁctional works such as El monte and Reglas de congo has the same characteristics as the fragments appearing in avowedly ﬁctional books such as Francisco y Francisca and Por qu´e. This fact, combined with the high degree of detail in the anthropological works and Cabrera’s positive valuation of Afro-Cuban culture, have led the majority of researchers who have examined her texts with an eye toward reconstructing earlier Afro-Cuban bozal language to conclude that her bozal language is tantamount to a ﬁrst-hand transcription. The truth, it would seem, falls a bit short of this assertion, although, from any viewpoint, Cabrera’s Afro-Cuban writings constitute the single most important contribution to the documentation of 43

Cabrera (1980b:15), Simo (1984:10).

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Caribbean bozal language. Lydia Cabrera had phenomenal powers of observation, a keen ear, and an equally impressive memory. Except for the last years, in which she used a tape recorder to accompany her ﬁeld interviews, Cabrera used notebooks and note cards to record her observations of bozal language and culture. At best, then, her bozal fragments must be taken as approximations written on the ﬂy, or reconstructed long after the fact from the author’s recollections of the general speech patterns of her Afro-Cuban informants. A more serious consideration in dealing with Lydia Cabrera’s bozal approximations is the fact that even the most anthropological-like texts are in fact literary approximations, while the stories and other ﬁctional works represent even greater ﬂights of the author’s imagination. In one interview Cabrera declared:44 No me considero nada. Yo he escrito para divertirme. Y te voy a ser franca: he escrito s´olo para tres personas . . . me reﬁero a Pierre Berger . . . Roger Bastide y Alfred Metraux . . . y para mis amigos los negros viejos, que encontraban bien lo que yo escrib´ıa. Pero nunca me he considerado escritora, ni antrop´ologa . . . turista, si t´u quieres. Lo que me ha llamado la atenci´on de los negros es la poes´ıa de sus mitos. Y eso es lo que yo he tratado de captar.

This statement in itself does not invalidate the possible anthropological and linguistic signiﬁcance of Cabrera’s writings; it only shows that accurate linguistic reporting was not foremost in her mind upon giving a literary rendition of AfroCuban culture and language.45 At other points in her career, however, Cabrera ascribed a greater value to her anthropological observations, although cautioning that she merely reported what she saw, rather than offering interpretations:46 Ha sido mi prop´osito ofrecer a los especialistas, con toda modestia y la mayor ﬁdelidad, un material que no ha pasado por el ﬁltro peligroso de la interpretaci´on, y enfrentarlos con los documentos vivos que he tenido la suerte de encontrar.

Elsewhere, Cabrera was even more revealing. To the question “Entonces, ¿usted contempla la posibilidad de que el habla bozal, en los cuentos, en las leyendas que la utilizan, est´e permeada de cultura hisp´anica?”, Cabrera replied:47 . . . En la misma religi´on se produjo un sincretismo . . . y desde luego, en los cuentos tambi´en hay sincretismo. Cuando yo escrib´ı los Cuentos negros hice lo que me dio la gana. As´ı que no podemos decir que sean puramente folkl´oricos. Aunque otros, s´ı est´an tomados sin alteraci´on alguna. Y bozales, los hab´ıa todav´ıa en Cuba cuando yo vine para ac´a. Te ibas a Matanzas, a Pinar del R´ıo, a Camag¨uey, y all´ı encontrabas al negro del campo, sin contacto con La Habana, que era el negro bozal. Estaba viviendo como en los tiempos de la colonia . . .

Cabrera openly confesses that her bozal imitations were often playful, written to entertain and to capture the ﬂavor of Afro-Cuban culture and language, rather 44 46

Zald´ıvar (1986:7). Cabrera (1983:8).

45 47

Vald´es-Cruz (1978). Zald´ıvar (1986:11).

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than the recorder-like near-transcriptions that some researchers have assumed. This admission does not invalidate her entire corpus, since Lydia Cabrera had a good ear and a phenomenal memory, and much of what she wrote was indeed based on an accurate recollection of Afro-Cuban speech. It does, nonetheless, introduce a critical element of caution, and invalidates attempts to perform, for example, quantitative analyses or other detailed linguistic analyses on Cabrera’s writings as though they were true transcriptions. The end of the preceding quotation is also revealing, since Cabrera apparently extends the meaning of bozal from the more widely accepted ‘born in Africa, only partially acculturated to Hispanic language and society’ to a more general meaning of rustic, uneducated, and isolated from urban society. The latter meaning, however, does not necessarily imply that any pidgin or creole language remained, only a certain distance from the mainstream of Cuban life. It is not clear that Cabrera used the same broad interpretation of bozal in her earlier writings, and in her younger years she indeed had much contact with true African-born bozales. Among Cuban scholars, the full impact of Lydia Cabrera’s Afro-Hispanic language has seldom been recognized, possibly given the prevailing notion among many non-specialist Cubans that Cuban blacks in general (i.e. those born and raised in Cuba and speaking Spanish monolingually) speak a “special” form of Spanish. When pressed for details, most (older) Cubans simply refer to phonetic traits which, while deﬁnitely more prevalent among the lower sociolects of Cuban Spanish, cannot be deﬁnitely ascribed to an African substratum, are also used by white Cubans of comparable socioeconomic status, and are usually found in other Spanish dialects including those for which no African connection can be postulated. Thus, for example, the literary scholar Vald´es-Cruz (1974:93) describes Cabrera’s use of “espa˜nol deformado”: Cuando incluye palabras en un espa˜nol deformado que imita el habla de los negros, se vale de ciertos recursos, como la supresi´on de la “s” o de otras consonantes ﬁnales y a veces hasta de toda la s´ılaba ﬁnal (m´a por m´as; se˜no por se˜nor, t´o por todo). Otro recurso es el de la asimilaci´on y la p´erdida de consonantes interiores o el de la confusi´on de los sonidos “l” y “r” (cansao por cansado; yebba por yerba; arma por alma).

These same pan-Caribbean traits have been used by Afro-Cuban authors such as Nicol´as Guill´en, as well as by white Cuban writers who imitated the speech of blacks, including Emilio Ballagas, Ram´on Guirao, etc. Historically, it was even commercially feasible to maintain this artiﬁcially exaggerated “black” Spanish. One case comes from a black Cuban radio comedian, Amador Dom´ınguez, who aspired to becoming an intellectual commentator and not simply a slapstick artist. Upon learning of Dom´ınguez’s aspirations, his boss replied: “¡Bah! El d´ıa que aprendas a hablar como blanco no te van a llamar para ning´un programa y te quedar´as sin trabajo. ¡Tu negocio es seguir hablando como negro!”48 Long 48

L´opez (1981:393), also Lipski (1985b).

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after African-born bozales had disappeared from Cuba, and when Afro-Cuban pidgin was at best a distant and rapidly fading memory, Cuban popular music, in the form of the son and occasionally the rumba, continued to coin new examples of bozal speech. Indeed, such songs continue to appear sporadically even today. Among the most famous practitioners of the neo-bozal musical tradition are Celia Cruz, Miguelito Vald´es, and, from earlier decades, Bola de Nieve (Ignacio Villa, 1911–71). The latter was also a poet, composing several poems in bozal language in which creoloid elements ﬁgure prominently. Villa, born scarcely more than a decade after Lydia Cabrera, lived at a time in which bozal language could still be heard, and there is every reason to consider his imitations as authentic (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #8). A brief fragment of purportedly authentic Afro-Hispanic language comes in the Biograf´ıa de un cimarr´on (1966) by Miguel Barnet (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #68). This book is essentially a transcription of the autobiography of an elderly black Cuban who had been a cimarr´on (escaped slave) in his youth. Esteban Montejo was born in Las Villas around 1859. Miguel Barnet learned of him 104 years later, in 1963, when he was interviewed by a Cuban newspaper. Montejo was a Cuban-born criollo. His father was a Lucum´ı (Yoruba speaker) from Oyo, in Nigeria, while his mother was evidently born in Cuba “de origen franc´es,”49 a term which Montejo applied to Haitians. At another point Montejo referred to Haitians in Cuba singing tumba francesa songs in patu´a.50 Montejo escaped from slavery at a very young age, and never really knew his parents. His godfather was named Gin Congo, suggesting that he was also African-born, but Montejo never learned of his existence until the 1890s. The young cimarr´on was apparently ﬁrst raised by the owner of the sugar estate on which he was born, then by a succession of escaped slaves. By the time Barnet interviewed the old man, he apparently spoke native vernacular Cuban Spanish, although Barnet alludes to “formas de lenguaje, giros, sintaxis, arca´ısmos y modismos de su habla.”51 This apparently refers to a disjointed narrative style in highly vernacular language, rather than to any Africanized bozal speech. This is conﬁrmed by the later remark (Barnet 1966:10): that “De haber copiado ﬁelmente los giros de su lenguaje, el libro se habr´ıa hecho dif´ıcil de comprender y en exceso reiterante. Sin embargo, fuimos cuidados en extremo al conservar la sintaxis cuando no se repet´ıa en cada p´agina.” Although Esteban Montejo was a native speaker of Spanish, he did recall the speech of older bozales he had known in his youth, and thus gave approximations to the Afro-Hispanic pidgin used by African-born blacks in early nineteenth-century Cuba: Criollo camina all´a adonde yo te diga, que yo te va a regal´a a ti una cosa . . . Ust´e, criollo, son bobo . . . mire, ust´e ve eso, con eso ust´e consigue t´o en cosa . . . (127) 49

Barnet (1966:16).

50

Ibid. (31).

51

Ibid. (9).

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Mientras t´u trabaja mayombe, t´u son due˜no e tierra (130). T´u ve y haz este trabajo y cuando t´u tiene problema resuelto, t´u viene a m´ı y paga . . . T´u son bueno y callao, yo va a cont´a a ti una cosa . . . (154) Ust´e, criollo, no sabe qu´e son liﬁante, ese que ust´e ve aqu´ı en circo no son liﬁante, liﬁante mi tierra son mayore, come coraz´on de palma . . . (155)

The language of these fragments is unremarkable, in no way suggesting a stable creole language with non-Hispanic syntax. Montejo himself declared (158): “Les dec´ıan bozales por decirles algo, y por que hablaban de acuerdo con la lengua de su pa´ıs. Hablaban distinto, eso era todo . . . Si queda alguno por ah´ı tiene que ser m´as viejo que yo veinte veces.” Several texts document the beginnings of Creole French-inﬂuenced Spanish as spoken in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba. In the story “Luna verde,” Carlos Carreras (1958:13–15) has some black characters, evidently Haitians emigrating to Cuba to cut sugar cane, speaking in “un franc´es roto,” but which in reality is neither French nor French creole, but more likely Spanish as spoken by French creole speakers: T´u ten´e canma, Col´ın, las mujeres son as´ı . . . Yo ten´e canma, t´u no apure . . . T´u, hijo bonito de blanco . . . Ella tener guang´a . . .

Several key features of creole carryover are present in this example, including unconjugated verbs without particle representing “have,” lack of reﬂexive verbs (t´u no apure), and missing copula (t´u hijo bonito de blanco). Haitian Creole was an important linguistic and cultural element in Cuba. In the twentieth century, the Machado and Batista governments imported thousands of Haitian contract laborers to cut sugar cane,52 creating generations of Cuban-born Haitians, whose plight is typiﬁed in Alejo Carpentier’s novel Ecue Yamba-´o. These Haitians often spoke a rudimentary Spanish which the uninitiated observer might mistake for an Afro-Hispanic creole. Moreover, Haitian Creole inﬂuence in Cuban Spanish antedates these twentieth-century contacts. French Creole-speaking laborers were very common in nineteenth-century Cuba, being especially prevalent around Santiago de Cuba. A few nineteenthcentury Afro-Cuban texts hint at Haitian Creole inﬂuence; for example the use of pa m´ı “mine,” identical in structure to Haitian pa-m (< pa-mwe): colaz´on pa m´ı ta brincando dentro la pecho como la cuebro. (Ben´ıtez del Cristo 1930) No se˜no´ , veg¨uenza no e pa m´ı, e pa amo Tom´a. (Berenguer y Sed 1929)

52

Alvarez Est´evez (1988).

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(Creole) French-speaking blacks in Cuba organized into musical societies known as the tumba francesa; these societies still exist, and, although many of the musicians are no longer completely ﬂuent in Haitian creole, some of the songs mix Spanish and Haitian.53 These texts cannot be confused with bozal Spanish, but rather constitute Spanish-Haitian code switching. In earlier periods, however, native speakers of Haitian who arrived in Cuba and learned Spanish as a second language spoke with many of the same creole-like features documented for the Dominican Republic. The last generation of such speakers still survives in eastern Cuba. Some Haitians, despite having lived as long as seventy years in Cuba, still speak Spanish with second-language characteristics which are similar if not identical to bozal Spanish attestations of earlier centuries: lack of subject-verb agreement, use of the third person singular or bare inﬁnitive as invariant verb form, misuse and elimination of prepositions, unstable noun-adjective agreement, and incomplete targeting of Spanish words:54 Yo contrao [encuentro] un paisano m´ıa nosotro habla su lengua e nosotro poco catellano e´ l sabe yo sabe poco nosotro habla tambi´en Yo trabaja, yo come. Yo trabaja lo ca˜naverale Nosotro habla catellano, habla creol tambi´en Yo cr´ıa mucho animal, siembra mucho animal, se roba to, toro, toro Yo no sabe mucho catellano, pero sabe poquito El val´on son teniente [en] La Habana Yo tene do hijo . . . y var´on yo ten´ıa se muri´o (O r t i z L o´ p e z (1999a )) Yo prende habl´a catellano con cubano . . . yo me guta habl´a catellano, pero poca cosa no sabe Yo tiene aqu´ı, tengo 16 a˜no. Siempre una haciendo una trabajo yo com´e, yo va bien. Yo hacel mucho trabajal; coltal, coltal ca˜na balato; recogel caf´e a sei kilo Depu´e ut´e decansal Ut´e lo habl´a, ut´e ta trabando con un due˜no ma grande, quello dec´ı ut´e hac´e (O r t i z L o´ p e z (1999b ))

The Afro-Cuban corpus is at once the most extensive and the most ambiguous as regards the nature of pan-Caribbean Afro-Hispanic language, and the eventual fate of bozal Spanish. The search is far from over; archives in Cuba contain much unpublished material that can potentially shed further light on the subject. Fieldwork in Cuba in search of vestiges of Afro-Hispanic language can still turn up valuable results, as evidenced by Ortiz L´opez (1998). Afro-Cuban religious rituals contain embedded bozal and post-bozal elements, and in some instances practitioners who are “possessed” by ancestral spirits speak in what is claimed to be bozal language.55 Regardless of the eventual deductions and 53 54

Franco (1959:76–77), Perl (1981), Mart´ınez Gordo (1985a, 1989), Al´en Rodr´ıguez (1986, 1991), Betancur Alvarez (1993:43–8), Perl and Grosse (1994, 1995). 55 Castellanos (1990). Ortiz L´opez (1999a, 1999b, 2001).

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conclusions, Afro-Cuban language will remain at the center of the reconstruction of earlier Afro-Hispanic speech and its permanent contributions to regional varieties of Spanish. The Afro-Dominican linguistic corpus Although the Dominican Republic contains a high proportion of citizens of African descent, the tiny Afro-Dominican written corpus is entirely lacking in legitimate bozal examples, in sharp contrast to neighboring Cuba and Puerto Rico. By far the greatest number of “Afro”-Dominican linguistic texts in reality depict the Spanish of Haitians, and thus represent the substratum inﬂuence of an established creole language, rather than the speech of African-born bozales. Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1975:16), speaking of the French and Haitian presence in western Santo Domingo, beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century, states that “as´ı se produjo en la isla el desplazamiento, transitorio e imperfecto, pero desplazamiento al ﬁn, de la lengua espa˜nola.” The French government established a French language publishing enterprise during the brief French occupation. Shortly after the Haitian occupation began, Haitian president Boyer ordered the military conscription of all male Dominicans between the ages of sixteen and twenty-ﬁve, an event which surely put them in contact with the language of the Haitian troops – Creole, not European French. In 1824 Boyer decreed the prohibition of the use of Spanish in ofﬁcial documents. All ofﬁcial usage was in French, but once more Haitian Creole was much more likely the language of the Haitian occupying forces, except for a small cultural elite. French became the language of many cultural events in the capital city, but it is unlikely that this had much of a linguistic effect on the majority of the Spanish-speaking population.56 Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1975:18), in speaking of Saman´a, does not acknowledge the direct implantation of Haitian Creole during or after the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo, preferring instead to attribute the minority status of Spanish to a variety of sources: “Si en la villa de Saman´a y en sus regiones aleda˜nas no predomina de manera absoluta el espa˜nol, ello se debe a la inmigraci´on negra de los Estados Unidos . . . y a las anteriores incursiones de piratas ingleses y franceses. Entonces naci´o el patois usado en la Pen´ınsula samanesa, confusa mezcla de espa˜nol, franc´es e ingl´es.” In reality, the linguistic situation in Saman´a is much more systematic:57 three well-delimited languages are spoken: Spanish, English (in several varieties), and an archaic variety of Haitian Creole (known locally as patois). There is none of the “confusa mezcla” as stated above, although inevitably the languages have mutually affected 56 57

Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1975:18). Benavides (1973) and Gonz´alez and Benavides (1982).

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one another. The ignorance of the situation in Saman´a on the part of otherwise well-informed Dominican scholars (who evidently had little active knowledge of either English or Haitian) has distorted the true situation of this region. To a Spanish-speaking Dominican, the use of either Haitian or the extremely vernacular forms of English found in Saman´a, interlarded with borrowings from Spanish, must surely have seemed like an unintelligible jargon, but the fact remains that Haitian Creole, followed by English, are stable substrate inﬂuences in Saman´a. One of the very earliest parodies of the speech of Haitians resident in Santo Domingo comes in 1845, a year after the ﬁnal Haitian withdrawal (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #1). This article, appearing in a newspaper and poking fun at the endless political conversations taking place in cafes and on street corners, portrays Haitian expatriates as speaking French rather than Haitian Creole, which is not unreasonable among the more elite Haitians who frequented the improvised tertulias of Santo Domingo. This grotesque parody bears no resemblance to French- or Creole-inﬂuenced Spanish, but it does document Dominicans’ contempt for the languages of the former French colony. These early comic representations set the stage for later, more accurate, imitations of Haitianized Spanish. Beginning in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Dominican literature and folklore is replete with legitimate examples of the use of Haitian in ﬂuid combinations with Spanish. For example, in a Dominican folktale a bewitched bird speaks some lines in a mix of Haitian Creole and Spanish (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #2). In this fragment, mue is Haitian mwe ‘I, me.’ Larraz´abal Blanco does not identify langu´e, but it is possibly Haitian lagu`e ‘war,’ in which nasalization is common in the vernacular pronunciation.58 Of more interest than the individual words themselves is the smooth interweaving of Spanish and Haitian elements in this peasants’ folktale. Rather than bilingual code-switching, this text suggests a gradual interpenetration of the two languages resulting in a creoloid form of Spanish which in the absence of knowledge of the Haitian contact could be taken for a vestige of an earlier purely Afro-Hispanic creole. Indeed, Larraz´abal Blanco (1975:197) cautions that “la existencia de voces criollas haitianas en nuestros cuentos no debe ser ´ındice de su origen afro, como pudiera suponerse.” In Villa Mella, considered one of the most “African” villages in the Dominican Republic, Haitian words have been recorded as part of the core vocabulary (for example, nu for nosotros ‘we’).59 In songs still sung by the Cofrad´ıa del 58

59

An alternative possibility is the vulgar Haitian epithet langu`et mama (u) ‘your mother’s clitoris,’ corresponding to Caribbean Spanish el co˜no de tu madre. Given that Haitian coco is also a vulgar term meaning ‘vagina,’ the latter hypothesis is quite plausible. Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1975:108).

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Esp´ıritu Santo, the words m’al´e ‘I’m going’ are frequent),60 and the combination ti mag¨uelo could combine Haitian ti “little” with Spanish ag¨uelo, the vernacular pronunciation for ‘grandfather.’61 Reported for Monte Plata is amodec´ı ‘por ejemplo,’ which the observer speculated came from a mi decir.62 A much more likely etymology involves the archaic French creole pronoun mo (modern mwe in Haitian), still found for example in Louisiana Creole French and in the archaic Haitian Creole of the Saman´a Peninsula. Dec´ı may be a hybrid of Haitian di and Spanish decir, or a combination involving Haitian d´ezi ‘desire.’ Also reported for the same area is ples´ı (of uncertain meaning), possibly from Haitian plez´ı ‘pleasure, pleased.’ In Santiago, sip´on (< Haitian zipon < French jupon) ‘skirt, slip,’ ful´a ‘kerchief,’ and possible dol´ın (< Haitian dol`e ‘pain’) “anger” have been reported.63 Other Haitian forms appear throughout the Dominican Republic, at the vernacular level among rural, predominantly Afro-American populations; few have been recorded in glossaries or other dialectological accounts. In Dajab´on, near the Haitian border, a report made in 1922 (Rodr´ıguez Demorizi 1975:219) noted that at least 40 percent of the population was Haitian, speaking patu´a. The author went on to state “es muy rara la persona de nacionalidad dominicana que no sabe hablar el ‘patu´a’ . . . sucede tambi´en que las familias acomodadas utilizan los servicios de las haitianas como cocineras y de los haitianos como peones. De ah´ı la oportunidad que favorece la inﬂuencia del ‘patu´a’ siendo accesible a los escolares y hasta a los ni˜nos de 4 a˜nos de edad en adelante.” The reference to “la persona de nacionalidad dominicana” clearly refers only to the western regions along the Haitian border, but it does give a feeling for the use of Haitian among a broad spectrum of Dominicans, in conjunction with rural vernacular varieties of Spanish. Many Dominican writers have incoporated imitations of the Spanish spoken by Haitians in the Dominican Republic. The richest literary representation of “Haitian” Spanish comes from the writings of the satirist Juan Antonio Alix (1833–1917), writing at the end of the nineteenth century. The best example is the “Di´alogo cantado entre un guajiro dominicano y un pap´a boc´o haitiano en un fandango en Dajab´on” (1874) (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #3). This poem demonstrates that Alix had a profound knowledge of Haitian Creole. All the Haitian examples are authentic, and some correspond to earlier forms which have now evolved. For example, the earlier vu < Fr. vous is now u ‘you’ in Haitian; both vu and u appear in Alix’s poem. The ﬁrst person singular pronoun, mwe in modern Haitian, was mo/mu as late as the end of the nineteenth century, as reﬂected in the “Di´alogo.” More than an example of Haitianized Spanish, this poem demonstrates code-switching, with entire sentences in Haitian intermixed 60 62

Hern´andez Soto (1996:131). Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1975:98).

61

Hern´andez Soto (1996:133). 63 Ibid. (146–49).

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with phrases in broken Spanish, of the bozal variety. A closer look at the latter elements reveals a number of combinations which, when occurring in AfroHispanic texts from other regions, have often been cited as evidence in favor of an earlier pan-Latin American Afro-Hispanic creole. Although Alix’s poems are the best known and most humorous imitations of Haitians’ attempts at speaking Spanish, other examples are found in Dominican literature and folklore, children’s games, etc. Dominicans once invented a pseudo-Haitian oath, to be said while making the sign of the cross:64 por la pe por la panta cr´u quilif´u quilif´u Mar´ıa quitif´u ump´a umj´u

The ﬁrst line is legitimately pu la p`e “for peace.” The second line, an obvious deformation of Santa Cruz, is reminiscent of the mocking habla de negros of Spanish Golden Age literature. Quilif´u is quite probably derived from Haitian qui li fu ‘who he/she [is] crazy,’ while quitif´u could be interpreted as ‘who [is a] little crazy.’ Among more realistic representations of Haitian-Spanish interlanguage are passages from the novel Over, by Marrero Aristy (1939), which documents the situation of Haitian and West Indian laborers on Dominican sugar plantations or bateyes (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #4). In this novel, similar examples are also attributed to cocolos, speakers of West Indian Creole English (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #5). In the poem “Cocolos de Cocolandia – II” Antonio Fr´ıas G´alvez includes the following verses, which imitate Spanish as spoken by West Indians, including creole French speakers:65 Ya Primo est´a cans´a Ya Primo est´a fatigu´e

Another novel representing the speech of Haitians is Ca˜nas y bueyes by Francisco Moscoso Puello (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #6). This author also represents the speech of cocolos: mi no comprendi, Chencho! The Spanish of cocolos is also imitated by Ferreras (1982), for example: t´u no voy a salir del escuelo si no tengo t´u necesidad de hacerlo. (18) . . . estoy coge el ca˜na yo tenga pic´a pa aument´a el suya, si soy as´ı yo no voy segu´ı ser compa˜nero suyo, conio. Tu soy muy sabio . . . (29)

The story “Luis Pie” by Juan Bosch (1978) also contains some revealing examples of Haitianized Spanish (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #7). 64

Ibid. (305).

65

Mota Acosta (1977).

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Although giving representations of Haitianized Spanish consistent with the earlier texts, Bosch evidently knew less about Haitian Creole than the Dominican writers mentioned above. No Haitian cane-cutter would say, e.g. mon per, but rather papa-m, nor mon pit´ı but rather pitit-mwe. A few brief and not particularly realistic imitations of Haitianized Spanish are found in the novel Jengibre by Pedro Andr´es P´erez Cabral (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #8). These fragments also exhibit the stereotype pronunciation of turning all ﬁnal vowels to e, as well as confusing French forms (ils and on instead of yo). However, the remaining combinations consistently reﬂect Haitians’ approximations to Spanish. Several twentieth-century Dominican poets have also imitated Haitianized Spanish, with varying degrees of accuracy. One example comes from Rub´en Suro, in the poem “Rabiaca del haitiano que espanta mosquitos” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #9). By the same author is the “Mon´ologo del negro con novia” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #10). These verses exhibit the time-worn stereotype of replacing ﬁnal vowels with e (or schwa), but also demonstrate the use of the third person singular (yo quema), and the inﬁnitive (yo ten´e), found in both bozal language and as a transfer from the Haitian uninﬂected verb system. The use of eye for ella is superﬁcially similar to the pronoun elle/nelle/ne found in many bozal texts from Cuba and Puerto Rico, and possibly reﬂecting a Papiamento input to Afro-Hispanic language in the latter areas. In the Suro text, however, eye falls in line with the remaining instances where ﬁnal vowels are replaced by e, instead of representing an otherwise unattested bozal pronoun in Afro-Dominican Spanish. Chery Jim´enez Rivera is another poet who has used “una jerga dom´ınicohaitiana nacida por el choque cultural y ling¨u´ıstico de dos pueblos que se encuentran en el panorama fronterizo y tratan all´ı de reducir sus diferencias.”66 The poem in question is “L’aitianita divariosa,” and most of the language is an eye-dialect representation of colloquial Cibao Spanish, in which the vocalization of syllable-ﬁnal liquids is represented by e instead of i, as is more common in Dominican literature (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #11). The origin of this phenomenon has yet to be satisfactorily determined.67 66 67

Caama˜no (1989:152). Golibart (1976a, 1976b:74–76) believes that vocalization of liquids is of Canary Island origin (particularly ﬁshermen from villages in the Canary Islands), although this pronunciation is very rare in contemporary Canary Spanish. He observes that MacCurdy (1950) found traces of vocalization in the speech of the Isle˜nos of Louisiana, a vestigial Spanish-speaking community derived in part from Canary Island immigrants who arrived towards the end of the eighteenth century. Most Isle˜no vocalization is of the sort paire < padre (although currently the form parde is more common [Lipski 1990c]), but this phenomenon is widespread in rural Spanish throughout the world, being especially prevalent in Chile. Megenney (1990a:80–81) hints at an African origin for the same pronunciation. Few other areas of Latin America have ever manifested this phenomenon. Puerto Rican j´ıbaro speech of the nineteenth century apparently had this trait, now absent in all Puerto Rican dialects (Gir´on n.d., Cadilla de Mart´ınez 1938:

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Occasional fragments in Haitian Creole (written in Spanish orthography) are interspersed, but despite Caama˜no’s classiﬁcation, this text cannot really be considered a specimen of Haitianized Spanish: mue pa ue a˜ne´ , ¿e u´ comp´e, u p’anc´o ue li? ‘I don’t see anything, and you friend, do you still see him?’

Even more so than the Alix poems, this text exempliﬁes code-switching rather than true penetration of Haitian Creole into Spanish. Despite acknowledgment that Haitian Creole or patois is one of the major languages used in the Saman´a Peninsula (together with several varieties of English), Gonz´alez and Benavides (1982) use data from nonstandard Saman´a Spanish to raise the issue of the prior creolization of Spanish in this region. Closer examination of the Saman´a Spanish data suggest instead the interlocking inﬂuence of Afro-American English and Haitian Creole, both impacting Spanish as acquired as a second language by older residents of Saman´a. Leaving aside the data from Saman´a, the only contemporary evidence of what might have been a legitimate bozal Spanish in the Dominican Republic comes in a few isolated words reported for some marginal dialects, whose phonetic deformations are more typical of attested bozal language from other regions than the results of contact with French- or English-based creoles. Among the remaining attestations of what might be bozal leftovers in Santo Domingo, we ﬁnd some anonymous coplas (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #13), supposedly written by Dominican blacks in gratitude to Haitian president Boyer for his abolition of slavery in Spanish Santo Domingo.68 The use of the third person singular verb form va in combination with a ﬁrst person subject is typical of bozal language, but also characterizes Haitianized Spanish. The use of the French/Creole word libert´e suggests a Haitian basis for this poem, rather than an Afro-Hispanic bozal remnant. Caama˜no (1989:234) regards this text as an Afro-Hispanic creole leftover, noting that “el limitado testimonio documental que representa el texto bajo estudio no permite otras observaciones sobre el antiguo afroespa˜nol criollo de Santo Domingo.” The Afro-Puerto Rican bozal corpus Depicting the life and language of African slaves and free workers never achieved the status in Puerto Rican literature that it enjoyed in neighboring

68

105–07; Alvarez Nazario 1990:80–81, for examples as early as 1814). Vocalization of liquids was also prevalent among the negros curros of nineteenth-century Cuba, free blacks living in Havana who adopted a distinctive manner of speaking (Bachiller y Morales 1883, Ortiz 1986), more related to Andalusian than to Afro-Hispanic patterns. It is thus possible that vocalization of liquids was once more common in many Spanish-speaking regions, being now reduced to a few small areas. Granda (1991) believes that liquid vocalization is due primarily to sociolinguistic marginality, rather than to substrate inﬂuences. Deive (1980:228), Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1973:52–53).

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Cuba, and though black characters and references abound in Puerto Rican novels, stories, and poems, only the tiniest fraction of these works yields any insight into the speech of Afro-Puerto Ricans, and even fewer documents reveal anything beyond brief accounts of foreigners’ blunders and malapropisms. A handful of texts represents the Afro-Hispanic speech of Puerto Rican bozales. The small number of Puerto Rican bozal texts stands in sharp contrast to the literally scores of Afro-Cuban texts. This is a function of the history of both islands. Cuba was swept up in the nineteenth-century sugar plantation boom, and received hundreds of thousands of new slaves within a few decades in the ﬁrst half of that century. Puerto Rico participated only marginally in this enterprise, and in particular there was no rush to suddenly import huge numbers of slaves in the nineteenth century. Puerto Rico was also relatively unpopulated in comparison with Cuba, had a much lower standard of living, fewer cultural opportunities, and a greatly reduced number of writers. By the nineteenth century, when most literary bozal imitations were produced in Latin America, the vast majority of black slaves in Puerto Rico were island-born and speaking Spanish with no second-language traits, although some ethnolinguistic markers may have remained: “Es obvio suponer que en cuanto a los negros y las negras nacidos en la isla, su lengua se cimentar´ıa sobre las bases del lenguaje popular puertorrique˜no, con sus variaciones. Los negros de tala o los trabajadores de suelo adquirieron el espa˜nol del campesino, mientras que los de la casa grande tal vez desarrollaron una modalidad, m´as reﬁnada, de acuerdo con la manifestaci´on de los amos en el a´ mbito dom´estico.”69 The Puerto Rican text which shows the greatest evidence of a systematically reconstructed Afro-Hispanic language is the skit La juega de gallos o el negro bozal (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #1) by Ram´on Caballero, originally published in Ponce in 1852, and ﬁrst brought to the attention of linguists by Alvarez Nazario (1974). Little is known about the author of this play, other than the fact that he was born in Venezuela, and eventually moved to Ponce.70 Nor is there any information about his familiarity with the speech of Africanborn bozales, but the latter were certainly present in Puerto Rico during the time in which the play was written. La juega de gallos combines scattered structures reminiscent of other Afro-Iberian creoles, set against a generally unremarkable bozal pidgin. The play contains such attested Afro-Hispanic elements as the use of ta + Vinf , the invariant copula son, the use of the bare inﬁnitive minus ﬁnal /r/ as invariant verb, the West African Pidgin English form yari yari ‘cry,’ and intrusive nasalization as in br´angaman < v´algame.71 These forms appear against the backdrop of imperfectly learned Spanish such as might be found in any foreign language classroom. On the basis of this text, Granda (1968:194, fn. 4) believes that “. . . es f´acil demostrar el car´acter igualmente ‘criollo’ 69 71

70 Gir´ Ortiz Lugo (1995:14). on (n.d.). Lipski (1986g, 1987b, 1992b, 1992c, 1999c, 2002c).

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de la modalidad ling¨u´ıstica puertorrique˜na . . .” From this point forward the claim that an Afro-Hispanic creole was once spoken in Puerto Rico has never been seriously challenged, despite the fact that the case rests on such a small corpus. In particular, since Ponce was the site of a large colony of Papiamentospeaking workers in the nineteenth century, the possibility that such creole-like verbs as yo ta quer´e might be inﬂuenced by Papiamento (which has identical constructions) warrants further exploration. Among later studies of “Caribbean bozal Spanish,” little attention has been paid to a possible Afro-Hispanic creole in Puerto Rico, with the latter region usually lumped together with the more extensive Afro-Cuban corpus. Another source of Afro-Puerto Rican language is another skit, Tio Fele by Eleuterio Derkes (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #2), published in 1883. There are several scenes in which bozal fragments occur; these do not suggest a systematic creole, but rather the imperfect learning of Spanish. These extremely brief fragments do little in the way of reconstructing bozal language in colonial Puerto Rico, but they do indicate some awareness of Africanized Spanish during the nineteenth century. In 1883 Rafael Escalona published two humorous skits, inspired by the Cuban literary stereotype of the negro catedr´atico. The title of Flor de una noche (Escalona 1883b) was intended to be a spoof of the Romantic Puerto Rican poem “Mi ﬂor de un d´ıa” by Jos´e Gautier Ben´ıtez, who in turn had derived his title from the play by the Catalan writer Francisco Camprod´on Flor de un d´ıa (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #10). Escalona’s play was ﬁrst performed in 1881. Amor a la pompadour (Escalona 1883a) was ﬁrst performed in 1882. The second play contains dialect imitations of j´ıbaros and negros catedr´aticos; the ﬁrst, of catedr´aticos and bozales. The catedr´atico examples represent vernacular Puerto Rican Spanish, with typical phonetic reductions and hypercorrections, together with the heavy dose of malapropisms that formed the basis for this literary stereotype. In the same play, the character Diego is a negro congo; his speech contains many typical bozal traits, including faulty nounadjective agreement, improper use of deﬁnite articles, use of the third person singular as invariant verb, all in variable opposition to correct Spanish usage. None of the traits points to anything more than second-language acquisition of Spanish. The character Juan is described as a negro carabal´ı, that is, from eastern Nigeria (speaking Ijo, Eﬁk, or Ibibio), but his speech is that of a Puerto Rican-born negro ladino. Amor a la pompadour also has catedr´atico speech, as well as j´ıbaro dialect. In addition to the dramatic pieces, an odd and completely unexplained d´ecima referring to the Spanish-American war of 1898 was published in a folklore collection,72 containing what appears to be Afro-Hispanic language (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #3). This poem contains a number of creoloid 72

Mason and Espinosa (1918:361).

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elements, such as the use of the generic article lan/nan,73 but given the lack of information regarding its composition, one can only speculate as to the authenticity of the language. There are a few other short Puerto Rican poems purporting to represent bozal language. The “D´ecima de negros,” which according to Degetau (1925:44) was “una canci´on de los negros bozales,” contains some non-agreeing conjugated or inﬁnitive verbs, as well as popular non-Africanized Puerto Rican Spanish (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #5).74 The poem “Yo so un negrito angolo” also contains a few suggestions of non-native bozal Spanish, but not of a stable creole (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #6).75 A number of songs and bombas from Puerto Rico contain verses sung in what may be African languages.76 The second song, according to Cadilla de Mart´ınez (1953), was observed and transcribed in Santurce. It is not clear whether the non-Spanish items of these songs represent African items or are merely onomatopeic, pseudoAfrican jitanj´aforas. Speaking of the ﬁrst song and dance, performed in Santurce by natives of Lo´ıza, Cadilla de Mart´ınez (1953:26) comments: Seg´un averig¨ue´ y pude observar, esos bailes de negros se llevan a cabo los s´abados por la noche y algunas veces durante el d´ıa. Los de d´ıa son muy raros y s´olo de cuando se trata de celebrar ﬁestas conmemorativas. Se reunen negros en un barrio formando un c´ırculo, en cuyo centro empiezan a cantar y a bailar uno de ellos . . . la canci´on y el coro son de entonaci´on mon´otona y chillona. El baile se ha denominado en algunas Antillas Congo, sin duda por su procedencia africana. Algunos authores le han cre´ıdo mezclado, o por lo menos derivado, del misterioso rito del Vod´u.

In the poem “Buscando dinero,” Llanos Allende (1962:31–33) offers a dialog between a brujo and a congo although the latter, presumably an African-born bozal, in reality uses vernacular Puerto Rican Spanish devoid of speciﬁc secondlanguage traits (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #8). A little-known but important literary representation of Afro-Puerto Rican speech comes in the story “Tate” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #9) by Mar´ıa Cadilla de Mart´ınez (1945:49–60). The protagonist is an elderly black woman, a freed slave of the writer’s grandfather, who was apparently born on a Puerto Rican plantation of an African father captured on the African coast and taken to the Caribbean by European slavers. The author gives no further information about this presumably real-life character (including the background of the mother, who was supposed to have died when Tate was very young), nor does she comment on the unusual speech, except to give glosses of words which no Puerto Rican or Spanish speaker from another region would recognize today. This lack of metacommentary is itself suggestive that bozal or hybrid bozalCaribbean creole speech was not unusual enough in Puerto Rico as late as the 73 76

74 Cadilla de Mart´ınez (1953:111). 75 Ibid. (308). Lipski (1987c). For example Cadilla de Mart´ınez (1933:25–26) Rosa-Nieves (1957:62–63) (Chapter Five Appendix Puerto Rico #7).

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early part of the twentieth century as to require extensive explanation. Several observations arise from this text: (1) The form don´a ‘give’ is essentially equivalent to Papiamento duna, and it is difﬁcult to derive this word from any Afro-Hispanic source which does not include at least some hybridization with creole languages. (2) Reduction of syllable onset clusters (negro > nego) is typical of AfroIberian pidgin, rather than more nativized Afro-Hispanic language. (3) The use of son as invariant copula (como son t´u) coincides with other AfroHispanic examples, especially from nineteenth-century Cuba.77 (4) Parra and parr´a ‘say’ appear to be a cross between Spanish hablar and French/creole parler. (5) Branca < blanca is a change found in Portuguese, but also in early AfroHispanic language. This word appears to have become part of a panHispanic Africanized jargon, a sort of early “black Spanish” used perhaps even by descendants of Africans who learned Spanish natively in Golden Age Spain and colonial Spanish America. (6) Although Cadilla translates bell´a as ‘tengo,’ it is much more likely to be the phonetic reduction of verdad [bel´a], as in contemporary vernacular Puerto Rican Spanish, or, if the ll is meant to represent [y], the verb vea with intrusive intervocalic [y], as found in many nonstandard Spanish varieties, and in some early Afro-Hispanic language. (7) esu may not be a contraction of su merced, but rather a vestigial African pronoun; en´u is the (now archaic) second person plural pronoun in AfroColombian Palenquero, derived from Kikongo or similar Bantu languages. (8) The form quer´e may be a rare example of voseo in Afro-Puerto Rican Spanish (to date, voseo is only attested for Antillean dialects in some remote areas of Cuba, and marginally for the nineteenth-century Dominican Republic. Alternatively, it may represent use of the bare inﬁnitive as invariant verb, a common strategy of bozal Spanish throughout its history. Similarly, correspond´e may represent an analogical preterite form (instead of correspond´ı) or a bare inﬁnitive. (9) Qui´a ser may not derive from qu´e ha de ser, since in other cases when this combination has been reduced, the /d/ has remained. This form has survived, for example, as the future/irrealis particle di in the Philippine Creole Spanish (Chabacano) dialects of Cavite and Ternate. It was also used in the now defunct Portuguese creoles of Goa and Bombay.78 In the Indian creole Portuguese dialects (except for Korlai), had (< ha de) was used as a future/irrealis particle.79 S˜ao Tom´e creole occasionally uses te or di to express distant future (Valkhoff 1966:111). Cadilla de Mart´ınez (1941:38) also observes that in vernacular Puerto Rican Spanish (i.e. of the early 77 79

78 Dalgado (1900–01, 1902–03, 1917, 1922). Lipski (1999c, 2002c). Schuchardt (1883a, 1883b:6, 1883c, 1889b); Dalgado (1906:159–60, 19) for Norteiro.

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twentieth century), ¿Me a conoces?,¿mea dices? replaces ¿Me conoces t´u?, ¿me dices? No explanation or clariﬁcation is given for this construction, which is not explicitly attributed to African inﬂuence. However, it bears a striking resemblance to the particle a in the unusual Afro-Dominican dialect (or perhaps limited set of idiolects) studied by Green (1996, 1997). Perhaps the most important bozal text from Puerto Rico was never published at all, but rather appears in an unpublished ﬁrst draft of an abolitionist play (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #11). In 1884, the poet/playwright Ram´on M´endez Qui˜nones (1847–89) wrote the play “¡Pobre Sinda!,” which was never published. This neo-Romantic drama is set in Puerto Rico, in the “´epoca de la odiosa esclavitud – 1864.” Among the characters is a “esclavo viejo, congo,” who in the deﬁnitive version of the manuscript speaks in normal, even sublime, Spanish, as he delivers his impassioned denunciations of the cruelties of slavery. In unpublished notes,80 M´endez Qui˜nones gives his reasons for not having this African-born slave use bozal language: “Hablando en su jerga, no convencer´ıa, y en los momentos m´as pat´eticos no har´ıa sentir, produciendo con sus exclamaciones de dolor la hilaridad del p´ublico.”81 To demonstrate his point, the author adds examples of several scenes that he had originally written in bozal Spanish, “y de las cuales prescind´ı por los conceptos antes expresados.” These fragments show great similarity with bozal texts from elsewhere in Latin America, and when combined with the author’s obvious concern for the situation of blacks in Puerto Rico, converge on a positive evaluation of the linguistic value of the unpublished notes. This text contains the independently veriﬁed g¨uet´e for usted, the invariant copula son, and the invariant third person pronoun nelle, abundant in Afro-Cuban literature and still used among a few elderly Afro-Cubans.82 However the most important aspect of this text is the fact of its expurgation from the ﬁnal edition of the play, since its seeming authenticity would be at cross-purposes with the author’s depiction of nobly suffering Africans. In addition to purportedly bozal imitations, a few Puerto Rican texts document the former presence of creole French speakers, particularly from the Lesser Antilles. For example in his novel La llamarada, Enrique Laguerre (1935:323–24) has black characters singing couplets with words in French creole (which, however, is not glossed in the text): Agued´a, dime lo que quieres; Dime lo que quieres, Agued´a, Dime lo que quieres; Si es cuny´a dimel´o. Si es ler´o dimel´o. 80

Discovered by Gir´on (1991:399–411).

81

Ibid. (400).

82

Ortiz L´opez (1998).

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Cuny´a is a fair realization of the Haitian (and lesser Antillean) French creole word for ‘now’; ler´o seems to mean ‘later,’ containing creole French l`e ‘time, hour.’ This is more indirect evidence of the presence of creole French among Afro-Puerto Rican communities. “Poema dedicado a la gran recitadora se˜nora Dominga de la Cruz” by Victorio Llanos (1962:93) contains the chorus Oh dan-z´e . . . mu´a . . . This line, in a poem about dancing, appears to contain the creole French elements dans´e ‘dance’ and mua (more often mu´e) ‘I, me.’ The same poem also contains the lines: ¿Qu´e importa que diga la gente que/yo baila bomba, ja, ja? There appears to be a lack of subject-verb agreement typical of bozal speech as well as of speakers of other Caribbean creoles; later in the poem the line is repeated, but with a subjunctive, which may mean that one of the lines was misprinted, although the poem evidently intends to portray an “African” tone: ¡Qu´e importa que diga la gente que/yo baile bomba! In the poem “Ca˜na,” Francisco Manrique Cabrera (1967:44) purports to represent the speech of black cane cutters: ca˜na tumb´a para hacendao; ca˜na par´a tumba hacendao.

It is not clear whether tumb´a and par´a represent uninﬂected inﬁnitives or adjectives (tumbada, parada), but in any case the lack of an article before hacendao suggests second-language usage typical of bozal speech. There are also some direct and indirect demonstrations of the Papiamento presence in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. In the ﬁrst acknoweledgment of such an inﬂuence, Alvarez Nazario (1970, 1972, 1974) reproduces a poem written in what is clearly a partially Hispanized Papiamento, published in Ponce (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #4). The text in question comes from a pamphlet describing festive activities realized in the south of Puerto Rico in 1830, celebrating the birth of the heiress to the throne of Fernando VII, who would become Isabel II. Among the songs and dances described in the pamphlet is the following song, attributed to the “mulatos holandeses que resid´ıan en el Sur.” The language of this song, while clearly written in a type of “jerga” (the term used by Pasarell), is not Papiamento, although bearing a number of resemblances to the latter language. However, the attribution of this text to natives of Cura¸cao, and the references to Cura¸cao and its history in the song itself, suggest that some form of Papiamento was once to be found among the “mulatos holandeses” residing in Puerto Rico.83 The most signiﬁcant aspect of this discovery, 83

A more contemporary example, from a poem published in 1947 (Rodr´ıguez de Nolla (1947:63) is: A˜no nuevo dand´e, a˜no tabin´ı.

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amply recognized by Alvarez Nazario, is the fact that the language of these genti di Cors´o was familiar enough to observers in early nineteenth-century Puerto Rico as to require no special introduction or translation. Manuel Alonso, in the classic nineteenth-century work El j´ıbaro, also referred to the presence of “criollos de Curazao” in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, evidently an unremarkable phenomenon in his day. Gir´on (n.d.) also describes the presence of Papiamento-speaking natives in Puerto Rico.84 Following the negrista trends in other Latin American countries, some contemporary Puerto Rico writers have employed popular phonetics to convey the speech of bozal or ladino blacks in Puerto Rico, much as Pal´es Matos had done for a pan-Latin American “Africanized” Spanish (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #12). In the story “Gu´asima” (Chapter Five Appendix AfroPuerto Rico #13), a son (probably born in Puerto Rico) of black slaves in central Puerto Rico describes memories of a nineteenth-century hurricane, using popular j´ıbaro Spanish. Finally, in the story “La iron´ıa que pasa,” written at the beginning of the twentieth century, Juan Braschi attributes to an Anglo-American a language suspiciously similar to that used to depict Afro-Puerto Rican bozales, rather than the more usual stereotype of gringo Spanish (uninﬂected inﬁnitives, diphthongized mid vowels, etc.). Following some initial sentences in which the American speaks using only unconjugated verbs, the dialog breaks into a jumbled mixture of conjugated and unconjugated verbs and misplaced concordance which recalls stereotypical bozal imitations (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #14), and which suggests that such stereotypes persist in the collective memory of Puerto Rican writers and readers. The Afro-Ecuadoran corpus Despite the signiﬁcant black population in Ecuador, from the earliest colonial period to the present day, there is very little documentation of Afro-Ecuadoran language. Prior to the early decades of the twentieth century, Ecuadoran writers did not describe the language of the nation’s black population, and there are no known documents purporting to represent the speech of African-born bozales or their immediate descendants. Twentieth-century Ecuadoran writers – mostly of African origin themselves – have offered literary examples of “black” Spanish of northwestern Ecuador, but the traits in question simply represent the vernacular speech of South America’s northwestern coast, and contain no hints of early This song fragment is virtually identical to a Papiamento carryover found in Venezuela (Dom´ınguez 1989:12): a˜no novo ta ben´ı a˜no novo ta bay telel´e, telel´a . . . 84

Alonso (1975:57). Also Vicente Rosal´ıa (1992).

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non-native bozal language. Nor has any written documentation of the early speech of the highland Afro-Ecuadoran population of the Chota Valley come to light. In the colonial period, African slaves in Ecuador formed maroon communities as elsewhere in Latin America, and some survived until the nineteenth century. One such village is Palenque in Los R´ıos province to the northeast of Guayaquil, where a considerable group of descendants of escaped slaves had settled, and where in the nineteenth century an apparently creolized Spanish appears to have existed. The historian Ch´avez Franco (1930:524–29) cited from memory examples from his own childhood days, but was unable to provide an exact translation for the highly deformed elements (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Ecuador #1). The village of Palenque still exists, but none of its residents speaks in this fashion, nor is there any collective memory of a creolized speech being used in past generations, which leads to the supposition that the examples recalled by Ch´avez Franco, if in fact they represent a creolized Spanish (and not, for example, an actual African song or a series of onomatopoeic forms), were the last remnants of an earlier speech mode. A few travelers’ accounts also suggest that as late as the end of the nineteenth century a distinctly Africanized Spanish may have been spoken in the Chota Valley. Hassaurek (1868:194) who traveled through Ecuador in 1861, noted, upon witnessing a celebration among chote˜nos that “I was unable to make out any of the verses, but my companions told me the songs were composed by the Negroes themselves, and in their own dialect. Like the Negroes of the United States, the Negroes of Spanish America have a dialect and pronunciation of their own. The same guttural voices and almost unintelligible pronunciation, the same queer gesticulation and shaking of the body, the same shrewd simplicity and good humor . . .” It is evident that, regardless of his qualiﬁcations as an explorer and an anthropologist, Hassaurek was a questionable linguist, who was strongly inﬂuenced by stereotypes and generalizations that even in the nineteenth century were invalid for Hispanic American dialectology. The fact that the chote˜nos” songs were incomprehensible to the visitor (who apparently was not entirely ﬂuent in Spanish) says nothing essential about the local Spanish dialect, but rather exempliﬁes a natural phenomenon, the phonetic deformation of sung language and the stylistic discrepancies between daily speech patterns and the lyrics of popular songs. Boyd-Bowman (1953:233) claimed that the Chota dialect “pertenece ling¨u´ısticamente a la provincia negra de Esmeraldas,” an opinion echoed by Weil et al. (1973:83), where we also ﬁnd the declaration that on the Ecuadoran coast, a “black” subdialect exists alongside other varieties. In the coplas and d´ecimas of Esmeraldas,85 sung most frequently during the annual Carnival, there are slight hints of an earlier period of Africanized 85

Garc´ıa (1980), Rahier (1985).

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Spanish, mostly in the form of occasional lapses of agreement (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Ecuador #2). There are also examples of the popular interchange of [f] and [hw ] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Ecuador #3), a phonetic development found in several areas of Latin America characterized by language contact.86 Examples of supposedly “Afro-Ecuadoran” pronunciation are found in literary works written by Ecuadorans of African descent, among which Adalberto Ortiz is one of the ﬁrst. In much of Esmeraldas province, AfroEcuadorans are in contact with indigenous groups, particularly the Cayapas. The pidginized Spanish of the Cayapas is juxtaposed with the popular Esmeralde˜no Spanish in the novel Juyungo by Adalberto Ortiz (1976). There is even an instance of a native Spanish speaker’s imitation of Cayapa Spanish (38): Mira, compadre; t´u dando poquito polvo amarillo, yo regalando collar bonito. Si t´u no queriendo collar ni tela bonita, yo dando bastante teyo . . .

There are also examples of the speech of the Colorados (and imitations thereof by native Spanish speakers), using the same strategy of the gerund as invariant verb (93): nosotros viniendo a visitarlos, compadre Segundo. Hoy d´ıa de ﬁesta, tomando un poco. Eso estando bueno, entren en mi casa, yo llamando otra gente . . . Toma, compadre Segundo, leche de tigre. Estando bueno . . .

In contrast, the “Afro-Esmeralde˜no” speech is represented simply by the loss of ﬁnal /r/ in inﬁnitives, by the occasional loss of ﬁnal /s/ and of intervocalic /d/: Yo qu´e voy a sab´e . . . Puede s´e. Pero lo que yo digo tambi´en es la verd´a . . . (83) Est´an enga˜naos y ver´an c´omo el ingeniero se los va atranc´a . . . (110) Todav´ıa ven´ı a ca´e a deshoras este condenao aguacero. (112) Dec´ı tu verd´a, no m´a. (176)

Similar examples are found in Nelson Estupi˜na´ n Bass Cuando los guayacanes ﬂorec´ıan (1974): . . . no sabemo nada. (44)

¡Cu´anto no hicimo! . . . Una vez pa ve si as´ı dejaba el vicio . . . (68) Another collection of Afro-Ecuadoran stories87 provides identical examples, with the addition of the vestigial Afro-Hispanic realization of intervocalic /d/ as [r], and the change /l/ > [r] in onset clusters, a trait which in other areas has been associated only with early bozal Spanish and never for native Spanish speakers of African descent. This is the closest approximation to what may 86

Lipski (1995c).

87

Ram´ırez de Mor´on (1975).

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have been earlier bozal language in contemporary Afro-Ecuadoran literature (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Ecuador #4). A few other scattered examples are found in Afro-Ecuadoran literature (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Ecuador #5). Little in the Afro-Ecuadoran corpus gives evidence of anything other than vernacular coastal pronunciation and popular morphological traits. In northwestern Ecuador, there are many references to Colombian blacks who arrived after independence, while the few references to the Chota Valley make only occasional reference to loss of word-ﬁnal /s/.88 The example “Todav´ıa ven´ı a ca´e a deshoras este condenao aguacero”89 may contain an example of an unconjugated verb, while the few instances of branco < blanco are not typical of regional Spanish, but do coincide both with the Portuguese word and with earlier Afro-Hispanic language. By the nineteenth century, when literary imitations of Afro-Hispanic language ﬂourished in Latin American narrative ﬁction, there were almost no bozales in Ecuador; most of the black population had been in the country since colonial times, or were native Spanish speakers more recently arriving from neighboring Colombia. The Afro-Colombian corpus Although Cartagena de Indias was the principal slaving port for the northern half of Spanish South America, and the maroon village Palenque de San Basilio, with its attendant creole language, arose close to Cartagena, the Afro-Colombian linguistic cupboard is nearly bare as regards legitimate bozal examples. In the seventeenth century, a number of musical texts, typically the negrillos sung in churches and cathedrals, were composed or performed in Colombia (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Colombia #1-7). Albeit possibly conceived on Colombian soil, the documents in question are identical to those produced in Spain during the same time period, and, like the companion texts from Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia of the same time period, were either written by expatriate Spaniards or writers educated in Spain, or were simply imitations of the Peninsular Spanish habla de negros. It may be that the ﬁrst African slaves taken to Colombia actually spoke with these traits, but the near identity with the Peninsular texts, as compared with later Afro-Hispanic texts indisputably produced in Latin America, casts the authenticity of the seventeenth-century Afro-Colombian texts into doubt. Found is the usual cluster of phonetic patterns, including shift of intervocalic /d/ to [r], the shift /r/ > [l] in intervocalic and onset cluster positions, loss of ﬁnal /s/ in the verbal ending -mos, loss of ﬁnal /r/ in inﬁnitives, lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/, and a few paragogic vowels (Chapter Five Appendix Colombia #12). 88 89

Not a common trait in this highland dialect; Lipski (1986e, 1987a). Ortiz (1976:112).

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In 1693, legal documents from Cartagena give some of the earliest examples of bozal Spanish from colonial Colombia which bear no noticeable relation to earlier Golden Age patterns: Ya blanco ya quer´e cari´a negro (Arr´azola 1970:151) Se˜no´ ten´e razon dec´ı vien (Ibid. 153) blanco habl´a [i] (Ibid. 131)

Immediately obvious in these brief fragments is the use of the bare uninﬂected inﬁnitive (lacking the ﬁnal /r/), a typical Spanish pidgin strategy, found in early bozal language of many regions, as well as in more contemporary approximations to Spanish.90 Another early example of Afro-Colombian language comes from the Paciﬁc port of Tumaco, an area that even today has a population of predominantly African origin. The Franciscan priest Juan de Santa Gertrudis visited the area in 1759, and registered the following humorous but plausible interchange between a bozal slave and a landowner:91 Mi amo, toc´a oro. Negro, ¿d´onde hallaste este oro? Mi amo, peda grande. ¿D´onde es Peda grande? Quote peda gande. Ma˜nana me ense˜nar´as Peda Gande. . . . era simplemente “bajo aquella piedra grande.”

This interchange shows the bare uninﬂected inﬁnitive, as well as onset cluster reduction (peda < piedra), both traits common in Afro-Iberian pidgins. Following these early examples, the Afro-Colombian corpus is vacuous as regards purported bozal language. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, several Colombian authors employed literary eye-dialect to represent the supposed speech of Afro-Colombians. In most instances, the traits involved are those of popular Caribbean Spanish, together with features of the most marginalized sociolects. Some novels also attempt to depict earlier times, when African-born bozales were still present in Colombia, although none explicitly attribute nonstandard Spanish forms to bozal African speakers.92 One exception is the comment in Palacios (1954:50): Conversaciones como e´ sta hab´ıa en cada grupo, aunque en lenguaje b´arbaro, porque ning´un negro hablaba bien el castellano; todos ellos eran africanos o hijos o nietos de africanos. Suprim´ıan siempre la r y la s ﬁnales, y aun la r en medio de la dicci´on, 90 92

91 Jurado Noboa (1990b:305), Santa Gertrudis (1970:205). Lipski (2001a, 2002d). Chapter Five Appendix Colombia B-8-11; Lipski (1999d).

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y se deten´ıan mucho en la vocal ﬁnal acentuada; a esto se agregaba un dejo en la pronunciaci´on, peculiar a todos ellos.

The traits mentioned in this passage reﬂect popular Spanish of coastal Colombia, stemming in turn from the Andalusian/Canary heritage of the Caribbean dialects. According to the testimony of individuals who actually heard bozal Spanish many years ago, Africans’ Spanish did indeed contain unique intonational patterns as well as phonetic truncations. For example the Palenquero language of Palenque de San Basilio has an intonation which is markedly different than neighboring coastal Colombian dialects of Spanish, and Palenquero’s vernacular Spanish usually contains the same patterns, thus making Palenqueros instantly identiﬁable when they go to Cartagena. The deﬁnitive traits were grammatical, however, consisting of unstable subject-verb and noun-adjective agreement, as well as syntactic anomalies such as juxtaposition of words instead of using prepositions and relative clauses. None of these features appears in purportedly “Afro-Colombian” literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Afro-Panamanian corpus There is little documentation of Afro-Hispanic language in colonial Panama, with the exception of the vestigial language of the negros congos, in which what are claimed to be bozal Spanish carryovers are liberally mixed with verbal improvisation and stereotyping.93 The very existence of the congo speech and rituals, along with other Afro-Panamanian songs which contain examples of non-native Spanish usage, point to the prior existence of a possibly widespread “African” Spanish in Panama, which all but disappeared before the relatively recent Panamanian literary tradition developed. Indeed, no known Panamanian written text claims to depict bozal Spanish, and the rich oral tradition yields ambiguous if tantalizing nuggets. Among the few documents in which any form of “Africanized” Spanish occurs, a mid-nineteenth-century poem imitates the speech of Panamanian-born blacks; the traits are similar to those of the negros curros of Cuba, reﬂecting popular phonetics such as loss of ﬁnal /s/ and neutralization of /l/ and /r/ (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Panama #1). In a collection of poems, the Afro-Panamanian writer V´ıctor Franceschi (1956) casts several of the Afro-Caribbean tinged poems in popular Caribbean pronunciation, such as aspiration or loss of ﬁnal /s/, loss of ﬁnal /r/, etc. (Chapter Five Appendix AfroPanama #2). The grammar and vocabulary of these poems in no way deviates from standard Spanish. In one poem, however, Franceschi unexpectedly introduces bozal characteristics, including use of the third person singular form as an invariant verb root, and constructions using ta + Vinf (Chapter Five Appendix 93

Lipski (1989), Joly (1981).

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Afro-Panama #3). The poem begins with unremarkable language, containing only occasional popular phonetic modiﬁcations; suddenly the language changes to include lines such as: Yo asegura que en ca˜nar la traidora t´a enroc´a . . . cuando t´u t´a tlabaj´a yo te puee asegur´a . . .

The construction t´u t´a tlabaj´a ‘you work’ is is the only known literary example of the construction ta + Vinf outside of Cuba and Puerto Rico; t´a enroc´a is simply est´a enroscada ‘she is curled up,’ and does not exhibit the same process.94 In another poem, Franceschi (1956:33) employs one ambiguous case of what may be the invariant copula son, common in nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban texts and occurring occasionally in other Afro-Hispanic documents: . . . ponle la yuca blanca, yuca que niega el blanco: yuca son p´a lo negro . . .!

These examples, although unique outside of the Afro-Cuban corpus, are worth pursuing. It is not known at this point where Franceschi derived his examples, since bozal language of this sort has not existed in Panama for several centuries. Imitation of Afro-Cuban literary models cannot be excluded, especially since there are no comparable examples in the works of other Panamanian authors.95 However, the language of the negros congos gives every indication of being a locally Panamanian phenomenon, and the Franceschi poems may provide evidence that some constructions thought to be primarily Afro-Cuban or Papiamento-inﬂuenced could once have existed elsewhere in the Caribbean region. In contemporary Panamanian Spanish, there are some words of African origin, particularly among the Afro-colonial population. Most of the elements are found elsewhere in the Caribbean region, and do not shed light directly on the African origins of slaves in colonial Panama (Jamieson 1992). Panamanian literature does contain several references to Afro-Antilleans, Creole Englishspeaking blacks descended from Panama Canal workers, and whose “African” speech traits when learning Spanish are twice-removed from both Africa and from slavery. Tejeira (1964:17) imitates the speech of Afro-Panamanians in Col´on, who pronounce intervocalic /d/ as [r]: 94

95

Outside of these two countries, and the Panamanian example just cited, Moodie cites an ambiguous example from the vestigial Spanish of Trinidad, while Tompkins (1981:311) mentions an older Afro-Peruvian informant in Ca˜nete, who recalled a line from an old song: “Lima ta hablar y Ca˜nete ta pond´e.” Given the highly eroded vestigial Spanish of Trinidad, the sole Trinidad example is questionable, while the Peruvian case remains unveriﬁed. Wilson (1982).

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– Si ron romingo gana, yo mejoro. – ¿Y c´omo va usted a mejorar – le pregunt´o alguien – si usted es su adversario? – No mejoro de mejorar . . .

A satirical song mocking Afro-Antillean Panamanians contains phonetic deformations suggestive of Afro-Hispanic stereotypes (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Panama #4). Many Panamanian novels and stories also illustrate the codeswitching of Creole English- and French-speaking Panamanians.96 A few vestiges of earlier bozal Spanish also survive in the lyrics of Panamanian folk dances, particularly the Zaracund´e.97 This dance, also known as El Cuenecu´e or Danza de los negros bozales, is currently performed in the town of Los Santos (with a very small population of African origin), but was once performed during Carnival season in other parts of Panama. One of the characters of this ritual dance is the Negro boz´a, a pronunciation reﬂecting the truncation of ﬁnal consonants in Afro-Hispanic speech; ﬁnal /r/ is frequently deleted in vernacular Panamanian Spanish, but ﬁnal /l/ almost never falls in contemporary speech. Other characters’ names also reﬂect bozal confusion of Spanish morphological endings: Pajarit´e (pajarito ‘little bird’), Fransisqu´e (Francisco). The Negro boz´a chants phrases which include Afro-Hispanic bozal language, including yo ten´e (yo tengo ‘I have’), la huert´e (la huerta ‘the garden’), yuqu´e (yuca ‘yucca’), tamarind´e (tamarindo ‘tamarind’), papay´e ‘papaya’. The song even contains a non-inverted question, frequent in the Spanish Antilles but not common in contemporary Panamanian Spanish:98 ¿Cu´antos hijos t´u teneis? ‘How many children do you have?’99 The frequent replacement of Spanish ﬁnal -o and -a by -e is similar to phenomena attributed in literature to Haitian L2 speakers of Spanish in the Dominican Republic, and actually veriﬁed by Ortiz L´opez.100 The Afro-Venezuelan corpus Although the presence of African-born slaves persisted in Venezuela well into the second half of the nineteenth century, there are few if any legitimate surviving bozal texts from Venezuela, although oral folklore is rich in suggestive fragments of once more pervasive Afro-Hispanic speech. One brief example101 comes in a tale in which a drowning man calls out to his black slave for help, promising him freedom, to which the slave responds in pidginized Spanish Si melo criban´a primero ‘if you write it for me ﬁrst’. Also found in much AfroVenezuelan folklore are snatches of songs and popular poems which reﬂect the presence of Papiamento elements, brought by slaves who escaped the nearby 96 98 99 101

97 Rhodes (1998). E.g. Cubena (1981, 1990). Except among Creole English-speaking Afro-Antilleans, probably through the inﬂuence of English creole; Bishop (1976:62). 100 Ortiz L´ Arosemena Moreno (1984). opez (1999a, 1999b, 2001). Ovalles (1935:70).

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Dutch slaving depots of Cura¸cao and Aruba and established themselves in remote areas of the Venezuelan coast. The coastal province of Coro received a constant stream of escaped slaves from Cura¸cao, who also introduced the AfroIberian creole language Papiamento into the Afro-Venezuelan linguistic mix.102 Many of the slaves brought to colonial Venezuela were loangos from the coastal Congo region, and some of their rituals survive to this day.103 The most vernacular speech of this (natively Spanish-speaking) group is characterized by several phenomena which bespeak earlier bozal or Afro-creole language, including realization of /r/ as [l] in onset clusters (plesidente, tlapo, pleso, cuatlo, etc.), realization of intervocalic /d/ as [r] (pororoso < poderoso, etc.), realization of intervocalic /r/ and /rr/ as [d] (badato < barato, vadia < varias, etc.), and reduction of onset clusters (nego < negro, ladone < ladrones, etc.). There are also some syntactic constructions which depart drastically from other forms of vernacular Venezuelan and Caribbean Spanish, for example: yo no voy a s´e apueta con utada polque depu´e ello se pueden demay´e y dec´ı . . . (Mosonyi et al. 1983:165) yo no quien me mand´o a venime pa ete condenao pueblo. (Ibid.) El me dice: “a s´e tengo.” (Hern´andez 1981:110)

A number of the loangos had escaped from nearby Cura¸cao beginning in the eighteenth century, and are the principal source for the various Papiamento song fragments that survived in this region well into the second half of the twentieth century. The above-mentioned traits are, however, not symptomatic of Papiamento presence, but rather are presumed carryovers from the Spanish acquired by African slaves. The phrase a s´e tengo is reminiscent of the Palenquero combination (i) a s´e ten´e ‘I have,’ of uncertain etymology. One loango verse containing Papiamento elements is:104 a˜no novo ta ben´ı a˜no novo ta bay telel´e, telel´a . . .

This verse would be correct in modern Papiamento, except that the word for “year” in the latter language is a˜na. In Coro, New Year’s Eve is celebrated with the same verse in Spanish (Dom´ınguez 1989:37): el a˜no nuevo se viene y el a˜no viejo se va . . . nosotros nos marcharemos para no volver jam´as . . . 102 103

Acosta Saignes (1967:196). Dom´ınguez (1989), Mosonyi et al. (1983).

104

Dom´ınguez (1989:12).

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The Puerto Rican poet Olga Rodr´ıguez de Nolla (1947:63) published in 1947 a poem in Spanish which contains the verse: “A˜no nuevo dand´e, a˜no tabin´ı.” Despite the obvious similarity with the Papiamento verses found in Coro (the Puerto Rican poet gives no source for her language, which is entirely Spanish throughout the collection of poems except for the above verse), there is no ready explanation for dand´e (some derivation of andar is suspected, possibly using a construction derived from Spanish/Portuguese ha de + i n f i n i t i v e ). The best-known Papiamento text from Venezuela was collected in Falc´on state (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Venezuela #1). Aretz de Ram´on and Ram´on y Rivera (1955:72), who did not recognize the language of the nearby Netherlands Antilles, classiﬁed the language as “el argot t´ıpico de los negros . . . son sumamente interesantes por su lenguaje pintoresco, que es muy dif´ıcil captar as´ı, y el cual probablemente pertenece al grupo de dialectos antillanos o patois.” Granda (1973a) subsequently identiﬁed the majority of the elements as Papiamento, although there has been much transformation and distortion. Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Venezuela #2-4 contains other Papiamento examples collected in Venezuela. The same Coro Afro-Venezuelan folklore recalls Cura¸cao in songs in Spanish (Dom´ınguez 1989:15): en busca de una negrita me voy para Curazao . . .

A few surviving song fragments and poems from contemporary AfroVenezuelan communities give hints of earlier Africanized speech, although the latter has completely disappeared from Venezuela.105 Sojo (1986:104) cites a song transcribed in Curiepe, along the Barlovento region to the east of Caracas, in 1906, as sung by loangos from the coastal village of Aricagua: Cuando voy po la calle, Juana, voy esongando, pa que digan los paes Peo pao va esando.

This text contains popular Caribbean pronunciation, and is otherwise unremarkable as a testimony of contemporary vernacular Spanish, except for the gerund esando, which may hark back to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century AfroHispanic copula sa(r), with occasional gerund esando. Another song fragment mentions the Pop´o (Ewe-Fon) group:106 Bailando guachicang´o con los neguitos del Pop´o, que me dieron a beb´e aguardiente con coliﬂ´o[o] 105

Megenney (1999).

106

Sojo (1986:105).

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In this song, the only possibly “African” vestige is the reduction of the onset cluster negritos > neguitos. Another example of onset cluster reduction comes in a song transcribed early in the twentieth century in Curiepe:107 . . . malab´ı, como dice el nego de la Sierra Sabac´o . . . un neguito de la Guinea me dijo un d´ıa –Aj´a? Que si los dos quer´ıamos ten´e una mima muj´e . . . –Verd´a? . . .

In a collective memory of the abolitionist movement in postcolonial Venezuela, black laborers were reputed to have shouted ¡Ya toro semo uno!108 evidencing the common Afro-Hispanic pronunciation of intervocalic /d/ as [r]. The same phenomenon is also found in a song fragment from Barlovento: Ari´o me respiro que cosa can crique . . .

Madriz Galindo (1969:9) explains: “Tal dialecto no es de extra˜nar, porque en nuestros antiguos negros existieron los llamados ‘luangos,’ que no pronunciaban con claridad el castellano.” The song “El sambarambul´e” contains similar examples, together with an uninﬂected plural:109 ¿Por o´ nde le rento? ¿Por o´ nde le roy? Que me dan los temblor . . .

Another song was transcribed in the village of Caraballeda:110 Dicen que mi Chang´o es mono Ma Chang´o no es mono n´a Ma Chang´o lo que tiene que no lo saben bail´a.

This song may contain an example of double negation,111 although if the reference to Chang´o is taken to suggest a Yoruba origin for the verses, double negation would not be an expected result. A similar use of n´a (da) as double negator is found in a song transcribed in Chichiriviche:112 Yo soy el P´ajaro Negro cuando la gana me d´a; cuando no me da la gana no soy p´ajaro n´a! 107 110

108 Ibid. (219). 109 INCIBA (1970:16–17). Ibid. (201). 111 Lipski (2000d). 112 Sojo (1986:258). Sojo (1986:106).

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The Afro-Venezuelan villages on the southern shore of Lake Maracaibo have retained several songs which make oblique reference to earlier Afro-Hispanic language. For example:113 No soy negro por la ley . . . yo sigo la ley de Cristo. ¡Mir´a, a m´ı nunca me han visto robando caf´e en el muey!

The realization of muelle as muey may represent an earlier Afro-Hispanic truncation. A song fragment dated 1783 contains use of the third person singular as invariant verb:114 . . . Ah malhaya mi garganta cuando yo viene a grit´a . . .

Another uninﬂected verb may be present in a song from Ocumare del Tuy:115 La jinca tumb´a el bucare Martina Faruche El Cachicamo Tapa la cuchara Tonada corrida.

A “Jurumung´a” song from the village of Qu´ıbor, near Barquisimeto, contains the lines:116 Jurumung´a min´a ah ese tamborero negro para bueno . . .

The verb min´a may be related to Palenquero min´ı “to come.” In other Afro-Venezuelan folk poems, the shift of /r/ to /l/ in onset clusters, and reduction of onset clusters, typically Afro-Hispanic traits not found in other varieties of Spanish, occur from time to time, for example in this song transcribed in T´achira state:117 Son un neglito chacantelito y no hay otro mej´o que yo: barro la casa lavo los tastes, limpo lo ni˜no y hago el arr´o. 113 115 117

Mart´ınez Su´arez (1986a:14). Ram´on y Rivera (1971:33). Ram´on y Rivera (1992:336).

114 Ram´ on y Rivera (1965:111). 116 Pollak-Eltz (1972:57).

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In the “Sarambul´e” or “baile para matar la culebra,” found in the Barlovento region, uninﬂected plurals, /d/ > [r], and lack of deﬁnite articles are found:118 ¿Por ’onde le rento? . . . ¿Por ’onde le roy? Que me dan los temblor . . . ¡Pic´o culebra! ¡Pic´o culebra a Francisco!

Venezuelan literature has abundantly portrayed black characters,119 but when an ethnolinguistically distinct speech mode has been ascribed to AfroVenezuelans, the results have uniformly been popular phonetic modiﬁcations common throughout the Caribbean.120 These include loss of syllable-ﬁnal /s/, neutralization of preconsonantal /l/ and /r/ and loss of these consonants wordﬁnally, loss of intervocalic /d/, as well as popular analogical formations (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Venezuela #5). As in other Caribbean nations, Venezuela’s population of African origin is disproportionately poor and undereducated, with the result that the vernacular traits in question are indeed found among marginalized Afro-Venezuelan speech communities. These characteristics are, however, not African in their origin, and the absence of imitations of foreign-born bozales in Venezuelan literature reﬂects the fact that few slaves were taken directly from Africa during the ﬁnal century of slavery. 118 120

119 E.g. Beane (1980). Ibid. (340–41). C. Alvarez (1989), Lewis (1992:83), Megenney (1985c).

6

Survey of major African language families

Introduction Among the corpus of bozal Spanish and Portuguese materials, none of the texts show the neat template-like superposition of Romance and African language patterns found among creole languages, perhaps not surprising in view of the fact that bozal language was re-created spontaneously each time a diverse group of Africans was thrust into a situation where learning Spanish or Portuguese was instantly necessary. Despite the lack of systematic one-to-one correspondences between grammatical structures peculiar to individual African languages and bozal Spanish or Portuguese, there are some recurring traits among major African languages whose traces among Afro-Iberian speech can potentially be separated from the spontaneous effects of imperfect second language acquisition. Among later bozal texts, particularly those from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there is a higher overall degree of linguistic accuracy, and even some attempts at anthropological accounts of Afro-Hispanic language and culture. Available documentation on the demographics of the African population in nineteenth-century Latin America is also more complete, and there are occasional glimpses of substratum inﬂuence on bozal Spanish syntax. An assessment of several prominent cross-sections of African grammatical structures is therefore not without merit, even in the absence of stable creoles. The following survey is not intended to be complete, but rather to underscore the type of considerations that might be brought to bear on individual bozal texts in order to fathom the possible effects of African grammatical patterns. Much of what makes African languages seem “different” from the perspective of Romance languages has to do with the internal morphological complexity of many African language families, involving noun classes and elaborate concordance systems. Most notorious are the Bantu languages, each with a dozen or more morphologically arbitrary nominal categories, with varying forms for singular and plural. Among some members of the Atlantic group, subject-verb concordance is marked in fashions diverging widely from Romance verb sufﬁxation. To superimpose such structures on a partially acquired Romance language would entail considerable grammatical complication, and the ex nihilo 197

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A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

construction of previously nonexistent morphological structures. As a consequence, Afro-Hispanic language shows no traces of African morphological complexity. It is rather in those domains where African syntactic patterns coincide with more efﬁcient learners’ strategies, e.g. in allowing for a morphologically transparent analytic construction formed by juxtaposing uninﬂected building blocks from the target language, that the feasibility of an African substratum inﬂuence on bozal language increases. When the African patterns are areal characteristics occurring broadly among the language families implicated in bozal language, the credibility of substratum inﬂuence rises proportionately. Introduction to major African language families Over the past half century there has been considerable evolution in the terminology used to describe African languages, as well as in the actual classiﬁcation schemes and the genealogical relationships among languages they presuppose. At the same time, many of the ethnic groups qua speech communities which interacted with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking populations were known at different times by a variety of names, and in some cases none of the historical names coincides with currently accepted terms. Terms such as Mina, Nagˆo, Arar´a, Carabal´ı, Angola, etc. were once common in designating African groups, their languages, and cultural practices, but none of these terms is currently used by linguists or ethnographers. According to contemporary classiﬁcations, the main African language families are Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo.1 Although it is the latter group which had the greatest impact on Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts, the remaining groups were at times implicated indirectly, through borrowings into Niger-Congo languages, or via the languages spoken by individuals engaged in trans-Saharan trade caravans. A f r o - A s i at i c . This includes the Semitic languages of North Africa, including Arabic and Berber. In addition to the use of Arabic items in the early Mediterranean Lingua Franca, Arabic elements entered many African languages with the spread of Islam. N i l o - S a h a r a n . This family was formerly known as “Eastern Sudanic,” and includes Amharic, Somali, and other languages of northeastern Africa. N i g e r - C o n g o . This group has also been known as Niger-Kordofanian. Under the latter classiﬁcation, Niger-Kordofanian is subdivided into Kordofanian (exempliﬁed by small groups of languages spoken in Sudan) and Niger-Congo. In some classiﬁcations, Mande is seen as a third division of Niger-Kordofanian. In the classiﬁcation scheme of Williamson (1989a), 1

These terms depart somewhat from the comprehensive classiﬁcation of Greenberg (1966), which still remains the most widely accepted genealogical model for African languages.

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Niger-Congo is divided into the three-way split of Mande, Atlantic-Congo, and Kordofanian. M a n d e . The principal languages of this group are Mende, Kpelle, Susu, and Vai (spoken in Sierra Leone) and the Mandinkan languages (including Mandinka and Bambara), spoken in a wide area stretching across the Senegambia. At l a n t i c . This includes Wolof (the major coastal Lingua Franca of Senegal), Serer (also spoken in Senegal), Fula (a major inland language family covering a wide area in northwestern Africa), Diola (a cluster of languages straddling the border between Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, and Temne (spoken in Sierra Leone). The Atlantic languages were the ﬁrst to come into direct contact with Portuguese, and made a lasting impact on Atlantic creoles, as well as being mentioned by name in many early bozal texts. I j o i d . Ijo, spoken in eastern coastal Nigeria around Port Harcourt, is the main language of this family. Ijo directly inﬂuenced the formation of the Berbice Dutch creole. It was probably also present in the Nineteenthcentury Hispanic Caribbean, particularly in Cuba, where large numbers of Africans arrived from the Nigerian coast. K r u . This is a family of languages spoken throughout Liberia and the Ivory Coast. Major Kru languages include Klao, Bassa, and Grebo, but none of the speech communities is large in comparison with other major African languages. The Kru people have traditionally taken to the sea, and Kru men were renowned as sailors from the sixteenth century onward. Relatively few Kru were taken as slaves, but many Kru served on slaving ships and in coastal settlements along the West African coast that participated in trade with Europeans. G u r . Also known as Voltaic languages, this group of small languages is spoken in the Sahel region across the northern portions of Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, and Benin, as well as representing most of the languages of Burkina Faso (the former Upper Volta). None of these languages is spoken near the coast, and as a result there is no evidence that Gur languages participated in signiﬁcant numbers in Afro-Hispanic contacts. D o g o n . This language, sometimes grouped with Gur languages, is spoken in northeastern Mali, and is not known to have intersected with Spanish or Portuguese during the Atlantic slave trade. A d a m wa - U b a n g u i . This is a small group of languages spoken in Central Africa, in southern Chad and neighboring areas. None of these languages apparently made an impact on Afro-Hispanic language, although a creolized member of this family, Sango, has become the major Lingua Franca of the Central African Republic, and may have come into contact with European languages during the slave trade.

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K wa . Using the current designation, Kwa languages comprise only a subset (“Western Kwa”) of the formerly much broader designation. Major languages include the Akan group (Twi, Fante, Asante, Bran/Brong), G˜a, the Ewe/Fon group (also known as Gbe languages). This was among the most important African language groups to intersect with Spanish and Portuguese, as well as with other European languages, and was instrumental both in shaping bozal language in many regions and in permanently inﬂuencing the formation of several creoles. C o n g o - B e n u e . This group contains the former “eastern Kwa” languages, Bantoid languages, and the entire Bantu group (to be discussed below). Among the most important non-Bantu members of the Congo-Benue group are Yoruba, Igbo, Eﬁk, the Edo cluster, the Idoma group. Together with the (new) Kwa group, this was the most important non-Bantu family of African languages to interact with Spanish and Portuguese. Congo-Benue languages have been directly implicated in the formation of Atlantic creoles, and deﬁnitely inﬂuenced Afro-Hispanic bozal languages, particularly in the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Ba n t u . This is a vast family of languages (estimates of the total number of Bantu languages range from more than 400 to some 670), stretching across most of the southern half of Africa and well into the northeastern quadrant. Although some non-Bantu languages are spoken in South Africa, the majority of African languages spoken below the equator belong to the Bantu family.2 In terms of the impact on Portuguese and, by extension, Spanish, the Kongo branch of the Bantu family is by far the most important. This includes Kikongo and its related dialects (e.g. Fiote, Tchiluba), Cabinda (spoken in the Angolan enclave of the same name), Kimbundu (spoken in and around Luanda, Angola, and becoming a lingua franca in much of Angola), Umbundu (spoken in and around the southern Angolan port of Benguela, which was an important slave exporting point). Angolan slave traders also brought speakers of inland Bantu languages such as Ngombe, and eventually from as far away as Mozambique, slaves speaking languages such as Chinyanja, Ronga, Sena, Shona, etc. However, for the purposes of reconstructing early bozal language, the Congo Basin Bantu languages are by far the most important.3 More so than any other large African language division, the Bantu languages share remarkable resemblances in formal structure (and among neighboring languages, often a 2

3

A complete genealogy of Bantu languages is an ongoing enterprise, with the most ambitious and far-reaching classiﬁcation scheme to date that of Guthrie (1948, 1953, 1967–71, 1971). Hinnebusch (1989) offers some more recent opinions on Bantu classiﬁcation. It is also possible that some Africans who arrived in the American colonies spoke regional Bantu Lingua Francas such as Lingala (which currently prevails in Kinshasa, Zaire) or creolized Bantu languages such as Kituba (derived from Kikongo).

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Table 6.1 Family

Representative languages

Atlantic Mande Ijoid Kru Gur Dogon Adanwa-Ubangui Kwa Congo-Benue Bantu

Wolof, Fula, Diola, Temne, Serer Mende, Mandinka/Bambara, Kpelle, Susu, Vai Ijo Klao, Bassa, Grebo many small groups Dogon Sango Akan (Twi, Fante, Asante, Bran/Brong), G˜a, Ewe/Fon Yoruba, Igbo, Eﬁk, Edo, Idoma, Nupe Kikongo, Kimbundu, Umbundu, Bubi, Fang, Ndow´e/Combe, Sena, Ronga, Swahili, Lingala

relatively high rate of mutual intelligibility). This contrasts, for example, with neighboring members of Atlantic, Mande, or Kwa languages, in which typological similarities noticed only by linguists are far overshadowed by signiﬁcant differences and virtually no mutual intelligibility. The comparative homogeneity of Bantu languages is a factor to be reckoned with in tracing the Atlantic slave trade across time, since during the time periods and in colonial regions where slaves were taken from the Bantu-speaking parts of Africa, it is possible to postulate a higher degree of coherence in the substratum, and to open the search for possible areal features creeping into bozal language.

Consequences of the diversity of African languages in Afro-Iberian contact situations Traditional classiﬁcations of African ethnic groups and languages also reﬂect linguistic diversity and similarity, albeit not always in complete accord with contemporary typological schemes. Thornton (1992:ch. 7) bases his discussion on a three-way division that formed the broad outline for the Atlantic slave trade: Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea, and Angola. Upper Guinea stretched approximately from the Senegal River to Cape Mount in Liberia. Lower Guinea stretched from the western Ivory Coast to Cameroon. In between Upper Guinea and Lower Guinea was a stretch of coastline (included in modern Liberia and Ivory Coast) sometimes known as the Kwakwa Coast, where little slave trading or other commerce with Europeans took place. Lower Guinea was separated from the historically designated area of Angola by most of contemporary Cameroon and Gabon, from which few slaves were taken.

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The greatest linguistic heterogeneity existed in Upper Guinea, which contained numerous members of the West Atlantic and Mande families. West Atlantic languages (of which Wolof was a prime exemplar) were quite different from one another, while members of the Mande group (overwhelmingly represented by Mandinka) were relatively similar. In areas where several mutually unintelligible languages were spoken in close proximity (e.g. the “Rivers of Guinea” in modern Guinea-Bissau), most inhabitants were multilingual, and regional lingua francas developed.4 Lower Guinea is the homeland of the traditional Kwa languages, today divided into the former Eastern Kwa languages of the Akan/Fon/Bran group and the Western Kwa languages such as Yoruba, Eﬁk, Edo, and Igbo. Linguistically, there is considerable homogeneity within the Akan group, while the remaining Kwa languages share numerous structures, but are in general not mutually intelligible except for the closest relatives. Yoruba emerged as an important lingua franca in the eastern portion of Lower Guinea, as did Ewe/Fon; the Akan languages held sway in the western portion. It is from the morphosyntactic similarities of the Lower Guinea/Kwa languages that many of the prototypical features of Afro-Atlantic creoles emerged, including the preverbal tense/mood/aspect particle system, predicate clefting, and some forms of articles, possessives, and plural markers. The area designated as Angola, stretching from contemporary central Zaire to southern Angola, spoke a variety of closely related Bantu languages, with Kikongo and Kimbundu having emerged as the most important regional languages. The degree of homogeneity of the Angolan languages was the greatest of the three traditional geographical groupings, and politically the powerful Kongo and Ndongo/Ngola empires had produced a greater sense of identity and unity among Africans drawn from this region. This linguistic proﬁle calls into question the notion that slave traders or plantation owners were able to secure sufﬁciently heterogeneous slave populations as to prevent communication in a common language. This reduced heterogeneity in many cases also calls into question the pressure to creolize Portuguese or Spanish, in West African slave depots and in New World plantation environments. First, linguistic diversity aboard slaving vessels was almost entirely a function of the slave collection which had been amassed by an African slave trader at a single port, since typical slaving vessels made only a single stop at an African slaving station to load slaves for the Atlantic crossing. During the early 4

The Spanish priest Sandoval (1956:92) believed erroneously that Mandinka, Wolof, and Fula speakers could easily communicate with one another because of a common Moslem tradition. Much more likely is the fact that Mandinka and Wolof had become important commercial languages in northwestern Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans. The Mande languages (including Mandinka, Bambara, and Mende) had been spread through the conquests of the Mali Empire, and were spoken by necessity far from their native region.

Survey of major African language families

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Atlantic slaving period, when ships stopped in Cacheu and other Upper Guinean ports, the chances of obtaining a linguistically heterogeneous population were the greatest, and it is probably not coincidental that a creolized Portuguese quickly developed in slave depots on the Cape Verde Islands and later on the mainland. Those slaving ships arriving at the southern end of Upper Guinea, modern Sierra Leone, received more homogeneous Mande-speaking slaves. Ships which took their cargo from the Mina coast obtained primarily speakers of Akan languages, while the increasingly important slave coast (Allada, Arda, and Whyda) yielded speakers of the Ewe/Fon group. Cargos of slaves from Angola were linguistically even more homogeneous. Moreover, large groups of slaves sold at a single time were frequently obtained by African middlemen as the result of wars between tribes, and thus may have come from a single geographical and ethnic area and may even have known each other: “An entire ship might be ﬁlled, not just with people possessing the same culture, but with people who grew up together.”5 Once in the American colonies, African slaves were subject to varying pressures, in the slave markets and on plantations, which sometimes resulted in ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous groupings. Particularly in the British Caribbean islands, many slave owners deliberately sought slaves from various ethnic groupings in order to minimize the possibilities of rebellion. On the other hand, many French planters preferred to draw their slaves from a single group and to encourage intermarriage, believing that stability of their labor force would be thus facilitated. As slave dealers and buyers became more sophisticated, certain traits were associated with particularly African ethnic groups; some were renowned as heavy laborers, others as rice cultivators, cooks, artisans, or overseers. Thus, depending upon the needs of a particular owner, slaves might be deliberately chosen from the same linguistic group. Finally, once Portuguese and then Dutch slave trading concentrated on the Angola region, the linguistic homogeneity of slave populations was virtually guaranteed. Selection of African slaves based on perceived traits associated with ethnic groups was well documented in Spanish America during the entire colonial period. 5

Thornton (1992:192–95).

7

Phonetics/phonology of Afro-Hispanic language

Introduction Spanish came into contact with a variety of West and Central African languages during a time period stretching across nearly four centuries, under widely varying demographic conditions and sociohistorical circumstances. Many dialects of Spanish were involved, ranging from sixteenth-century Andalusian Spanish, in which the phonological traits that today make this dialect so distinctive were just emerging, to distinctive Caribbean, Andean, and Paciﬁc South American dialects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, already far evolved from the Peninsular antecedents. Thus the result of Africans’ pronunciation of Spanish varied as the Spanish dialects themselves evolved: for example, the product of an Angolan Bantu language and early sixteenth-century Peninsular Spanish were qualitatively different from the product of the same Bantu language and nineteenth-century Cuban or coastal Peruvian Spanish. Even more diverse was the panoply of African languages that ran headlong into Spanish and Portuguese, ﬁrst in Europe and coastal Africa, then in the Americas. All African language families were implicated; through sheer force of numbers, Bantu languages (stretching from the Gulf of Guinea through southern Africa and around to much of eastern Africa) eventually came to represent the largest single crosssection of African languages, with Kwa languages in second place, and the remainder divided among Kru, Mende, Atlantic, and other smaller groups. Each dyadic contact between a particular African language and a speciﬁc spatial/temporal variety of Spanish gave rise to a unique pattern of phonological adaptation, in principle making the totality of Afro-Hispanic phonology as vast as the union of African languages and Spanish dialects over several hundred years. To compound the problem, little accurate information exists in representation of the ﬁrst centuries of Afro-Hispanic pronunciation. Few if any Spanish writers had even the slightest knowledge of African languages, and even fewer took the trouble to accurately transcribe the phonetic difﬁculties experienced by Africans who attempted to learn European languages. Much easier was the facile stereotype, the repetition of hackneyed transpositions and vulgarly comical plays on words, typiﬁed by the omnipresent 204

Phonetics/phonology of Afro-Hispanic language

205

cagayera for caballero. All too frequently, literary representations of “Africanized” Spanish were picked up via imitation by writers who had no direct contact with African speakers of Spanish, and passed from text to text like a sinister party line game, becoming more distorted and less realistic with each copy. Common denominators among African languages: tone and stress There is as much difference among the various major African language families as between any one of these families and Ibero-Romance languages. Indeed, pan-African typological variation is generally greater than found among the Indo-European languages. Even taking into consideration the fewer than twenty African languages that had the greatest known impact on Spanish and Portuguese, the typological diversity is considerable. In the midst of this multiplicity of phonological conﬁgurations, there are a few common denominators worth taking into consideration in assessing the formation of Afro-Hispanic speech patterns. In addition to speciﬁc points of potential linguistic transfer, few and far between, general strategies of second-language phonology become operative when considering the totality of the Afro-Hispanic interface. The one phonological trait most commonly found among an extremely broad cross-section of African languages, and which opposes nearly all subSaharan African languages to Ibero-Romance, is the presence of phonemic lexical tones among African languages. The Cushitic languages (spoken in northeastern Africa) are exceptional in that few have distinctive tones;1 however, this language family was sparsely represented during Afro-Hispanic encounters. Of the African languages known to have interacted with IberoRomance, only West African languages from the Senegambia region – principally Wolof, Fula, and Serere – lack phonemic tones. Of the major East African languages, Swahili, does not exhibit lexical tones. However, Swahili had little demonstrable impact on Spanish, since few Africans from Swahilispeaking regions were ever taken to Spanish America. Correspondingly, very few sub-Saharan African languages have a distinctive stress accent. This is strikingly different from all Indo-European languages, which typically have a well-deﬁned stress accent of some sort (whether predictable by general algorithm or phonemically arbitrary), at times in conjunction with a pitch accent (e.g. Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian, Swedish).2 Little empirical evidence exists 1 2

Welmers (1973:78). Welmers (1973:77) laments: “A shocking number of people concerned with African languages still seem to think of tone as a species of esoteric, inscrutable, and utterly unfortunate accretion characteristic of underprivileged languages . . . the usual treatment is to ignore it, in hope that

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which documents the behavior of suprasegmental systems during the acquisition of non-tonal European languages by speakers of sub-Saharan African languages. The most that is usually offered is a vague reference to “tone languages” to explain away the “strange” (e.g. with respect to native European usage) intonational patterns often observed in Africans’ and some Asians’ pronunciation of non-tonal European languages. Given the magnitude of the typological dissimilarity, and the fact that phonemic tones are found in most if not all sub-Saharan African languages that intermingled with Spanish and Portuguese, the matter of tonal adaptation deserves further study. All African tonal languages have phonemically single lexical tones. Superﬁcial complex tones (e.g. rising, falling, circumﬂex) result from “dumping” of autosegmental tones onto a single vowel, normally at the right edge of a word. Among the Bantu languages, the usual tonal distinction is between High and Low tones. Three-tone systems (High, Mid, Low) are found in several West African languages, with Yoruba providing a representative example. The limited psycholinguistic research which has been done on the acquisition of tone languages points to the tones as the ﬁrst component of the phonology to be learned accurately by young children, usually well before the consonant and vowel systems are ﬁrmly in place. Tonal adaptations of European loan-words in African languages When European words with a stress accent are borrowed into African tonal languages, it is usual for the tonic syllable to be interpreted as a lexical High tone, or a circumﬂex rising+falling combination. This is a natural consequence of the usual correlation between stress accent and rising intonation in such Indo-European languages as English and Spanish. At times, one or more of the originally posttonic syllables may also receive a high tone, depending upon the Africans’ perception of the tonal patterns in the European language. The originally stressed vowel may also be lengthened in African languages which have distinctive vowel length or like-vowel sequences. Alleyne (1980:71) notes the regular correspondence between Saramaccan high pitch and main stress in Sranan Tongo, and in the lexiﬁer languages of Saramaccan (English and Portuguese). Sierra Leone Krio also replaces English main stress with phonemic high tone.3 According to Alleyne (1980:73), pitch accent in borrowed words can eventually become phonemic when a language, for example a developing creole, begins to borrow words from African languages in which lexical

3

it will go away of itself.” Foreign service manuals for such languages as Yoruba, Igbo, Kikuyu, etc., go to great lengths to provide tonal discrimination exercises, and to emphasize the vital importance of correct tonal usage. Berry (1970).

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207

tone is already present. If these tones are retained during borrowing, the lexiﬁcation of tones in words derived from the original lexiﬁer language will be enhanced.4 In Cuba, the Yoruba language – known locally as lucum´ı – became an important concomitant of Afro-Cuban santer´ıa rituals, and in addition to being spoken natively by a vestigial bozal population, contributed many words to the vocabulary of Cuban santeros, most of whom speak no Yoruba. Many of these terms have penetrated into popular Cuban culture, being found in music and poetry created by monolingual Spanish speakers. Yoruba words taken into Spanish lost the majority of their tonal patterns. However, Yoruba High tone, particularly in word-ﬁnal syllables, was frequently represented by a stress accent in Spanish. Thus (using the acute accent for high tone, the grave accent for low tone, and no written accent for mid tone) il´e (Yor. `ıl´e) ‘house,’ Chang´o, orish´a, meyi (Yor. m´ej`ı) ‘two, twins, pair,’ etc.5 A study of Portuguese borrowings into African languages provides similar illustrations.6 For example, Portu(gal) > P´ut`o in Kikongo, Kimbundu and other Angolan languages. Portugu´es was passed on to Kintandu as mp´ut´ul´uk´eesu; Mp´utu means ‘Europe’. In Kitandu, Dom Afonso > Nd´o F´uu´ nsu, Dona Maria > Nd´oo´ na M´adiya. In some Zairean languages, prata > mp´al´ata. In other borrowings into Kikongo, coroa > k`olˆowa/k`oolˆoa, Satan´as > s`atan´a, Andr´e > 4

5

6

A selection of English loanwords into Yoruba neatly illustrates many processes of tonal adaptation (Ojo 1977, Salami 1982): ENGLISH YORUBA pound p´ou` n copper k´ob`o halfpenny e´ep`ın`ı six(pence) s´ıs`ı shop s´oo` bu dirt(y) `ıd`ot´ı church s´oo` s`ı doctor d´ok´ıt`a collar k´ol`a Bible b´ıb´el`ı grammar gr´am`a minister m´ın´ıst`a table t´ab`ıl`ı paradise p´ar´ad´a`ıs`ı driver d´er´eb`a opener o´ p`un`a oven o´ f`un`u corporal k´ob`ur`u coat k´oo` t`u Cabrera (1970c); also Olmsted (1953); Yai (1978). For examples of Yoruba survivals in Trinidad, Warner-Lewis 1971, 1982, 1991. Brazilian Yoruba is described by Silva (1958), Portugal (1985), Komolafe and Silva (1978), inter alia. Atkins (1953), Bal (1968, 1974, 1991), Bradshaw (1965), Kiraithe and Baden (1976), Likangama (1990), Martins (1958a, 1958b), Prata (1983).

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Nd´eri, bolo > mb´oola/mb´oolo, escada > sik´aada, sapato > ns`amp´atu, arroz > l´ooso, mula > m´uula, escola > sik´oo´ la, hora > wo´ola, l´apis > kil´ap´ı, f´osforo > fof´olo, etc. English borrowings into Ijo exhibit similar patterns: ﬂag > ﬁl´agi, pan > p´ani, ﬂower > ﬁl´awa, etc.7 Atkins (1953) is among the few attempts to systematically trace the assignment of lexical tones to Portuguese borrowings, taking examples from Kimbundu. His brief but illustrative demonstration shows that Kimbundu did not simply interpret Portuguese tonic stress as High tone (in fact, this substitution did not always occur), but attempted to ﬁt Portuguese words into the tonal templates of already existing Kimbundu noun classes. Thus from arroz Kimbundu has the root -los´o (e.g. ma-los´o ‘heaps of rice’). Livro gave the plural ma-divul´u, bengala gave m-b´ang´al´a, etc. These examples show that in many cases there is little correspondence between Portuguese tonic stress and Kimbundu High tone; rather, the Portuguese words are ﬁtted into already existing Kimbundu tonal conﬁgurations. Among personal names borrowed are Sara > Sala, Joana > Nzw´an´a, Fabi˜ao > Faby´aaˆ , Eduardo > Duw´alud´u, Alexandre > X´and´el´e, etc. Once more, although the correspondence between Portuguese tonic stress and High tone is somewhat closer, there are cases of Kimbundu High tone corresponding to Portuguese atonic vowels. Polysyllabic Portuguese words taken into Kimbundu come closer to the correspondence atonic vowel = Low tone/tonic vowel = High tone: bicicleta > bisilel´eta, bacalhao > mbakany´aaˆ , etc. The same also holds for the small group of Portuguese functional words adapted to Kimbundu: at´e > kat´e, nunca > n´uca, ent˜ao > ant´aaˆ , etc. These examples need to be supplemented by more recent and more wideranging data, but even these early observations sufﬁce to show that Africans’ adaptation of Spanish and Portuguese words to African tonal patterns cannot be reduced to a simple formula. Perception of grammatical function, and attempts to assign nouns (the majority of the borrowings) to an established nominal category, were also important factors, at least among the Bantu languages. Possible impact of tonal languages on Spanish and Portuguese The full story of the pronunciation of Spanish and Portuguese words by speakers of tonal African languages cannot be deduced only by studying borrowings into African languages. In the latter case, foreign words are adapted completely to the structure of the host language, and are inserted into discourse realized entirely in an African language. The borrowing process in effect removes the “strangeness” of the originally foreign word, by altering its phonetic structure until it is indistinguishable from the native lexical stock. The learning of Spanish 7

Jenewari (1989).

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or Portuguese by an African speaker, especially outside of Africa, presents a completely different scenario. Spanish words are not being ﬁtted into an already existing African phonotactic system. Rather, the African speaker is trying to master new patterns, in which tones appear to chaotically vary across words, in that successive pronunciations of the same word can emerge with different “tones” on each syllable, as perceived by the tone-sensitive African speaker. There is no stable background of words based on lexical tones against which new Spanish words can be ﬁtted. Rather, the entire language which is being learned is typologically so different, as regards the fundamental use of tones, that the African learner cannot possibly analyze each attempted Spanish word as a tonally stable conﬁguration as would be found in the native African language. European words borrowed into an African language normally entered one at a time. Africans slowly became used to individual words such as Cristo, Portugal, Dios, etc., and the African speech community ultimately settled on a stabilized adaptation to the local language. An African learner of Spanish or Portuguese is faced with the overwhelming task of analyzing and reproducing thousands of words, and ﬂuent speech gives no time for trial and error, or gradual approximations. As a consequence, it is unreasonable to suppose that African bozales systematically pronounced a sentence in Spanish with the same tonal consistency as though each word had been individually borrowed into an African language in an African setting. Although each polysyllabic Spanish or Portuguese word in isolation has a stress accent, many of these accents disappear or are partially shifted during connected speech. African bozales clearly did not learn Spanish and Portuguese through imitation of isolated citation forms, but rather tried to grasp the phonological signiﬁcance of ﬂuent discourse. The end results are often strikingly different from the neat correlations observed in assimilated European borrowings into African languages. One common strategy, observed among contemporary Africans who speak Spanish and to a certain extent Portuguese is the more or less systematic assignment of a different tone to each syllable, often at odds with the simple equation tonic stress = High tone and atonic syllables = Low tone.8 These tones rarely become lexicalized, so that a given polysyllabic word as pronounced by a single speaker may emerge with different tonal melodies on each occasion. What results is a more or less undulating melody of high and low tones, at times punctuated by mid tones and rising/falling contour tones. Such a pronunciation is radically different from the more usual intonational patterns in native varieties of Spanish, where the pitch register varies smoothly and gradually across large expanses of syllables, and where a syllable-by-syllable tonal change rarely or never occurs. To the European ear, a syllable-based tonal alternation as produced by an African 8

Salmons (1992) for tone > stress phenomena among European languages.

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learner of Spanish causes a sing-song cadence, and may blur the intonational differences between statements and questions. In the absence of a perceptible stress accent, syllable-level tonal shifts may obliterate such minimal pairs as trabajo/trabaj´o. Many African tone languages also exhibit syntactically motivated tonal polarity phenomena, in which High and Low tones are switched at certain syntactic boundaries. This has been carried over at least partially to some creole languages, with the most noteworthy case being Papiamento.9 Early studies of Papiamento10 noticed the use of High and Low tones, but it is only more recently that Papiamento specialists have recognized that these tones have lexical and grammatical functions. Even more recent is the realization that lexically prespeciﬁed tones can be modiﬁed in connected speech through polarity phenomena. There are more subtle phenonema which occur during the collision of an African language with lexical tones and a European language in which intonation takes a larger domain. Many tonal African languages exhibit dynamic processes of gradual tonal shift such as downstep, downdrift, and tone terracing, any or all of which could, under the right circumstances, be confused with contextually determined intonational patterns in European languages. Morever, in some African languages, the initial tone of a sentence has an effect on the intonation of the remainder of the sentence. Essentially, the sentence- or phrase-initial tone sets the musical “key” in which the remainder of the sentence is uttered: a sentence beginning with a lexical high tone will exhibit an average pitch which is higher than sentences beginning with an initial low tone, irrespective of downstep and downdrift, and regardless of intervening conﬁgurations of high and low tones. The possible implications of such a system for the interface with European languages has been explored by Setse (1965), in a study of the interference of Ewe on the acquisition of English, and vice versa, in eastern Ghana. In Ewe, the initial lexical tone of a sentence determines the overall intonational contour of the remainder of the sentence. Setse (1965:57–58) observes that Ewe speakers learning English tend to carry over the same practice, interpreting English stressed initial syllables as high toned, and vice versa, thereby producing unrealistic and often confusing intonational patterns in English. For example, a declarative sentence such as T´og´o mountains are high, which begins with a high tone (whether pronounced in Ewe, or as rendered in English with an initial stressed syllable) will tend to be produced with an overall high pitch, making it sound more like an echo question. Similarly, a sentence such as Y`aw`o has also gone out will be produced with a characteristically low intonational curve. 9

R¨omer (1977, 1980, 1983); also Bendix (1983).

10

E.g. Harris (1951).

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A sample case: the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea A possible example of syllable-by-syllable tonal anchoring in Afro-Hispanic pronunciation, which may once have characterized bozal speech, comes from contemporary Spanish as spoken ﬂuently but non-natively in Equatorial Guinea.11 With the exception of the island of Annob´on, where a Portuguesebased creole (with heavy Angolan Bantu inﬂuence) is spoken, and the frequent use of Pidgin English throughout the island of Bioko (Fernando Poo), the native languages of Equatorial Guinea are Bantu languages which normally exhibit high and low tones, together with superﬁcial contour tones. These languages include Bubi (the indigenous language of Fernando Poo), Fang (the main language of the mainland enclave of R´ıo Muni), and the playero or coastal languages, including Combe/Ndow´e, Bujeba, etc. There exists no established framework for describing spoken Spanish in terms of syllable-based lexical tones, but the following examples are displayed orthographically in terms of a three-tone system similar to that found in Yoruba, in which acute accents indicate High tone, grave accents Low tone, circumﬂex accents rise+fall, and no diacritic indicates Mid tone. Not all Guineans produce such musically undulating speech, but the examples below are quite representative of the Africanized Spanish found throughout the country, and cutting across various ethnic groups. Fang woman in Malabo: el qu`e ti´ene d`ın´ero n`o h´abla . . . yo p`ens´aba qu’`est´a arr´ıba . . . v´ıno e` l am´ıgo d`e su m`ar´ıdo . . .

Young Bubi man from Barrio B, near Malabo: H´ay a` lgunos qu`e, cuand´o e` st´an e` n casa, com`o s´on bubi, h`abl´aran e` l bubi s´ol`am`ent`e. Cu`and´o uno y´a est`a en l`a ens`an˜ a´ nz`a media cog`e l`a `ıdiom`a que quier`e. Me falt`a un s´ol`o publ`o qu`e no h´e ido.

Young Bubi man from Baney: Pu´ede d`ur´ar s`us ses´ent`a a˜nos. El a´ rbol n`o tien`e m`an´era d`e des`arr`oll´arse.

Combe man from Bata: Pl`ay´ero som`os t´odos n`osotr`os. Si h´ay d`os f´ang qu`e e´ ntiend`en c´ombe se pu´ede h`ablar e` l c´ombe, ¿no?

11

Lipski (1985a), Quilis and Casado-Fresnillo (1992, 1995).

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Bujeba woman in Bata: Par`a v`end´er i par`a c`onsum`o pr´opio. N`os´otros p`ag´amos m´enos.

These examples do not show a totally consistent tone-to-syllable association, but a noteworthy non-Spanish intonational pattern is evident from these transcriptions. Many declarative sentences end on a mid or high tone, and occasionally even on a rising tone, in contrast to native non-African varieties of Spanish. In the case of Spanish as phonologically restructured by speakers of Bantu languages in Equatorial Guinea (all of which use a basic two-tone system), it appears that many instances of lexical stress accent in Spanish have been reinterpreted as lexically preattached High tone. The remaining syllables receive Low tone by default, but tone terracing results in superﬁcial Mid tones occurring with some regularity between High and Low tones. References to Africans’ use of tones in Spanish and Portuguese Few references to tonal patterns used by African bozales are found in early literature, but the ease with which Golden Age black theatrical ﬁgures slip effortlessly between speech and song suggests that Europeans perceived Africanized Spanish as already “musical.” This was carried over into the chants of black itinerant street venders or pregoneros, who were a commoplace in many Latin American cities for several centuries, and who were also found in Spain and especially Portugal, well into the nineteenth century. Especially in Latin America, these street vendors were often bozales who still spoke Spanish with some Africanized traits. Each vendor developed a characteristic chant to sell his or her wares. Although these chants cannot be directly tied to African tones, a glance at the transcriptions reveals that few if any of these chants represent “musical” phrases in the Western sense.12 Mesquita (1903:543), writing at the end of the nineteenth century, described black street vendors in Lisbon throughout the ages, and declared “ainda n˜ao ha muito que andavam nos bairros orientaes e alfamistas, e no bairro Alto, as pretinhas do mexilh˜ao, netas d’aquellas outras, e cujo preg˜ao metalico, monotono e sinistro, era provavelmente reprodu¸ca˜ o do tradicional preg˜ao das antigas marisqueiras.” This impressionistic description also suggests an intrusion of syllable-based tonal ﬂuctuation, which would sound foreign and even menacing to Portuguese speakers accustomed to more gradual intonational curves. The Afro-Hispanic pregones are qualitatively more similar 12

Rossi y Rub´ı (1791), Pereda Vald´es (1929), Portal (1932), Ayarza de Morales (1939), Car´ambula (1952a, 1952b, 1968), De Mar´ıa (1976), Cuche (1981), Estenssoro Fuchs (1988).

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to Africans’ tonalized approximations to Spanish words as described for Equatorial Guinea, and it is not unlikely that an African tonal contribution is found in the pregones. African tonal patterns have at times been implicated more directly in describing contemporary Afro-Hispanic speech communities, but the results have yet to be put on a ﬁrm empirical foundation. For example, Megenney (1982:193) refers to the putatively anomalous tonal patterns in the speech of some AfroDominican enclaves such as Villa Mella. He also gives examples from Colombian Palenquero which show a similar departure from what is claimed to be “normal” (i.e. non Afro-Hispanic) Spanish intonation. He is careful not to make the direct claim of African tonal inﬂuence, leaving the matter for future investigation. An examination of the taped material (kindly furnished by Megenney) reveals an intonational pattern similar to that found in Equatorial Guinea, but now nativized in a population which has spoken Spanish natively and monolingually for at least a century or more (in the past, both United States black English and Haitian Creole were spoken in Villa Mella, but Spanish has been the principal native language of the village for several centuries). Other researchers who have studied Afro-American dialects and creole languages have also commented on tonal differences with respect to the original lexiﬁer languages, although tracing deﬁnite inﬂuences of African tones is left to speculation. Herskovits (1941:312) observes that “that the peculiarly ‘musical’ quality of Negro English as spoken in the United States and the same trait found in the speech of white Southerners represent a non-functioning survival of this characteristic of African languages is entirely possible, especially since this same ‘musical’ quality is prominent in Negro-English and Negro-French everywhere.” Turner (1969:249) makes a similarly cautious speculation as regards the intonational patterns of Gullah. Megenney (1982:195) claims that the intonation of negative sentences in Papiamento (an Afro-Iberian creole noted for its unique tonal structures) exactly parallels that of Fante, and notes tonal survivals in Saramaccan. African syllabic structures The typological diversity of African languages, even in the sub-Saharan region, is such that few absolute generalizations about syllable structure can be made. Despite widespread common views, held both by non-specialists and Spanish dialectologists alike, not all sub-Saharan African languages (1) have only open syllables, (2) do not distinguish /l/ and /r/, (3) have nasal vowels, (4) have prenasalized consonants, or (5) do not have onset clusters. However, each of the above-mentioned traits does recur in a wide range of prominent African languages families, and both in terms of demographic proportions and in view

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of the relative social status of certain African groups in the diaspora settings, some effective common threads can be suggested. Syllable-ﬁnal consonants The overwhelming majority of sub-Saharan African languages lack coda consonants altogether.13 Among the remaining languages, only nasal consonants commonly occur in the coda, and then only word-ﬁnally. Among the language groups which exhibit word-ﬁnal nasals are Akan, Kpelle, Eﬁk, Wolof, many of the Mandinkan languages, some Edoid languages, and many Bantu languages. Typically only a single nasal phoneme is found word-ﬁnally, although in a few languages more than one nasal phoneme appears word-ﬁnally. The number of African languages allowing obstruents in the coda is very small, although some of the relevant languages cannot be discounted as having enjoyed some prominence in Afro-Hispanic encounters. Eﬁk is relatively rare in its tolerance for obstruents, including stops, in word-ﬁnal position. In contradiction to widely accepted models of sonority, Eﬁk tolerates word-ﬁnal stops, but exhibits no instances of ﬁnal liquids or /s/, the most common word-ﬁnal consonants in Spanish. Although word-ﬁnal obstruents are tolerated in Eﬁk, open syllables are quantitatively much more common.14 Several of the Atlantic languages, among which Wolof ﬁgures prominently,15 also contain word-ﬁnal consonants. Once more, in connected speech word-ﬁnal consonants are comparatively infrequent. Word-ﬁnal consonants also appear in Hausa, and in some Bantu languages (e.g. Fang, as spoken in Equatorial Guinea and parts of Gabon). In none of the major African language families which intersected with Spanish and Portuguese do ﬁnal consonants ﬁgure prominently, and in those instances where the African languages absorbed and nativized Ibero-Romance words, ﬁnal consonants were typically either deleted (especially if the preceding vowel was unstressed) or followed by a paragogic vowel, thereby ensuring a sequence of open syllables. The exception to the lack of word-ﬁnal consonants in African languages is the frequent presence of word-ﬁnal nasal consonants, at times alternating with nasalized vowels. Onset clusters By far the majority of African languages, from all major families, tolerate only single consonants in the syllable onset. Although many languages exhibit prenasalized obstruents, these invariably behave as single phonological elements. The same holds for doubly articulated labiovelar stops, normally written as kp 13

Welmers (1973), Maddieson (1984).

14

Ward (1933).

15

Ka (1994).

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and gb, and which act as phonologically single consonants. As in so many other cases, Eﬁk is exceptional among African languages in tolerating obstruent+/r/ onset clusters, ostensibly similar to combinations found in Spanish and Portuguese.16 In the same language, intervocalic /t/ and /d/ are often pronounced as simple [r], a phenomenon also documented in many early Afro-Hispanic texts.17 The epenthetic vowel observed in native Eﬁk words corresponds to the frequent insertion of an epenthetic vowel to break up onset clusters in European words borrowed into African languages. For example, Kikongo has Cristo > kidisitu, cruz > kulunsi, ingl´es > ngelesi, franco > fw´al´anka, trombeta > tulumbe´et´a, etc.; Kimbundu has claro > calalo, Cl´audio > Culaudio; Swahili has brea > bereu, ﬂotilha > furutile, prac¸a > baraza, franga > faranga, fronha > foronya, lacre > lakiri, etc., but also assimilated Cristo > Kristo, padre > padre/padiri, etc. Among Mozambican languages, we have sacramento > Chope sakramentu, brinco > Macua e` brinko, blusa > Macua bulusa, broca > Macua eporoka, cobre > Macua kobiri, blasfemia > Chinianja blasfemya, but bruto > Chinianja bulutu. On the other hand, some West African languages have easily incorporated o b s t r u e n t +l i q u i d combinations in borrowed words, even though such clusters are absent in the native vocabulary. Thus for example we ﬁnd cobrar > Temne kopra, but cobre > Limba kobiri, Mandinka koporo, Susu kobiri; frasco > Limba, Temne frasko; prata > Mandinka prata; vidro > Temne a-bithra, Limba hu-bitira, etc. Yoruba has gr´am`a < grammar (an obviously technical term), but br´ed`ı/b´ur´ed`ı < bread, erop´ul´ee` n`ı < aeroplane, b´ul´uu` > blue, f´ır´ı`ı < free, b´ır´ık`ı < brick and even g´ul´uk´oo` s`ı < glucose. Observation of the ﬁrst attempts of contemporary Africans from a variety of languages to articulate Spanish and Portuguese does not support the option of the epenthetic vowel as the most frequent result. In some cases, replacement of /r/ by [l] in onset clusters can be observed, but another frequently occurring alternative is the elimination of the liquid consonant. Although no quantitative data are available, this reduction appears to be more prevalent word-internally than word-initially, a suggestion born out by the vestigial remains of reduced consonant clusters found among contemporary Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Brazilian communities. The term ombe < hombre is common in the vernacular speech of much of the Caribbean and is a frequent interjection in popular music such as the Colombian vallenato and the Dominican merengue, while nˆego < negro is used colloquially by Brazilians of all backgrounds, especially when used as a term of endearment. In marginalized Brazilian dialects in which the African 16

17

However, the /r/ in these contexts is often a syllabic tone-bearing trill, and, when not syllabic, is usually preceded by a ﬂeeting epenthetic vowel (Ward 1933:13–14). Ward (1933:13) considers the vowel to be “a short vowel off-glide of the plosive,” but it is also possible that the earlier syncope of a full vowel produced the contemporary Eﬁk forms. (Ward 1933:2, 14).

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contribution is strong, reduction of onset clusters through elimination of the liquid extends broadly across the lexicon, to encompass scores of words. Reduction of onset clusters in early Afro-Iberian language Early Afro-Hispanic texts – indeed until well into the nineteenth century – rarely if ever depict Africans as reducing onset clusters through loss of the liquid, while the use of epenthetic vowels does occur from time to time.18 This is typiﬁed by the change negro > nego.19 This change also occurs frequently in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, where an African component can be postulated. In the R´ıo de la Plata area, the corpus of Afro-Argentine and Afro-Uruguayan language does not normally give evidence of this change. However, occasional glimpses emerge, which may be writers’ inventions or stereotypes.20 This pronunciation was apparently also found among street vendors or pregoneros:21 yo soy nenguito ni˜no que siempre passo po ac´a vendiendo escoba y pumero y nadie me quiere comp´a. ¿Ser´a poque soy tan nego? que passo de regul´a y toa la gente s’asuta y no me quiee comp´a.

In vestigial Afro-Peruvian language, the same reduction is found, for example in marginal areas such as the Chincha community described by G´alvez Ronceros (1975). Among the possibly African-inﬂuenced pronunciation features of this community is the reduction of syllable-initial consonant clusters (e.g. trabajo > tabajo, hombre > hombe). The same pronunciation is found in the novel Matalach´e, by Enrique L´opez Alb´ujar (1966): Vaya, mi hija, porque no hay na que se haga en la fr´abica sin consult´a a ese nego chala de mis pecaos . . . Nega Casilda no molet´a, amita. Ella ayudao mat´a cabrita Jos´e Manu´e, y pa nego congo na . . . Neguito no rir´a ni cantar´a ma, manque muera e pena. Perd´on pa su neguito . . .

In the satirical text El gran doctor Copaiba (Carrera Vergara 1943) we ﬁnd: Ay, amito, a refresc´a la mollera. Sacar´a pallantanfuera remonio der gato que quiere ara˜na´ er neguito cuidar´a a Francica. 18 19 20

21

Lipski (1994a, 1994b, 1995a, 2001c, 2002b). E. g. Jeroslow (1974:45–46), Mendon¸ca (1935:114), Raimundo (1933:70–71). Thus, for example, a poster advertising an Afro-Argentina comparsa of the late 1800s shows a stereotyped barefoot black escobero, broom in one hand and hat in the other. The caption is “voy a pint´a la cara a la donseya. ¡Dice que no me quiere po s´e nego! Pues la pinto de nego, y nega es eya” (Matamoro 1976:68). Becco (n. d.:45).

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The well-attested existence of Spanish and Portuguese borrowings into African languages is proof enough that at least some Africans in contact with Ibero-Romance inserted epenthetic vowels, if not continuously, then from time to time. Epenthetic vowels were seldom used to break up onset clusters, as opposed to the frequent use of ﬁnal paragogic vowels, and the occasional epenthetic vowel following syllable-ﬁnal consonants. This contrasts with the more frequent use of epenthetic vowels after coda consonants. Afro-Hispanic language beginning in the sixteenth century dealt with Spanish o b s t r u e n t +l i q u i d onset clusters largely through neutralization of the liquid consonant in second position. Neutralization in favor of [l] was the most common event; neutralization to [r] also occurred, particularly in cases of contact with some variety of Portuguese. Liquid consonants among African languages Among African languages, the distribution and behavior of liquid consonants varies widely, and true common denominators are almost nonexistent. Ladefoged (1968) surveyed sixty-one West African languages covering all major language families from the Senegambia to the Bight of Biafra; his survey reveals that most distinguish /r/ and /l/.22 There is apparent free variation or complementary distribution between /l/ and /r/ in Ewe and Tiv. Fewer languages do not exhibit the phoneme /l/, although some prominent West African languages are included in this group (essentially the entire Akan family): Fante, Twi, Igbira, Eﬁk, Kutep, and some varieties of Tiv. In Tiv and Akan, [l] may sometimes occur as an intervocalic allophone of /r/. Among languages of the Senegambia, and the old Windward and Grain Coasts, /l/ and /r/ are distinguished in most of the major languages. Mandinga, Vai, Temne, Mende, Wolof, and Kru routinely distinguish the two liquids, and have maintained them separately in borrowings from Portuguese and English.23 Yoruba distinguishes both /r/ and /l/, in onset position (Yoruba has no syllable-ﬁnal consonants). Neutralization of prevocalic liquid consonants in Afro-Iberian language In the earliest Afro-Hispanic texts there is none of the systematic neutralization of liquids that would come to characterize later Afro-Iberian texts. These texts 22

23

Among major non-Bantu African languages which make this distinction are: Fula, Wolof, Serer, Dyola, Sherbro, Limba, Temne, Loko, Soso, Sisala, Ga, Late, Batonu, Nkonya, Siuw, Srachi, Bini, Itsekiri, Urhobo, Isoko, Oro, Igbo, Idoma, Ijo, Kalabari, Kambari, Hausa, Ngwo, Bura, Margi and Songay. Among languages lacking the distinction, most have /l/ rather than /r/: these include Kissi, Mende, Bambara, Dagbani, Nzima, Effuta, Kyeropong, G˜a, Fon, Avatime, Bafut, Kom. E.g. Bradshaw (1965).

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are consistent with the notion that the major African language groups represented in sixteenth-century Portugal and Spain, at least during the ﬁrst half of the century, came from northwest and west Africa, in which /l/ and /r/ were distinguished in the majority of the languages. For example Diego S´anchez de Badajoz, in plays written between 1533 and 1548, begins to make use of liquid neutralization, but in favor of [r] rather than [l], a change suggesting the intersection of such West African language families as Akan and Eﬁk (Chapter Three Appendix #2-5). In the bozal imitations of Lope de Rueda (Chapter Three Apendix #6-8) there is virtually no neutralization of liquids, with the exception of the shift /l/ > [r] in onset clusters, a phenomenon which was common in popular Spanish dialects of the period (particularly in Extremadura and Le´on – whence the sayagu´es stage dialect, but also in Andalusia). In some cases, Lope de Rueda may have been suggesting that Africans in sixteenth-century Spain had ﬁrst passed through Portugal, learning some rudiments of Portuguese: diabro < diablo, muntripricar < multiplicar, etc. The major Bantu languages which came into contact with Spanish and Portuguese during the centuries of direct Afro-Iberian linguistic contact do not systematically distinguish /l/ and /r/. Kikongo, Kimbundu, Umbundu, etc., have only /l/, although as shown above, the contemporary Portuguese as spoken by native Angolans does not overwhelmingly exhibit neutralization of liquids in favor of [l].24 In the Spanish Golden Age, however, things were evidently quite different, since the literary record from both the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America shows an increasing tendency to neutralize /l/ and /r/ (usually in favor of [l]) beginning in the seventeenth century. With such works as the “Entrem´es de los negros” of Sim´on Aguado (Chapter Three Appendix #14), literary Afro-Hispanic language begins to systematically depict the interchange of /l/ and /r/, usually in favor of the former sound. In Lope de Vega, the shift /r/ > [l] is used quite sparingly, and usually in key stereotyped elements such as neglo, plimo, and siolo (Chapter Three Appendix #19-27). A few years later, the play “El valiente negro en Flandes” by Andr´es de Claramonte (Chapter Three Appendix #28), brought additional examples of this change, but involving the same set of words. G´ongora’s humorous Afro-Hispanic sonnets, also written around the ﬁrst decade of the seventeenth century, make more frequent use of the shift /l/ > [r] (Chapter Three Appendix #15-18). By the middle of the seventeenth century the shift /r/ > [l] was characteristic of literary habla de negros, and was much more frequent than the opposite change. By this time, Africans from Bantuspeaking areas of the Congo Basin and Angola were present in large numbers, both in Spain and in Spanish-American colonies, and the recurring absence of 24

As pointed out by Fuentes Guerra and G´omez G´omez (1996:31–34), there are several Bantu languages which do distinguish /r/ and /l/; others prefer /r/.

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a distinction between /l/ and /r/ in these languages begins to seep into literary authors’ representations of bozal speech. Sor Juana In´es de la Cruz, in poems written in the 1670s and 1680s, frequently used the shift of /r/ > [l], although not to the same extent found in Peninsular Spanish texts (Chapter Three Appendix #46). By the time of her writings, the Portuguese slave trade from Angola and S˜ao Tom´e had reached a high point, and it is likely that she heard large numbers of Bantu-speaking Africans, who may well have had difﬁculty with Spanish /r/. In Portugal, lateralization of /r/ in literary l´ıngua de preto follows a similar pattern. The ﬁrst group of Afro-Portuguese texts to make use of phonetic deformations are the plays of Gil Vicente, written in the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century (Chapter Two Appendix #5-7). These texts show no instances of the change /r/ > [l], and few instances where liquids are modiﬁed at all, except for the loss of ﬁnal /r/ in verbal inﬁnitives. The same holds true for Chiado’s plays and for most of the remaining texts. Only in a few anonymous poems and songs from the mid-seventeenth century onward does the change /r/ > [l] become common in Afro-Portuguese literature. In view of contemporary varieties of Spanish and Portuguese as learned by speakers of Bantu languages which do not distinguish /l/ and /r/,25 it is unlikely that most bozales ever replaced all instances of /r/ by [l] except perhaps during the ﬁrst encounters between Europeans and Africans. In attempting to reconstruct the speech of the ﬁrst Afro-American communities (largely those which developed Englishbased creoles), Alleyne (1980:61) claims that “it is clear that no phonemic distinction existed between [l] and [r] in the earliest form of Afro-American dialects. [l] is the preferred sound in all dialects.” This statement may be true, for example for Saramaccan, and rings true for Palenquero. Srnan Tongo, however, shows [r] as the most prevalent liquid, while the remaining English-based Atlantic creoles are completely ambiguous. There is no doubt from the data that confusion of liquids was a factor in some Afro-American speech communities, but no evidence offered to date suggests that a single form of neutralization prevailed in a “proto-Afro-American” speech community, even if attention is limited only to English-based creoles. A hypothetical reconstruction of a protoIbero-Romance creole is equally problematical, despite the frequent and wellarticulated claims to the effect that a single Afro-Lusitanian pidgin underlies all Afro-Iberian and other Ibero-Romance based creoles, and possibly some creoles based on other languages, including English and Dutch. Afro-Lusitanian contacts in the Congo/Angola region, as reﬂected in S˜ao Tomense, Annobonese, and Colombian Palenquero, indeed seem to have systematically replaced Spanish and Portuguese /r/ by [l] in nearly all contexts. However, this never seems to have happened in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, where the surrounding 25

Lipski (1985a), Quilis and Casado-Fresnillo (1992, 1995) for the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea, Lipski (1986c) for other varieties of African Spanish, Lipski (1995b) for Angolan Portuguese.

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African languages normally maintain the /l/–/r/ distinction, nor is there evidence of systematic neutralization of liquids in Asian Portuguese creoles, nor in Philippine Creole Spanish One of the most frequent phonetic modiﬁcations found in Golden Age Spanish and Latin American bozal texts (from Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, and Mexico) is neutralization of word-initial and intervocalic liquids, usually involving lateralization of /r/ to [l].26 This shift, although occasionally affecting a few words in marginal dialects of Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and Latin America, is not typical of any speech community in the Spanish-speaking world, and was dropped by Africans who learned Spanish natively, regardless of the variety acquired. Many bozal texts extend this neutralization to interchange of intervocalic /d/ and /l/, a shift which is frequent in Portuguese borrowings into Kikongo, Kimbundu and other Bantu languages, and which reﬂects the frequent phonological alternation beween /d/ and /l/ in many Bantu languages.27 Among surviving Afro-Iberian linguistic groups, this change is found in Panamanian congo language,28 vestigial Afro-Venezuelan speech,29 Palenquero,30 S˜ao Tomense,31 and Annobonese,32 but is not found in non-Africanized Spanish dialects.33 Also frequent in Afro-Hispanic texts is the shift /r/ > [l] in o b s t r u e n t + l i q u i d clusters. Interchange of /l/ and /r/ in the syllabic onset occurred sporadically in Ibero-Romance, although the shift of /l/ to [r] was much more frequent.34 In contemporary Andalusian Spanish, the same process occasionally occurs,35 but never with the frequency found in bozal texts. Some stereotyping was involved (as suggested by the high frequency of selected items, such as Francisco > Flancico and primo > plimo). However, bozal texts should be interpreted not as indicating only the shift of /r/ > [l] among Africans, but the fact that the opposite change, /l/ > [r], was unremarkable in rustic non-African Spanish, and was not as frequently incorporated into literary habla de negros. Lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ in Afro-Hispanic texts In many modern Caribbean Spanish dialects, /r/ is lateralized to [l] both preconsonantally and in phrase-ﬁnal position. In modern Spain, this change is increasingly rare, although once more common in rural communities of Murcia and eastern Andalusia. Lateralization of /r/ is somewhat more common in the Canary Islands, but nowhere approaching rates found, for example, in vernacular speech 26 27 28 30 32 33 34

Alleyne (1980:61–62) gives examples for other African-based creoles. Raimundo (1933:69–70), Atkins (1953), Martins (1958a, 1958b), Bal (1968), Dunzo (1974), also Granda (1989) for Colombian Palenquero. 29 Mosonyi et al. (1983), Megenney (1985c, 1989a, 1990c, 1999). Lipski (1989). 31 Ferraz (1979). Friedemann and Pati˜no Rosselli (1983). Vila (1891), Barrena (1957), Ferraz (1984). Numerous examples are found in Lipski (1994b, 1995a, 2001c). 35 Salvador (1978). E.g. Torreblanca (1989a).

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of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and parts of Cuba and Venezuela. As with loss of /r/ and reduction of /s/, dating of the lateralization of /r/ in nonAfrican dialects is hampered by the lack of credible documentation. In most areas of Spain and Latin America the ﬁrst unequivocal written examples do not come until the nineteenth century, although it seems certain that the process had begun earlier in most areas. In contrast to the general scarcity of early attestations of the lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ in Spanish, Afro-Hispanic texts from the Golden Age onward frequently exhibit the shift /r/ > [l], at ﬁrst only in word-internal preconsonantal position but eventually encompassing word-/phrase-ﬁnal positions as well. Lateralization of preconsonantal /r/ appears at approximately the same time as loss of word-ﬁnal /r/, i.e. in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ is found in Latin American bozal texts from all regions, even in areas such as Mexico, highland Colombia, Peru, and the R´ıo de la Plata region where this change never became permanently implanted in the local dialects. According to Fontanella de Weinberg (1987a), lateralization of /r/ was at one point relatively common in Buenos Aires, peaking in the middle of the eighteenth century and dwindling precipitously thereafter. It is perhaps not coincidental that at the same time period, the African and Afro-American population of Buenos Aires rose to its highest proportion (roughly 30 percent), and also dropped drastically in the following decades, being eventually overwhelmed by European immigration. In Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, lateralized /r/ in Afro-Hispanic language is conﬁned to the earliest texts, from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Later Afro-Peruvian texts show loss of /r/, particularly in verbal inﬁnitives, a pronunciation still found in coastal areas of predominantly African descent. Lateralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ has never been a common trait of any regional dialect of Spain, and it might be thought that when representing Africanized Spanish, Golden Age writers simply exchanged syllable-ﬁnal /l/ and /r/ following Quevedo’s formula. That this facile assumption is inadequate is shown by the fact that replacement of syllable-ﬁnal liquids does not appear in bozal texts until well into the seventeenth century, fully a century after bozal Spanish is attested, and by the fact that while lateralization of /r/ is very common in later bozal texts, conversion of syllable-ﬁnal /l/ to [r] is limited to only a handful of items. Loss of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ in Afro-Hispanic language The behavior of syllable- and phrase-ﬁnal /r/ varies between Andalusian and Latin American dialects, and also shows a variety of manifestations in AfroHispanic language across time and space. In contemporary Andalusia, phraseﬁnal /r/ is most commonly lost; preconsonantally a greater number of variants exists, but retention of some sound is the usual result. In the Canary Islands, the situation is more varied, with retention of phrase-ﬁnal /r/ in some form (often [l])

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more common than in Andalusia. In Latin American dialects where /r/-reduction is common, principally in the Caribbean, phrase-ﬁnal realizations usually vary between [l] and elision of /r/, while preconsonantally the manifestations include loss, lateralization, gemination of the following consonant, glottalization, and vocalization. All of these phenomena fall under the general rubric of weakening, a process often assumed to have originated in southern Spain. Although reduction of /r/ occurs in many Afro-Hispanic texts, most Golden Age examples are limited to the ﬁnal /-r/ in verbal inﬁnitives. This morphological correlate of /r/-loss is also well attested in Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and Latin America. In Latin America, loss of ﬁnal /-r/ in inﬁnitives is found in bozal texts from eighteenth-century Mexico and Colombia, from Peru (beginning of the nineteenth century) and from the R´ıo de la Plata (late eighteenth/early nineteenth century). In these same texts, loss of word-ﬁnal /r/ also occurred in other words, such as se˜nor, and loss of preconsonantal word-internal /r/, while rare, is attested. Of these areas, only coastal Peru and Colombia, and a few marginal areas of Guerrero and Oaxaca in Mexico routinely elide verbﬁnal /r/; the areas exhibiting this elision are characterized by a high percentage of African descendency. Areas such as Mexico and the R´ıo de la Plata, whose pronunciation eventually became dominated by other patterns and whose Afro-Hispanic population dwindled, moved away from reduction of /r/. Stop/ﬂap realization of intervocalic /d/ in bozal speech Frequent in Afro-Hispanic (and Afro-Lusitanian) literary texts, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, is the conversion of intervocalic /d/ to [r], as in todo > toro. Judging by the pronunciation of intervocalic /d/ in contemporary Afro-Hispanic dialects, it is likely that the sound that emerged was not always a ﬂap but, sometimes an occlusive intervocalic [d], which Spanish writers accustomed to the usual fricative variant transcribed as /r/.36 Bozal texts from Latin America, from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, follow identical patterns. Currently, the pronunciation of intervocalic /d/ as an occlusive or ﬂap is common in bilingual areas of Latin America where the indigenous language has no fricative realization of /d/, and is found in AfroHispanic speech of Equatorial Guinea, in parts of the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, as well as typifying the speech of West Africans who learn Spanish.37 This feature never came to characterize any major regional variety of Spanish, but was typical of bozal Spanish of all levels of ﬂuency. 36 37

Alleyne (1980:62) for examples from African-inﬂuenced creoles in the Americas. Granda (1977), N´un˜ ez Cede˜no (1982, 1987), Lipski (1985a, 1986b,c, 1988a, 1992d), Megenney (1990a, 1990c, 1999), Schwegler (1991a), Quilis and Casado-Fresnillo (1992, 1995).

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Reduction of syllable-ﬁnal /s/ in Afro-Hispanic speech Although documentation of /s/-weakening in pre-nineteenth-century Spanish is scarce, literary habla de negros exhibits loss of ﬁnal /s/ beginning early in the sixteenth century. Many objections have been raised against accepting bozal cases as valid evidence for the evolution of Andalusian Spanish. Salvador (1981), noting the early loss of /s/ in bozal texts such as those of Lope de Rueda and G´ongora, suggests that if loss of ﬁnal /s/ had already been widespread in Andalusia beginning in the sixteenth century, these authors would not have attributed the phenomenon only to African slaves. Alvarez Nazario (1974:84) categorically rejects any connection between Golden Age bozal texts and the development of regional Spanish dialects. Pereda Vald´es (1965:179–80) is of the opinion that “hab´ıa m´as inventiva humor´ıstica que autenticidad en aquel lenguaje literario deformativo y onomatop´eyico.” The opposite point of view is sustained, e.g. by Dunzo (1974:121): “In an effort to transport local color to the stage, the Spanish playwrights portrayed in a remarkably accurate fashion the speech common to the Blacks of the era.” Loss of /s/ in Golden Age bozal texts demonstrates both internal consistency and compatibility with independently documented Afro-Hispanic language, thus giving to the bozal documents more credibility than suggested by the previous comments. Loss of ﬁnal /s/ ﬁrst appears in bozal Spanish texts in the ﬁrst decades of the sixteenth century, beginning with S´anchez de Badajoz and Lope de Rueda. The only consistent case involves the verbal desinence -mos. For Veres (1950:212) this is devoid of linguistic signiﬁcance, and is merely a stylistic device: “. . . en la persona NOS del presente de indicativo . . . podemos rastrear la diﬁcultad de los negros para pronunciar la -s ﬁnal, rasgo completamente convencional, ya que Lope de Rueda hace hablar continuamente a sus negras articulando la -s ﬁnal.” The examples collected in the present study, however, suggest a phonological basis for this differential treatment of ﬁnal /s/. Megenney (1989b) relates the morphologically conditioned cases of /s/-elision in Golden Age bozal Spanish to vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, where /s/ frequently falls in similar circumstances, without passing through a process of phonetic reduction. It is worth noting that in bozal Portuguese texts from the early sixteenth century, the ﬁnal /s/ of the desinence -mos is also lost (e.g. the plays O clˆerigo da beira, Nao d’amores and Fragoa d’amor of Gil Vicente, from the 1520s), although there is no evidence of general weakening of ﬁnal /s/ in sixteenth-century Portuguese. By the time of V´elez de Guevara’s El negro del seraph´ın (ca. 1643; Chapter Three Appendix #30), the ﬁnal /s/ of second person verb forms is also variably elided. These same texts show very limited instances of /s/-reduction where no morphological conditioning is involved, e.g. in word-internal preconsonantal position, or ﬁnal lexical /s/. The frequent loss of /s/ in Jes´us is probably

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attributable to Portuguese, or to clipping based on Jesucristo. S´anchez de Badajoz’s Farsa teologal (Chapter Three Appendix #2) shows a few examples of loss of preconsonantal /s/, as in crito [Cristo], trequilado [trasquilado] and etar [estar] (the unreduced form estar occurs more frequently). These may be scribal errors or idiosyncrasies, but their scarcity, in comparison with numerous cases of retained preconsonantal and word-ﬁnal /s/, renders it unlikely that early bozal Spanish was eliminating syllable-ﬁnal /s/ in a wholesale fashion. Elimination of preconsonantal /s/ appears occasionally in a few of Lope de Vega’s plays: in El santo negro Rosambuco (Chapter Three Appendix #27) we ﬁnd vito [visto], riponde [responde], and Franchico [Francisco] (the latter name and the pronunciation without /s/ became a stereotype in bozal literary texts). The form paqua [Pascua] is found in a late-sixteenth-century romancerillo (Chapter Three Appendix #13), alongside numerous instances of retained preconsonantal /s/. In the late-seventeenth-century bozal texts of Sor Juana In´es de la Cruz loss of preconsonantal /s/ is still very sporadic, with only a handful of cases in her entire Afro-Hispanic corpus: Flasica [Francisca], ﬁeta [ﬁesta] (alongside ﬁesa and ﬁesta), naquete [en aqueste], etc. (Chapter Three Appendix #46). In Sor Juana, we ﬁnd some of the ﬁrst consistent cases of another example of morphological conditioning of /s/-reduction: loss of plural /s/ in nouns when preceded by a plural article in which /s/ is generally retained: las leina [las reinas], las melcede [las mercedes], lus nenglu [los negros], las paja [las pajas], etc. This conﬁguration, where plural /s/ appears only on the ﬁrst available position of a noun phrase, is typical of vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, and is found in many basilectal varieties of Latin American Spanish, particularly those with a strong African connection, in the Dominican Republic, Colombia (Choc´o region), Ecuador, and in the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea. In Brazil, highland Ecuador and Equatorial Guinea, syllable-ﬁnal /s/ is generally not weakened to [h], while in the other dialects morphologically conditioned retention of /s/ is combined with general loss of word-ﬁnal /s/. Other late-seventeenth-century bozal texts from Spain begin to show loss of /s/ across all components of the noun phrase, while retaining ﬁnal lexical /s/ as well as the second person singular verb ending. In a villancico dated 1673 (Chapter Three Appendix #48), we ﬁnd ¿Lo bajo habemo veniro? . . . ¿Lo tiple ess´a tura junta? Another song, dated 1699 (Chapter Three Appendix #49), contains lines like Reye zamo del Oriente. An anonymous villancico dated 1661 (Chapter Three Appendix #50) provides Hag´amole plac¸a a lo Reye Mago turo lo neglo, e turo lo branco; another dated 1676 (Chapter Three Appendix #51) offers Tlaemo mucho cantare and still another dated 1694 (Chapter Three Appendix #52) contains lines like turu lo Neglico la noche de Nasimienta ha de andal como pimienta. These examples indirectly suggest that reduction of ﬁnal /s/ in southern Spain and the Caribbean was still not conditioned by purely phonetic factors as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Golden

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Age texts show a striking imbalance in apparent cases of /s/-reduction. The corpus used for the present study reveals more than 440 instances of loss of /s/ in the verbal ending /-mos/, beginning in the early sixteenth century. This compares to a handful of other cases of /s/-loss, none of which occur until well into the seventeenth century. Among the latter, most involve plural /-s/. Although the exact proportions are irrelevant, it is clear that bozal pronunciation of the verbal ending -mos extended an already weakened pronunciation found in local Spanish dialects. Much the same occurred in early-twentieth-century Buenos Aires and Montevideo, when speakers of cocoliche, the Spanish interlanguage of Italian immigrants, categorically eliminated ﬁnal /s/ in the ending -mos (normally aspirated to [h] in porte˜no Spanish), while at the same time reinforcing other instances of (already weakened) preconsonantal /s/ to [s].38 Of the Spanish bozal texts being considered, none shows reduction of preconsonantal /s/ without reduction in the verbal sufﬁx -mos, while the opposite conﬁguration is quite common, characterizing nearly the entire Golden Age corpus. The consistency of the textual data suggests a reasonably accurate transcription of bozal speech, from which it may be concluded that by the end of the seventeenth century, Afro-Hispanic speech was just beginning to effect wholesale elimination of preconsonantal /s/ and lexical word-ﬁnal /s/. Andalusian and Caribbean Spanish were obviously not providing a model for elimination of all syllable-ﬁnal /s/, since the imperfect language acquisition represented by bozal speech invariably reduced syllable structure, and never enhanced it. However, this does not necessarily mean that Andalusian Spanish showed no reduction of /s/ until at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, only that weakened variants were still perceivable by Africans. Amongst Golden Age bozal texts, apparent loss of preconsonantal /s/ is proportionately more common toward the end of this period. Moreover, all instances of /s/-loss discussed so far have been in perceptually weak positions, preconsonantally or wordﬁnally following an unstressed vowel. If Andalusian Spanish were already weakening (but not eliminating) /s/ in these positions, for example to an aspiration, Africans, most of whose languages do not contain the distinction between strongly and weakly stressed syllables, might easily fail to perceive any sound at all. Paragogic vowels and the validation of Afro-Hispanic texts When borrowing Spanish or Portuguese words containing syllable-ﬁnal consonants into African languages, a frequent strategy was the addition of a paragogic vowel. Sometimes a vowel was also added to break up two-consonant onsets, but reduction of the onset (usually by elimination of the second consonant) was 38

Donghi de Halperin (1925), Lavandera (1984:64–66).

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more common. For example, Kikongo and Kimbundu began to borrow words from Portuguese beginning in the ﬁfteenth century:39 K i k o n g o : dotolo < doutor; katekisimu < catesismo; kidisitu < Cristo; kulunsi < cruz; loosu < arroz; mptulukeesu < portuguˆes; nanasa/nanasi < anan´as; ngelesi < ingl´es; nsaalu < sal; poosita < posto. K i m bu n d u : calalo < claro; Culaudio < Cl´audio; lapassi < rapaz; Rodolofu < Rodolfo. Portuguese preconsonantal /s/ was not always salvaged by addition of a paragogic vowel, but was sometimes lost, as in Kikongo fofolo < f´osforo; kipeelo < espelho; lupitaalu < hospital Metathesis was another occasional option: K i k o n g o : sikoba < escoba; sikoola < escola; siponza < esponja; sitadu < estado. K i m bu n d u : sicora < escola; sikarera < escalera; supada < espada; supoleta < espoleta. The ﬁnal paragogic vowel (whose timbre was normally dictated by processes of vowel harmony), was almost invariably added after a stressed syllable; when the ﬁnal syllable was unstressed, the Portuguese ﬁnal consonant was most frequently lost, as in Kikongo kilapi < l´apis; vokolo/ukolo < o´ culos; woolo < ouros; zikopu < copas. Similar developments are found in Afro-Lusitanian creoles, particularly those of the Gulf of Guinea. To cite only a few examples, from S˜ao Tomense (ST), Principense (P), Angolar (A) (Ferraz 1979), Annobonese (Ann.):40 arroz > ST loso, Ann. aloso, P urosu; azul > ST zulu; barril > ST balili; Deus > ST desu; doutor > ST dotolo; ﬂor > Ann. foli; garfo > ST galufu; mais > ST, P, A mashi; o´ culos > ST oklo; paz > ST pazi; Pedro > Ann. P´edulu; sabedor > Ann. sabedolo; senhor > Ann. sholo; sol > Ann. solo; trˆes > ST tleshi; voz > ST vozu.

A number of instances of paragogic vowels are also found in Afro-Brazilian Portuguese, where the Kikongo and Kimbundu input was very strong. Some of the modiﬁed forms have become ﬁxed in nonstandard rural varieties, especially in place names and nicknames.41 A sample includes: baranco < branco; baravo < bravo; buruto < bruto; faraco < fraco; Firimino < Firmino; Fulugenc¸o > Fulgˆencio; Puludenc¸o < Prudˆencio; purugunta < pergunta; Quelemente < Clemente; suporeta < espoleta.42 39

40 41 42

Mendon¸ca (1935:116–18), Martins (1958a, 1958b), Bal (1968). Leite de Vasconcellos (1901:158) and Schuchardt (1888d) noted that Kimbundu speakers in Angola still added the paragogic vowels in question as late as the end of the nineteenth century. (Barrena 1957). Raimundo (1933:69–70), Ramos (1935:248), Machado Filho (1964:71, 84, 109–10). Alleyne (1980:45–48) documents the extensive use of paragogic vowels in other Africaninﬂuenced creoles.

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The presence of paragogic and epenthetic vowels in bozal Spanish texts can be applied as a diagnostic of regional Spanish pronunciation. In so doing, it must be conceded that the precarious situation in which adult slaves learned a pidgin Spanish was far different from extended language contact that resulted, for example, in Portuguese borrowings into Kikongo. In the latter case, a speech community gradually and voluntarily adopted foreign words into a native language that was not threatened in future generations, as were African languages in the diaspora. Bozal learners might be expected to perform more drastic reduction of words than West African communities who learned European words from missionaries and traders, but a comparison with Afro-Lusitanian creoles and Afro-Brazilian Portuguese suggests a consistent adaptation of ﬁnal consonants: paragogic vowels were added when the preceding vowel was stressed, and the consonant was usually lost following an unstressed vowel. The same general trends hold for word-internal syllable-ﬁnal consonants. Extrapolating to cognate structures in bozal Spanish, we would expect to ﬁnd paragogic vowels in the same conﬁgurations, if the ﬁnal consonants were still pronounced in the regional dialects of Spanish during the time periods in question. These expectations are realized in many instances, with the paragogic vowels distributed according to the prediction. Typical examples from Golden Age Spain include:43 amolo [amor], bicicochos [bizcochos], cansiona [canci´on], casicabele [cascabel], guruganta [garganta], pavillono [pabell´on], turumento [tormenta], and dozens of others. These data point to the conclusion that Andalusian ﬁnal /s/, at least following a stressed vowel, was articulated strongly enough to be analyzed by Africans as requiring a paragogic vowel, through the end of the seventeenth century and perhaps later. Afro-Hispanic language and the canonical CV syllable Consonantal reduction in Afro-Iberian language, including contemporary Spanish dialects where an African component is prominent, has often been attributed to reduction of syllabic complexity, the striving for a canonical CV syllable by speakers of African languages whose syllable prototypes contained no closed syllables. The supposed inexorability of such a drive has been used to dismiss early loss of consonants in Afro-Hispanic speech,44 despite the well-documented trend toward open syllables in vernacular Spanish worldwide beginning prior to the ﬁfteenth century. According to such “African-only” theories, Africans simply ignored Spanish ﬁnal consonants, straining local Spanish varieties in which these consonants were intact through a CV-dominated ﬁlter that ruthlessly stripped off even the most strongly articulated ﬁnal consonants. A comparative study of bozal language over a period of several centuries challenges this simplistic assumption, as do data from several Afro-Lusitanian 43

Lipski (1995a, 2002b).

44

E.g. Chasca (1946), Alvarez Nazario (1974), Salvador (1981).

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pidgins and creoles. Treatment of both Spanish and Portuguese words by real speakers of African languages normally follows more complex paths than mere truncation of “offending” consonants.45 A major conditioning factor is the treatment of stressed vs. unstressed syllables by speakers of languages lacking a stress accent. Simple truncation of syllable-ﬁnal consonants has never been the prevailing strategy among African languages when borrowing words from European languages. Particularly when stressed syllables are at stake, paragogic vowels are more common, and strongly articulated consonants (e.g. sibilants) in unstressed syllables are more often than not retained through the addition of a vowel. Also overlooked in treatments of Afro-Hispanic language that ignore correlations with local varieties of Spanish is the fact that the prototypical West African syllabic template not only contains no syllable-ﬁnal consonants, but also contains no syllable-initial consonant clusters. Putative exceptions involve coarticulated consonants such as [gb], or prenasalized obstruents which behave phonologically as single consonants. When these languages borrow words from European languages, epenthetic vowels are also typically used to break up syllable-initial clusters, typiﬁed by the evolution ﬂor > fulˆo. This presupposes an intense enough contact for adaptation of Romance onset clusters to occur. Under more urgent and transitory linguistic contact such as might occur during a slave raid, on a slaving ship, or in a plantation environment, onset reduction would be favored, much as happens in child language. A study of the fashions in which the Spanish syllable template was treated by bozal speakers as represented in literature reveals that bozal language is considerably more advanced than the sort of desperate survival response which would truncate any and all consonants which stood in the way of a canonical CV syllable. Afro-Hispanic literary texts reveal syllable types not found in a cross-section of West African languages, as do most independently veriﬁed Afro-Hispanic contact languages. In order to observe the type of drastic syllabic reduction predicted by an inexorably CV model, one has to turn to Afro-Iberian creoles which were (a) formed very early (sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries), (b) formed very rapidly, within the space of a single generation, and (c) cut off from further contact with Spanish or Portuguese for several centuries. The list includes the Gulf of Guinea creoles spoken on Annob´on and S˜ao Tom´e, as well as Palenquero and Saramaccan.46 45 46

Bradshaw (1965), Bal (1974), Cabral (1975), Kiraithe and Baden (1976), Prata (1983). Vila (1891), Herskovits (1931), Barrena (1957), Friedemann and Pati˜no (1983), Ferraz (1979). Reduction of syllable-initial clusters is also found in some isolated vernacular dialects of Brazilian Portuguese in which a heavy African presence can be documented (e.g. Mendon¸ca 1935:114; Raimundo 1939:70–71; Jeroslow 1974:45–46). In these dialects, isolation and drift are probably at the root of the severe syllabic reduction, rather than a basis in a radical Afro-Lusitanian pidgin or creole.

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Literary habla de negros contains very few examples of the breaking of syllable-initial consonant clusters, either through loss of one consonant or through addition of an epenthetic vowel; one of these two processes would be expected if Africans were indeed ﬁltering received Spanish through a maximally simple CV template. Among the only veriﬁable cases from Golden Age Spain are bolocado [brocado], ezturumento [instrumento], falauta [ﬂauta], and salamandera [salamandra]. A handful of cases are found in Argentina/Uruguay at the turn of the nineteenth century: balanco/baranco [blanco], conterera [Contreras], ofelenda [ofrenda], otoros [otros], pobere [pobre], quilitiano [cristiano], sabelemo [sabremos]. The latter examples may reﬂect the fact that, as the slave trade to the R´ıo de la Plata region peaked in the late eighteenth century, a large proportion of the Africans were transshipped from Brazil, where at least some had learned the rudiments of Portuguese. Other features of bozal language from Buenos Aires and Montevideo support this hypothesis, particularly the frequent raising of ﬁnal unstressed /o/ to [u]. In Afro-Hispanic language of various time periods, syllable-initial clusters were at times created, due to the use of metathesis as one means of resolving an unacceptable syllabic coda. Metathesis was frequent both in African languages’ assimilation of Spanish and Portuguese words, and within vernacular Spanish and Portuguese, at times with convergent results. The use of metathesis to displace a syllable-ﬁnal consonant to syllable-initial position has already been noted, for example sicoba/shicoba < escoba. In Ibero-Romance, liquids are common in syllable-ﬁnal position, and i n i t i a l o b s t r u e n t + l i q u i d clusters are also frequent. Metatheses of syllable-ﬁnal liquids to produce o b s t r u e n t +l i q u i d onset clusters has been a common process. AfroIberian bozal speakers evidently made use of the same process, judging by the greatly increased number of metatheses in Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese texts. There is no indication that Africans spontaneously invented metatheses in the absence of models in received Spanish. Metathesis was already a viable strategy in the vernacular Spanish which provided the input for bozal language, and Africans adopted and extended metathesis to words not metathesized by other speakers. The common drum´ı(r) < dormir is found in AfroHispanic language both past and present, in Papiamento, and in Afro-Brazilian Portuguese; similar forms abound in Afro-Hispanic language from many areas and time periods. Some examples of metathesis in Afro-Hispanic texts are probably continuations of metathesis patterns found in isolated and rural Spanish worldwide. In other instances, rather than creating open syllables, closed syllables were formed during methathesis, but such examples, common in vernacular Spanish worldwide, are most likely not of Afro-Hispanic origin. Afro-Portuguese metathesis follows the same pattern; some examples are: fruta < furta (Ramos 1935:248), Fulosina < Eufrasina (Machado Filho 1964:109), incront´a < incontr´a (Jeroslow 1974:53), pruquˆe < porquˆe (Ramos

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1935:52), troc´a < tocar (ibid.), vredade < verdade (Raimundo 1933:71). Syllable-ﬁnal consonants were usually avoided in bozal language, but there was not such a strong avoidance of o b s t r u e n t +l i q u i d clusters in the syllabic onset. It is possible that ﬁrst generation bozal speakers did insert a ﬂeeting epenthetic vowel in such combinations, which was ignored by Spanish writers unless its duration approached that of an underlying vowel. Sociolinguistic conditioning of syllable-structure patterning As with the case of tonal adaptations, it is necessary to distinguish between adaptation of European words into African languages, and likely interference experienced by African speakers when attempting to learn the pronunciation of European languages. Spanish and Portuguese words borrowed into African languages were gradually modiﬁed until their phonotactic shape was in no way different from the native lexicon. In the majority of cases, given the demographics of the African side of the Afro-Iberian linguistic interface, the African languages contained no word-ﬁnal consonants, nor word-internal coda consonants, and Spanish and Portuguese syllables were modiﬁed either through truncation of the coda consonants or through addition of paragogic vowels. On the other hand, the observation of contemporary situations in which Africans from a variety of linguistic backgrounds attempt to learn Spanish and Portuguese for the ﬁrst time reveals minimal difﬁculty with the articulation of word-ﬁnal consonants. In the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea, which derives from consonant-strong Peninsular dialects of Castile and Valencia, word-ﬁnal consonants are routinely maintained. They occasional drop in the speech of less ﬂuent Guineans, but the loss is never widespread nor consistent, this despite the fact that similar conﬁgurations are all but unknown in native Guinean languages. These same African languages do not permit word-internal coda consonants, and yet Spanish coda consonants largely survive, without suffering either effacement or paragogic vowel insertion. The same is true for Portuguese, even as spoken at the most rudimentary level, in Angola, Mozambique, S˜ao Tom´e, and Guinea-Bissau, and for Spanish as learned occasionally by speakers from other West and Central African countries.47 This observation extends not only to privileged intellectuals and expatriates, but also to those who pick up smatterings of Spanish and Portuguese through trade, travel, or exile. Contemporary observations simply do not give evidence of the massive syllabic deformations of received Spanish and Portuguese phonotactic patterns such as appear in earlier literary representation of “Africanized” Spanish and Portuguese. In fact, the latter imitations bear similarity not to modern Africans’ spoken Spanish 47

Lipski (1986c).

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and Portuguese, but rather to the fully nativized borrowings of European lexical items into African languages. One might be tempted to completely write off early literary imitations as mere parodies, devoid of linguistic reality, except for the obvious existence of Afro-Iberian creoles in which just syllabic deformation took place: Palenquero, S˜ao Tomense and Principense, Annobonese, and to a certain extent Papiamento. This real-life set of languages in which precisely the sort of massive syllabic replacement found in early Afro-Hispanic literary imitations actually took place requires greater attention than can be mustered in the present work. In essence, the prime differentiating factor seems to be intimately related to the sociolinguistic conditions which are normally required for full creolization to take place. These include at least the following: (1) Lack of a viable common language among the second language learners, forcing them to communicate with one another in whatever version of the target language they can muster. Although multi-ethnic communication in Spanish or Portuguese does take place in areas of Africa characterized by the ofﬁcial use of these languages, such instances are quite rare. Africans in their homelands normally communicate with one another in local and regional languages, at times supplemented by long-standing lingua francas such as Pidgin English, Lingala, Swahili, Kituba, etc. Their use of European languages is more or less circumscribed by ofﬁcial domains, including school, church, some government activities, and of course when communicating with most Europeans. This reduces the number of opportunities for adapting the European words to a more African pattern, and maintains a constant awareness that Spanish is a “foreign” language. (2) Limited availability of native speaker models. In situations where creole languages developed, the original creole speakers had relatively little access to adequate native speaker models. On slave plantations, for example, Africans often had contact only with overseers, teamsters and cooks, who themselves spoke Spanish or Portuguese only imperfectly. Slaves working in domestic households or in urban areas where they were in contact with a large nativespeaking population did not develop a creole language, but rapidly acquired a reasonable approximation to the received language; in this environment, their offspring would learn Spanish natively. In the contemporary African setting, where Spanish or Portuguese are the ofﬁcial languages, African speakers are never too far removed either from quasi-native speakers, or from the ofﬁcial reminders of usage (radio broadcasts, ofﬁcial announcements, public speeches, and the like). Even if the latter are produced by other Africans, these are the speakers who have acquired the “best” Spanish or Portuguese. (3) Closely related to the previous point is the demographic proportion of potential creole speakers to native speakers of the target language. In

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environments where Afro-Iberian creoles have developed, Africans outnumbered Europeans at ratios ranging from 10–15 to 1 to more than 100 to 1. While it might seem that even greater proportions might obtain in modern Africa, when one considers the proportion of the population that effectively speaks Spanish or Portuguese, the numbers are much smaller. A native Spanish speaker, say from Spain, in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, ﬁnds that most of the surrounding Africans also speak Spanish, although they may not be doing so at any given moment (e.g. when mutual use of an African language or Pidgin English is the most viable option). The Equatorial Guinean in the same setting will also ﬁnd it feasible to use Spanish in almost any circumstances. To a lesser extent, this condition holds true in Luanda, Bissau, and Maputo, where, however, there is a greater proportion of non-Portuguese speakers from the hinterlands. (4) In the contemporary African setting, children normally learn Spanish and Portuguese ﬁrst in school, although they may certainly have heard the language used, for example on the radio, among certain adults, perhaps even by their parents. The school system, albeit often staffed by less than totally ﬂuent teachers, especially in rural areas, provides a cross-generational consistency in linguistic usage, which ensures that successive generations of children will acquire essentially the same language. This is different from the typical protocreole scenario, where the children’s main linguistic input is the deﬁcient target language as used by their parents and others in their immediate environment. In effect, each generation of Africans in places like Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Mozambique, etc., learns the European language from scratch, using primarily ofﬁcial models in ofﬁcial settings to effect the transfer. In the ﬁrst Afro-Hispanic contacts, unﬂatteringly but perhaps not unrealistically depicted in literary texts from the ﬁfteenth to seventeenth centuries, African bozales are depicted as speaking a wide range of second-language variants of Spanish and Portuguese, from highly deformed and barely recognizable attempts to virtually perfect imitations. The best literary effects were derived from the former styles, and the temptation to slip from a legitimate Afro-Hispanic pidgin into a stage parody was too great for some authors to resist. At the same time, too great a density of deformed variants would render the speech entirely unintelligible to European audiences, thus depriving the crudely humorous lines of their comic effect. Judging by the texts, the majority of authors leaned in the direction of the hapless African captive, recently thrust into the Romance-speaking world, whose attempts at speaking Spanish or Portuguese show little attempt at accommodating Romance phonotactics. Signiﬁcantly, a large number of the most “Africanized” texts presents Africans speaking to one another in a European or American setting; to the extent that some authors actually observed such conversations rather than simply inventing humorous scenarios out of whole cloth, we get some hints of what an incipient Afro-Hispanic pidgin might have looked like.

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Spontaneous and intrusive nasalization in Afro-Hispanic language Among the other recurring changes in written attestations of Afro-Hispanic speech, one of the most intriguing developments is spontaneous intrusive nasalization, which resulted both in the slight modiﬁcation of existent words and in the creation of new words, combining the function of articles, demonstratives, and pronouns. This spontaneous shift is typiﬁed by the evolution of negro to nengre/ningre/nengue/nenglo, etc., which became a literary stereotype for Afro-Hispanic speech. The full range of cases is illustrated in the Appendix to chapter 7. Non-etymological nasalization in Spanish is not limited to Afro-Hispanic language, since vernacular Spanish of many regions exhibits items such as dende < desde.48 In bozal texts, however, a number of recurring forms appear, derived from Spanish words lacking a nasal, and in which an /n/ has appeared in word-ﬁnal position or word-internal syllable-ﬁnal position. These words are found in representations of Afro-Hispanic language from the sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century, one of the few phonetic traits not traceable to vernacular non-Africanized Spanish that spans the entire time period for which some type of pidginized Afro-Hispanic speech is attested. Together with spontaneous nasalization came denasalization; in the same corpus, apparent loss of word-ﬁnal /n/ is attested, with both phenomena often appearing in a single document. In view of these opposing tendencies, it is inaccurate to characterize Afro-Hispanic speech as generally “more nasal” or “less nasal” than other dialects of Spanish. It is often stated, though seldom substantiated, that “African” inﬂuence on Spanish included an increase of nasalization. Alvarez Nazario (1974:116) notes that in early Afro-Hispanic texts from Spain one ﬁnds “introducci´on de un elemento conson´antico de resonancia nasal, a veces en sustituci´on de otro sonido.” At another point, the author refers to “la tendencia del negro a la nasalidad” (175). Rub´en del Rosario (1956:6) refers to Afro-Hispanic bozal speech in Puerto Rico as “habla muy grave, oscura y nasalizada,” stating also (8) that “los negros esclavos, base de la poblaci´on negra y mestiza, ten´ıan una clara propensi´on a la nasalidad . . . el negro trajo o desarroll´o su h´abito de nasalizar.” Romero (1987:102) speaks of the “n´umero abundante de nasalizaciones voc´alicas, que parece provinieran de inﬂuencias afronegras.” Chasca (1946:336) notes that “the tendency toward nasality of the [seventeenthcentury Spain] Spanish speaking negroes would be increased by Portuguese 48

In these cases, it usually appears that nasalization has affected a syllable-ﬁnal obstruent, usually /s/, and given the widespread attestation of “nasalized /s/” in many Spanish regions (e.g. Canﬁeld 1960 for El Salvador, Wright and Robe 1939 for Mexico), it is not necessary to postulate any extraterritorial roots.

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inﬂuence.” Pichardo (1976:11), describing nineteenth-century bozal Spanish in Cuba, observes the frequent change of /y/ to [˜n], a change also observed by Henr´ıquez Ure˜na (1940:168) for Dominican Spanish, although not necessarily attributed to African inﬂuence. Lenz (1928:82) comments on increased used of nasal consonants in Papiamento, attributing this at least partially to African inﬂuence, quoting Schuchardt’s (1882) attribution to Afro-Hispanic speakers a tendency to nasalize vowels. Wagner (1949:153) also comments on increased nasality of Cuban bozal Spanish, Papiamento, and other Caribbean creoles. Although it remains to be convincingly demonstrated that Afro-Hispanic speech in general was any more “nasalized” than other ethnic or regional varieties, several recurring types of addition or shift of nasal elements in AfroHispanic speech may be identiﬁed. The prominence of what was probably a relatively small subset of such elements, noteworthy for their differences with respect to other Spanish dialects, was responsible for the notion that AfroHispanic speech was characteristically nasal. In many dialects of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as Afro-Romance creoles, the presence of a word-internal nasal consonant may cause nasalization of other elements in the word, both vowels and consonants. The most common process is vowel nasalization (with leftward, rightward or bidirectional spreading, determined partially on a language-speciﬁc basis, partially idiosyncratically). Cases of apparent spread of nasalization are found in bozal texts, in what sometimes looks to be leftward spreading (with occasional rightward nasalization), e.g. multiplicar > muntipricar,49 Mingu´e < Miguel.50 Some common cases include br´angaman < v´algame [Dios], simpa˜nole < espa˜noles, ringalame < regalarme, sintaliano < italiano, dimpensa < dispensa, pr´antano < pl´atano, sintimao < estimado, satinfasione < satisfacci´on, tamberna < taberna, etc. Nearly all the cases of polysyllabic words not originally containing a nasal in which an intrusive nasal element is found in bozal texts exhibit the added nasal element on the ﬁrst vowel, with alternate variants at times demonstrating rightward spreading, rarely if ever affecting the ﬁnal vowel. Typical examples include lango < largo, (n)anqu´ı < aqu´ı, limbre < libre, dimparate < disparate, rimpito < repito, pincueso < pescuezo, dimpach´a < despachar, dingrasiao < desgraciados, rimpic´a < repicar, sincritore < escritores, ingresia < iglesia, sintrella < estrella, pintola < pistola, dimbarat´o < desbarat´o, unt´e < usted,51 Jesuncristo < Jesucristo, Punto Rico < Puerto Rico, ring´o < rigor,52 Nantega < Ortega,53 nontron < otros. In a very few words, spontaneous nasality appears to have spread rightward from the initial syllable: br´angaman < v´algame, and sumprica/sumpringa < suplica. There are few counterexamples to the attachment of a nasal element to the initial vowel, and most can be accounted for 49 51

Chasca (1946:326). Alzola (1965:363).

50 52

Alvarez Nazario (1974:150). Alvarez Nazario (1974:150).

53

Ibid. (147).

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by independent constraints or developments. Thus satinfasione < satisfacci´on may reﬂect the previous existence of a nasal in the root word. Arintocrasia < aristocracia can be explained through phonotactic constraints, since if the ﬁrst vowel were nasalized and then developed an excrescent syllable-ﬁnal [n], the originally intervocalic /r/ would now ﬁnd itself in postconsonantal onset-initial position, and according to Spanish phonotactics the /r/ would have to be realized as a trill, representing a non structure-preserving transformation. Prohimbido < prohibido actually contains a diphthong in the initial syllable (the letter h is silent and the unstressed /i/ is realized as a semivowel), to which the nasal element was added. Another apparent counterexample, pecandora < pecadora as used by G´ongora can be explained through the obvious analogy with the gerund pecando, whereas intrusive nasalization of the ﬁrst vowel could conceivably result in potential confusion with penca ‘cowhide used for whipping,’ thereby detracting from G´ongora’s attempted humor. Finally, the nasal element in Jesuncristo/Sesunclito, etc., most likely was attached originally to Jes´us, constituting a type of word-ﬁnal nasalization to be covered below. The last type of spontaneous nasalization in Afro-Hispanic speech to be studied here involves word-ﬁnal position: callan < callad,54 daremon < daremos, bucan < busca, etc. A particularly intriguing set of forms exhibiting nonetymological word-ﬁnal nasals are monosyllabic catchall morphemes such as lan, lon, and nan, as well as other monosyllabic function words derived from clitics, copulas, prepositions and the like. Previous analyses of word-ﬁnal nasalization The only Afro-Hispanic words exhibiting word-ﬁnal nasalization that have been previously analyzed are the pair lan/nan. Given the phonetic similarity of these items with pronouns or articles in Afro-Hispanic creoles such as Palenquero, Papiamento, S˜ao Tomense and Annobonese, some investigators have suggested that these words were actually derived from a proto-Hispanic creole, or perhaps borrowed directly from African etyma.55 In Puerto Rican bozal Spanish, both lan and nan are found, but in Cuban texts, lan (with occasional variant lon) occurs almost exclusively. If the occurrence of lan/nan in Cuba and Puerto Rico stems from a common extraterritorial source, then the existence of both forms in Puerto Rico and the predominance of the former in Cuba would suggest an evolution lan > nan, initiated and only partially completed in Puerto Rico. The 54 55

Chasca (1946). Lipski (1987c). Cotton and Sharp (1988:208) refer to lan in Afro-Caribbean speech as “an undifferentiated article in Black speech in the Caribbean,” without further justiﬁcation or explanation. In a more penetrating analysis of these items, Alvarez Nazario (1974:167, 185–97) postulates that the original form was nan, and that the change nan > lan took place through the inﬂuence of the deﬁnite article la.

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opposite development would be suggested only if it could be demonstrated that lan/nan was attested in Cuba signiﬁcantly before appearing in Puerto Rico, having undergone the putative evolution nan > lan before the latter form was transferred to Cuba, via an as yet unattested route of linguistic transplantation. However, the data collected for the present study show that lan occurs from the early seventeenth century on, both in Spain and in Spanish America, including Puerto Rico; lon makes its ﬁrst written appearance shortly thereafter.56 The almost total restriction of nan to nineteenth-century Puerto Rican texts thus suggests a route of evolution opposite to that suggested by Alvarez Nazario, namely lan > nan, if in fact the two items are related etymologically. Alvarez Nazario also attempts to identify nan with a host of other elements (nano, na, ne, nelle), which appear in Afro-Hispanic texts from the Golden Age to the nineteenth century. He also proposes that the semantic replacement of a preposition plus article is related to the plural particle ma of Colombian Palenquero, e.g. ma ngomb´e ‘the cattle,’ where he interprets ma as a fusion of na and the Spanish possessive mi. However, the Palenquero form is in reality a Bantu plural marker, only fortuitously similar to fusions of Romance items. Given the lack of other signiﬁcant parallels with West African or Caribbean creoles, and the fact that lan/nan does not occur in Palenquero (the one Afro-Hispanic language demonstrably inﬂuenced by Bantu morphology), there is no compelling reason to identify lan/nan as direct transfers from African languages or creoles. The claimed similarity with Palenquero stems from a misunderstanding of the function of ma in the latter language. Nan is phonetically identical to the third person plural pronoun/plural marker in Papiamento, but in the latter language pluralizing nan is invariably placed after the noun: e kasnan ‘the houses.’ No use of Papiamento nan parallels Afro-Hispanic usage. Since no bozal texts show nan used as a plural subject pronoun or postposed plural marker, it seems that the similarity with Papiamento is fortuitous. The change lan > nan may simply result from regressive nasalization (a nearly identical change has occurred in Haitian Creole), or non-etymological replacement/insertion of a word-initial /n/, such as is frequently found in Antillean bozal texts in the form of the undifferentiated third person pronoun nelle/neye/ne. For example, Brau (1894:138) observes that in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, what he called “cimarrones bozales” used expressions such as na-cosina, ne-pueblo, na-casa, etc., for en la cocina ‘in the kitchen,’ en el pueblo ‘in the town,’ en la casa ‘in the house,’ again suggesting a simple phonetic shift, or conceivably na as derived from a Portuguese pidgin, rather than a transfer of African morphological structures. It is not inconceivable that West African or creole morphological structures inﬂuenced the development of lan. However, since the latter element ﬁts in among a series of monosyllabic function words all showing the same 56

Example Chapter Seven Appendix E.10 hints at earlier progenitors.

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spontaneous nasalization but otherwise exhibiting no basic similarities, the case for an African/creole origin is not compelling. There is indeed a reason for not separating out lan/nan, namely the fact that Afro-Hispanic materials reveal a large and potentially open-ended set of words in which a ﬁnal nasal element was added. Evidence of prenasalization in Afro-Hispanic language Close scrutiny of the Afro-Hispanic data suggests that what was eventually transcribed as a word-ﬁnal /n/ in elements such as lan, lon, den, etc., reﬂects the presence of a p r e n a s a l i z e d o b s t r u e n t in the following word, a transformation of an originally oral consonant resulting from a unique combination of West African areal characteristics and a particular interpretation of Spanish and Afro-Hispanic phonotactic patterns by Africans and Spanish speakers alike. Prenasalized obstruents are a common feature of many West African language families, among them several known to have been carried to Spain and Latin America. Such sounds have traditionally caused difﬁculties of interpretation and pronunciation for speakers of European languages, and when found phrase-initially they are often perceived and transcribed as preceded by a prothetic vowel, or as a n a s a l +o b s t r u e n t cluster separated by an epenthetic vowel. Although most Afro-Hispanic texts reﬂect no particular linguistic sophistication as regards transcription of non-Spanish sounds, there are a few fragments that appear to directly reﬂect the presence of prenasalized obstruents.57 There is also evidence that African words containing prenasalized consonants were absorbed into Afro-Hispanic language. For example, in Caribbean bozal Spanish, Africanisms (usually from the Bantu group) containing prenasalized consonants frequently lost the nasalization, but an alternative route of evolution included a prothetic /e/: mbala > embala “boniato,” ndoki > endoki ‘witch doctor,’ nkento > enkento ‘wife,’ nganga > enganga ‘witchcraft’.58 Finally, there is evidence that African words containing prenasalized obstruents were at times resyllabiﬁed as a syllable-ﬁnal nasal followed by a syllable-initial obstruent, when adapted into Spanish: e.g. Kikongo siri + mpompa > cirimbomba ‘drunken orgy’.59 Prenasalization of European words originally beginning in oral obstruents was a frequent concomitant of many Afro-European linguistic contacts, including the formative periods of Ibero-Romance-based creole languages of the Americas. In addition to the documented presence of prenasalized consonants (e.g. in Gullah and Njuka), Palenquero, the most distinctively Africanized Spanish-based creole, has not 57

58

Several relevant examples are included in the Appendix to Chapter 7, Part K, but some of the remaining examples in the Appendix also admit the interpretation of a prenasalized obstruent: B.1, B.5, B.6–9 and E.8 are particularly likely candidates. 59 Megenney (1979:119). Garc´ıa Gonz´alez and Vald´es Acosta (1978:21).

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only retained African items containing prenasalized consonants (e.g. ngombe ‘cattle’), but has also prenasalized Spanish word-initial obstruents, most particularly /d/ and /g/:60 dejar > ndej´a, gritar > ngrit´a, ganar > ngan´a, dolor > ndol´o, doce > ndosi, duro > ndulo, (a)garrar > ngal´a, etc. In the adaptation of Portuguese loans in Kikongo and Kimbundu, initial oral consonants were frequently, but not uniformly, rendered by prenasalized obstruents when borrowed into African languages. A small sample of the hundreds of Portuguese borrowings in Kikongo which illustrate this shift are: catequista > nkatikista, Jo˜ao > Nzuau, Pedro > Mp´etelo, Paulo > Mpaolo, Garcia > Ngalasia/Ngala, sal > nsalu, ac¸ucar > nsucadi/nsucali, pano > mpaanu, fardo > mfwadu/mfwalu, saco > nsaaku, tinta > ntinta. The list of obstruent-initial Portuguese words that did not undergo prenasalization is also lengthy, which indicates that the process was variable at best. Also interesting is the fact that Portuguese words beginning with an initial nasalized (or occasionally even oral) vowel were at times reinterpreted as a prenasalized obstruent in Kikongo: Abel > Mbele, Ambr´osio > Mbolozi, Agostinho > Ngositinu, etc. Occasionally, word-internal nasalization or nasal spreading occurred in Kikongo: pipa > mpimpa, Miguel > Minguiedi, agulha > nguia, etc. An initial CV syllable was often reinterpreted as a prenasalized obstruent, whether or not the initial consonant was originally a nasal: bigode > ngode, mulato > nlaato, etc. Kimbundu also transformed Portuguese items through prenasalization:61 Jo˜ao > Nzwazitu, Joana > Nzwana, etc. Similar borrowing procedures occurred in other West African languages, which provides a plausible basis for such developments in Afro-Hispanic language. In many Bantu languages, the initial nasal element acts as a nominal class marker, and it is possible that borrowed items were assigned to nominal classes based on their perceived similarity with native nouns. This would be similar to the assignment of gender to loanwords in Spanish not originally conforming to the canonical Spanish patterns in which gender is predictable. Nearly all attestations of spontaneous “word-ﬁnal” n in Afro-Hispanic words in reality occur preconsonantally, where a Spanish speaker would likely misinterpret, e.g. la ngallina as lan gallina. Word-initial voiced stops form the majority of the examples, which is consistent with the distribution of prenasalized obstruents in West African languages, as well as with the Palenquero data. Prenasalized consonants are most prevalent in languages characterized by open syllables, which also correlates with bozal Spanish, in which nearly all Spanish syllable-ﬁnal consonants were eliminated.62 It is interesting to note that Portuguese word-ﬁnal nasal vowels were uniformly denasalized in Kikongo, corresponding to the pattern frequently noted in bozal Spanish texts (Appendix Part L), in which a word-ﬁnal /n/ or nasal vowel was lost: Sebasti˜ao > Sibatiau, 60

Friedemann and Pati˜no Rosselli (1983:99–100).

61

Atkins (1953).

62

Herbert (1986).

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lim˜ao > limao/nlimau/limanu, mam˜ao > mamau/mamo, serr˜ao > selau, pris˜ao > pelezo, kapit˜ao > kapitau, etc. Modern Palenquero effectively denasalizes such words as tambi´e < tambi´en ‘also,’ although at times a residual nasal resonance is detectable. It is unclear whether such examples represent complete denasalization of the ﬁnal vowel, or whether, given the presence of ﬁnal nasal vowels in a large subset of African languages represented among speakers of Afro-Hispanic pidgin, Spanish-speaking writers simply missed the compensatory nasalization of the preceding vowel. Speakers of African languages, like most other second-language learners of Spanish, routinely pronounced all instances of /b/, /d/, and /g/ as occlusives, as opposed to the more frequently fricative articulations found in native varieties of Spanish. The retention of occlusion, while in its origins a reﬂection of African phonotactic patterns which did not contain the stop-fricative alternation, created a series of sounds not normally occurring intervocalically in Spanish, including in word-initial postvocalic position. An occlusive pronunciation of the voiced obstruent in a combination like la gallina would, if interpreted within a Spanish phonotactic model, suggest the latent existence of a preceding consonant, most probably a nasal. Although nothing in the phonetic realization would give substance to such an analysis, the Spanish distributional possibilities, in combination with already existent prenasalized stops in the pool of African languages found in the bozal populations, would facilitate reinterpretation of word-initial voiced stops as containing two root nodes. Addition of a prenasalized segment ﬁts smoothly within this pattern. In the case of prenasalized obstruents in bozal Spanish, there is nothing to suggest that the original word-initial consonants were analyzed as clusters. Once the inclusion of prenasalized stops in bozal speech had begun to affect word-initial /b/, /d/, and /g/, this pattern could be extended to initial voiceless stops, providing that the pool of African languages serving as a substrate trigger also contained prenasalized segments whose second element was voiceless. Both types of prenasalized obstruents are found among West African languages, but prenasalized voiced obstruents are more common.63 Analogy with the voiced series, rather than a differential analysis of Spanish voiceless stops (which do not alternate with fricatives), would be at work here. In AfroHispanic speech voiceless stops were sometimes voiced following nasals; remnants such as Palenquero planda < pl´atano, Palenquero/Papiamentu hende < gente, and Papiamentu punda < punta may signal an earlier time period when postnasal voicing of obstruents was more frequent. The majority of bozal attestations of function words apparently ending in [n] are found before voiced stops.

63

Ibid., Welmers (1973).

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Summary reconstruction of early Afro-Iberian phonology The reconstruction of Afro-Hispanic phonology is circumscribed by both temporal constraints and geographical settings. The ﬁrst large category spans the largest stretch of both time and space, and may be roughly identiﬁed with the representation of Africanized Spanish in Golden Age literature, plus the ﬁrst manifestations of colonial Spanish American writing. In Spain, the time period involved begins in the late ﬁfteenth century, and – in literature at least – extends through the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century. Bozal Spanish of the sort represented in the literary texts of the epoch probably ceased to be a viable linguistic commodity by the second half of the seventeenth century. In Latin America, the time period in question being towards the end of the sixteenth century, although the ﬁrst written attestations do not come until the second half of the seventeenth century, ending somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century. All major colonial centers were involved, although the written attestations cluster around major mining areas and the largest administrative centers: Potos´ı in Alto Per´u and Cuzco in Peru, Mexico City, Puebla, Bogot´a, and the like. The extant documentation covers two very distinct dialect areas of Spain: Castilian and Andalusian (together with some transitional zones). In early colonial Spanish America, documented seventeenth/eighteenth century AfroHispanic language contacts center on highland zones characterized by strong consonantal articulation in syllable-ﬁnal position, and on a relatively uniform pronunciation of stressed and unstressed vowels. Despite these wide dialectal adstrata, Africanized Spanish in this ﬁrst category exhibits more similarities than differences. These include: (1) occlusive pronunciation of /b/, /d/, and /g/ in all positions, sometimes producing the impression of a preceding nasal consonant. In a few instances, true prenasalized stops may have emerged, but these never prevailed, except in splinter groups, often formed by runaway slaves, whose language was cut off from further contact with Spanish: this includes Palenquero, as well as the Afro-American creole Gullah and some of the creoles of Surinam. Rapidly pronounced intervocalic /d/ was often perceived by native Spanish speakers as [r]. (2) weak but tenacious pronunciation of syllable-ﬁnal consonants. By no means did Africans simply strain all Spanish in their environment through a rigid CV ﬁlter; rather, they accentuated already present tendencies towards consonantal weakening in those regions where such processes existed. In Castile and highland Spanish America, ﬁnal consonants were as often retained as weakened or lost, while in Andalusia (and presumably the developing Caribbean and other coastal dialects of Latin America), Africans overgeneralized the ever-expanding move to eliminate syllable- and word-ﬁnal consonants.

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(3) special mention must be made of ﬁnal /s/ in the ﬁrst person plural verbal desinence -mos, for evidence suggests consistent pronuciation without the ﬁnal /s/ by Africans in all the regions and time periods under consideration. Also found with high frequency was the dropping of plural /s/ in multipleword noun phrases, remaining only on the ﬁrst word of the phrase (typically a deﬁnite article). The evidence suggests a recurring tendency to see plural /s/ and the /s/ in /-mos/ as largely redundant, as opposed to instances of syllable- and word-ﬁnal /s/ which were devoid of morphological value. The latter instances of /s/ were lost only when the regional variety of Spanish already weakened /s/, for example in Andalusia, at least by the end of the seventeenth century. (4) paragogic vowels occurred variably, especially following polysyllabic words ending in a stressed vowel plus consonant (e.g. se˜nor, Dios), for which there was no ready model in the majority of African languages which intersected with Spanish. Word-internally, paragogic vowels were common in early borrowings into African languages, which were characterized by a brief contact with native speakers of Portuguese or Spanish, followed by oral transmission from one non-native speaker to the next, all of which facilitated rapid divergence from the original source. In Africanized Spanish spoken in closer contact with native speakers of Spanish, wordinternal paragogic vowels were rare and transitory, with the frequency of such vowels varying according to the native African languages involved, as well as with degree of assimilation of Spanish. When paragogic vowels did appear, vowel harmony with a preceding vowel, usually the vowel receiving the main stress, was a common strategy. (5) interchange of /l/ and /r/ was by no means the norm for all or even most AfroHispanic language. Only after the large inﬂux of Bantu-speaking Africans (towards the end of the seventeenth century) did the change of /r/ to /l/ and interchange of /d/ and /l/ become in the least common. Observations of contemporary Bantu speakers who have learned Spanish or Portuguese as a second language (e.g. in Equatorial Guinea and Angola) reveal a fairly low rate of neutralization of /l/ and /r/, even among the least proﬁcient speakers. However, the presence of even a few cases of liquid neutralization sufﬁce to create the stereotype of massive replacement of /r/ by /l/. (6) failure to maintain the /r/–/rr/ distinction is characteristic of Africanized Spanish of all times and places. Although the single ﬂap [r] is the most usual manifestation, observation of Spanish spoken non-natively in Equatorial Guinea shows that hypercorrect use of the trill [rr] is also a frequent event. (7) the majority of Africans acquiring Spanish spoke language with lexical tones, and attempted to reinterpret the Spanish intensity stress accent in tonal terms. For all Africans speaking tone languages, replacement of tonic stress by a high tone without concomitant higher intensity was the rule, but

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more proﬁcient speakers suppressed the tendency to assign a discrete tone to each syllable, gravitating instead in favor of a roughly (low) monotone pronunciation of most atonic vowels. The ﬁnal stages: nineteenth-century Spanish American bozal Spanish Qualitatively, Afro-Hispanic language in Latin America began to change during the eighteenth century, but the majority of the documentation of this second phase begins at the turn of the nineteenth century. The areas in question are primarily Buenos Aires and Montevideo, coastal Peru, and to a lesser extent the Caribbean coast of South America, especially Venezuela. In the R´ıo de la Plata, African laborers arrived in relatively large numbers, but most remained in urban areas. Contact with Spanish was extensive, and slavery ended a few decades later, so that blacks, even African-born bozales, drifted into a variety of menial occupations, most of which brought them into constant contact with native speakers of Spanish. In coastal Peru, the majority of Africans remained in the greater Lima area, where the situation was similar to that of the R´ıo de la Plata. There was also a large African contingent in the coastal plantations, where something approaching Caribbean bozal Spanish may have developed. There is almost no documentation of this latter group, so reconstruction of their language will have to be based entirely on extrapolation. By the nineteenth century, the R´ıo de la Plata and coastal South American dialects had already developed signiﬁcant weakening of syllable-ﬁnal consonants, especially /s/ and, in the case of Peru, also /r/ and /l/. Afro-Hispanic language built on these tendencies, which meant virtually no paragogic vowels, and an abundance of open syllables. Given the preponderance of Bantu-speaking slaves taken to the R´ıo de la Plata during this time, almost all of whom came from the Portuguese Congo and Angola, Bantu phonetic tendencies could predominate. In coastal Peru, the late-arriving Africans in the nineteenth century were of more varied origin, roughly duplicating (in diversity, but not in quantity) the Africans arriving in nineteenth-century Cuba. This means a roughly even mix between speakers of Bantu languages and speakers of Kwa languages. As a consequence, fewer characteristics of speciﬁc African language families are found. Afro-Hispanic language in nineteenth-century South America presented, in addition to the omnipresent neutralization of /r/ and /rr/, occlusive pronunciation of /b/ and /g/, and reinterpretation of Spanish stress accent in terms of tone, at least the following common features: (1) severe weakening and frequent loss of all syllable-ﬁnal /s/. (2) frequent loss of word-ﬁnal /r/, especially in verbal inﬁnitives. In coastal Peru, loss of /r/ and /l/ was more generally extended to all syllable-ﬁnal contexts, word-internal and word-ﬁnal.

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(3) in the R´ıo de la Plata area, replacement of /r/ by /l/ was relatively common among African bozales, and may have inﬂuenced the speech of nonAfricans during the period when blacks (African- and American-born) made up 30 to 40 percent of the Buenos Aires and Montevideo populations.64 The relative scarcity of this phenomenon in Afro-Peruvian speech lends credence to the notion that the highly concentrated Bantu presence in Argentina and Uruguay was directly responsible for this change. (4) Africans reinterpreted the weak and variably deleted intervocalic /d/ of coastal South American Spanish as zero, although the occlusive pronunciation of /d/ in other contexts is probable. In the nineteenth century, the plantation slavery of Cuba created the conditions for heavier and more long-lasting African phonetic inﬂuences, which at times transcended the speech of foreign-born bozales to encompass AfroAmerican Spanish. Diachronic reconstruction suggests that by the turn of the nineteenth century, Cuban Spanish had the same phonetic characteristics as it has today, although among the large Spanish-born population (at times reaching 50 percent of the white population), retention of ﬁnal consonants was frequent, and even among some upper-class Cubans there was some reluctance to reduce ﬁnal consonants to the extent found in popular speech. It was the latter variety that interacted with Afro-Hispanic speech, so that massive loss of syllable-ﬁnal consonants, as well as some neutralization of syllable-ﬁnal /r/ in favor of [l] is to be expected. Africans in nineteenth-century Cuba had a far lesser chance to interact with native Spanish speakers than in the countries described above; therefore, the opportunities were greater for phonological restructuring of the sort found in more radical creoles. The only reason why such a restructuring never took place is the short period of time (roughly ﬁfty years) in which a signiﬁcant African-born population acquired Spanish non-natively in Cuba in the difﬁcult plantation situation. As a consequence, Afro-Cuban bozal Spanish was in most ways similar to Africanized Spanish in coastal South America, with the tendencies toward loss of ﬁnal consonants more exaggerated. Among the few distinguishing features of this transitory Afro-Hispanic variety are the following: (1) reduction of two-consonant onset clusters through loss of the second (liquid) consonant, typiﬁed by the reduction of hombre > ombe, negro > nego. (2) prenasalization of many word-initial voiced obstruents and occasionally of word-initial voiceless stops. Prenasalization occurred at all times and places where Spanish and African languages came together, but this process appears to have evolved the furthest in Cuba. In few areas did Afro-Hispanic speech reﬂect the phonological impact of a single African language or areal grouping. The majority of features used by 64

Fontanella (1987b).

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African bozales are generic to second-language learners of Spanish from a variety of backgrounds, exacerbated by the difﬁcult conditions in which Spanish was being acquired, and by the highly colloquial spoken Spanish that served as input, in which many processes of consonantal reduction were evident. Pan-African characteristics such as the reinterpretation of the stress accent in terms of tone allowed non-Africans to detect an African “accent,” even at a distance. Finally, discrepancies between the phonotactics of the African languages involved (most of which permitted only CV-type syllables) and Spanish were accentuated by regional varieties of Spanish in which processes of consonantal reduction were already underway.

8

Grammatical features of Afro-Hispanic language

Introduction This chapter will focus on particular grammatical structures among African languages and possible substratum inﬂuences in Afro-Iberian speech. The list of possible transfers is nearly endless, and yet among creole languages worldwide only a relatively small handful of syntactic patterns are typically implicated in substratum transfer. Overall conﬁgurations such as word order, together with speciﬁc constructions involving negation, interrogation, topicalization, deﬁniteness marking, pluralization, and copular predicates are among the leading venues in which the action of substratum languages may be sought.

General word order among African and Afro-Iberian languages When full argumental noun phrases (NPs) are involved, the majority of African languages that interacted with Spanish and Portuguese are head-initial SVO (subject-verb-object) languages, meaning that objects follow prepositions and verbs, and complementizers such as that/que come at the beginning of the clauses they introduce. A proportionately smaller number of languages exhibit SOV (subject-object-verb) order, with some being head-ﬁnal/postpositional. Some languages appear to be in transition from one word order pattern to another. Few African languages depart drastically from one of these two canonical patterns, although alternative word orders are common in constructions involving focus and topicalization, relativization, interrogation, etc. According to Heine (1976:23–24), who surveyed some 300 African languages, 95 percent have S-V order in intransitive sentences; in transitive sentences, the proportions are 71 percent SVO, 24 percent SOV, and 5 percent VSO. If the subject is pronominal, 94 percent of the languages place the pronoun preverbally. He notes: “Given any unknown African language one can therefore predict with a certain degree of probability that in this language the subject precedes the verb, that nominal qualiﬁers like adjectives, numerals or demonstratives follow the noun, and so on” (24). Most Benue-Congo languages have a “type A” cluster of properties, including SVO order, prepositions, n o u n +g e n i t i v e order, 245

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n o u n +a d j e c t i v e order, preverbal tense/mood/aspect markers, object pronouns in postverbal position, and the general order s u b j e c t p r o n o u n + t e n s e / m o o d / a s p e c t m a r k e r s +n e g at i v e p a r t i c l e +v e r b + o b j e c t p r o n o u n . Most West Atlantic and Eastern Kwa languages also fall into this pattern, leaving Mande and Western Kwa languages as the only major African language families that intersected with colonial Spanish that deviate from this basic pattern. Western Kwa languages and Mande languages normally exhibit “Type B” characteristics: they have postpositions rather than prepositions, exhibit the order g e n i t i v e +n o u n , do not distinguish nouns by gender, and have little or no nominal morphology of any type. Phonologically, Type B languages usually have open syllables only, and contrast oral and nasal vowels. Type B languages share with the A group predominant SVO and n o u n+ a d j e c t i v e word order. These two groups account for nearly all African languages known to have come into contact with colonial Spanish and Portuguese, and therefore provide a set of common denominators around which the search for African structural inﬂuence on Afro-Iberian language can be based. When pronominal clitics are drawn into the picture, the list of available wordorder patterns grows even longer. Africanists are divided in their reconstruction of proto Niger-Congo, as to whether it was originally SVO or SOV.1 In some cases, word-order patterns appear to have shifted partially during the time span represented by Afro-Hispanic linguistic encounters. Among the African language groups exhibiting SOV word order are the Mande languages, including Mandinga, Bambara, Vai, Mende, and Kpelle, stretching from the Senegambia to the former Grain Coast. In these languages, deﬁnite articles, plural markers, and demonstratives are frequently postposed, while possessives usually precede the noun they modify. Since the Mande family has been suggested as a major contributor to the formation of some AfroAmerican language varieties – both bozal languages and established creoles,2 the question of possible word-order effects deserves at least a second glance. Ijo, spoken in eastern Nigeria, is another African language cluster with predominantly SOV word order.3 Under the name Carabal´ı (Calabars in English), Ijo speakers were present in Cuba, but the possible extent of their linguistic contributions has yet to be assessed. Ijo speakers formed a coherent speech community in the Berbice region of Guyana, and Ijo was a key factor in the formation of Berbice Dutch creole.4 Despite the SOV structure of Ijo, Berbice Dutch creole is a SVO language, which some investigators have taken as a demonstration of the universally unmarked status of SVO order, and the possible activation of the “bioprogram” during creole formation.5 On the other hand, Berbice Dutch does 1 2 4 5

Williamson (1989a). 3 Jenewari (1989). E.g. G. Hall (1992) for Louisiana Creole French. Robertson (1979), Smith, Robertson and Williamson (1987), Kouwenberg and Robertson (1988). Bickerton (1981).

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have postpositions, clearly derived from the substratum and virtually impossible to derive from any form of Dutch unaffected by a postpositional substratum language. Smith et al. (1987) propose that Berbice Dutch was formed through intense contact and combination of only two languages – Eastern Ijo (Kalabari) and some form of Dutch, possibly already creolized. If this hypothesis is correct, it opens the possibility for creolization to occur during bilateral linguistic contacts, and not only when the superstrate language is in contact with a number of mutually unintelligible substrate languages.6 Kru languages, representing the old Windward and Grain Coasts, typically have a SVO order in simple sentences, but when auxiliary or negative elements occur, the preferred order is S AUX IO DO V.7 Members of the Kru group were widely represented during the Atlantic slave trade as Kru men, renowned for their seafaring abilities, shipped out as sailors and crewmembers for various enterprises all along the west coast of Africa. Kru seamen have been implicated in the spread of varieties of West African Pidgin English (especially Sierra Leone Krio) to Fernando Poo, eastern Nigeria, and Cameroon. On Fernando Poo, the Kru formed a coherent community, often clinging to pidgin English even when ofﬁcial usage switched to Spanish. Proportionately few Kru language speakers were documented among slave populations taken to Latin America, possibly because slave traders found the Kru to be more valuable as sailors and intermediaries. African language families with predominantly SVO word order are more numerous, and represented a much greater proportion of the African side of Afro-Hispanic linguistic encounters. The Atlantic family typically uses SVO order,8 and many Atlantic languages were documented in the slave trade to the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, including Wolof, Fula, Diola, Serer, Temne, and Biafada. Kwa languages9 were among the most important languages to interact with Spanish and Portuguese. Prominent Kwa languages include the Akan group (Twi, Asante, Fante), Ewe, Fon, Bran, and G˜a. Among the even larger Benue-Congo family,10 such languages as Yoruba, Igbo, Eﬁk, Tiv, and Edo (Bini) were well-documented players in Afro-Hispanic communities. Virtually all of these languages observe a basic SVO word order, with deviations occurring during focus and topicalization. By far the largest subgroup of the Benue-Congo classiﬁcation is the vast Bantu family, including such languages as Kikongo, Kimbundu, UmBundu, and many languages from the interior of the Congo Basin, Angola, and later Mozambique and East Africa. Bantu languages normally follow a basic SVO pattern. In the balance, most African languages participating in bozal Spanish and Portuguese encounters prefer SVO order, and no modiﬁcation of Romance 6 9

7 Marchese (1989). 8 (Wilson (1989). E.g. as proposed by Whinnom (1965). 10 (Williamson 1989b) In the revised classiﬁcation, e.g. of Stewart (1989).

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word order would be expected. African slaves who spoke SOV languages fell from prominence in Afro-Iberian communities after the early seventeenth century, although they were proportionately more important in French and British colonies. Many speakers of African SOV languages also spoke another regional language or lingua franca characterized by SVO order; for Mande language speakers, knowledge of Fula or Wolof was common, while Ijo speakers usually were familiar with neighboring Benue-Congo languages, and, later, with Pidgin English. Possible inﬂuence of SOV languages on Afro-Iberian speech Spanish and Portuguese were in contact with a proportionately high number of Mande speakers, using SOV word order, only during the ﬁrst century of European penetration of West Africa, and occasional fragments from the sparse sixteenth-century bozal corpus may reveal a gravitation away from SVO patterns. For example, from the Coplas of Rodrigo de Reinosa (Chapter Three Appendix #1), we ﬁnd: . . . si querer, conmigo facer choque, choque, y con un bezul dos veces arreo en vostro becer all´a se me troque . . .

The Afro-Portuguese fragment by Henrique da Mota (Chapter Two Appendix #2), from the late ﬁfteenth or early sixteenth century, contains a few hints of SOV order: . . . Vos loguo todos chamar . . . vos pipa nunca tapar, vos a mym quero pinguar . . .

It is not possible to unequivocally attribute occasional lapses into SOV word order to an African substratum, since medieval Spanish and Portuguese still used O-V constructions as an alternative to the more prevalent V-O pattern. If SVO is indeed a universal trait of pidgins and creoles, to be overcome only in the presence of extremely concentrated substratum or adstratum pressure (e.g. as occurred in the formation of Philippine Creole Spanish, whose predominantly VSO pattern follows the structure of all contributing Philippine languages), then one should not look for any deviation from SVO syntax in bozal Spanish or Portuguese, unless an exceptionally homogeneous contact with an SOV African language was at stake. The case of Guinea-Bissau Kriyol is of some relevance to the study of Afro-Hispanic word order, since Kriyol is in contact both with SVO Atlantic languages (especially Bijago and Manjaku, and, in the Casamance, with Diola) and with the SOV Mande language Mandinka. Kriyol word order

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is SVO, except for topicalized sentences, but there are several instances where Portuguese (or pidgin Portuguese) word order has taken precedence over any of the African substrate patterns.11 Subjects and subject pronouns In many African languages, the issue of subject pronouns is closely bound up with subject-verb agreement. A question as apparently straightforward as whether or not “null subjects” are permitted in African languages becomes entangled with syntactic characterization of “subject” position vs. agreement or inﬂectional marker. To further complicate matters, many African language families have dual series of “subject pronouns” – a free-standing stressable set which closely correspond in meaning and usage to Ibero-Romance subject pronouns, and preverbal clitics, which ﬁnd Romance counterparts only in some French and northern Italian dialects.12 At the same time, proponents of a universally unmarked syntax during the creolization process frequently point to overt uninﬂected subject pronouns as the preferred option. The Mande family is typiﬁed by the behavior of Mende.13 In this language, there are several sets of closely related subject clitics, which are used with different verbal tenses, with conjunctions, and in certain other constructions. There is also a series of emphatic (disjunctive) subject pronouns. Use of the subject clitic is obligatory, and when an optional emphatic pronoun is used, it must be followed by the subject clitic: ngia ngi tewe ‘I (emph.) cut,’ where ngia is the disjunctive pronoun, and ngi is the subject clitic. In this sense, Mende is a “null subject” language, since the only optionally occurring “subject pronoun” is in fact an agreement marker which does not occupy the subject’s true argument position. Mandinka has a similar distribution of emphatic subject pronouns and subject clitics.14 The ﬁrst person singular subject clitic is a velar nasal with a high tone, alternating with m- and n-; the ﬁrst person plural subject clitic is similar, but with a low tone. Rowlands (1959:56) observes that since the tonal distinctions are often lost on Europeans, “Mandinkas tend to use Emphatic forms in speaking to Europeans in many situations where they would use Unemphatic forms among themselves. This corresponds to putting stress on a Pronoun in English to ensure clarity.” This suggests that the use of emphatic pronouns to reinforce subject position (e.g. Ibero-Romance use of (a)mi instead of yo/eu) could work in the opposite direction, with Africans deliberately choosing emphatic disjunctive pronouns in their dealings with Europeans, who then overgeneralized their notions about pronouns in African languages. 11 13

Kihm (1994:142). Migeod (1908).

12 14

Brandi and Cordin (1989), Rizzi (1986), Saﬁr (1985). Rowlands (1959:ch. 6).

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Subject pronouns in Atlantic languages often generally exhibit the same disjunctive pronoun/clitic split found among the Mande group. Among Kwa and Benue-Congo languages, it is more usual to ﬁnd a distinction between emphatic subject pronouns and subject clitics; when emphatic pronouns are used, the clitic is normally absent.15 Among the Bantu languages, optional free-standing (and emphatic) pronouns are combined with obligatory preverbal subject clitics. Although the full subject pronouns vary widely among African languages, the subject clitics are typologically quite similar. All are monosyllabic, and many consist of a single vowel or consonant preﬁxed to the verb. The greatest cross-linguistic similarity concerns the ﬁrst person singular subject clitic, which takes the form of a nasal preﬁx m- or a homorganic nasal, alternating with the CV combination mi- (with alternative form mo-) in a surprising variety of languages, from the Senegambia to southern Africa. In a later section we will explore the contribution to early pidgin Spanish and Portuguese of the (synchronically) coincidental preference for m-/mi- as ﬁrst person singular subject clitic. To observers unfamiliar with the languages in question, preverbal subject clitics may be confused with the verb itself. No major African language allows for free elimination of all subject marking, except at times for imperative constructions. Subject clitics – almost always preﬁxes – take the place of verbal sufﬁxes, which mark subject-verb agreement in Romance. To most African speakers, leaving off a subject clitic renders the sentence as “incomplete” as would a Spanish verb stem from which the inﬂectional sufﬁx had been truncated. On the other hand, no major African language group marks subject-verb agreement enclitically (post-verbally), although Bantu languages typically combine both preﬁxes and sufﬁxes in creating verb complexes. Subjects and pronouns in Afro-Iberian language Spanish and Portuguese subject pronouns share a superﬁcial resemblance to both subject clitics and disjunctive subject pronouns in African languages. The monosyllabic pronouns yo/eu, t´u/tu, nos (Portuguese), vos, and e´ l (Spanish) have the same phonotactic shape as many African subject clitics, all the more so if weakening or elision of ﬁnal consonants is allowed.16 Even ele (Portuguese) and ella/ela could pass for subject clitics in many African languages, as could 15

16

See Pulleyblank (1986) for a representative analysis of Yoruba subject clitics. These languages also exhibit some allomorphs of the subject clitic, for example in negative forms. In transplanted varieties of some of these languages (for example Yoruba in Cuba, Trinidad, and Brazil), use of the disjoint subject pronouns prevails, hinting at a possible semi-creolization as these languages were learned by other Africans in the New World setting, and/or passed along imperfectly to the last generation of speakers. Schwegler (2002).

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usted pronounced as ut´e (the quintessential Andalusian/Caribbean realization). Polysyllabic pronouns such as nosotros, vosotros, and ustedes are conspicuously unclitic-like, but, for example, when the ﬁrst syllable of nosotros is lost, a more acceptable candidate for subject clitic results (as in Palenquero suto < nosotros, rural Haitian and Lesser Antillean z`ot < nous/vous autres ‘we/you all’). Even contemporary Palenquero utere < ustedes, truncated to ’tere, could pass for a subject clitic. If Spanish and Portuguese subject pronouns could sound like subject clitics to the bozal attempting to learn the European language, there is no ready source of other Ibero-Romance elements which could pass for disjunctive or emphatic subject pronouns. Only full nouns could potentially ﬁll that role, and the frequent use of proper names instead of ﬁrst and second person pronouns in bozal texts may reﬂect Africans’ compensation for the absence of an identiﬁable subject clitic (since received Spanish would contain proportionally few tokens of the normally redundant pronouns yo, t´u, etc.) by the full nominal. For example, from the Valiente negro en Flandes by Claramonte (Chapter Three Appendix #28) come lines like: Turo lo que vosanc´e me ordenamo, Ant´on hacemo; ¿Por qu´e en Juan matar queremo a Antoniyo? Pues ¿qui´en damo comir´a a Ant´on? Y a Ant´on, ¿qu´e damo? Tambien, pobre Ant´on, morimo.

Use of one’s proper name instead of the ﬁrst person singular pronoun is a common staple of rudimentary pidgins worldwide, and is also stereotyped in “baby talk” imitations of foreigners’ language, particularly the speech of Africans, Asians, and Native Americans and their attempts to learn European languages. We should not write too much into the use of personal names in replacement of subject pronouns in early bozal texts, but the possible compensation for the lack of a pronoun/clitic duality in Ibero-Romance remains as a possible contributing factor. No Afro-Hispanic bozal texts examined to date contain transparent cases of Ibero-Romance pronouns being used as subject clitics; we do not ﬁnd, for example, constructions such as *Juan e´ l sabe (i.e. without a topicalized subject set off by an intonational pause), as might occur in some northern Italian dialects and in some vernacular varieties of contemporary French. However, later bozal language, particularly the large Afro-Cuban corpus, does provide some curious instances of the invariant clitic lo, in some cases appearing to be a “clitic doubled” direct object, such as is found in Andean Spanish interlanguage, and in other instances in combination with intransitive verbs, where no obvious argument can be assigned to lo. Representative cases are found in Chapter Eight Appendix #1. There are even a few examples of non-argument lo

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and la in some Golden Age bozal texts, found in Chapter Eight Appendix #2. Of particular signiﬁcance are the early examples by Lope de Rueda, who in many other instances provided imitations of bozal language consistent with Afro-Hispanic contacts. The use of non-argument clitics, especially invariant lo, is found in some bilingual interlanguage varieties of Spanish in Latin America, reﬂecting syntactic peculiarities of indigenous languages. Usually, Spanish lo, by virtue of its usual preverbal position, its invariant nature, and its clitic status, is reinterpreted as a transitivity or tense marker found in the native language.17 In Quecha-inﬂuenced Andean Spanish, for example, invariant lo accompanies all transitive verbs, regardless of the direct object. In Nahuatlinﬂuenced Spanish, invariant lo not only doubles direct objects, but also appears with some intransitive verbs.18 Clitic doubling with lo was once common in indigenous interlanguages in parts of Central America, including Pipil and Lenca in El Salvador and Honduras. Overt subject pronouns and subject-verb agreement in Afro-Iberian language In Afro-Hispanic texts, particularly from the Caribbean, the apparent overuse of overt subject pronouns has been taken as a diagnostic for creole or post-creole status.19 However, even in non-creole Spanish dialects categorical use of subject pronouns may arise when, for example, natural processes of consonantal reduction (e. g. /s/ > [h] > Ø; /n/ > n a s a l i z e d vow e l > Ø) partially obliterate verbal endings; this has occurred in some parts of Andalusia and in Caribbean Spanish.20 An examination of the bozal corpus reveals considerable variation in the use of overt subject pronouns, even when subject-verb concordance is unstable or nonexistent. In the nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban texts, overt subjects are most common, but by this time, in tandem with massive loss of ﬁnal consonants in popular speech, vernacular Caribbean Spanish was making extensive use of overt subject pronouns. Among Golden Age bozal texts, overt subject pronouns are in general no more frequent than in non-Africanized Spanish of the same time period, this despite the fact that verbal agreement is often effectively suspended in bozal language. The morphological result of stunted verb conjugation took different forms: the uninﬂected inﬁnitive, third person singular, and ﬁrst person plural were all used at times as an invariant verb stem, with examples in Chapter Eight Appendix #3. One possible approach to the combination of null subjects with faulty subject-verb agreement is to adopt the perspective that the ﬁrst stages of Afro-Hispanic pidgin (as represented by the texts of Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral, Reinosa’s Coplas, Lope de Rueda’s 17 19

18 Hill (1987). Lipski (1994e:82–89). 20 Mond´ E.g. Otheguy (1973), Perl (1982). ejar (1970), Poplack (1980).

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characters, etc.) are characterized by a reduced syntax in which there are no functional heads such as inﬂexion, complementizer, preposition, determiner (hence no functional projections), but only lexical heads such as noun, verb, and adjective, and lexical projections.21 Among the early Afro-Hispanic texts the lack of consistent agreement manifested itself in many different fashions, most prominently the third person singular, the uninﬂected inﬁnitive, and the ﬁrst person plural. The latter form, if it was every truly used in Afro-Hispanic speech rather than being just a literary invention, disappears from the corpus by the end of the seventeenth century. Afro-Hispanic language from Latin America most frequently uses the third person singular as the invariant verb root; the bare inﬁnitive was also occasionally used. For example, the Afro-Cuban corpus contains many instances of the uninﬂected inﬁnitive as invariant verb root (Chapter Eight Appendix #4). From the eighteenth to nineteenth century Afro-Peruvian corpus comes a single example: Yo no falt´a a sumes´e puque s´olo pregon´a tam´a, tamale (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #10). This compares with earlier bozal usage of the inﬁnitive (Chapter Eight Appendix #5). Examples of the third person singular used as default verb in the Afro-Cuban bozal corpus are found in Chapter Eight Appendix #6. The Afro-Peruvian bozal corpus contains examples like: Yo quiele s´e diput´a (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #12). Most of these examples also contain overt subject pronouns, making it untenable to claim that all forms of bozal Spanish lacked a true subject position. However, the ﬁfteenthand early sixteenth-century texts come closest to the vision of an Afro-Hispanic pidgin lacking most functional projections. This was the period in which few Africans had come into contact with European languages, and the black African community in the Iberian Peninsula was so small that no Afro-Hispanic speech group could form. Direct objects in African languages All African languages have some sort of direct object pronouns, but the manifestations vary widely, even more so than with subject pronouns. Since the canonical word order for all major African languages is subject-ﬁrst, subject pronouns are normally the ﬁrst major constituent in a sentence; the relative position of the direct object with respect to other constituents is more variable. Spanish and Portuguese, typifying Romance developments, have object clitics in addition to (or instead of) direct object pronouns. In Mande languages, which have SOV order, DO pronouns are preverbal clitics, similar to Ibero-Romance patterns. In Mende, for example,22 DO 21 22

For example Aldridge (1988), Lebeaux (1988), Radford (1988, 1990), Pierce (1992), D´eprez and Pierce (1993), Hyams and Wexler (1993). Migeod (1908:200).

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pronouns differ only slightly from their counterparts in subject position (the ﬁrst subject pronoun is used with aorist and past tenses, while the second is used with present and future tenses). When the DO is a third person object understood from the context, it can be eliminated. Atlantic languages prefer SVO order; DO pronouns follow the verb, often as enclitics. The phonological form of the DO clitics is often quite different from preverbal subject clitics, and from free-standing subject pronouns, but the position is always postverbal. Kwa and non-Bantu Benue-Congo languages also have series of DO pronouns that are usually phonological clitics, regardless of their syntactic status. In SVO languages (the majority in this group), DO pronouns appear in immediate postverbal position. In SOV languages (e.g. Ijo), proclitic DO pronouns are found. There is usually at least some phonological similarity between subject clitics and DO clitics, and, especially in the ﬁrst person singular, they are often identical. In Yoruba, for example, the subject clitic is mo (with variant mi in negative sentences), while the DO clitic is mi. The behavior of DO pronouns in Bantu languages is more complex, given the greater complexity of the Bantu verb and the incorporation of both subject and object clitics as part of the verb. Most Bantu languages allow for freestanding DO pronouns in the normal postverbal argument position. Kikongo is relatively rare in allowing for some emphatic and negative constructions in which a disjunctive pronominal DO occurs preverbally; however, in these cases a subject pronoun is used.23 Obligatorily in Bantu languages, when there is no overt DO, and optionally when a DO is present, a DO preﬁx is attached to the verb stem. In the usual case, the order of morphemes in the verbal complex is s u b j e c t c l i t i c +t e n s e m a r k e r +DO c l i t i c +v e r b s t e m , making the DO clitic seem more like an inﬁx than a preﬁx. Free-standing personal DO pronouns are usually reserved for emphatic or contrastive status. In pidginized varieties of Bantu languages, disjunctive object pronouns are often used instead of DO proclitics. This is true despite the high level of cognates among Bantu DO clitics.24 The majority of SVO African languages place DO pronouns in the same position as DO nouns, i.e. after the verb. Even in Bantu languages, which have an option somewhat similar to Spanish preverbal DO clitics, a SVO order with free-standing DO pronouns is a possible alternative. In some languages the DO pronouns are clitics, while in others they behave as independent pronominals, and there is usually a phonological similarity with respect to full subject 23 24

Bentley (1887:577). Stapleton (1903:69) observes that “in the mongrel Swahili spoken in the district of Stanley Falls, the Objective Preﬁxes are rarely heard, the full form of the Pronoun being generally used in the 1st Class.” Pidgin Swahili is spoken in eastern Zaire (former Shaba/Katanga; Fabian 1986, 1990; Polom´e 1968), and may well have ﬁgured in the mix of African languages which came into contact with Portuguese, particularly when the Portuguese slave trade reached eastern Africa (Mozambique).

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pronouns (although not always to subject clitics). Although the Bantu group employs preverbal DO clitics, these are separated from the subject by tense markers, which makes the entire verbal complex different from the typical Spanish pattern. It is possible that some more advanced Bantu-speaking learners of Spanish attempted to analyze the occasional Spanish preverbal adverb (as in Yo ya lo conoc´ı) as a tense morpheme appearing in the same position as in Bantu structures. However, given the relative morphological opacity of the Spanish c l i t i c +v e r b complex, the simpler SVO option with disjunctive pronouns (which, because they frequently occurred in isolation or in emphatic or contrastive contexts, were more prominent in received discourse) was frequently taken. Direct object pronouns in Afro-Iberian language Given the high degree of commonality among African languages as regards DO pronoun usage, a uniﬁed strategy of bozal language would be to maintain SVO order even when DO pronouns were at stake, and to use disjunctive pronouns wherever possible. This procedure cannot be attributed to a speciﬁc African language or family, but is rather a logical consequence of recurring patterns among most African language families. Bozal texts from all time periods give evidence of this tendency. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese has regularized the use of disjunctive (subject) pronouns instead of clitics, a striking departure from European Portuguese usage which many observers attribute to an earlier semicreole stage in Brazil: vejo eˆ le “I see him/it” vs. European Portuguese vejo-o. As seen by this example, Brazilian Portuguese also allows for third person disjunctive pronouns to be used with inanimate objects, whereas in European Portuguese, eˆ le, ela, etc. as subject and DO can only refer to human/animate beings. Examples from the bozal corpus are found in Chapter Eight Appendix #8. Negation in African languages Patterns of negation among African languages are quite diverse, and members of the same family may express negation in different fashions. In some languages, negation is expressed through purely autosegmental phonological changes, e.g. vowel lengthening or tone shift, although the majority of African languages contain some sort of negative particle corresponding to Spanish no/Portuguese n˜ao. In only a few instances is it likely that African negation patterns had any effect on bozal languages. In Mende, taken as a representative of the Mande family, negation is frequently expressed by simply lengthening the ﬁnal vowel of the subject clitic. There are also intensifying words which are used to reinforce some negative

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constructions).25 Mandinka usually employs a special preverbal negative auxiliary. Vai places a negative morpheme between the subject clitic and the verb. Atlantic languages, typiﬁed by Diola-Fogny, Temne and Wolof, sufﬁx morphemes to the verb to indicate negation.26 This negative element comes immediately after the verb, not phrase- or clause-ﬁnally as occurs in Palenquero, and occasionally in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese. Fula combines vowel lengthening with negative items. Among Kwa languages, and non-Bantu languages of the Benue-Congo group, negation is usually expressed by a single morpheme. In the Akan family, a clitic is preﬁxed to the verb. Yoruba employs the negative particle k`o between the subject clitic and the verb. In rapid speech the /k/ disappears and the vowel may merge with the preceding vowel, with the result that negation is frequently realized as a low-tone extension of the preceding vowel. In such languages as Nupe and Igbo, negation is expressed by a sentence-ﬁnal particle. Ewe combines a sentence-ﬁnal particle o with a particle me placed between the subject clitic and the verb. Ijo places a negative particle between the verb and the following aspect marker. G˜a combines a preﬁx and a sufﬁx on the verb stem.27 In Sango, negation involves a postposed marker pεpε, occurring at or near the end of the negated clause.28 Kikongo, together with some minor Bantu languages, shows “double negation,” similar to French ne . . . pas constructions. Kikongo typically uses ke . . . ko:29 Ke be- sumba ko NEG Cl. Buy NEG = ‘They do not buy.’

Some related Congo languages employ different strategies, typically combining a different set of subject clitics with changes to the verb endings.30 Others use postposed ko in conjunction with a preverbal negative particle such as si, inserted between the subject clitic and the verb.31 In Kimbundu, there is a difference between the speech of Luanda and the speech of the sert˜ao or hinterlands.32 In the latter dialects, negation is accomplished by simply preﬁxing ki- to the afﬁrmative verb. Through vowel fusion with subject clitics and class markers, the variants ka- and ku- also occur. In the Luanda dialect, however, preverbal ki- is optional, while following the verb a disjunctive pronoun, the same used 25 26 27 28 30 32

Migeod (1908:92–95). Migeod (1908:92) cautions that “the addition of a single word the equivalent of not to a positive statement, for the purpose of rendering it negative, does not occur.” Migeod (1911, vol. 1:109–10), Rowlands (1959:87–88), Sauvageot (1965:115–16), Welmers (1976:84–85), Church (1981:238–39). Zimmermann (1858:105–06), Warburton et al. (1968:32–33), Fiag˜a (1976:52–53). 29 Bentley (1887:607). Samarin (1967:148). 31 E.g. Ussel (1888:48–49). E.g. Cambier (1891:69–70). Chatelain (1888–89:51–52), Batalha (1891:38), also Johnson (1930:36), whose book describes the “Mbundu” language but is actually a grammar of Kimbundu.

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in possessive constructions, occurs.33 In Umbundu, another important Angolan language spoken in Benguela and widely represented in the Atlantic slave trade, negation is done entirely by means of preﬁxes, usually ka- or ha-, immediately before the subject clitic, together with some changes in the subject clitic. In Xhosa a negative particle is inserted between the subject clitic and the verb; this is usually accompanied by a change in the ﬁnal vowel of the verb. Bubi, spoken on Fernando Poo, typically inserts a single particle (chi, ta, etc.) between the subject clitic and the verb. A similar process is used in Combe/Ndow´e, another important language of Equatorial Guinea, spoken along the coast of R´ıo Muni. Bujeba, another coastal language of R´ıo Muni, employs a form of double negation, inserting the particle a` a` between the subject clitic and the verb, and afﬁxing -le to the verb. Fang, the most widely spoken language of Equatorial Guinea, combines a particle a` inserted after the subject clitic and a particle ke or ki (sometimes omitted) following the verb. Despite the prominence of Fang in Equatorial Guinea, being the language of the ruling class and widely spoken as a second language by most of the population, there is no evidence of double or postposed negation in the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea, regardless of the level of ﬂuency or the presence of other interference from native languages. Negative preﬁxes are also typical of Bantu languages spoken in Mozambique.34 Other Bantu languages use only sufﬁxes. For example, Lingala postposes tε´ to the end of the entire predicate. Swahili uses a variety of sufﬁxes, all placed after the verb.35 Negative structures among African languages exhibit so much diversity that there is little hope for the discovery of a uniﬁed “African” negation pattern in bozal Spanish and Portuguese. The only circumstances that might allow for an African-inﬂuenced negation pattern in bozal language would be an unusually homogeneous African linguistic community learning Spanish or Portuguese in the same setting. In the history of Afro-Iberian contacts, this scenario has usually been reserved for African colonial languages (e.g. Angolan and Mozambican Portuguese), or for isolated creoles originally arising from a highly homogeneous slave population, such as Palenquero. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, notorious for double and postposed negation, might also ﬁt this category, given 33 34

35

This construction has been in existence for a long time; it is registered, for example, in the early grammar of Dias (1697:21–23). For example, Chinyanja preﬁxes the negative particle si (which sometimes appears as sa- or s-) to the verb (Henry 1891:132–33; Mission´arios da Companhia de Jes´us 1964:95–96). In Sena, there are a separate set of subject clitics for negative forms (Anderson 1897:27). Xilenge preposes a monosyllable, usually a-, to the subject clitic (Smith and Matthews 1902:23–24). Ronga also typically preposes a- (or nga) to the subject clitic, as well as changing the ﬁnal vowel of the verb (Junod 1896:138–39; Quint˜ao 1951:109–10). Juanola (1890:56), McLaren (1906:100-01), Gonz´alez Echegaray (1916:142–43), Abad (1928:67), Fern´andez (1951:37–38), Guthrie (1951:65), Ndongo Esono (1956:60–61), Lecompte (1963:37–38), Nze Abuy (1975:69–70), Contini-Morava (1989), Schadeberg (1990:40–43), Bolekia Bolek´a (1991:132–34).

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that the vast majority of African slaves came via the Portuguese slaving ports in Angola, with Kimbundu and Umbundu ﬁguring prominently in Afro-Brazilian communities. Parkvall (2000:62) suggests a Bantu substrate as the most probable source for double negation in Atlantic creoles and vernacular Brazilian and Angolan Portuguese.

Double negation in Afro-Iberian language At several points in the bozal corpus, double negation appears. Double negation is also found in the overwhelmingly Afro-Hispanic Choc´o region of Colombia and in the vernacular speech of the Dominican Republic.36 Postposed negation (using nu) is found in Palenquero, a creole whose Bantu sources (particularly Kikongo and Kimbundu) are well established. In the Dominican Republic and in the Choc´o, Schwegler (1996a) and Megenney (1990a) postulate that an African contribution may be at work. Schwegler and Megenney trace this pattern to Bantu languages, particularly Kimbundu and Kikongo. In the Choc´o, an African basis for double negation is quite plausible, particularly given the proximity of the Palenque de San Basilio and the earlier existence of other escaped slave communities, in which creolized language similar to Palenquero appears to have developed. Slaves who escaped from Cartagena or the mining camps in Antioquia often followed the course of rivers and ended up in the Choc´o, and, given the strong Bantu inﬂuence in Palenquero, it is reasonable to suppose that at least some Afro-Colombians acquired double negation due to a Bantu substrate. The same could be said for Brazil, where the Portuguese-dominated slave trade carried thousands of Africans from the Portuguese zones of Angola and the Congo directly to Brazil. Unlike in other Latin American regions where slaves came from a wide variety of African regions, Brazil received a much heavier concentration of Kimbundu and Kikongo speakers prior to the nineteenth century (when importation of Yoruba- and Ewe-speaking slaves became the major trend). In the Brazilian case, it is even conceivable that some slaves had acquired a Portuguese-based creole such as S˜ao Tomense, in which double negation is used. However, comparative data on Afro-Hispanic language from elsewhere in Latin America cast doubt on the notion that double or postposed negation was once the norm for a wider cross-section of Afro-Hispanic speech. Among the extensive documentation of Afro-Hispanic bozal speech in nineteenth-century Peru, Argentina, and Uruguay, there is not a single attestation of double or postposed negation, despite the fact that the Bantu substrate was particularly strong in the R´ıo de la Plata area. The only other Latin American region where 36

Jim´enez Sabater (1975:170), Granda (1977), Benavides (1985), Megenney (1990a:121–28), Schwegler (1991a, 1996a). Lipski (2000d) examines many possibilities of double negation and the theories used to explain these constructions.

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double negation was attested in Afro-Hispanic language is nineteenth-century Cuba, where a few bozal texts representing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appear to present such patterns (Chapter Eight Appendix #9). The Cuban examples require a different approach, since by the time of the outpouring of nineteenth-century bozal examples, the predominant groups were divided between Kikongo/Bantu speakers and speakers of Kwa languages, particularly Yoruba. The latter group, however, provided most of the linguistic input to Cuban bozal Spanish; Kikongo contributions were conﬁned to certain Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies. Cabrera (1983) amply documents the linguistic structures produced by Yoruba interference in bozal Spanish, but none of the examples of Spanish as produced by Bantu speakers (e.g. the examples in Cabrera 1979) show other traces of Bantu syntactic inﬂuence. The Cuban data, when combined with the frequent use of double negation in rural regions of the Dominican Republic, suggest that a Haitian inﬂuence may be at least partially responsible. Within the Dominican Republic, double negation is particularly frequent in the Saman´a Peninsula, and also in western regions where the Haitian presence is especially prevalent. Haitian is noted for use of a sort of double negation, combining the usual preverbal pa with cliticized phrase-ﬁnal -non. Ending afﬁrmative sentences with cliticized -wi is an even more common strategy; the same sort of double afﬁrmation occurs in vernacular Dominican Spanish.37 Since Spanish no is cognate with Haitian non, while Spanish no occupies the same syntactic position as Haitian pa and is easily acquired by speakers of the latter language, the pathway to the formation of double negation in Haitian-Spanish contact situations is straightforward. Speakers of Haitian were certainly in the right places at the right time to have caused the formation of double negatives in Cuban bozal Spanish, although there is no direct evidence of a Haitian contribution. This hypothesis does not invalidate claims of a Bantu inﬂuence in Cuban and even Dominican double negation, but it does reduce the necessity of such a postulate, by suggesting another contributing source. Double negation is also found in the local Spanish dialect of the G¨uiria Peninsula of Venezuela, where Spanish is in contact with the French creole of Trinidad, which also employs double negation.38 This construction is not found elsewhere in Venezuela, even in areas of heavy African cultural and linguistic traditions.39 All of the above examples point to the conclusion that double negation in Latin American Spanish dialects is the result of language contact, 37 38 39

See Al´en Olavo (1986:57) for examples of Haitian tumba francesa songs in Cuba. Llorente (1994, 1995). Outside of the Afro-Hispanic domain, non-emphatic double negation has been observed in the Spanish of Quechua-dominant bilinguals in northwestern Argentina (Postigo de Bed´ıa 1994:360–61), which has been traced to the use of a combination of preposed and postposed negative markers in Quechua.

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but not necessarily from a single source.40 Contact with creole languages in which double negation prevails appears to be the most likely source of double negation in G¨uiria, the Dominican Republic, and eastern Cuba, while Quechua is the source in northwestern Argentina. In the Colombian Choc´o, matters are less clear; contact with Kikongo or another African language employing double negation remains possible, as does the intermediate formation of a restructured Spanish semi-creole or creole, as suggested by Schwegler (1996a). Interrogative constructions among African languages Expression of interrogation varies widely among African language families, but some worthwhile commonalities do emerge. The two interrogative elements most commonly occurring as clausal subjects across African languages are “what” and “who.”41 Such concepts as “why,” “when,” “which,” “where,” etc. may occur as adverbial complements, as in Spanish and Portuguese, but in many African languages the same concepts result from paraphrases, rather than being represented by individual interrogative words. Among suggested universal tendencies for pidgins and creoles is the development of bimorphemic interrogative words of the sort “what thing,” “what person,” “what place,” etc., combining a single invariant interrogative element with a series of nouns, rather than having a set of unanalyzable interrogative elements. Some African languages make use of similar strategies, so that a choice between substratum and universal tendencies is not always possible.42 For example among Bantu languages, and in some other African languages, the word for “what” is frequently based on the word for “thing.”43 The combination ¿qu´e cosa? occurred widely in Afro-Hispanic language, and became ﬁxed in Papiamento kiko < que cosa/que coisa. Some examples of the use of (qu´e) cosa from the Afro-Cuban corpus are found in Chapter Eight Appendix #11. The Golden Age bozal corpus contains few examples: Que cosa estar vos hablando? (Gil Vicente, Floresta de enganos; Chapter Three Appendix #55) Cosa vimo que creeya pantar´a . . . (G´ongora, “A lo mismo” [al nacimiento de Cristo nuestro se˜nor]; Chapter Three Appendix #16)

Among African languages, the position of interrogative words is frequently sentence-initial, as in Spanish and Portuguese, but a number of important languages also retain interrogative words in situ, without syntactic movement. Kimbundu and Umbundu usually leave interrogative words in their original 40 41 43

This is the approach pursued in Lipski (1994a, 1996a, 1999a, 2000d). 42 Muysken and Smith (1990). E.g.Welmers (1973:417). Torrend (1891:209), Welmers (1973:431).

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position.44 The effects of this interrogative formation can be observed in Angolan musseque Portuguese, where in situ interrogatives frequently occur (Chapter Eight Appendix #12). The Kimbundu use of in situ interrogative words is found in some other Bantu languages, with numerous alternative variants and options.45 Other key Bantu languages prepose interrogative words: Kikongo normally preposes interrogative words,46 in the same positions as in Spanish and Portuguese. The same usually holds for Fang, Bubi, Combe/Ndow´e, and Fiote.47 Among non-Bantu languages of Africa, the tendency toward preposed interrogative words is noteworthy. Representative languages and groups using preposed interrogative words include Mende, Yoruba, Temne, Igbo, and G˜a. Fante prefers preposed interrogatives, although in situ placement is a possible option.48 A comparatively small number of West African languages regularly employs in situ interrogation. Ijo tends to place interrogative words in situ, thus only interrogative pronouns representing the subject are phrase-initial. Vai allows either in situ interrogative placement, or preposed questions words, via topicalization. Mandinka prefers in situ interrogative words, as do DiolaFogny and Sango.49 In some languages (Yoruba is a good example), use of a sentence-initial interrogative word is combined with a resumptive pronoun and/or a dummy copula, creating constructions of the sort “Who is it that goes?” The corresponding resumptive pronouns are preverbal clitics, and the result is in effect a complex interrogative expression, similar to Spanish qu´e es lo que . . . The latter construction is possible in all Spanish dialects, but appears particularly often in Caribbean Spanish, where it also creates the effect of preserving declarative sentence order.50 It is unlikely that this construction represents a direct African contribution, but especially in nineteenth-century Cuba, when a high proportion of Yoruba speakers arrived simultaneously and formed coherent Afro-Hispanic speech communities, the existence of cognate constructions in native African languages may have favored what is ordinarily a less common stylistic option in Spanish. In the balance, a large and representative cross-section of African languages that came into contact with Spanish and Portuguese during the initial century or 44 45

46 47 48 49 50

Chatelain (1888–89:30–31), Johnson (1930:40–41), Schadeberg (1990:18). Henry (1891:120–24), Junod (1896:108–10), Anderson (1897:24), Smith and Matthews (1902:20), McLaren (1906:130 and passim.), Quint˜ao (1951:91–92), Guthrie (1951:59–62), Gonz´alez Echegaray (1960:109). Bentley (1887:584–85). Ussel (1888:83), Juanola (1890:46–47), Abad (1928:50–51), Fern´andez (1951:55–56, 144–47), Ndongo Esono (1956:51–52), Nze Abuy (1975:73–74). Zimmermann (1858:115), Migeod (1908:73–74), Ward (1936:122–23), Welmers (1945:58), Wilson (1961:33). Rowlands (1959:67–68), Sapir (1965:48), Williamson (1965:77–8), Samarin (1967:217–18), Welmers (1976:118–20). Su˜ner (1986).

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two of bozal language gravitates toward sentence-initial placement of interrogative elements. Such a conﬁguration would cause no difﬁculty in acquiring Spanish and Portuguese interrogative placement. Only in exceptional circumstances, where speakers of closely related African languages all of which prefer in situ interrogatives acquired Spanish or Portuguese as a pidgin, could deviations from sentence-initial interrogatives be contemplated. Nearly all African languages require a preverbal subject clitic, usually even when a non-pronominal subject is also present, and except for focused or topicalized constructions, subjects normally occur preverbally. A very likely common denominator for broad cross-sections of African bozales learning Spanish or Portuguese would therefore be non-inverted questions, a tendency expected to be exceptionally strong when dealing with a monosyllabic prononimal subject such as t´u or e´ l. The Golden Age bozal corpus contains few examples of interrogative sentences with overt subject; most questions are short subjectless asides of the form ¿qu´e hacemo? There are a few cases of subject-verb inversion: Agora s´ı me contenta; mas ¿sabe qu´e querer yo, si˜nor Pollos? (Lope de Rueda, Comedia de Eufemia; Chapter Three Appendix #8) Gentel homber; ¿qu´e querer vox, voxa merxa? (Feliciano de Silva, Segunda Celestina; Chapter Three Appendix #10)

The early bozal Portuguese corpus contains some examples of non-inverted questions. Afro-Portuguese examples are in Chapter Eight Appendix #13. There are also examples of inverted questions (Chapter Eight Appendix #14). The Afro-Cuban bozal corpus has more examples of non-inverted questions (Chapter Eight Appendix #15). There are also a few instances of inverted questions (Chapter Eight Appendix #16). The corpus shows greater variation than would be predicted by a simple consideration of prevailing African syntactic patterns. Bozal language is not just the sum total of all the African languages which interacted with Spanish or Portuguese. Contact with native speakers of the European languages, degree of ﬂuency, circumstances of language use, stability of African speech communities, and relative homogeneity of the substratum languages, are all factors which inﬂuenced the extent to which bozal language showed the traces of individual African languages. Subject preposing in WH-questions has at times been attributed to an earlier Afro-Hispanic creole, if not directly to an African substrate.51 However, the Canary Island and Galician contribution cannot be ignored, since non-inverted WH questions are common in both dialect zones, which provided large groups of settlers to the colonial Spanish Caribbean. More to the point, Afro-Iberian creoles typically employ declarative word order in WH-questions, simply placing the interrogative word at the beginning of the sentence. This includes Cape 51

Alvarez Nazario (1974).

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Verdean/Guinea-Bissau creole Portuguese, S˜ao Tomense, Papiamento, Palenquero. Invariant declarative word order in WH-questions has also been suggested as a possible universal in creole formation, so in sorting out interrogative usage in bozal Spanish and Portuguese, one must thread a path among substratum inﬂuences, Ibero-Romance dialectal variants, possibly earlier creolization, and universally unmarked creoloid structures. In Latin America, non-inverted questions are only found in the Caribbean area, and only selectively. Such questions are common in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, but vanishingly rare in Panama, Venezuela, and coastal Colombia, with some important exceptions. In the Antilles, contact with creole languages was once frequent among the Afro-Hispanic population (Papiamento, Haitian and Jamaican creoles in Cuba; Papiamento and some French and English creoles in Puerto Rico; Haitian and more recently English creoles in the Dominican Republic. In Venezuela, non-inverted questions are frequent only in the eastern coastal region, particularly in the G¨uiria Peninsula,52 where Spanish is in contact with Trinidadian French creole, which employs noninverted questions. In Panama, non-inverted questions are typical only in the Caribbean port of Col´on, among West Indians who speak Creole English, in which non-inverted questions predominate.53 Finally, some bilingual speakers in Palenque de San Basilio, Colombia, employ non-inverted questions when speaking Spanish, reﬂecting Palenquero usage but differing from prevailing patterns in coastal Colombian Spanish. The correlation between non-inverted questions and the adstratal presence of another language employing such constructions is difﬁcult to exclude in the cases just mentioned, although this by no means implies that contact with creoles or other languages is responsible for the appearance of non-inverted questions in other Spanish dialects. Yes-no questions in African and Afro-Iberian languages Yes-no questions among African languages manifest a range of possibilities, with some languages possessing alternative constructions. The major difference between African languages as a group and Ibero-Romance is the lack, among the former languages, of subject inversion in yes-no interrogative structures. Bozal language typically made no use of inversion or other syntactic modiﬁcations in yes-no questions. As in the case of questions involving interrogative words, a determination of possible syntactic inversion is complicated by the general lack of overt subjects in many bozal texts (Chapter Eight Appendix #17). There are only a few instances of inversion (Chapter Eight Appendix #18). Few examples of inverted yes-no questions are found in Cuban bozal Spanish 52

Llorente (1994, 1995).

53

Bishop (1976:62).

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(Chapter Eight Appendix #19). The Peruvian bozal and criollo corpus also contains some examples of yes-no questions (Chapter Eight Appendix #20). Congo-Benue languages often have an interrogative particle for yes-no questions; for example Yoruba uses sentence-initial sˇe´ or nj´e. In Igbo, when the subject is a noun, a resumptive pronoun is used to make a declarative sentence into a question. When the subject is a pronoun, it is given a uniformly low tone. In some instances, the entire tone sequence of the sentence is raised in yes-no questions.54 Sentence-ﬁnal particles are also used (optionally or obligatorily) in Songhay, Hausa, Kanura, Mandinka, Mende, Twi, G˜a. Ewe employs a clause-ﬁnal particle as well as intonation to distinguish yes-no questions. Intonation alone can be used to distinguish yes-no questions from the corresponding declarative sentences in Fula, Bambara, Mandinka, Vai, Wolof, G˜a, and Eﬁk.55 In Fanti, yes-no questions end with the particle a; at times, a conjunction na or ana also occurs sentence-initially. Diola-Fogny permits use of a gradually rising intonation to signal yes-no questions. For more emphasis, a hypothetical marker roughly corresponding to “perhaps” may be placed sentence-initially. A few dialects use a sentence-ﬁnal particle, bang, borrowed from Mandinka. Temne uses a sentence-ﬁnal particle, -i, combined with rising intonation and a higher overall pitch level. Sango uses rising intonational patterns to signal yes-no questions.56 Among Bantu languages, there are several strategies for forming yes-no questions. In Bubi, yes-no questions begin with the particle ana; when the subject is pronominal, the pronoun is also repeated. Chinyanja postposes the particle kodi at the end of declarative sentences to turn them into questions. Xilenge postposes xana; in Ronga, xana may be either sentence-initial or sentenceﬁnal. Xhosa uses postposed -na, and/or a rising intonation, in yes-no questions. Kikongo can form yes-no questions by intonation alone; for emphasis, or when an afﬁrmative answer is expected, a sentence-ﬁnal particle -e may be appended. Sena is reputed to use an interrogative intonation. Lingala and Fiote also typically use intonational curves to distinguish yes-no questions from declarative sentences.57 In the bozal corpus there are some instances of inverted yes-no questions. This does not mean that the writers actually heard Africans producing questions 54

55

56 57

In Ijo, it is possible to make yes-no questions simply by changing the intonational patterns (giving a slight rise to the ﬁnal portion of the sentence). More emphatic questions employ a phrase-ﬁnal particle -`aa. Zimmermann (1858:115), Migeod (1911:vol. 1, 110–11), Ward (1936:120–21), Rowlands (1959:34–35, 137–38), Williamson (1965:76–7), Warburton et al. (1968:1 and passim.), Fiag˜a (1976:80), Welmers (1976:36). Welmers (1945:57–58), Wilson 1961:42), Sapir (1965:48), Samarin (1967:216–17). Bentley (1887:594), Ussel (1888:67), Juanola (1890:57–58), Henry (1891:136), Junod (1896:110), Anderson (1897:28), Smith and Matthews (1902:20), McLaren (1906:128), Guthrie (1951:56–57), Quint˜ao (1951:182).

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in which subject inversion had occurred, but only that the writers had not chosen question formation as part of the repertoire of linguistic stereotypes. Speakers of languages which do not employ subject-verb inversion in questions typically have difﬁculty in acquiring this feature of Spanish (e.g. English speakers in contemporary foreign language classes), and it is reasonable to suppose that bozal speakers were no more adept at learning this new syntactic strategy. The treatment of subject pronouns as subject clitics, situated in invariant preverbal position, would reinforce the resistance to subject-verb inversion. In contemporary areas of Latin American in which traces of Afro-Hispanic language have been postulated, it is common to hear non-inverted questions of the sort ¿T´u sabes . . .?, ¿Ut´e sabe . . .?, etc. Since such questions are also found in dialects of Spanish for which no African contribution can be postulated, non-inverted yes-no questions have not been regarded as potential evidence in the search for Afro-Hispanic linguistic roots (unlike non-inversion in questions with interrogative words). The matter clearly warrants closer attention. Signaling nominal plural in African and Afro-Iberian languages A number of creole languages based on European lexiﬁer languages have adopted plural markers that deviate signiﬁcantly from their European counterparts. Usually, these innovative plural markers can be traced directly to the substratum, either to a speciﬁc language, or to areal characteristics that converged during creole formation. Haitian creole -yo (the third person plural subject pronoun) placed at the end of the entire NP is also found in Ewe/Fon, the language family which apparently played the most signiﬁcant role in the formative period of Haitian.58 Papiamento also places the third person subject pronoun (nan) at the end of nouns, to signal plurality, but only when the surrounding context is not adequate to determine number. English-based Caribbean creoles use postposed dem in a similar fashion. In all cases, recurring patterns among certain African languages have been implicated. Palenquero signals nominal plural by the preposed marker ma, evidently of Bantu origin. Among Bantu languages, there are numerous preﬁxes for singular and plural, depending on the noun class. Even considering Kimbundu and Kikongo, the two languages whose traces are most clearly observable in Palenquero, there are many different nominal preﬁxes in the plural. However, ma is frequent enough to be immediately recognized as a plural preﬁx by speakers of Angola/Congo Bantu languages. In bozal Spanish and Portuguese, on the other hand, there are no special syntactic or morphological devices for signaling nominal plural. What is found in the texts is great instability in plural marking, with a decided preference 58

Fiag˜a (1976:11–12).

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for singular forms, especially when a plural reference can be obtained from the surrounding context. Nominal and adjectival plural in Spanish and Portuguese is marked by ﬁnal /s/, a sound which especially in Spanish was subject to erosion and elision during much of the bozal period. It is therefore not possible to accurately determine whether an apparently singular form with plural meaning in a bozal text is due to a phonological process already begun in Ibero-Romance, or is a demonstration of substratum inﬂuence. The Bantu languages have the most consistent pluralization strategy, consisting of separate sets of singular and plural preﬁxes for all nouns, depending on noun class. Since the number of noun classes is often a dozen or more in any given language, the net effect is a rather arbitrary set of singular-plural correspondences which must be learned, e.g. as English ox-oxen, woman-women, sheep-sheep, analysis-analyses, etc. Such Bantu forms as ngombe ‘cow,’ nguba “peanut,” etc. were taken as undifferentiated singulars into Afro-American creoles like Palenquero and Gullah. The Palenquero use of ma as pluralizing particle is highly exceptional, and evidently reﬂects the extraordinarily homogeneous substratum of closely related Bantu languages underlying this creole. Among non-Bantu African languages, strategies for pluralizing nouns are much more diverse, although clustering around the use of prenominal and postnominal particles. In most of these languages, plural is only explicitly marked when plural reference cannot be surmised from the surrounding context.59 Thus with numbers and plural quantiﬁers signifying ‘many,’ ‘a few,’ ‘some,’ etc., many African languages add no plural marker to the accompanying noun. A minority of non-Bantu African languages employs extensive stem modiﬁcations. In most cases pluralization is a morphologically transparent analytical operation. Sufﬁx particles are used, for example, in Songhay, Mandinka, Bambara, Susu, Vai, Mende, Fanti, Ijo, Ewe, and G˜a. Preﬁxes are used in Yoruba, Wolof, Twi, Eﬁk. Igbo and Temne use no special plural marker on nouns, although Temne employs a plural article.60 Diola-Fogny uses a series of singular and plural preﬁxes that are somewhat similar to Bantu patterns. Fula uses a set of complex modiﬁcations, including preﬁxes, sufﬁxes, and stem modiﬁcations. Hausa, an Afro-Asiatic language distantly related to Arabic and other Semitic languages, employs a number of strategies for plural formation, including template-based singular and plural forms typical of the Semitic group. The Afro-Iberian bozal corpus gives no examples of alternative pluralization strategies using particles, not even combinations using plural pronouns. There are, however, numerous examples of obviously plural nouns lacking the plural 59 60

Manessy 1964/1985). Rowlands (1959:38), Manessy (1964, 1985), Sauvageot (1965:72–73).

Grammatical features of Afro-Hispanic language

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ending. Particularly in sixteenth-century Spanish texts, and in texts coming from Portugal, it is unlikely that phonetic reduction of ﬁnal /s/ is at work: . . . como la persona samo tan negro carradaz y recogidaz . . . (Lope de Rueda, Comedia de Tymbria; Chapter Three Appendix #7) y all´a en Gelofe, do tu terra sea, comer con gran hambre carabaju vejo, cabeza de can, lagarto bermejo . . . (Reinosa, Coplas; Chapter Three Appendix #1)

Eventually bozal language apparently moved in the direction of marking plurality only once per NP, usually on the ﬁrst element. This process never became ﬁxed in any variety of Afro-Hispanic language, possibly because in the dialect zones where Afro-Hispanic speech patterns persisted for the longest time, consistent consonant reduction caused all instances of /s/ to perish, including as a plural marker in NPs. In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese it is frequent for plural to be marked only on the ﬁrst element of a NP.

Deﬁnite articles in African and Afro-Iberian languages African languages vary widely in terms of the presence, position, and use of deﬁnite articles. Most Portuguese-based creoles either have no deﬁnite articles or have adapted Portuguese articles. Pr´ıncipe creole uses postposed -se.61 AfroIberian bozal language is characterized by variable and unstable use of deﬁnite articles, with omission of articles predominating over hypercorrect usage. Among non-Bantu African languages, some place deﬁnite articles before the NP, others after the NP, and some have no deﬁnite articles. A few languages have special deﬁnite and indeﬁnite form of nouns. Typical cases include: D e f i n i t e a r t i c l e p l a c e d b e f o r e NP: Temne D e f i n i t e a r t i c l e p l a c e d a f t e r NP: Songhai, Wolof, G˜a, Ijo P o s t p o s e d d e m o n s t r at i v e s “a certain”: Yoruba, Ijo N o d e f i n i t e a r t i c l e s : Yoruba, Ijo, Vai, Mandinka, Bambara, Hausa, Twi, Igbo, Eﬁk S e p a r at e d e f i n i t e a n d i n d e f i n i t e f o r m s : Fula, Mende

Most Bantu languages have preverbal particles which function as deﬁnite articles. In Kikongo, Kimbundu, and related Congo Basin languages, the “deﬁnite articles” are single vowels, typically i, u, o, or e.62 This makes them similar or identical in form to the Portuguese deﬁnite articles o and a. In function, however, there are major differences, since Bantu articles are separated from the nominal stem at least by the singular/plural preﬁx. Moreover, deﬁnite articles are used more as Classical Latin demonstratives than as Ibero-Romance articles, i.e. only when contrastively indicating speciﬁc deﬁnite nouns. Otherwise, 61

Holm (1990); also Janson (1984).

62

E.g. Bentley (1887:555), Torrend (1891:64–65).

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no articles are used, creating article-less combinations similar to those found in African languages lacking deﬁnite articles. All other things being equal, one would anticipate that Bantu languages in contact with Spanish and Portuguese would exhibit a more convergent pattern, eliminating deﬁnite articles in circumstances where Kikongo or Kimbundu, for example, would not use an article, but also containing examples of speciﬁc nouns signaled by deﬁnite articles. Contemporary Angolan musseque Portuguese, formed in contact with Kimbundu, partially bears out this hypothesis, echoing patterns also found in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese. Examples from the Angolan musseque corpus are in Chapter Eight Appendix #21). In the early Afro-Hispanic bozal corpus, examples of loss of deﬁnite articles are less frequent: Yo me ir a porta de ferro . . . Yo me ir a porta de villa . . . (Reinosa, Coplas; Chapter Three Appendix #1)

In the nineteenth-century Cuban bozal corpus, which is by all appearances a much more realistic approximation to Afro-Hispanic pidgin of the time period, there are more examples of omission of the deﬁnite article (Chapter Eight Appendix #22). The Afro-Peruvian bozal corpus yields only: neguito congo aprend´ıo canto . . . Neguito no rir´a ni cantar´a ma . . . (L´opez Alb´ujar, Matalach´e; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #14) Francica, bot´a frifr´o (Nicomedes Santa Cruz [1982], “Pelona”)

Even bozal speakers who did use Spanish articles more or less correctly, often failed to make the articles agree in gender and number with the accompanying NP. Although Romance-based creoles in general have taken masculine singular forms from the lexiﬁer languages and made them into invariant creole forms, bozal language, including late-nineteenth-century examples evidently based on accurate observations, was not consistent in this regard. There is however a decided preference for la before masculine nouns, more than use of el before feminine NPs. Since la represents a canonical open CV syllable, the basic common denominator across almost all African languages, the phonetic shape of this article must be considered (Chapter Eight Appendix #23). Confusion of deﬁnite articles, nearly always favoring la, is amply documented in the nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban bozal corpus (Chapter Eight Appendix #24). From the Afro-Peruvian bozal corpus come: cuando yo ta la congleso (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #12) tan bonito la Ber´en (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #8)

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Copulative verbs in African languages Many African languages omit the copula with predicate adjectives, having instead a series of “adjectival verbs” or “verbalized adjectives.” Yet other African languages omit the copula with predicate nominatives. Some languages have copulative verbs corresponding in large measure to the Ibero-Romance counterparts; a few languages even have two copulas which pattern like ser– estar. In some cases (e.g. Yoruba), there is confusion between copulative verbs and topicalizing particles. The lack of any clear common denominators in the expression of copulas among African language families suggests that little direct substratum inﬂuence would be found in bozal Portuguese and Spanish, except when a highly coherent substratum is at work.63 Genitive constructions among African and Afro-Iberian languages Among African languages, there are several well-deﬁned patterns for genitive constructions involving two nouns (e.g. “John’s house”). Some African languages have special genitive case markers or particles. Another frequent pattern is the n o u n + n o u n combination; in some languages the possessor comes in ﬁrst position (e.g. of the type “John book”), while in others the possessor comes last (e.g. “ball John”). In some languages there is a n o u n +p a r t i c l e + n o u n combination in which the possessor is the ﬁrst noun. Among most Bantu languages and several prominent non-Bantu languages there are approximate counterparts to the casa de Juan type construction of Ibero-Romance. In the Bantu group in particular, the connective element involved cannot be analyzed as a preposition or particle, but is more properly part of the nominal concord system in that it depends on nominal class and number.64 P o s s e s s o r +p o s s e s s e d (e.g. “John house”): Mandinka (only with some kinship terms and inalienable possession), Songhai, Bambara, Vai, Twi, G˜a, Ijo, and other Akan languages P o s s e s s e d +p o s s e s s o r (e.g. “house John”): Yoruba, Fula, Eﬁk P o s s e s s o r +p a r t i c l e / p r e p o s i t i o n / p o s s e s s i v e (e.g. “his”/“her”)+p o s s e s s e d : Mandinka, Vai (sometimes), Mende (sometimes) P o s s e s s e d +p a r t i c l e / p r e p o s i t i o n (e.g. “of ”)+p o s s e s s o r : Hausa, Wolof, Temne, Nupe, Igbo, Bubi, Ngombe, Swahili, Kele, Soko, Ngala, Kikongo, Kimbundu 63

Lipski (1999c, 2002c).

64

Welmers (1973:275–76).

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From this list of possibilities it can be seen that, as a group, Bantu languages present genitive constructions superﬁcially showing the same order as in IberoRomance. Combinations involving true prepositions are also found in several prominent African languages that came into contact with Spanish and Portuguese. In the bozal corpus, we do not ﬁnd many deviations from canonical Romance genitive patterns, perhaps for this reason. Afro-Iberian creoles as a group also maintain the Romance genitive pattern: this includes Cape Verdean and Guinea-Bissau creoles, S˜ao Tomense, Annobonense, Palenquero, and Papiamento. Only in the Afro-Cuban bozal corpus are there consistent examples of genitive constructions in which juxtaposition of p o s s e s s e d +p o s s e s s o r takes the place of constructions based on prepositions. This is the predominant genitive pattern in Yoruba and related Kwa languages that were prominently represented in nineteenth-century Cuban bozal speech, and this unusually coherent substratum may have inﬂuenced Afro-Cuban syntactic patterns (Chapter Eight Appendix #25). In these examples, the similarity with Yoruba and related Congo-Benue languages is probably not mere coincidence; this type of construction is virtually absent in earlier stages of bozal language, when the African substratum languages were more varied in their treatment of genitive constructions. Verb systems among African languages African languages of the Kwa-Benue group use preverbal subject clitics to mark verb phrases for person and number, rather than the sufﬁxes found in Indo-European languages. Indeed, all modiﬁcations of the verbal stem are usually preposed, either as bound morphemes or as independent particles that may be used as adverbs. In general, African languages tend to mark aspect rather than tense in establishing “past” vs. “present” distinctions, and irrealis rather than future to express notions of futurity, conditionality, and constructions which would be rendered by the subjunctive in Romance languages. The use of preverbal particles to the complete exclusion of postverbal inﬂections is a key feature of all Afro-European creoles, and many scholars have looked to an African substratum. Substratum inﬂuence seems quite likely in the case of creoles formed with an apparently homogeneous substratum, such as Haitian, which in a very striking fashion replicates the verbal structure of the Ewe/Fon cluster. Similarly, Guinea-Bissau Kriyol shows much the same verbal structure as surrounding African languages.65 Mandinka, an important member of the Mande family, mostly uses preverbal operators to indicate tense, mood, and aspect. There is, however, an intransitive sufﬁx attached to the end of the verb stem. Mende makes greater use of sufﬁx 65

Kihm (1994).

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particles placed after the verb stem, in addition to preverbal markers. The sufﬁxes are used to indicate, for example, perfective and pluperfect constructions, inﬁnitives, continuous aspect, etc.66 In Temne, as in some other Atlantic languages, most verbal markers are pre-stem particles. Diola-Fogny, on the other hand, has many post-stem aspect markers. Fanti and other Akan languages use only pre-stem particles or preﬁxes. Ijo typically uses post-stem particles to indicate tense and mood. Preverbal particles are also found in such languages as Ewe, Twi, Ibo, Eﬁk, and Vai. Bambara and Wolof have both preﬁx and sufﬁx markers modifying the verbal stem. Bantu languages use both preﬁxes and sufﬁxes, including numerous suppletive forms, to indicate tense, mood, and aspect.67 Some African languages make use of independent particles, which can also be used, for example as adverbs or separate verbs, to signal verbal tense, mood, and aspect. In other languages, verbal afﬁxes are bound morphemes, often involving signiﬁcant vocalic and consonantal modiﬁcations. There may also be concomitant modiﬁcation of the verbal stem itself, and of the subject clitics (e.g. in Mande). There are not enough common denominators to suggest a coherent system of verbal particles in general bozal language, coming into contact with a variety of African language families. In some circumstances, however, there was evidently enough coherence in the African substratum to facilitate the conversion of Spanish or Portuguese independent words to preverbal tensemood-aspect (TMA) particles. Thus Papiamento uses ta (arguably derived from Spanish/Portuguese est´a or estar) for both progressive and habitual; preverbal a (derived either from ha or from ya) indicates past/perfective. Lo (< logo/luego) is the future/irrealis marker, but is often placed before the subject pronoun or noun.68 Papiamento also has the hybrid element t´abata, combining the IberoRomance imperfective of estar with what appears to be another derivative of estar, to indicate past imperfective. The form ta also appears in Cape Verdean and Guinea-Bissau creoles and in Palenquero, as well as in some Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles in Asia. Among Afro-Iberian creoles, none make use of verb-derived forms for future, while the past/perfective is arguably derived from an adverbial ya/ja. Among Afro-French creoles, however, the future is usually formed from va or a similar verb, while present/progressive comes from apr`es “after.” Prior to the nineteenth century, there is no evidence in the bozal corpus that any Spanish or Portuguese elements were consistently functioning as preverbal particles, replacing verbal inﬂection, to signal tense, mood, and aspect. Thus for 66 67 68

Migeod (1908:ch. 6), Rowlands (1959:ch. 8). Wilson (1961:22–23), Sapir (1965:30–31), Welmers (1973:55–56). Williamson (1965:ch. 3), Church (1981). Although in contemporary vernacular Papiamento there is a tendency to place lo in immediately preverbal position, where it is more easily analyzed as a particle.

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example, no form of estar is combined with another verbal root, except in transparently progressive constructions, in which the -ndo ending is still present. In the Golden Age bozal corpus, there are only a few cases where ya is combined with present tense or uninﬂected verbs in what might be a calque of African p a r t i c l e +v e r b s t e m combinations, and in which a reading of “now” or “shortly” is not likely (Chapter Eight Appendix #26). No one of these cases provides clear evidence that ya/ja is functioning as a preverbal aspectual particle (indeed, it is not clear whether sixteenth-to-seventeenth-century Spanish writers would notice the difference). In a few of the above examples, however (especially from Gil Vicente), it is possible that ya acted as an aspect marker rather than the usual adverbial adjunct. There are almost no cases of particles that could indicate future/irrealis in the bozal corpus. It has sometimes been suggested that va had this function, but most instances of va in bozal Spanish can be analyzed as simple instances of the periphrastic future (Chapter Eight Appendix #28). In the pre-nineteenth-century bozal corpus, there are no examples of ta or est´a(r) used with an invariable verb stem in a fashion suggestive of its use as a preverbal particle. However, the nineteenth-century Cuban bozal corpus provides a different panorama, with wide use of ta as an obvious aspectual particle, similar to use in Papiamento, Palenquero, Cape Verdean, etc. This has led to claims that Cuban bozal Spanish shares with Palenquero and Papiamento (and with Cape Verdean) an earlier Afro-Lusitanian heritage. Ziegler (1981) has even suggested that Afro-Cuban bozal speech used va and ya as preverbal particles, in addition to or instead of their normal functions as auxiliary verb and adverbial adjunct, respectively (Chapter Eight Appendix #27). The claims that ya and va are acting as particles are impossible to fully evaluate based only on these fragmentary textual citations. Spanish ya has a wide range of meanings, which span the range from past/perfective (e.g. ya se fue) to future/irrealis (ya veremos), as well as signaling simple present, roughly meaning ‘now.’ Only in cases where ya appears with an unconjugated inﬁnitive or a verb which appears to be an invariant present-tense form is there any likelihood that ya in Afro-Cuban bozal texts is behaving like a particle. Thus examples like Ya mi lleg´a la buj´ı, ya ped´e, ya yo cuch´a, T´u ya son muj´e ten´e siete a˜no, and ya llev´a mi lengua jafuera may conceivably represent a partially restructured verb system in which an invariant stem is combined with preposed aspectual particles. In order to subject this hypothesis to a deﬁnitive test, it would be necessary to have an extensive veriﬁed corpus from a single individual or speech community, to determine whether these examples show simple faulty concordance or a Yoruba-like verb system. Matters are similarly complicated with respect to va before verbal stems. Since in the Spanish periphrastic future va a + i n f i n i t i v e , va a is pronounced as va, there is no a priori way of determining whether a combination such as yo va

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mor´ı in bozal texts represent a restructured verb system, or merely an invariant but otherwise unremarkable Spanish verb. A concentration of examples with clear lack of concordance hints at possible restructuring, but the matter remains open: ¿quiene va pag´a la pato?, ¿y n´elle lo muchachito va pend´e su Pa˜na de nut´e?, yo va est´a de garraf´on, yo va fri´ımi cuepo toro, yo va d´ı, yo va camin´a, nelle va llor´a, Yo va creb´ı, Yo me va cupl´a billete, etc. The bozal Cuban texts, particularly the examples collected by Lydia Cabrera, reﬂect a strong Yoruba substratum, and in some cases actual Yoruba items are incorporated into the Afro-Hispanic pidgin. In these extreme circumstances, it may be that some Cuban bozales used available Spanish monosyllabic items such as ta, ya, and va as though they were Yoruba preverbal particles. Yoruba has invariant verb stems, to which are preﬁxed particles such as n´ for progressive, ti for past/perfective, y`ı´ı for future, m´aa for habitual, etc. The obligatory constituent order is s u b j e c t c l i t i c +TMA p a r t i c l e +v e r b s t e m , e.g. mo n´ lo. ‘I am going,’ mo ti lo. ‘I went,’ etc. Virtually identical combinations are found in neighboring languages with which many Afro-Cuban bozales would have spoken either natively or through previous contacts in Nigeria. It is not unreasonable to expect that Yoruba-speaking Africans who were attempting to learn Spanish in Cuban slave quarters would instinctively construct verb phrases in an already familiar pattern. Since Spanish already provided a series of monosyllabic verbal adjuncts or auxiliaries which could occur in positions identical to those of Kwa preverbal particles, it was but a small step to the restructuring of such words as ta, ya, va, etc. to take on new functions. In many cases, Spanish speakers would not notice that a familiar item was being used in a modiﬁed fashion, and thus it may be that Cuban bozal language actually contained a more radically restructured verb system than is suggested by the selection of texts surveyed above. The Cuban bozal corpus is unique among Afro-Hispanic linguistic materials, in that the possibility for syntactic transfer from African languages was enhanced by the homogeneity of the bozal community. In the remaining bozal texts, from the ﬁfteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, and representing varieties of both Spanish and Portuguese, there is no evidence of any substratum inﬂuence on the verb system. The observed gravitation toward a single invariant verb stem is a general concomitant of second-language learning under duress, and while the widespread existence of invariant verb stems among African languages may have furthered the erosion of Ibero-Romance verbs in bozal speech, African language interference is not at the root of the reduced verbal paradigms found in bozal texts. Conspicuously absent from the bozal corpus – although found in many Atlantic creoles – are such combinations as serial verbs (of the “I take knife cut” sort) and “predicate clefting” such as Papiamento ta papia mi ta papia ‘I am speaking.’ An overview of the entire Afro-Iberian bozal corpus reveals

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that the authors of the texts (invariably white Spanish or Portuguese speakers with no detailed knowledge of African languages, and with varying degrees of familiarity with bozal language as used in their own communities) tended to include only those grammatical pecularities which represented only small deviations from standard Spanish or Portuguese, or which were already familiar to the general public as the result of other language contact environment. In the verbal system, for example, unstable conjugation and errors of agreement could be observed in the speech of any second-language learner of Spanish or Portuguese; bare inﬁnitives have also been used in hastily assembled Romance contact vernaculars, from the medieval Lingua Franca to contemporary “Gringo Spanish” (e.g. of the ¿cu´anto costar esto? variety). Literary stereotypes of the moro or Moor already exploited this tendency. Slight modiﬁcations in the use of auxiliaries or adjuncts such as ya and va would not be noticed by most writers, whose literary characters would continue to use these items as in standard Spanish. Prepositions and postpositions in African languages In general, African languages follow the widespread typological patterns by which SVO languages tend toward prepositions, while SOV languages prefer postpositions. However, in many African languages, what are translated as prepositions are in fact nouns (e.g. ‘head,’ ‘foot,’ etc.) or serial verbs. There are also a number of different possibilities for genitive constructions that in IberoRomance languages are expressed by the preposition de, as well as a variety of locative constructions. For those African languages (numerically in the majority) that do use prenominal relational items that occupy the same position – if not necessarily having the same syntactic function – as Ibero-Romance prepositions, there is no conceptual difﬁculty in acquiring Spanish and Portuguese prepositions. To be expected is the confusion of particular prepositions, as well as the elimination of prepositions, particularly in constructions where a preposition might be absent in the African substratum languages (e.g. genitive constructions). In the entire Afro-Iberian bozal corpus, there are no examples of postpositions or other grammatical deviations from Romance prepositional usage, and in fact there are comparatively few deviations from the normal Spanish/ Portuguese prepositional patterns. In the Afro-Cuban bozal corpus, there are examples of riba used as a bare preposition, in a fashion similar to its usage in Papiamento (Chapter 9). This represents a signiﬁcant deviation from monolingual Spanish usage, and may signal a Yoruba inﬂuence (Yoruba uses ni + o´ ri = l´ori ‘at (the) head’ as the preposition corresponding to ‘above,’ and ‘over’ (Chapter Eight Appendix #29). These examples also give evidence of the frequent elimination of common prepositions such as de and a (Chapter Eight Appendix #30).

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General grammatical characteristics of pre-nineteenth century Afro-Iberian speech Prior to the nineteenth century, Afro-Iberian language had crystallized into stable creoles in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Casamance, S˜ao Tom´e, Pr´ıncipe and Annob´on, Cura¸cao, San Basilio de Palenque, and in various Asian ports. In addition to these established creole-speaking communities, bozal Spanish and Portuguese continued to be reinvented by successive generations of Africans taken to the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America. Although in the nineteenth century Spanish may have brieﬂy creolized in some isolated Caribbean pockets, and almost certainly Portuguese was restructured in Afro-Brazilian communities, most bozales acquired an unstable pidgin, which was replaced by local varieties of Spanish and Portuguese. As a continually reappearing series of interlanguages this speech was inherently variable and non-systematic, and literary imitations probably ascribed a greater degree of consistency to Afro-Iberian language than ever existed. Among at least some of the bozales there were recurring grammatical patterns, resulting as much from imperfect second-language acquisition as from the inﬂuence of particular African languages. Among the more salient traits were: (1) Imperfectly conjugated verbs, with a gravitation toward the third person singular, and to a lesser extent the uninﬂected inﬁnitive (usually lacking the ﬁnal [r]). Use of the ﬁrst person plural in -mos as invariant verb may have existed as an occasional option, but was probably overstated by Golden Age parodies. (2) Early Afro-Iberian language often used (a)m´ı as subject pronoun, but this usage evidently disappeared by the end of the sixteenth century. (3) Disjunctive object pronouns were sometimes used instead of object clitics, especially postposed m´ı instead of proclitic or enclitic me. (4) In the early stages of acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese, nearly all Africans omitted deﬁnite and indeﬁnite articles; this tendency prevailed across all substratum families and time periods. (5) Gender and number concord between nouns and adjectives was sporadic at best, although there was no massive use of a single inﬂexion. When nominal plural was signaled, it was through use of /s/, at least on the ﬁrst element of an NP; there is no textual evidence of alternative, substratum-inﬂuenced plural constructions in the bozal corpus. (6) In the ﬁrst century and a half of Afro-Iberian language, the invariant copula sa/s˜a (as well as invariant samos) alternated with correctly and incorrectly conjugated forms of ser and estar. The latter copulas were normally used in a fashion identical with prescribed Spanish and Portuguese usage, except for the very ﬁrst Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts.

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General traits of nineteenth-century Afro-Caribbean Spanish Afro-Caribbean Spanish of this period was qualitatively different from bozal languages of other periods and regions. Surviving elderly Afro-Cubans still recall the speech of the ﬁnal generations of Caribbean bozales, and can attest to the essential veracity of literary and anthropological imitations. The following features were found in most if not all Afro-Hispanic speakers in nineteenthcentury Cuba, and among bozales in Puerto Rico: (1) Frequent use of third person singular verb forms as invariant verbs. (2) Use of son as invariant copula, alternating with correctly and incorrectly conjugated forms of ser and estar. (3) Frequent lack of noun-adjective concordance. (4) Frequent use of disjunctive postverbal object pronouns, especially m´ı, instead of object clitics. (5) Frequent use of the third person singular (and possibly plural) undifferentiated pronoun elle/nelle, with occasional variant n´e. In addition to these indisputably Afro-Caribbean traits, some speakers used constructions pointing more dramatically to the possible creolization of Spanish. Such speakers appear to have represented a minority – possibly a large one – of all bozales in Cuba. The possible reasons for such qualitative discrepancies among Afro-Cuban bozales will be explored in the following chapter. Among the creoloid traits observed in a subset of Afro-Cuban speakers are: (1) Occasional use of m´ı as subject pronoun. (2) Occasional use of g¨uete instead of usted. (3) Use of awe for hoy and ahuora for ahora.69 (4) Verb constructions based on ta + verbal inﬁnitive, lacking ﬁnal /r/. 69

Lipski (1999b).

9

The Spanish-Creole debate

Introduction Having reviewed a wide spectrum of Afro-Iberian linguistic manifestations, spanning four centuries and four continents, we are in a position to reassess the question of whether Spanish ever creolized, and if so, where, under what circumstances, with what antecedents, and with what long-term effects on the surrounding Spanish dialects. First it is necessary to revisit the question of why so few (if any) Spanish-derived creoles are found throughout the world, in comparison with the large and diverse collection of Portuguese-, French-, and English-based creoles scattered across ﬁve continents. Attempts – sometimes only implicitly stated – at answering this question for Spanish have taken at least the following forms: (1) the demographic proportions of Europeans to Africans in the Caribbean were not favorable to the formation of creoles; (2) Spanish colonization was somehow “different” from that undertaken by Portugal, France, and England, thus accounting for greater Hispanization of the Spanish colonies; (3) all Afro-European creoles formed in West Africa, where Spain held no slave depots; (4) Spanish did once creolize in the Americas, and certain vernacular varieties of Caribbean Spanish are the post-creole remnants of what was once a more extensive creole language; as yet undiscovered enclaves of vestigial Spanish creole language may still be uncovered, as the creole nature of AfroColombian Palenquero was revealed only a few decades ago. The bulk of this chapter will consider the last viewpoint, which is of direct relevance to the evaluation of the Afro-Hispanic materials discussed in the preceding chapters. First, however, we turn to the other proposals on the apparent failure of Spanish to creolize under conditions that would seem to duplicate those of communities where Portuguese-, French-, and English-based creoles arose. Demographics as a reason for the non-creolization of Caribbean Spanish A number of scholars have compared the demographic proportions of Africanborn slaves to creole slaves and Europeans in Spanish Caribbean colonies and in French and British Caribbean colonies, in order to address the lack 277

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of creolization of Caribbean Spanish and the vigorous and long-standing existence of French- and English-based creoles. Mintz (1971) postulates three sets of conditions that affected the development and spread of creole languages in the Caribbean: (1) relative proportions of Africans, Europeans, and other groups; (2) codes of social relationship and status among the various groups; (3) speciﬁc community settings. Mintz asserts – not without caution – that in the Spanish Caribbean Africans never dominated the population, and “movement from the social category of ‘slaves’ to that of ‘freemen’ was almost always relatively rapid and relatively continuous.”1 This is partially tied to the lack of a plantation-based society in the Spanish Caribbean, except in Cuba and minimally in Puerto Rico towards the end of the eighteenth century, by which time Caribbean creole languages had already solidiﬁed on other islands. Mintz also hints that Spaniards born in Cuba and Puerto Rico tended to think of themselves as Cuban and Puerto Rican “creoles” rather than as expatriate Spaniards, unlike the situation in English and French colonies; according to Mintz this may have hastened the tolerance for linguistic and racial miscegenation on the Spanish islands, thus precluding the discontinuities implicit in creolization. Laurence (1974) accepts the essence of Mintz’s proposal but urges caution in the interpretation of details, lest one fall into the myth of a “kinder gentler” Spanish slavery that has uncritically been proffered as the basis for the non-creolization of colonial Spanish. Choosing Cuba as a test case, Laurence describes the system of coartaci´on that existed before the establishment of sugar plantations, and through which Spanish slaves could buy their freedom. This practice was opportunistic and pragmatic rather than bespeaking an overwhelming social liberalism, but it did speed the entry of blacks into free society, with the concomitant linguistic contacts. Once the sugar plantation hit Cuba in the late 1700s social conditions for African slaves changed drastically and rapidly for the worse, and had such a society lasted for more than a single generation, it is quite possible that a Spanish-based creole might have arisen on Cuban plantations. Laurence does allow for the transitory existence of Spanish creoles in maroon communities in the Caribbean, much as once occurred in Palenque de San Basilio, Colombia. Clearly demographic proportions alone are not enough to account for the formation or non-formation of Caribbean creole languages, but the relative proportions of Africans and white settlers in the Spanish colonies were for several centuries different enough from those found in French and English colonies as to provide a key piece to the Spanish dialect puzzle. Racial and class boundaries were somewhat more permeable in the Spanish Caribbean, if only due to the practicalities of coexistence in economically stagnant colonies, and

1

Mintz (1971:481); emphasis in original.

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linguistic attitudes – and interchange of language between blacks and whites – took different paths than in the islands ruled by plantocracies. Was Spanish colonial slavery “different”? Chaudenson (2001:129–34) is the strongest proponent of the notion that the ideological nature of Spanish colonization resulted in the effective Hispanization of colonial populations to such an extent that even rapid demographic imbalances such as occurred with the huge importation of African slaves into the nineteenth-century Spanish Caribbean was unable to dislodge the Spanish language and permit the formation of a creole. At ﬁrst glance, such a notion seems impossible to accept, for example in the face of the fact that the Spanish language never took root in the Philippines, despite more than four centuries of Spanish colonization, or the tenuous foothold of Spanish in Paraguay and the Andean highlands, where Spanish missionaries and colonizers often preferred the use of indigenous languages over Spanish. In the Spanish Caribbean, however, the indigenous population rapidly disappeared, decimated by disease, forced labor, and rebellion, while the African-born population remained relatively small until the end of the eighteenth century, when the sugar plantation boom occasioned by the collapse of the French colony of Saint-Domingue – which became the rebellious and unstable free nation of Haiti – induced Spanish colonists in Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela to dramatically increase the importation of African slaves. Chaudenson (2001:131) surmises – consistently with all available documentation – that “. . . at this time [end of the eighteenth century], Spanish (in its Cubanized form, of course) was the language of the whole population of the Island, Whites and Blacks alike. Not until 1790–1820 did Cuba take on its current appearance of a sugar island with a primarily Black population” (emphasis in original). Chaudenson inaccurately asserts that “in 1862, Blacks made up more than 80 percent of the population of the Island, with slaves representing about half this ﬁgure” (131); in fact the black and mulatto population was perhaps around 50 percent, although in sugar-producing areas – where the conditions for creolization of Spanish were the most promising – the black to white ratios were even higher than the ﬁgures cited by Chaudenson.2 Clinching his analysis of the failure of Cuban Spanish to creole under the massive immigration of Africanborn slaves, Chaudenson (2001:131–32) states: “At the time of widespread African immigration in Cuba at the end of the eighteenth century, Cubanized Spanish was also characterized by . . . systemic stabilization and generalized usage by the whole local population (particularly the social groups responsible 2

Humboldt (1827, 1956), Aimes (1907), Knight (1970), Moreno Fraginals (1978), P´erez de la Riva (1979), Castellanos and Castellanos (1988).

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for assimilating immigrants). This regional variety of Spanish served as the target language for African slaves, and they therefore learned it using ‘ordinary’ strategies of approximative acquisition. In other words, the phenomenon of ‘square approximation’ which I believe to characterize and deﬁne creolization did not occur here.” In the Dominican Republic, the proportion of blacks to whites never reached the levels found in Cuba, since Dominican planters were not about to recreate the conﬁgurations that had resulted in slave revolts and the expulsion of white owners in the French half of the island. For Chaudenson, the “homestead society” (soci´et´e d’habitation) which existed prior to the establishment of large sugar plantations in the late eighteenth century, and in which blacks and whites worked and interacted linguistically in close proximity, provided a ready model for the acquisition of Spanish by subsequently arriving Africans, although one may take exception to the claim that, for example in Santo Domingo, “slavery was indeed present, but, because of the wellestablished nature of White-Black relationships, it was less ‘ferocious’ than in the ‘plantation society.’”3 Chaudenson concludes (134) that “. . . in Cuba . . . the continuation of a homestead society . . . lasted for more than two centuries. This in turn led to the stabilization of Spanish approximations into a local variety . . . and to generalized use of this language throughout colonial society. From that point on, later immigration did not have a signiﬁcant impact on the language . . . and it did not lead to a creolization of Spanish, since immigrants were ‘exposed’ to a homogeneous and generalized local form of the language.” And why did similar results not obtain for French Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and other islands on which French-derived creoles arose? In the French islands the homestead society was replaced by a plantation society with a much higher proportion of African-born slaves at a much earlier period than occurred in Cuba and Santo Domingo, with the result – again according to Chaudenson – that later arriving African slaves did not have access to fully native forms of French, but only to “a form of language that itself already consisted of approximations of French . . . the core phenomenon was thus a shift to the exponent of approximations of French, a square approximation which seems to me to be the true moment and place of creolization: the autonomization of this approximative system in relation to French.”4 This is presumably because the white settlers – many of whom were poor and worked alongside their black slaves and laborers – themselves spoke non-prestige varieties of French, and freely absorbed linguistic features from the Africans, eventually providing the seeds from which the creole language would spring. Although this approach has much to recommend it, the historical facts do not fully support such a differential implantation of French versus Spanish in the homestead societies. 3 4

P. 134, based on an interpretation of Dipp and Maggiolo (1982). Chaudenson (2001:127); emphasis in original.

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It is difﬁcult to accept that French would creolize but Spanish would remain unaffected by demographically similar African slave arrivals. The birthplace of Afro-Hispanic creoles: Africa or the Americas? The claim that Spanish-derived creoles never formed because Spain never held sway in West Africa has been advanced by McWhorter (1995, 2000) who in essence has postulated that creoles derived from European languages did not form in plantation societies but rather in West African slaving stations and entrepˆots. Although not rejecting out of hand Chaudenson’s arguments that the formation of a Spanish-based creole in Cuba and Santo Domingo was impeded by the persistence of the soci´et´e d’habitation until the end of the eighteenth century, McWhorter asserts that in some mainland South American colonies, particularly in the Choc´o and Popay´an areas of Colombia, and in parts of Ecuador, the homestead society model never obtained. The use of African labor on plantations and in placer mining created demographic and sociolinguistic situations similar to those found in traditional plantation societies, and therefore – according to McWhorter’s reasoning – Spanish-based creoles should have emerged if the plantation creole model is essentially correct. To the extent that his afﬁrmation that no true Spanish-based creoles exist, the remainder of McWhorter’s claims grow in credibility. One test case is the Colombian Choc´o, where Africans outnumbered Europeans for several centuries in this isolated region. This would seem an ideal candidate for creole formation, but contemporary Choc´o Spanish shows only the signs of geographical and sociolinguistic marginality, but is grammatically identical to other varieties of Spanish.5 However, McWhorter’s bleak description of the inaccessibility of Spanish to African slaves in the Choc´o leaves open the question of how any native variety of Spanish penetrated this region. The fact that even the most uneducated and geographically isolated chocoano speaks grammatically standard Spanish (although including features typical of rural illiterate speakers worldwide) reveals that earlier barriers to access to full Spanish were completely penetrated, which does not exclude the possibility that prior to acquiring standard Spanish, Choc´o residents spoke some kind of Spanish-derived creole. The Chota Valley of highland Ecuador contains another speech community in which Africans once signiﬁcantly outnumbered Europeans, but whose modern Spanish dialect shows only the mildest traces of an earlier restructured variety.6 However, the Chota Valley is not geographically isolated (today the Pan American Highway 5

6

Although Schwegler (1996a) claims that the prevalent double negation stems from a previous Spanish-based creole, Ru´ız Garc´ıa (2000) has found some vestigial deviations from monolingual Spanish grammar which may be the fossil remains of a long-disappeared Choc´o creole or semicreole. Lipski (1986e, 1987a), Schwegler (1994, 1999).

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passes through the region), and, at least since the middle of the nineteenth century, its inhabitants have always been able to freely travel to the remainder of Spanish-speaking Ecuador, surely ample time for any earlier creole to have been completely erased. Moving to demolish arguments that Spanish-based creoles do exist in Latin America, McWhorter writes off Papiamento and Palenquero, as well as a putative pan-Caribbean bozal Spanish creole, to be discussed below, as ultimately being based on Portuguese, therefore formed in Portuguese slaving stations on the West African coast. However, the debate on the origins of the two existing creoles is far from resolved. In particular, scholars are almost evenly divided as to the Spanish vs. Portuguese origins of Papiamento, while the obvious afﬁnities between Palenquero and the Portuguese creoles of the Gulf of Guinea are matched by the equally strong afﬁnities with Spanish, which even according to the Portuguese-origin hypothesis (e.g. Schwegler 1996b) are not due to subsequent decreolization or relexiﬁcation. Even Philippine Creole Spanish (Chabacano), dismissed by McWhorter (following Whinnom 1956) as relexiﬁed from Portuguese and – amazingly – as “having emerged via marriages between Iberian men and Philippine women” (14), is not unequivocally derived from Portuguese, and most probably had origins far more complex than those suggested by McWhorter.7 As to the unlikelihood that any vestiges of now extinct Spanish-based creoles in Latin America will turn up, one may cite the compelling evidence unearthed by Ortiz L´opez (1998), who interviewed elderly Afro-Cubans in that nation’s most remote regions and discovered not only accurate imitations of the last generation of bozales (including family members of some of the oldest informants), but also post-creole traits in their own speech, phenomena which Cuban linguists have long declared as extinct in their own country. Similarly, Green describes the speech of some Afro-Dominicans who evidence creoloid features in their speech.8 Similarly, the ritualized bozal imitations of the negros congos of Panama9 hint at earlier more restructured Spanish, as does the bozal “talking in tongues” found among some Afro-Cuban adepts.10 True, these approximations to Spanish are less grammatically deviant and systematically restructured than, for example, Haitian Creole or Palenquero, but do fall in line with some Caribbean English creoles and Indian Ocean French creoles. McWhorter (2000:203) argues that “plantations themselves did not pidginize input to slaves” and therefore that “. . . on Spanish plantations, there were not two targets – the local standard and the creole – but just one, the local standard. Therefore, Spanish slaves simply acquired a second-language 7 8 9

Lipski (1992a). Green (1997, 1999, 2001); Lipski (2001a) suggests that at least some of these traits may originate in language disorders. 10 Castellanos (1990). Lipski (1989).

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Spanish, and passed this on to subsequent generations.” It is known, however, that Africans’ documented approximations to Spanish in the Americas often contained all the traits normally ascribed to pidgins. If by lack of pidginization McWhorter means that ﬂuent Spanish speakers never deliberately modiﬁed their language when speaking to African bozales, this may also not be accurate, given well-documented imitations of Afro-Hispanic pidgin throughout Latin America, including documents written by Africans or their immediate descendents in a demonstrably stable pidgin, such as the “Proclama que en un cabildo de negros congos de la ciudad de La Habana pronunci´o su presidente, Rey Monfundi Siliman” (ca. 1808; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #2). For Alvarez Nazario (1974:137), this document is the oldest specimen of AfroAntillean Spanish, but the format of this pamphlet, giving a pidginized Spanish version “en dialecto natural y propio de ellos” in one column and an en face translation into Spanish in a parallel column, casts some doubt on the authenticity of the examples, or at the very least of the authorship, since the text appears to have been written by a (white) native speaker of Spanish, rather than by a true Congo, whether bozal or Cuban-born. At the core of McWhorter’s hypothesis is an ideological claim: “the prevalence of creole competence was due to the creole becoming established as the linguistic expression of black identity, as blacks came to interact more exclusively with one another than with whites.” The idea itself is neither objectionable nor implausible (McWhorter rightly points to vernacular African American English as a contemporary example), but leaves unanswered the question of why creoles did not develop in areas such as the Choc´o, the Chota Valley, and other areas of Spanish America in which blacks remained an isolated majority population for long periods of time. McWhorter attempts to answer the question by afﬁrming that only pidgins imported from Africa developed into creoles in the Americas, and that plantations were not conducive to pidginization of Spanish or other European languages. The reasoning is circular, however, since the only “evidence” is the fact that creoles did not develop in Spanish American plantations (if indeed they did not). There is nothing inherent in the plantation or post-plantation environment which is qualitatively different than the trading post and castle slave venues described by McWhorter, and no a priori reason why blacks on a plantation should not adopt a second-language variety of Spanish as an ethnolinguistic solidarity marker (assuming that one can defensibly differentiate pidgins and rudimentary second-language approximations). McWhorter assumes that in Spanish colonial plantations, for example in Cuba, black overseers – who were typically native speakers of Spanish (perhaps with some ethnolinguistic identifying traits in their Spanish) – were instrumental in transmitting a more or less complete version of Spanish to bozal slaves, rather than allowing the latter to continue using a pidgin:

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Shared ethnicity, and the shared condition of slavery, surely delineated plantation blacks as a speech community within the plantation, which would have constituted a prototypical network of strong ties . . . Blacks with richer access to the local standard were a part of this network, and thus input from the standard was readily available to other members of the black community. One channel of such transmission would have been interactions with black overseers, particularly likely to have served as linguistic intermediaries between the whites who trusted them and the blacks with whom they identiﬁed. (200)

These afﬁrmations are at odds with many known facts of Spanish colonial plantation slavery. Overseers, known variously as mayorales, contramayorales, capataces, and mayordomos, were almost exclusively free blacks or mulattoes, and were as a group despised and mistrusted by slaves (bozal and ladino) precisely because of their presumed unconditional loyalty to the white masters. In 1797 the Spanish priest residing in Cuba Nicol´as Duque de Estrada wrote a manual instructing fellow priests on how to teach Christian doctrine to bozal slaves.11 Duque felt the need to compare Jesus Christ to plantation overseers, in order to ensure obedience by the slaves; as noted by Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:101) “Jesucristo . . . es un mayoral bueno . . . la obligaci´on del siervo, si quiere salvarse, es trabajar intensamente para el amo, pues tal era la voluntad de Dios . . .” The Cuban writer Bachiller y Morales (1883:99), describing Cuban bozal talking drums and work songs to the German creolist Hugo Schuchardt, notes that “si el mayoral era malo, los cantores hac´ıan acompa˜nar a los ecos de sus tambores palabras signiﬁcativas: ‘mayor´a come gente’ – ‘mayor´a so malo,’ etc.” The autobiography of the former Cuban slave Juan Francisco Manzano, whose period of slavery covered the early nineteenth century, describes numerous instances of brutal treatment on his masters’ plantations, at the hands of black overseers. Cuban literary texts portray the vicious treatment frequently dispensed by black overseers to their equally black slave charges; for example in the novel En el cafetal, by Domingo Malpica La Barca (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #19), a bozal slave admits: “Yo cuando gente entra dormir, yo queda fuera, contramayoral tranca por dentro, mayoral echa llave, yo duerme y entra por la ma˜nana y toma caf´e.” Although some black overseers undoubtedly experienced feelings of solidarity towards enslaved blacks, more frequently the overseers had been co-opted by the white masters, and as happens all too frequently among oppressed groups, could be even more cruel to members of their own race and ethnic groups than any white colonist. McWhorter (2000:200) surmises: “The Spanish that even isolated black Hispanophones speak today shows that slaves, especially children, had access to a lexiﬁer in plantation settings.” This does not necessarily follow from the historical facts, because these “isolated” groups have in fact been linguistically integrated into their respective regional and national speech communities for at 11

Alp´ızar Castillo (1987), Fern´andez Marrero (1987), Lavi˜na (1989).

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least the past century, sufﬁcient time for earlier and highly stigmatized pidginlike traits to disappear; vestigial remnants from the Chota Valley, the Colombian Choc´o, the Barlovento coast of Venezuela, some Afro-Dominican villages, and isolated Afro-Cubans suggest that constructions that deviate substantially from natively spoken Spanish may have faded from view comparatively recently in these regions. As to how (non-Spanish) pidgins born in West Africa could turn into creoles in the Americas even in the face of the European lexiﬁer language, McWhorter (2000:202) posits deliberate diglossia: . . . the founding slaves who spoke a pidgin . . . rather than treating the West African pidgin as a mere step on the path to the local standard, would retain it as a vernacular register encoding in-group identity . . . when colonies passed from the soci´et´e d’habitation phase to the plantation phase, the creole would have gradually prevailed over the local standard in the slave speech community . . . the prevalence of creole competence was due to the creole becoming established as the linguistic expression of black identity, as blacks came to interact more exclulsively with one another than with whites.

This is a plausible account of the survival of Afro-Colombian Palenquero, whose roots may well stem from the Afro-Portuguese creole of S˜ao Tom´e, and which has been deliberately maintained in a diglossic relation with Spanish at least since the eighteenth century. It is also consistent with the triumph of maroon culture and, by extension, language which resulted in Haitian independence. However, this viewpoint does little to explain the origin of Papiamento, which, apart from some general similarities to Cape Verdean Creole, is not clearly related to any West African creole. To conclude his account of the non-existence of Spanish-derived creoles, McWhorter (2000:203–04) afﬁrms: . . . the recruitment of a West-African-born pidgin as a vehicle of black identity occurred only where a pidgin had been imported in the ﬁrst place. Early Spanish slaves in the Choc´o, the Chota Valley, Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru imported no such pidgin. Thus on Spanish plantations, there were not two targets – the local standard and the creole – but just one, the local standard. Therefore Spanish slaves simply acquired a secondlanguage Spanish, and passed this on to subsequent generations. There was no ‘pidgin’ pole to express black identity through, and thus no movement among slaves towards such a pole as the black community grew and coalesced . . . black identity was thus expressed via a vernacular dialect of the local Spanish, with ‘blackness’ encoded via slight phonological variations and above all, African lexical borrowings.

Once more, this statement contains plausible elements together with afﬁrmations that fail to ﬁnd support in historical documentation. There is no acceptable evidence that “black” Spanish is or ever has been characterized by deliberately adopted phonetic traits, although white compatriots often believe this to be the case.12 At the same time, there are hints that in Cuba, and probably elsewhere, 12

Lipski (1985b, 1999d).

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blacks deliberately adopted marked registers in order to distinguish themselves from their non-black counterparts; this ranged from the hyperbolic speech of the negros curros in nineteenth-century Havana13 to the combination of contrived and vestigial bozal speech among the negros congos of Panama.14 In the balance, McWhorter’s thought-provoking comments offer much food for thought, but fall short of a complete explanation for the relative scarcity of Spanish-based creoles. In particular, this theory gives no reason why a developing Spanish-, French-, English- or Portuguese-based pidgin formed in an American plantation environment could not serve as a marker of black identity, and be deliberately retained by black slaves as they simultaneously acquired a more complete version of the masters’ language; there is no compelling reason why only a pidgin previously used in West Africa might possess this regenerative power. There is no doubt that black and white linguistic attitudes were instrumental in the formation or non-formation of creole languages, and both Chaudenson and McWhorter have contributed signiﬁcantly to the understanding of creole genesis. Like those of virtually every other creole researcher, their models are put to a stringent test when confronting the data from Spanish colonial speech communities, and the combination of strengths and shortcomings surveyed above justify a more detailed exploration into the possibility that Afro-Hispanic language may once have creolized, in the Americas and perhaps elsewhere. The scarcity of current Afro-Hispanic creoles With the exception of Palenquero and, arguably, Papiamento, no Spanish-based creole exists in Latin America today; even the aforementioned creoles may owe more of their origins to Portuguese than to Spanish. Even after creole languages were recognized as a special result of language contact and not just “broken” language, it was long felt that no Spanish-based creoles existed. Van Name (1871) appears to have been the ﬁrst to recognize that Papiamento was at least partially a Spanish-based creole. In commenting on Pichardo’s (1849) observations on Cuban bozal language, Van Name noted: “This description accords nearly enough with the Creole Spanish of Cura¸coa [sic] to show that we have here the beginning of proper Creole, but for the reasons given above, it has failed of development.” Pichardo adds that “the Creole Negroes, i.e., those born on the island, all speak the Spanish.” Subsequent comments centered on the possibility that blacks in Cuba had developed or adapted a creolized Spanish. Thus Reinecke (1937:269) in the ﬁrst comprehensive survey of creoles, speculated that “conditions, one would assume, were eminently favorable for the formation of a Cuban Spanish creole dialect,” although conceding (271) that “the jargon was there, but there is no indication that it took deﬁnite shape.” 13

Fernando Ortiz (1986).

14

Lipski (1989).

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Holm (1989:305) would speak cautiously of a “restructured” Spanish in the Caribbean: “The Caribbean seems more likely than Spain to have had a stable Spanish-based pidgin during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . .” Referring speciﬁcally to Cuba, Holm states that “there is fairly clear evidence that a pidgin developed on Cuba during the nineteenth century, although it is less clear that it ever became a true creole” (307).15 The question of Spanish-based creoles remained conﬁned to Papiamento and the more debatable Afro-Cuban Spanish until the realization that the “lengua” spoken in the Afro-Colombian village of Palenque de San Basilio was in fact a creole, grammatically much different from Spanish.16 Most scholars investigating Palenquero converge on the opinion that Palenquero is in essence a partially relexiﬁed version of an early Afro-Portuguese pidgin ﬁrst formed in West Africa. In turn, Palenquero is related to Papiamento, with its unmistakable Portuguese elements, with Cape Verdean Portuguese Creole, with S˜ao Tomense Portuguese Creole, with Afro-Portuguese texts from the Renaissance, and with vestigial Afro-Hispanic language from several places in Latin America. The general feeling, then, inclines toward the view that most or all of Palenquero may have been originally formed prior to contact with Spanish, and that partial relexiﬁcation in the direction of Spanish has not affected the fundamental grammatical structures of this language. Claims of a bozal-derived Afro-Hispanic creole A number of Hispanists and creole researchers have supported the notion that Afro-Hispanic bozal speech creolized in the Caribbean and perhaps elsewhere.17 These researchers have attempted to link Afro-Hispanic bozal 15

16

17

Other opponents of this view include Alp´ızar Castillo (1989:75–76) and L´opez Morales (1980:108–09). Perl (1984:53, n. 30) recalls the differences between urban slavery and the isolated slave barracks, where true Spanish-based pidgins and creoles had a more viable opportunity to have developed, a caution also echoed by P´erez de la Riva (1978:33–34). Bickerton and Escalante (1970). In reality, Palenquero had been described extensively by Escalante (1954), but not from the perspective of being essentially anything other than a particularly nonstandard variety of Spanish. Even earlier, Ochoa Franco (1945) had reproduced fragments of Palenquero speech, however without commenting on its possible creole basis. Montes Giraldo (1959, 1962) and Fl´orez (1960) had also visited the village as part of the work on the linguistic atlas of Colombia, but – possibly by virtue of being outsiders (unlike Escalante, who was from Palenque himself) – noted only regional speech characteristics and did not pick up on the fact that a separate language was spoken there. By the 1970s, Palenquero was the object of serious study by dialectologists and creolists, and with increasing frequency, the possible Afro-Portuguese basis of the language was the subject of attention. Granda has studied the problem from a number of perspectives, and Megenney (1986) and Schwegler (1989, 1991b, 1993, 1996b) have also made important contributions in this respect. Among these scholars are Wagner (1949), Whinnom (1956, 1965), Granda (1968, 1971, 1976), Otheguy (1973), Yacou (1977), Ziegler (1981), Perl (1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1989d), Megenney (1984a, 1985a, 1985b, 1990a, 1993), Castellanos (1985), and Schwegler (1999).

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language with earlier Afro-Lusitanian pidgins and creoles, all stemming ultimately from a Portuguese-based maritime pidgin or “reconnaissance language.”18 Another signiﬁcant body of research opposes some or all of these views, and points to the conclusion that bozal Spanish in the Caribbean never represented more than a transitory phenomenon that did not survive transgenerationally, but rather evolved smoothly into regional Caribbean varieties of Spanish.19 Nearly all the “black” Spanish found in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Latin American texts represents the speech of African-born bozales, although in the R´ıo de la Plata region, the literature suggests that American-born blacks may have continued bozal linguistic patterns for a generation or more (Lipski 2001c). To the extent that the written documents attest the spontaneously produced interlanguage of foreign-born language learners, these bozal texts have little signiﬁcance for Latin American dialectology. On the other hand, if it can be demonstrated that consistent traits came to deﬁne Afro-Hispanic language in the New World, such as once occurred in Spain, the possibilities for a more profound linguistic contact are enhanced. If Afro-Hispanic speech ever reached the stage of creolization, or even attained the status of “restructured Spanish,” then a later process of decreolization might have resulted in a continuum of linguistic variation spanning the range between the earliest bozal language and the contemporary regional standards of Latin American Spanish. These are indeed important issues, and in addition to studying the development of AfroHispanic language in particular countries, we are led to consider the general patterns of language usage among Afro-Hispanics in Latin America. One of the earliest investigators to link Caribbean bozal Spanish to an earlier Afro-Lusitanian pidgin was Wagner (1949:101). Wagner’s comments lay fallow until the development of more ambitious theories of creolization and monogenesis. The ﬁrst attempt to document the presence of an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin among bozales in Latin America was Granda’s (1970) analysis of the observations of Alonso de Sandoval (1956:94). The latter, a (Spanish-born) Peruvian priest resident in Cartagena de Indias, remarked in 1627 that African slaves from S˜ao Tom´e spoke “con la comunicaci´on que con tan b´arbaras naciones han tenido el tiempo que han residido en San Thom´e, las entienden casi todas con un g´enero de lenguaje muy corrupto y revesado de la portuguesa que llaman lengua de San Thom´e . . .” The reference to some sort of Portuguese-based pidgin or creole is clear, but the implication that slaves from other regions also acquired an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin is not, since Sandoval’s quote continues: 18 19

Whinnom (1956, 1965), Thompson (1961), Naro (1978). Opposing views are represented by Bachiller y Morales (1883), Reinecke (1937), Alvarez Nazario (1974), Laurence (1974), Vald´es Bernal (1978, 1987), L´opez Morales (1980, 1998:ch. 5), Mart´ınez Gordo (1982), Alp´ızar Castillo (1987, 1989), and Lipski (1986a, 1986f, 1993, 1996a, 1998a, 1998c, 1999a, 2000a, 2001b, 2002a).

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“. . . al modo que ahora nosotros entendemos y hablamos con todo g´enero de negros y naciones con nuestra lengua espa˜nola corrupta, como com´unmente la hablan todos los negros.” Although Granda interprets Sandoval’s observations to mean that an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin formed a substrate for all Afro-Hispanic language in Cartagena (and by extrapolation, elsewhere in the Spanish American colonies), the ﬁnal sentence seems to indicate the opposite, namely that even Africans speaking the “lengua de San Thom´e” eventually acquired bozal Spanish. In any event, by the end of the eighteenth century, when the critical Caribbean bozal texts appear, Spain was acquiring few slaves from the Portuguese depot on S˜ao Tom´e. Granda (1971:483) unequivocally states: “. . . Cuba ha pose´ıdo y posee a´un entre su poblaci´on negra rastros y manifestaciones ling¨u´ısticas ‘criollas’ . . . uni´endose as´ı al ‘papiamento,’ al ‘palenquero’ . . . y a las manifestaciones puertorrique˜nas en la formaci´on de un ‘corpus’ dialectal ‘criollo’ de superestrato espa˜nol . . .” Granda (1972a:11) postulates that “no era impensable que el habla que sirvi´o de veh´ıculo de comunicaci´on normal entre los moradores de los barracones de esclavos importados de Africa hubiera pervivido, de generaci´on en generaci´on, por un proceso de continuidad ininterrumpida, renovado en cada nuevo caso de incorporaci´on de negros ‘bozales’ . . .” In turn, Perl (1984:53) believes that speakers of “espa˜nol relexiﬁcado y pidginizado” included not only African-born plantation slaves, but also “esclavos de plantaci´on nacidos en Cuba, esclavos dom´esticos y personas libres de color que no ten´ıan una posici´on social o que viv´ıan en lugares aislados.” Lapesa (1980:560) insists that “las postreras supervivencias del criollo espa˜nol parecen ser el habla ‘bozal’ que se usaba entre negros de Puerto Rico en el siglo pasado y todav´ıa entre los de Cuba a mediados del actual.” Vald´es Bernal (1978:86–87) poses the question ¿Ser´ıa el bozal un habla criolla como las hasta hoy conocidas variantes ‘criollo’-inglesa de Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago, Honduras Brit´anicas . . . la ‘criollo’-francesa de Hait´ı, Luisiana, Guadalupe . . . la ‘criollo’-holandesa ya en decadencia de las Islas V´ırgenes, y la ‘criollo’-portuguesa de Cura¸cao, Aruba y Bonaire? . . . en los primeros siglos de importaci´on de negros esclavos en Cuba (XVI–XVII) se daban las condiciones para que existiese un habla criolla, pues las diversas lenguas africanas habladas por los n´ucleos de esclavos no fueron sustituidas inmediatamente por el espa˜nol, por lo que debi´o existir un per´ıodo intermedio de ‘criollizaci´on’ de la ‘lingua franca’, el espa˜nol, seguido de otro de ‘descriollizaci´on’, dentro del marco de la poblaci´on de procedencia africana.

He even suggests that during the ﬁrst decades of the sixteenth century, Spanishborn blacks taken to the Caribbean colonies “muy bien pudieron ser el foco que originara el bozal, lo que signiﬁcar´ıa la introducci´on en Cuba del habla del negro nacido en Espa˜na.” While echoing the observation of Pichardo (1849) that “los negros criollos hablan como los blancos del pa´ıs de su nacimiento o vecindad,” Vald´es Bernal (1978:88–89) concludes that

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el habla ‘criolla’ o bozal ya a ﬁnales del siglo XIX iba desapareciendo, pues s´olo era utilizada por ‘negros de reciente introducci´on’ . . . otro testimonio de que el bozal ya estaba en v´ıas de desaparici´on de la Cuba del siglo XIX se deduce del hecho de que en la literatura costumbrista cubana generalmente aparece esta modalidad ‘criolla’ del espa˜nol en boca de negros oriundos del Africa o en negros – acaso nacidos en Cuba, o sea criollos – de muy avanzada edad, mientras que a los negros (y mulatos) j´ovenes – tambi´en criollos – no se les caracteriza en los di´alogos con el bozal . . .

Putative evidence of bozal Spanish turned creole in Cuba and Puerto Rico Among the pro-bozal creole studies, the existence of a prior stable AfroHispanic creole in Puerto Rico is based on a handful of texts analyzed by Alvarez Nazario (1974), principally the skit “La juega de gallos o el negro bozal” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #1). Alvarez Nazario demonstrated many parallels between the Puerto Rican texts and Afro-Iberian language from other regions and time periods, although his characterization of Puerto Rican bozal language as a “criollo afroespa˜nol” may refer to a non-native pidgin, rather than to a nativized creole. That the latter might indeed have existed in Puerto Rico was ﬁrst claimed by Germ´an de Granda, who notes:20 “. . . es f´acil demostrar el car´acter igualmente ‘criollo’ de la modalidad ling¨u´ıstica puertorrique˜na . . .” From this point forward the claim that an Afro-Hispanic creole was once spoken in Puerto Rico has never been seriously challenged, despite the fact that the case rests on such a small corpus.21 Among later studies of “Caribbean bozal Spanish,” little attention has been paid to a possible AfroHispanic creole in Puerto Rico, with the latter region usually lumped together with the more extensive Afro-Cuban corpus. The existence of a former Afro-Hispanic creole in Cuba has been forcefully asserted by a number of investigators. Wagner’s (1949:158) case was based on the poem “Yo bota lan garaf´o” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #26) and the “Di´alogo” between a negro criollo and a bozal (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #27). In a later and more comprehensive analysis, Granda (1971) made ample use of El monte by Lydia Cabrera, originally published in 1954, an anthropological text containing data on religious beliefs among Afro-Cubans, and which includes extensive imitations of bozal Spanish. Granda unquestioningly accepts the accuracy of Cabrera’s imitations, given her high reputation in other linguistic and folkloric matters. Otheguy (1973) adds to the list of creoloid traits mentioned by Granda, and claims that Cabrera’s work demonstrates the prior existence of an Afro-Hispanic creole in the Caribbean. Perl (1982) also refers to El monte, as well as to the brief bozal fragments from Miguel Barnet’s Autobiograf´ıa de un cimarr´on. Perl (1982:424) asserts that “. . . the 20

Granda (1968:194, fn. 4).

21

Lipski( 2001b).

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Cuban ‘habla bozal’ was no idiolectally determined jargon of the Blacks in the nineteenth century but a social variety of Spanish comparable with other varieties of Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles.” With respect to a possible extra-territorial origin, Perl (1982:423) suggests that “. . . especially the morphosyntactic features of the ‘habla bozal’ are very suitable for demonstrating the relations to other Iberian-based creoles and the embedding of the ‘habla bozal’ within the Creoles and the ‘intermediate varieties’ in the Caribbean area.” Ziegler (1981) assumes axiomatically that Afro-Cuban bozal Spanish constituted a deﬁnable creole, and attempted to write a grammar of this putative creole. Ziegler believes that Cuban bozal creole resulted from ﬁfteenth-century Portuguese, with later accretions from several West African languages, from nonstandard Spanish dialects, and from Jamaican creole English, carried by Jamaicans arriving in Havana in the eighteenth century. It is known, for example, that during the British occupation of Havana in 1763, tens of thousands of slaves were quickly imported into Cuba by the British.22 The minimal traces of Portuguese in surviving bozal texts is, according to Ziegler, due to sustained contact with non-creole Cuban Spanish. Megenney (1984a, 1985a) adopts Ziegler’s evidence, and groups “Afro-Cuban creole” together with Palenquero and Papiamento in a comparative analysis of Portuguese-inﬂuenced Latin American creoles. Valkhoff (1966:116) states, without further discussion, that the only surviving Spanish-based creoles are “Malayo-Spanish” of the Philippines (i.e. Chabacano), “Negro-Spanish of Cuba,” and Papiamento. Holm (1989:305–09) is more cautious, speaking only of “restructured Spanish” in the Caribbean, and noting that while there is ample evidence of a Spanish pidgin in nineteenthcentury Cuba, it is not clear that a true creole developed. Speaking of the possibility for creolization of Spanish in Cuba, Reinecke (1937:269) noted that “conditions, one would assume, were eminently favorable for the formation of a Cuban Spanish creole dialect,” although admitting that “the jargon [i.e. bozal] speech was there, but there is no indication that it took deﬁnite shape” (271). The Afro-Lusitanian theory is based on tenuous evidence of Portuguese participation in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave trade to Cuba, together with similarities between the putative Cuban bozal creole and the acknowledged creoles Papiamento and Palenquero, for which Afro-Portuguese roots may be more uncontroversially established. For Puerto Rico, the case is even more precarious, for only two literary texts (for which a possible imitation of Cuban models cannot be entirely excluded) establish claims of a stable AfroHispanic creole, and the parallels with Papiamento and Palenquero are therefore even more limited. In view of these considerations, not all investigators have accepted the notion that any stable Afro-Hispanic creole was ever spoken in the Caribbean. 22

Knight (1970:7).

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Presumed creole features of bozal Spanish Bozal Spanish is not currently spoken, and its existence is documented only indirectly, in literary imitations, travelers’ accounts and anthropological studies. Although scholars who support the bozal qua creole hypothesis are not in total agreement as to the features in Afro-Caribbean Spanish texts which bespeak earlier creolization, the following traits – found in written texts – are most frequently mentioned:23 (1) Preverbal aspectual particles combined with an invariant verbal stem. The most suggestive element is ta, acting variously as imperfective, progressive, or habitual particle:24 ¿Po que t´u no ta quer´e a m´ı? (Ram´on Caballero, “La juega de gallos o el negro bozal”; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #1) Horita ta ben´ı pa c´a (Ignacio Villa, “Drumi, Mobila”; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #8) R´ıo seco ta corre mamba (Fernando Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #7) Como que yo ta cuch´a la gente que habla tanto . . . yo ta mir´a gente mucho (Manuel Cabrera Paz, “Exclamaciones de un negro”; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #3) Primero ta llor´a na m´a. (Mar´ıa de Santa Cruz, Historias campesinas; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #18) Ta ju´ı, ta puj´a m´ı, si˜no´ (Anselmo Su´arez y Romero, Francisco; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #11)

In a few cases it might be possible to argue that spontaneous developments took place, e.g. when ta is clearly derived from esta(r) where erosion of gerund is involved: Que to mi cuepo me et´a tembl´a (Lydia Cabrera, Reglas de congo; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #64) pavo real ta buc´an palo (Lydia Cabrera, El monte; Chapter Five Appendix AfroCuba #38) yo est´a cort´a un ca˜nas (Ismael Consuegra Guzm´an, “Yo est´a cort´a un ca˜nas”; Feij´oo 1979:102).

In other cases, however, the verbs in question are habitual or durative, contexts where Spanish would not use any combination involving estar. 23 24

For an analysis of the development of the particle ta, see Lipski (1986g, 1987b, 1991b, 1992c). Lipski (1986g, 1987b, 1991b, 1992c).

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This residue is among the few sure indicators of an infusion of creole elements into bozal language. Less convincing cases have been made for preverbal ya as a past/ perfective marker and for invariant va as a future/irrealis marker, as seen in chapters 5 and 8. It is difﬁcult to unequivocally assign particle status to these elements, since va is frequently used in the Spanish periphrastic future (although exhibiting full subject-verb agreement), while ya is a commonly used sentential adverb. In most instances, bozal ya occurs before subject pronouns (like Papiamento future/irrealis lo) rather than preverbally, as is the case with the particle ya/ja in other Ibero-Romance based creoles, as well as representing the most usual conﬁguration in Spanish. When the subject is a full NP, ya appears after the subject. In some instances, the placement of these elements in immediately preverbal position, together with the lack of subject-verb agreement in the case of va and the presence of accompanying adverbs with ya may signal grammaticalization of these elements as preverbal particles. (2) Double negation. This combination, also found in vernacular Spanish of the predominantly Afro-American communities in the Colombian Choc´o and in vernacular Dominican Spanish, is found in a handful of nineteenthcentury Afro-Cuban texts:25 yo no so pobre, no (Ben´ıtez del Cristo, Los novios catedr´aticos; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #29) Yo no so planeta, no (Ben´ıtez del Cristo, Los novios catedr´aticos; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #29). No moja no (Lydia Cabrera, Francisco y Francisca; Chapter Five Appendix AfroCuba #30) No e´ m´ıo, no (Lydia Cabrera, Francisco y Francisca; Chapter Five Appendix AfroCuba #30) no se˜no´ , yo no soy cuchara, no (Lydia Cabrera, El monte; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #38) El amo no quiere matar Eugenio, no (Malpica la Barca, En el cafetal; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #19) Yo no bebe guariente, no (Francisco Fern´andez, Los negros catedr´aticos; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #47). . . . yo pens´a que mama suyo que lo par´ı nelle no lo va a cu˜nus´e, no (Jos´e Crespo y Borb´on “Creto Gang´a”; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #63) alma mio no va a juntar no, con cuerpo de otra gente . . . (Duque de Estrada, Catecismo para negros bozales; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #65) 25

Jim´enez Sabater (1975:170), Benavides (1985), Megenney (1990a:121–28), Schwegler (1996a).

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Recent ﬁeld work among elderly Afro-Cubans by Ortiz L´opez (1998) has revealed only the most exceptional retentions of this combination in Cuba; there are no known attestations of double negation in Puerto Rico or other Caribbean Spanish dialects (with the exception of one isolated Venezuelan case). Double negation occurs in the Afro-Lusitanian creoles of the Gulf of Guinea, in the vernacular Portuguese spoken in the working-class neighborhoods or musseques of Luanda, Angola, and in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, with a strong African basis. Schwegler and Megenney trace this pattern to Bantu languages, particularly Kimbundu and Kikongo, where a combination of an (invariable) preposed negative element and an often variable postverbal negative element are used. Schwegler (1996a) has proposed that the vestigial remains of double negation in contemporary AfroHispanic dialects are evidence that an earlier pan-Caribbean Spanish creole with Afro-Portuguese roots once employed double negation. There are no known Spanish dialectal antecedents for such a construction. (3) Use of the invariant subject pronoun elle/nelle for masculine and feminine, singular and, sometimes, plural referents (Chapter 10 Appendix # 1). This pronoun is still remembered and occasionally used by elderly AfroCubans living in isolated rural communities.26 Other Ibero-Romance based creoles use the Portuguese-derived pronoun ele (with several variants) for masculine and feminine referents. Alvarez Nazario (1974:185–97) feels that semantic replacement of a preposition plus an article (as in na) has occurred. There is, however, no plausible source in the case of (n)elle. The [y] represented by ll is presumably derived from ella, ellas, and ellos; neither Portuguese eˆ le nor similar forms in Papiamento, Palenquero, S˜ao Tomense, etc., provide a source for the [y]. Schwegler (1996b) has attempted to phonologically derive Afro-Caribbean elle from Afro-Portuguese ele, but it is more likely that the common denominators represented by the Spanish pronouns ella, ellos, ellas, ello provided the phonotactic template. However, neither a gender-invariant third person pronoun nor a subject pronoun ending in -e is attested in non-Africanized Spanish dialects. The pronoun ele for e´ l is occasionally heard in the Colombian Choc´o and in the Afro-Ecuadorian communities of the Chota Valley. Schwegler (1996b) has proposed that these are carryovers of an originally Portuguese-based creole; however, it is not possible to rule out paragogic vowels, and not necessarily due to African phonotactic inﬂuences. For example, the traditional Spanish of northern New Mexico frequently exhibits phrase-ﬁnal paragogic vowels, especially after verbal inﬁnitives, but hearing ele for e´ l is not impossible.27 26 27

Ortiz (1998). See Hills (1906), Espinosa (1909:138), McSpadden (1934), Rael (1937), Hern´andez-Ch´avez and P´erez (1991).

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(4) Traits found in many Afro-Caribbean bozal texts but no longer heard in any variety of Caribbean Spanish include omission of deﬁnite articles, loss of common prepositions, especially de and a, frequent loss of noun-adjective and subject-verb agreement, and elimination of the complementizer que. All bespeak the partial acquisition of Spanish as a second language, but do not necessarily presuppose creolization of bozal Spanish. (5) Traits still common to vernacular Caribbean Spanish which have at times been attributed to a previous creole or semi-creole stage include noninverted questions of the sort ¿Qu´e t´u quieres?; preposed subjects of inﬁnitives, of the sort para t´u hacer eso; and categorical use of normally redundant overt subject pronouns. In addition to these common denominators, other linguistic features of Afro-Iberian language have at times been used as the basis for monogenetic Portuguese-pidgin theories and claims that Afro-Hispanic language once creolized. These include: (1) Use of the second person singular pronoun bo(s) < vos, instead of t´u. This pronoun is found in Palenquero and Papiamento, but is very rare in Cuban bozal Spanish,28 and is not found in Puerto Rican texts; vos is also found in most Portuguese-based creoles in Africa and Asia, and in Philippine Creole Spanish. At the same time, use of vos is common in many Spanish American regions, including parts of coastal Venezuela, and vos was used vestigially in Cuba (but not in Puerto Rico) until well into the twentieth century, precisely in the region whence come the few examples of vos in bozal Spanish.29 Among other Afro-Hispanic manifestations in Latin America, use of second person forms of address generally follows regional Spanish usage; thus t´u is found in texts from Mexico, Venezuela, most of Colombia, Peru,30 northwestern Ecuador and even in such areas of widespread voseo as Argentina and Uruguay. The Panamanian negros congos use t´u exclusively both in the congo dialect and in the local Spanish dialect, despite the fact that other areas of Panama are characterized by the voseo.31 Among contemporary (non-creole) Afro-Hispanic dialects, only the Chota Valley dialect of Ecuador regularly employs vos,32 and this follows regional Spanish usage. (2) Neutralization of pronominal case, usually in favor of disjunctive pronouns. In addition to the use of vos, Palenquero and Papiamento employ variants of the disjunctive pronoun mi for subjects and objects, but use of mi as subject is vanishingly rare in nineteenth-century Caribbean bozal texts, except in imitation of Haitian creole speakers’ pidgin Spanish in the Dominican Republic,33 or where Papiamento speakers are implicated. 28 30 31 33

29 Pichardo (1849:12), L´ E.g. Ballagas (1946:92). opez Morales (1971:136–42). In alternation with vos (L´opez Alb´ujar 1966:72). 32 Lipski (1989), Robe 1960). Lipski (1986e, 1987a). Juan Antonio Alix, in Rodr´ıguez Demorizi (1973:267–90).

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(3) Use of subject pronouns as possessives. Papiamento and Palenquero, as well as Afro-Lusitanian and French creoles regularly use some variant of the subject pronouns as possessive markers, sometimes postposed to the respective nouns. Such usage is conspicuously absent in Latin American bozal Spanish, even in the Caribbean, and is also absent in bozal Spanish texts of previous centuries. (4) Use of the third person plural subject pronoun (usually postposed) as a nominal plural marker. This combination is usual in Papiamento (e.g. buki ‘book,’ bukinan ‘books’), as well as in most French creoles, and may have occurred in nineteenth-century Caribbean bozal speech in the form of the pronoun nan (variant lan) of possible Papiamento origin: como lan gallo cuando pelea;34 me garra po nan pasa.35 However, this form, while at times used as deﬁnite article and possibly as a nominal plural marker (always preposed, unlike in Papiamento), was never used as a true subject pronoun in bozal Spanish.36 Palenquero does not use the third person plural pronoun to signal nominal plurality, but rather employs the (preposed) marker ma: ma ngaina utere e´ ten pete ‘your chickens stink.’37 (5) Use of invariant third person subject pronouns, of the form ele/e/a for the singular, and eles (Papiamento nan, Palenquero an´e) for the plural.38 The scarcity of nan among bozal Spanish dialects has already been discussed, but use of a single third person variant39 instead of the normal masculine/feminine dyad is found variably in nineteenth-century Caribbean bozal speech: si yo lo ten´e uno ni˜no como nelle, yo va mur´ı de cuntentamienta.40 In other attestations of bozal Spanish, there is occasional confusion of e´ l and ella and of ellos and ellas, but systematic neutralization in favor of a single third person form is not reﬂected in any known text, although such may have occurred for some bozal communities.41 34 35

36

37 38 39 40 41

Cuba; Cruz (1974:118). Puerto Rico; Alvarez Nazario (1974:387). Alvarez Nazario (1959:46; 1974:197) and Valkhoff (1966:96) consider this possibility, while DeBose (1974) suggests that Papiamento nan may come from Spanish est´an or Portuguese estam [sic]. See Lipski (1987c) for a further analysis of this word. It is also possible that the ﬁnal /n/ of lan/nan results from the nasalization of the ﬁnal /s/ of the deﬁnite articles los/las, since this process is also attested for bozal Spanish: Bachiller y Morales (1883:100–01), Ben´ıtez del Cristo (1930:132), Cruz (1974:37), Vald´es Bernal (1978), Perl (1981), Lipski (1992b). Friedemann and Pati˜no Rosselli (1983:148). Granda (1968, 1978), Otheguy (1973), Alleyne (1980:11–13). Usually elle/nelle; Alvarez Nazario (1974:190), Cruz (1974:168). Cuba; Cruz (1974:117–18). Schwegler (1996b) has uncovered occasional use of ele in the Afro-Ecuadoran Chota Valley community, and Ru´ız Garc´ıa (2000) has found what may be a few examples of this undifferentiated pronoun in the Colombian Choc´o dialect.

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(6) Loss of the copula.42 All principal Afro-Hispanic creoles, including Papiamento and Palenquero, offer an alternative to the zero option; Papiamento has ta, presumably derived from the verb estar, while Palenquero has both ta and e´ , with occasional jue and send´a.43 In nineteenth-century Caribbean bozal Spanish several examples of loss of the copula are found, in alternation with correct and incorrect use of the copulative verbs ser and estar; substantially the same holds for other Afro-Hispanic dialects in Latin America, although use of some form of the copula is the general rule. In Golden Age bozal Spanish and Portuguese, the copula was frequently present, in the form of the verb sar, apparently a blend of ser and estar.44 (7) Lack of gender and number agreement in nouns and adjectives. From the earliest attestations of Africanized Spanish and Portuguese, gender and number have been unstable and variable, usually resulting in incorrect assignment of gender, partial lapses in adjectival-nominal agreement, use of incorrect articles, use of singular forms for plural referents and vice versa. However, with the exception of established creoles such as Papiamento, Chabacano and Palenquero, such neutralization was never carried to completion. (8) Loss of deﬁnite and indeﬁnite articles. Despite the fact that this feature has been pointed out as a common feature of Afro-Hispanic creoles,45 loss of articles is neither complete nor systematic in any dialect.46 Rather, as with reduction of nominal inﬂection, loss of articles is sporadic, somewhat idiosyncratic, and subject to modiﬁcation during the ﬁrst stages of decreolization, as well as in the beginning stages of language erosion. (9) Loss of prepositions.47 Many specimens of bozal Spanish contain high rates of loss of de and a, but this is not sufﬁcient to postulate a common origin for Afro-Hispanic creoles, since the same traits are found in vernacular and vestigial Spanish worldwide. (10) Use of tener instead of haber as the existential verb. Among bozal Spanish texts, use of tener with existential force is quite rare; one example is:48 en botica tien de t´o. Much more frequent is the use of haber, albeit with highly nonstandard forms and syntactic patterns: yo lo ve craramiente que lo hab´e en la mundo quiene me lo ten´e inﬁsi´on y g¨uena golunt´a.49 (11) Categorical use of normally redundant subject pronouns.50 Even in noncreole Spanish dialects categorical use of subject pronouns may arise 42 43 44 45 47 48

Alvarez Nazario (1959:46, 1974:115–20), Ziegler (1981), Perl (1982). Friedemann and Pati˜no Rosselli (1983:130), Lipski (1999c, 2002c). (Alvarez Nazario (1974:121), Naro (1978:342), Lipski (1999c, 2002c). 46 Janson (1984). E.g. by Alvarez Nazario (1959:46), Granda (1968), Perl (1982). Alvarez Nazario (1959, 1974), Granda (1968, 1972a, 1978), Otheguy (1973), Ziegler (1981), Perl (1982, 1985, 1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c). 49 Cruz (1974:230). 50 E.g. Otheguy (1973), Perl (1982). Cabrera (1969).

298

(12)

(13)

(14)

(15)

(16)

51 53 54 56 57 58 59

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when, for example, natural processes of consonantal reduction (e. g. /s/ > [h] > Ø; /n/ > [˜v] > Ø) partially obliterate verbal endings; this has occurred in some parts of Andalusia and in Caribbean Spanish.51 Constructions based on a p r e p o s i t i o n (frequently para) + s u b j e c t p r o n o u n + i n f i n i t i v e instead of a subordinate clause involving the conjunction que and a subjunctive verb form: pa t´u tener = para que t´u tengas ‘in order for you to have.’52 This combination is frequent in popular Spanish of southern Spain and the Canary Islands, and is attested in many areas of Latin America;53 it is likely to have arisen spontaneously in more than one area, since it results from the reduction of a marked conjugated form to the maximally unmarked inﬁnitive, as occurs in Spanish child language.54 The frequent Caribbean preposing of m´as in negative expressions (m´as nada ‘no more,’ m´as nunca ‘never again’) instead of the more usual phrase-ﬁnal position has been claimed as the result of earlier Portuguesebased creole language.55 The Portuguese connection is quite likely, but the presence of this construction in Caribbean Spanish is more likely due to the heavy Galician and Canary Island inﬂuence, in which such constructions (apparently due to earlier Galician-Portuguese maritime contacts) are common.56 Postposed demonstratives, of the form piera ese ‘that rock’.57 Within bozal Spanish texts, postposed demonstratives are used very infrequently; the above example stands nearly alone, set against preposed demonstratives and lack of demonstratives. The portmanteau preposition na (found in many African and Asian Portuguese creoles, in Philippine Creole Spanish, Papiamento, and Palenquero, and in some bozal dialects58 ) with varying values including ‘on,’ ‘in,’ ‘to,’ has been attributed to Portuguese na < em + a ‘in the (f.).’59 This form may have multiple origins, given its phonological simplicity as a maximally unmarked CV element and the nature of creoles, pidgins, and bozal speech as approximative varieties. Perhaps the most frequently cited structural parallel among Afro-Iberian creoles is the use of verbal aspectual particles in combination with

52 Alvarez Nazario (1959:46). Mond´ejar (1970), Poplack (1980). Fl´orez (1946:377), Padr´on (1949:164), Kany (1951:159). 55 Megenney (1985a). Gili Gaya (1960:29, 1972). P´erez Vidal (1944), Kany (1951:363–4), D’Albuquerque (1953), Alvarez Nazario (1972b:95), Lorenzo Ramos (1976), Torres Stinga (1981). Taylor (1971), Otheguy (1973), Ziegler (1981), Cabrera (1983:108). For example in Venezuela; Aretz de Ram´on y Rivera and Ram´on de Rivera (1955:72): tres corona na mi mano “three crowns in my hand.” E.g. by Whinnom (1956, 1965), Taylor (1971), Megenney (1984a, 1985a); for an assessment of na in Philippine Creole Spanish also Lipski (1988b).

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unconjugated verb stems; the particle ta is used for present/imperfective and durative aspect, with ya/ja and sometimes ba a frequent concomitant in the past/imperfective.60 Among bozal Spanish dialects, however, the combination ta + Vinf is found only in nineteenth-century Cuban and Puerto Rican texts, where this construction alternates with the archetypical bozal pattern of partially or incorrectly conjugated verb forms.61 Such expressions were unknown in Golden Age Spanish and Portuguese texts, despite the fact that such Afro-Iberian dialects as those of Annobon, S˜ao Tom´e, Palenquero, Saramaccan and Papiamento were apparently formed during this time period; among Latin American bozal texts, no trace of aspectual particles is found in any region other than Cuba and Puerto Rico,62 and in the latter countries only following the turn of the nineteenth century. While the existence of aspectual particles in Palenquero and Papiamento are likely results of common or shared Afro-Iberian antecedents, the presence of such particles in nineteenth-century Cuban and Puerto Rican bozal speech are more likely the consequence of the importation of Papiamentoand other creole-speaking slaves into these nations around the beginning of the nineteenth century.63 Similarities and differences in bozal Spanish The preceding overview has demonstrated considerable disparities among bozal Spanish manifestations, in which the three special Latin American cases (Papiamento, Palenquero, and nineteenth-century Cuban/Puerto Rican bozal speech) form a nucleus of shared characteristics which suggest Afro-Iberian origin, whereas other Afro-Hispanic manifestations over a period of nearly four centuries, exhibit more diversity. The very earliest attempts at representing bozal Spanish, in sixteenth-century Spain, are merely imitations of contemporary Portuguese literary patterns, while also reﬂecting the speech of slaves recently 60

61 62

63

A partial list of investigators who have used the existence of particles like ta as evidence of a common origin for Afro-Iberian creoles and for the existence of an Afro-Lusitanian basis for Caribbean bozal Spanish includes Alvarez Nazario (1959, 1974), Granda (1968, 1969, 1972a, 1978), Taylor (1971), Otheguy (1973), Naro (1978), Alleyne (1980:11–13), Ziegler (1981), Perl (1982, 1985), Megenney (1984a, 1985a). For an alternative interpretation, Muysken (1981a). Lipski (1986g, 1987b, 1991b, 1992c, 1993, 1996a, 1998a, 1998c, 1999a, 2000a). Some examples come from the Dominican Republic, in a poem by Alix purporting to represent a Haitian creole speaker’s rudimentary attempts at speaking Spanish (Rodr´ıguez Demorizi 1973:270): manque tu t´a d´ı que no ‘although you say no.’ The existence of aspectual particles in this context is not surprising, given their usage in Haitian Creole (Lipski 1994a). Tompkins (1981:311) cites an older Afro-Peruvian informant in Ca˜nete, who recalled a line from an old song: Lima ta hablar y Ca˜nete ta pond´e. This suggests that at least some creoloid verb forms may have occasionally surfaced in Afro-Peruvian speech, although apparently never coalescing into a consistent pattern. Alvarez Nazario (1959, 1974:65, 218–9), Granda (1973a).

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arrived from Portugal. From the middle of the sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth bozal Spanish existed in its own right in various regions, with the following shared features: (1) Unstable and variable nominal gender and occasionally number inﬂection. (2) Unstable verb conjugation, manifested as incorrect conjugated forms (often gravitating toward the third person singular) and occasional uninﬂected inﬁnitives. (3) Variable loss of deﬁnite and indeﬁnite articles. (4) Varible loss of prepositions, especially a and de. (5) Occasional confusion of pronominal case (usually involving the ﬁrst person singular pronouns), at times resulting in use of disjunctive pronouns as subject (m´ı saber) and at other times in the use of subject pronouns as verbal or prepositional objects (para yo). (6) Frequent phonetic and phonological deformation, at times reﬂecting regular processes (loss of syllable-ﬁnal /s/, /l/, and /r/; neutralization and interchange of syllable-ﬁnal /l/ and /r/; neutralization of /r/ and /rr/ and of /r/, /l/, and /d/), and equally as often representing more idiosyncratic deformations and misidentiﬁcations. Of the above features common to Peninsular and Latin American bozal Spanish, all are frequently found in vestigial Spanish worldwide in which no African connection can be demonstrated. They are also found in the non-creole Spanish of Equatorial Guinea and in cases of marginal bilingualism with nonAfrican languages in such areas as Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, etc.64 Moreover, features (1), (4) and (6) are frequently found in popular rural Spanish of many regions, and features (2) and (5) are not unknown in nonstandard Spanish dialects. All of these characteristics are natural consequences of imperfect learning, of the possible interference of a variety of non-Romance languages, of the lack of a wide pool of adequate native speaker models, and the absence of individual and societal monitoring and feedback mechanisms that would partially counteract reductive tendencies. The fact that the same features are found in established Romance- and English-based creoles is less indicative of potentially common origins than of quasi-universal tendencies of drift, reduction, and structural simpliﬁcation. In particular, none of the features points convincingly to an Afro-Iberian base for general bozal Spanish. Although Africanized Spanish was widely represented in Latin America over a period of nearly 300 years, a high degree of homogeneity never existed from one region to another, except for those features resulting naturally from imperfect learning, and any early Afro-Lusitanian basis either disappeared among later

64

Riley (1952), Gifford (1973), Meli´a (1974, 1980), Siade (1974), Cerr´on-Palomino (1976), Usher de Herreros (1976), Granda (1979), Welti (1979), Quant and Irigoyen (1980), Muysken (1981b).

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shipments of slaves or was subsequently neutralized once the recently arrived bozales came into contact with substantial Spanish-speaking populations. Creole-to-creole contacts in the Spanish Caribbean One promising area of research, which has emerged only recently, suggests that contacts between Spanish and already established creole languages in the Caribbean setting account for many of the linguistic pecularities which have been used to bolster claims of earlier creolization. The events in question are not of early colonial origin, but rather occurred principally during the demographic and economic upheavals of the nineteenth-century Caribbean, in some instances carrying over well into the twentieth century. For this reason, the linguistic traces of these creoles are still observable in vestigial and isolated communities in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, all of which are Afro-American. The AfroEuropean creoles in question all share signiﬁcant structural similarities with one another, and in the absence of demographic and linguistic documentation, the traces of Caribbean creoles in vestigial Afro-Caribbean Spanish are potentially indistinguishable from structures to be expected if the Spanish dialect itself had passed through a creole stage. The historical circumstances giving rise to Spanish-creole contacts in the Caribbean varied from one region to another, and also varied according to the time period. In the Dominican Republic, contact with Caribbean creoles resulted in part from the shared history of the island of Espa˜nola and the highly permeable Spanish-Haitian Creole interface. To this natural coexistence is added a gradually increasing labor force from other Caribbean islands, beginning early in the twentieth century. The presence of Caribbean creoles in Puerto Rico was even more limited, due to the minimal importance of large plantation agriculture. Most speakers of creole languages found in Puerto Rico are occasional arrivals from neighboring islands, whose impact on the island’s linguistic proﬁle is negligible. It is in Cuba that the greatest demographic upheavals occurred, beginning early in the nineteenth century and continuing through the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. The voracious labor demands, coupled with Cuba’s geographical location and already linguistically diverse population, resulted in a patchwork of languages and dialects whose traces can still be detected. The preceding chapters have documented the presence of French creoles, Caribbean English creoles and West African pidgin English, Negerhollands, Papiamento, Chinese pidgin Spanish and possibly Macao Portuguese creole, and US Black English in the Spanish Caribbean, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to the well-studied dichotomy between natively spoken Spanish vs. Africanized bozal language, the labor demands of the second half of the nineteenth century brought in speakers of many structurally (and possibly genetically) related creole languages. In some instances

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the historical record provides direct testimony as to the manner in which such individuals learned and used Spanish, while in other cases the possible linguistic consequences must be extrapolated from available demographic information. It is unlikely that any single creole language signiﬁcantly altered Afro-Caribbean Spanish during the contact period; a more likely scenario entails the mutual reinforcement of certain creoloid patterns which may or may not have been present in bozal Spanish, but which would be familiar to speakers of structurally cognate Afro-Caribbean creoles, and would be extended beyond normal expectations. Matters are not helped by the fact that writers of the time had little interest in Afro-American ethnography; any black individual who produced grammatically “deviant” or simply nonstandard Spanish was dismissed as a bozal, even during the latter decades of the nineteenth century when black laborers born on other Caribbean islands far outnumbered African-born bozales. The heavy African cultural and ethnic presence in the Spanish Caribbean has often been taken uncritically as proof that any unusual feature of Caribbean Spanish is due to African inﬂuence. When to the mix is added a corpus of creole-like language formerly attributed to blacks in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the equation seems complete: Spanish once creolized in Latin America, at least among the population of African origin, and this creole gradually percolated up to encompass all local varieties of Spanish. This would make Caribbean Spanish much like English as spoken by Jamaicans, or French as spoken by Haitians, except that in the Spanish Caribbean the creole itself would have disappeared, leaving only fossil imprints in vernacular Spanish. The facts, however, do not support this simple equation. Conditions favoring the formation of a stable creole never existed in the Spanish Caribbean. A much more reasonable route for creole-like characteristics of earlier Afro-Caribbean Spanish, as well as contemporary vernacular varieties, is the impact of established creole languages, which in one guise or another formed the linguistic backbone of the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Regardless of the European language which provided their lexicon, these creoles already shared considerable similarity with one another, due both to universal aspects of creolization, and to commonly recurring patterns in key groups of West African and European languages. In the linguistic proving ground of nineteenth-century Caribbean plantations, simply throwing Spanish together with any of the Caribbean creoles, or better yet with several, would yield strikingly similar results, which might be superﬁcially indistinguishable from the effects of spontaneous creolization of Spanish. Among some of the creoloid features found in some Caribbean bozal Spanish texts attributable to possible contact with the creole languages mentioned above are: (1) Double negation in colloquial Dominican Spanish and in some nineteenthcentury Afro-Cuban bozal texts. Probable source: Haitian Creole. Recently,

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(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

303

double negation has also been reported for the Spanish of the G¨uiria Peninsula of Venezuela,65 where Spanish was in contact with Trinidadian French creole, which uses both double negation (with postposed no(n)) and double afﬁrmation. Ortiz L´opez (1999a) discovered cases of double negation in the pidginized Spanish spoken by elderly Haitians in Cuba. Realization of intervocalic /d/ as a stop [d] or ﬂap [r] in Villa Mella, Saman´a, and Afro-Dominican poror´o dialects. Probable source: American Black English and Haitian Creole. Use of preverbal ta + i n f i n i t i v e , found in some nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican texts. Probable source: Papiamento, with slight possibility for Macao creole Portuguese reinforcement in Chinese-Cuban laborer groups. Use of (a)m´ı as subject pronoun in some nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban texts. Probable source: Papiamento and/or West African Pidgin English, with possible reinforcement by Negerhollands, Jamaican Creole English, and among Chinese laborers, China Coast Pidgin English. This usage never took hold in the Spanish Caribbean, probably because it was highly stigmatized from the outset (this substitution is very common in early child language, and also was found in the ﬁrst Afro-Iberian language from Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century). Errors of subject-verb and noun-adjective agreement in Saman´a, Dominican Republic.66 Probable source: American Black English and Haitian Creole (i.e. Spanish not spoken natively in this area). Categorical use of normally redundant subject pronouns in Afro-Caribbean Spanish. Caribbean Spanish is noted for its high use of overt subject pronouns, partially in compensation for the extensive loss of ﬁnal consonants (especially /s/) in verbal endings. However, all of the pidgin and creole languages that came into contact with nineteenth-century bozal Spanish in the Caribbean require overt subject pronouns, since there is no verbal inﬂection. Thus, any speaker of an Afro-European pidgin or creole would further extend the already existent Caribbean tendency towards overt subject pronouns. Conclusions

The debate on the possible creolization of Caribbean Spanish is far from over, and the language contact data surveyed in the present study in no way invalidate the serious scholarship which has taken place on all facets of the controversy. By seeing the nineteenth-century Caribbean as a rich tapestry of interacting languages, many of which shared structural similarities, the task of deciding 65

Llorente (1994, 1995).

66

Gonz´alez and Benavides (1982).

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whether a truly creolized Spanish – whether spontaneously generated or transferred from other places and times – becomes harder rather than easier, since the simple presence of a creoloid conﬁguration in attested or reconstructed Afro-Hispanic language cannot be taken uncritically as evidence of creolized Spanish. Much as in physical archaeology, the reconstruction of prior linguistic epochs is an evolving science that relies on methodological improvements, theoretical reﬁnements, and ongoing discovery of raw materials. The inclusion of creole-to-creole contacts in the Hispanic Caribbean is offered as a modest contribution to this endeavor. The last word on the status of Afro-Hispanic language in the Americas has yet to be written.

References

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Index

abaku´a, Afro-Cuban 11 Acapulco, Mexico, Africans in 2, 43, 97 Acosta-Rubio, Ra´ul 161–162 Acosta Saignes, Miguel 127, 129 Acu˜na de Figueroa, Francisco 102 Adamwa-Ubangui language family 199 afﬁrmation, double, see double afﬁrmation Africa, slavery 20–21 African-American English, United States 5, 85, 114, 148, 213, 301, 303 Africanisms in Spanish 4 Afro-Asiatic language family 198 Afro-Caribbean Spanish 276 Afro-Cuban language 8, 234–236, 243, 251–253, 259, 263, 268, 276, 281, 285, 299, 301 Afro-Lusitanian elements in Spanish texts 72–73 Afro-Peruvian language 242, 243, 264, 268 Afro-Portuguese pidgin 6, 74 Afro-Puerto Rican language 235–236, 276, 299 Aguado, Sim´on 41, 42, 82–83, 218 Aguirre Beltr´an, Gonzalo 47, 138, 142 Aimes, Hubert 103 Ajuda 38 Akan languages and peoples 18, 19, 39, 60, 97, 106, 200, 202, 203, 214, 217, 218, 247, 256, 269, 271 Alba, Julio 162–163 Alix, Juan Antonio 149, 174–175 Alleyne, Mervyn 206–208, 219 Alonso, Manuel 184 Althoff, F. Daniel 138 Alvarez de Peralta, Jos´e 112 Alvarez Nazario, Manuel 115, 147, 178, 183, 223, 233, 236, 283, 290, 294 Alzola, Concepci´on Teresa 153 (a)m´ı, subject pronoun 30, 53, 54, 57, 58, 67, 73, 82, 93, 158, 162, 249, 275, 276, 303 Amaro, Ana Maria 70

352

Andalusia 32 slavery in 43, 74 Spanish dialects 76, 78, 87, 89, 189, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 240, 251, 252, 298 Andean region 9, 251, 252, 279 Andrews, George Reid 103 Angola 11, 25, 27–29, 34–38, 41, 44, 47, 48, 55, 60, 66, 101, 103, 115, 120–122, 126, 198, 200, 219, 242, 247, 258 Portuguese dialects 20, 29, 56, 63, 70, 230, 232, 241, 257, 258, 261, 268, 294 Angola Maconde, Juan 138 Angolar creole language 226 Annob´on creole language and people 6, 54, 55, 66, 69, 108, 219, 220, 226, 228, 231, 235, 270, 275, 299 Arabic language and people 18, 24, 198, 266 Arag´on, slavery in 19 Arar´a language and people 11, 105, 122, 126, 198 Araujo, Juan de 130 Ardra 36, 66, 105 Aretz de Ram´on, Isabel 193 Argentina Africans in 2, 46, 100–103, 129, 142–145, 216, 220, 229, 243, 258 Italians in 4 Spanish dialects 260, 295, 300 Arguin Island 24, 36 Arizona, Africans in 2 Arona, Juan de 134 articles deﬁnite 57, 141, 149, 179, 180, 196, 267–268, 275, 295, 297, 300 indeﬁnite 275, 297, 300 asiento, slaving monopoly 33, 35, 37, 44, 107, 121, 125 Asturian language 75 Atkins, Guy 208 Atlantic-Congo language family 199 Atlantic language family, see West Atlantic language family

Index Austen, Ralph 18 Auto de Vicente Anes Joeira, anonymous play 58 Avellaneda, Francisco de 88 Avila, Spain, slavery in 43 Ayacucho, Peru 133 Aymara language and people 137–138 Azevedo, Rafael Avila de 69 Bachiller y Morales, Antonio 146, 154–156, 284 Badajoz, Spain 73 Bahia, Brazil, Africans in 46 Bai, invariant form of ir 58, 61 Bakongo, see Congo Balearic Islands, slavery in 15 Ballagas, Emilio 168 Bambara language and people 106, 199, 246, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271 Bantu languages 9, 19, 70, 200–201, 204, 242, 247, 266 Bari, slavery in 15 Barlovento region, Venezuela 285 Barnet, Miguel 169, 290 Basque country, Spain, slavery in 43 Basque dialect of Spanish 88, 92, 93 Basque language and people 3 Bassein, India 31 Batalha, Graciete Nogueira 69 Batavia, Indonesia 30 Benavides, Celso 177 Benguela 28, 34, 37, 103, 257 Benin modern nation 11, 26, 32, 34–40, 44, 66, 103, 105, 199 ancient kingdom 18, 39, 40 Ben´ıtez del Cristo, Ignacio 293 Berber language and people 24, 198 Berbesi language and people 47 Berbice, Guyana 34, 246 Berbice Dutch creole 106, 199, 246–247 Bergman, Hannah 88 Biafada, see Biafara language and people Biafara language and people 47, 115, 126, 247 Bib´ı language and people 105 Bijago language and people 248 Bilad Ghana 23 Bioko (Fernando Poo) 211 Bissau 25 Black English, US, see African-American English black Portuguese 62 Bogot´a, Colombia 91, 240 Bola de Nieve, see Villa, Ignacio

353 Bolivia Africans in 1, 5, 46–48, 95, 100, 127, 129, 137–138, 187 Spanish dialects 131, 137 Bologna, slavery in 15 Bombay 30, 181 Bonny, Nigeria 44 Bon´o, Pedro 112–113 Bosch, Gerardus 107 Bosch, Juan 175 Boyd-Bowman, Peter 185 bozal, deﬁnition 5 bozal Portuguese 29 bozal Spanish, hypotheses regarding formation 6 bozals, used in Catalan 15 Braccesi, Alessandro 16–17 Bram, see Bran language and people Bran language and people 47, 247 Braschi, Juan 184 Br´asio, Ant´onio 66 Brau, Salvador 236 Brazil Africans in 10, 25, 28, 29, 34–39, 44–46, 48, 49, 105, 126, 128, 258 Afro-Portuguese dialects 29, 56, 62 Portuguese dialects, vernacular 57, 93, 216, 223, 224, 255–258, 268, 294 British, slave trade, see English, slave trade Bubi language and people 211, 257, 261, 264, 269 Buenos Aires, Argentina Africans in 6, 37, 38, 43, 48, 81, 100–103, 126, 127, 242, 243 Spanish dialect 221, 225 Bujeba language and people 211, 257 Burgos, Spain, slavery in 43 Burkina Faso (Upper Volta) 199 Caama˜no de Fern´andez, Vicenta 177 Cabada, Juan de la 141 Caballero, Ram´on 178–179 Cabinda language and people 200 Cabrales Arteaga, Jos´e 71–73 Cabrera, Lydia 6, 8, 106, 163–168, 259, 273, 292, 293 Cabrera, Manuel 151, 292 Cadilla de Mart´ınez, Mar´ıa 180–182 C´adiz, Spain, slavery in 43 Calabar region, Nigeria 36, 37, 44, 105, 115 Calcagno, Francisco 153, 160–161 Calder´on de la Barca, Pedro 87–88 Calicut 30 cal´o 4, 96

354

Index

Cambunda 96, 103 Cameroon 201, 247 Campeche, Mexico 97, 99 Canary Islands 15, 25, 45 Spanish dialects 89, 189, 220, 222, 262, 298 Cancioneiro geral, Garcia de Resende 40, 52–55, 57, 71, 72, 75 cancionero, song collections 8 Cang´a 96 C˜ao, Diego 26 capataces 11 Cape Verde creole language and people 6, 58, 70, 108, 162, 219, 262, 270–272, 274, 285, 287 Islands 25, 32, 34, 39, 45, 47, 55, 122, 203 Peninsula, Senegal 39 Carabal´ı language and people 11, 44, 96, 105–106, 115, 122, 126, 198, 246 Carden, Guy 114 Caribbean, Spanish dialects 225, 251, 252, 261 Caro de Mall´en, Ana 88 Carpentier, Alejo 108, 165, 170 Carrera Vergara, Eudocio 135, 216 Carreras, Carlos 170 Cartagena de Indias, Colombia 10, 12, 35, 43, 121, 258 Carthaginian language and people 3 Casamance 38, 248 Castellanos, Jorge and Isabel 104, 106, 146, 284 Castile slavery in 43 Spanish dialects 230, 240 Catalan language 15 Catalonia, slavery in 15 Caviedes, Juan del Valle 131 Ceuta 23 Ceylon, see Sri Lanka Chabacano (Philippine Creole Spanish) 154, 163, 181, 220, 248, 282, 297 Chasca, Edmund de 77, 233 Chaudenson, Robert 279–281, 286 Chaul 29, 31 Ch´avez Franco, Modesto 185 Chevai 29 Chiado, Antˆonio Ribeiro 57–58, 219 Chile 4, 46, 47 Paciﬁc island labor 8 China Coast Pidgin English 303 Chincha, Peru 216 Chinese pidgin Spanish 301 Chinese, language and people in Latin America 4, 49, 108–109, 148, 303 Chinyanga language and people 264

Choc´o region, Colombia 48, 56, 76, 121, 258, 260, 281, 283, 285, 293, 294 Chota Valley, Ecuador 119, 185, 187, 281–283, 285, 294, 295 Ciplijauskait´e, Birut´e 83 Ciudad Real, Spain, slavery in 43 Claramonte, Andr´es de 86, 90, 218, 251 Clements, J. Clancy 51 clitics, subject 250, 262, 265 Cochin 29–31 Cocoliche 81, 225 cofrad´ıa, Afro-Hispanic brotherhoods 19, 60, 72, 96 Colombia Africans in 1, 5, 6, 10, 12, 35, 46, 48, 95, 118–123, 127, 129, 187–189 Spanish dialects 91, 93, 221, 222, 224, 263, 295 Col´on, Panama 263 Combe language and people 211, 257, 261 Comes, Juan Bautista 91, 93 concordance, loss of 84, 137, 148, 149, 151, 162, 171, 179, 189, 275, 276, 300, 303 Congo, ethnic designation, kingdom 11, 19–21, 25–28, 44, 47, 48, 51, 55, 63, 96, 99, 101, 103, 105–107, 115, 119, 121, 122, 126, 144, 147, 192, 242, 247, 263 Congo-Benue languages 9, 148, 200, 245, 247, 250, 254, 256 conjugated verbs, loss of 64, 67 consonants, syllable-ﬁnal in African languages 214 Consuegra Guzm´an, Ismael 292 contramayoral 11 copula 30, 53, 54, 57–61, 65–70, 78, 80, 82, 84, 87, 89, 93, 135, 148, 151, 160, 162, 170, 178, 181, 182, 190, 193, 261, 269, 275, 276, 296, 297 C´ordoba, Spain 18, 83 slavery in 43 Coromandel Coast 31 Coromantine 36, 38 Correa, Gaspar 49 Cort´es Cort´es, Fernando 74 Coss´ıo, Jos´e M. de 71, 72 Cotarelo y Mor´ı, Emilio 77, 81, 86 creole languages in the Spanish Caribbean 116–117 Crespo y Borb´on, Jos´e (Creto Gang´a) 147, 152–154, 162, 293 Creto Gang´a, see Crespo y Borb´on, Jos´e Cruz, Celia 169 Cruz, Mary 152, 153 Cruz, Sor Juana In´es 5, 85, 91–93, 139, 140, 219, 224

Index Cuajicuinalapa, Mexico 98, 142 Cuango language and people 126 Cuba Africans in 2, 5–8, 10–12, 45, 46, 49, 96, 99, 103–111, 5, 126, 127, 129, 135, 145–172, 178, 181, 189, 190, 199, 206–207, 242–243, 246, 259, 261, 278–280, 283, 284, 301 Chinese in 4 Spanish dialects 221, 243, 260, 263, 295 Cuijla, see Cuajicuinalapa Cuman´a, Venezuela 35 Cura¸cao 8, 34–35, 46, 107–108, 113, 192, 275 Curtin, Philip 45–48, 104 Cuzco, Peru 91, 95, 132, 240 CV syllable structure 228 /d/ elision 140 realized as stop [d]/ﬂap [r] 55–56, 58, 59, 67, 75, 79, 82, 89, 93, 130, 131, 135, 140, 143, 148, 186, 187, 190, 192, 194, 196, 222, 303 Dahomey 44, 105, 115 Dam˜ao 29, 31, 68 De la Guardia, Roberto 125 De la Torriente, Lolo 159 Degetau, Federico 180 Delicado, Francisco 80–81 Demerara 34 demonstratives, postposed 298 Denmark 38 Derkes, Eleuterio 179 Deschamps Chapeaux, Pedro 159 Diola language and people 106, 199, 247, 248, 256, 261, 264, 266, 271 diphthongs in verb forms 80 direct objects 137, 253–255 Diu 29, 31, 68 Dogon language family 199 Dom´ınguez, Luis Arturo 192, 193 Dominican Republic Africans in 10, 12, 35, 36, 46, 56, 76, 99, 111–115, 148, 172–177, 279, 280 Spanish dialects 91, 93, 171, 181, 182, 213, 221, 222, 224, 234, 258–260, 263, 281, 282, 285, 293, 295, 301–303 Dondo 27 double afﬁrmation 259 Dunzo, Annette Ivory 223 Duque de Estrada, Nicol´as 145–146, 284, 293 durative aspect 292, 299 Dutch slave trade 18, 33–35

355 Eannes, Gil 23 Easter Island forced labor 8 Ecuador Africans in 6, 46, 48, 118, 184–187 Spanish dialects 91, 93, 224, 226, 295, 300 Edo language group 200, 202, 214, 247 Eﬁk language and people 11, 44, 106, 115, 148, 179, 200, 202, 214, 215, 218, 247, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271 elle/nelle as third person pronoun 149, 151, 154, 160, 176, 182, 236, 276, 294–295 Elmina, fort 18, 25, 26, 34, 39, 47, 106 Eltis, David 46, 103, 105, 113, 115 Encina, Juan del 74 English creoles 114–115, 177, 190, 191, 263, 265, 282, 301 English, slave trade 35–37 entrem´es, Afro-Hispanic 8 epenthetic vowels 216, 217 Equatorial Guinea 56, 92–93, 211–214, 222, 224, 230, 232, 241, 257, 300 Escalante, Aquiles 121 Escalona, Rafael 179 Esmeraldas, Ecuador 119–120, 185–187 Essequibo 34 Estupi˜na´ n Bass, Nelson 6 Ethiopia 18 eu as subject pronoun 58 Ewe/Fon language and people 11, 44, 67, 97, 105, 193, 200, 203, 210, 217, 247, 263–266, 270, 271 existential verbs 297 Extremadura, slavery in 43, 74 Extreme˜no dialect 75, 218 fala de preto, Afro-Portuguese imitations 52, 59, 60, 62, 219 Fang language and people 211, 214, 257, 261 Fante language and people 213, 261, 264, 266, 271 Fanti, see Fante language and people Fernandes, Gaspar 91, 139 Fern´andez, Francisco 293 Fern´andez, Lucas 74 Fernando Poo 110, 247, 257 Ferrara, Mario 16 Ferraz, Luis Ivens 226 Ferreras, Ram´on Alberto 175 Fiote language 261, 264 ﬁrst person plural verb forms as invariant 85, 87, 89, 253, 275 Florence, slavery in 15, 16 Florence, Italian dialect 16–17 Fongbe, see Ewe/Fon language and people

356

Index

Fontanella de Weinberg, Beatriz 221 foreigner talk 73, 77 Franceschi, V´ıctor 189, 190 French creoles 110, 126, 128, 170–171, 177, 191, 263, 282, 301, 303 language and people 3 slave trade 33, 35 Fr´ıas G´alvez, Antonio 175 Fuentes, Manuel Atanasio 134–135 Fula language and people 44, 115, 126, 199, 205, 247, 248, 264, 266, 267, 269 future marking 60, 271, 272, 293 G˜a language and people 200, 247, 256, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269 Gabon 201, 214 Galicia, slavery in 43 Galician language 75, 92, 93, 262 G´alvez Ronceros, Antonio 131, 216 Gama, Vasco da 30, 52, 54 Gambia 36–38 Gang´a language and people 105–107, 115 gauchos 1, 100, 101 Gbe language group 200 gemination of consonants 147 gender agreement, loss of 61, 275, 297, 300 genitive constructions in African languages 269–270 Genoa slavery in 15 German language and people 4 Ghana ancient kingdom 18 modern nation 25, 26, 39, 60, 106, 199, 210 Gir´on, Socorro 184 Goa 29–31, 69, 181 Gold Coast 20, 22, 25, 26, 34–37, 39, 47, 60, 106, 115, 121, 125–127, 129 G´omez de Toledo, Gaspar 81–82 Gon¸calvez, Antam 24 G´ongora, Luis de 41, 42, 83–85, 91, 93, 218, 223, 235, 260 Gonz´alez, Carlisle 177 Gonz´alez Rub´ı, Pedro Antonio 89 Goodman, Morris 51 Gor´ee Island 34, 36–38, 125 Grain Coast 39, 44, 217, 246, 247 Granda, Germ´an de 71, 107, 163, 178, 193, 288–290 Greek language and people 3 Green, Katherine 182 Guadalajara, Spain, slavery in 43 Guadeloupe 36, 280 Guanche language and people 15

Guatemala Africans in 5, 48, 139 Paciﬁc island labor 8 Guatemala City 91 Guerrero, Manuel Vicente 90 Guete, Jaime de 82 Guill´en, Nicol´as 6 Guinea, designations 40–41 Guinea-Bissau 25, 35, 38, 47, 122, 199, 202, 248–249 Kriyˆol language 70, 219, 263, 270, 271, 275 Portuguese dialect 230 Guirao, Ram´on 168 G¨uiria Peninsula, Venezuela 259, 260, 263, 303 Gullah language and people 99, 213, 237, 240, 266 Gur language family 199 Guti´errez de Padilla, Juan 139 Guyana 246 Guyanese Creole 8 Guzm´an Navarro, Arturo 125 Gypsy, see Roma language and people habitual aspect 271, 292 habla de negros, Afro-Hispanic imitations 52, 74, 76, 77, 79, 82–84, 86, 87, 89–90, 92–94, 129, 137, 139, 187, 218, 220, 223, 229 hablar congo, see negros congos, Panama Haiti 1, 11, 44, 108, 169, 279, 303 Creole language 8, 58, 108, 110–111, 113–114, 116–117, 172–173, 183, 191, 213, 236, 251, 259, 263, 265, 282, 295, 301–303 French dialect 302 revolution 10, 99 Hassaurek, Frederick 185 Hatherly, Ana 59 Hausa language and people 214, 264, 266, 267, 269 Havana, Cuba 10, 35, 43, 126, 127 Heine, Bernd 245 Henr´ıquez Ure˜na, Pedro 114, 234 Henry, Prince of Portugal 23 Herskovits, Melville 213 Hesseling, D. C. 107 Holm, John 67, 287, 291 Honduras, Africans in 1, 2, 35, 48 Hong Kong 51 Huelva, slavery in 43 Humboldt, Baron A. von 103, 126, 128 Iberian language and people 3 Ibibio language and people 106, 179

Index Ibo language 271 Ica, Peru 131, 135 Idoma language group 200 Igbo language and people 11, 44, 97, 106, 115, 148, 200, 202, 247, 256, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269 Ijo language and people 44, 105, 106, 148, 179, 199, 246, 248, 254, 256, 261, 266, 267, 269, 271 Ijoid language family 199 imperfective aspect 292, 299 in situ questions, see questions, in situ India, Portuguese colonies in 29, 30, 68 indigenous lexical items in Spanish 9 Indonesia 30, 51 inﬁnitives uninﬂected 53, 54, 58, 73, 80, 89, 141, 147, 151, 162, 171, 178, 180, 184, 187, 188, 195, 253, 272 with preverbal subject 141, 298 ingenio, sugar plantation 11 interrogation, see questions interrogative constructions in African languages 260–263 invariant verb forms 61, 70 ir 58 Italian language and people 3, 4, 93 Italy, slavery in 14–16, 18, 19 Ivory Coast 15, 26, 35, 38, 39, 199, 201 Jamaica 49, 108, 118 Creole language 8, 108, 163, 263, 303 English dialect 302 Jamieson, Mart´ın 190 Jammes, Robert 83 Japan 30, 31 language and people 4 Jim´enez Rivera, Chery 176 Jim´enez Torres, Julieta 92–94 Jo˜ao, king of Portugal 23 Johnson, Lemuel 52 Judeo Spanish 3–4 judezmo, see Judeo Spanish Jurado Noboa, Fernando 119, 120 juruminga/jurumingue 149 Kanem, kingdom 18 Kanura language 264 Kasanje kingdom 28 Kele language and people 269 Kenya 32 Kikongo language 11, 19, 21, 25–27, 29, 44, 60, 65, 66, 96, 97, 101, 103, 106, 115, 144, 148, 181, 199, 200, 202, 218, 220,

357 226, 237–238, 247, 254, 256, 258, 260, 261, 264, 265, 267–269, 294 Kimbundu language 28, 29, 44, 60, 66, 97, 101, 103, 200, 202, 208, 218, 220, 226, 238, 247, 256–258, 260, 261, 263, 265, 267–269, 294 Kituba language 231 Kongo, see Congo Korlai 30, 181 Kpelle language and people 199, 214, 247 Krio language (Sierra Leone) 206, 207 Kru languages and peoples 9, 44, 199, 204, 217, 247 Kwa languages and peoples 9, 26, 38, 44, 56, 67, 70, 115, 148, 200–202, 204, 246, 247, 250, 254, 256, 259, 270, 273 /λ/, delateralization 56, 58, 60, 67, 78, 80, 82, 131 /l/ and /d/, interchange 53, 66, 75, 87, 138 La Paz, Bolivia 91 Ladefoged, Peter 217 ladino, see Judeo Spanish Laguerre, Enrique 182–183 Lapesa, Rafael 163, 289 Larraz´abal Blanco, Carlos 173 Latin language 267 Laurence, Kemlin 7, 278 Lenca language, inﬂuence on Spanish 252 Lenz, Rodolfo 234 Le´on, Spain, slavery in 43 Leonese language 75, 218 Liberia 39, 44, 199, 201 licencia, slaving monopoly 43–44 Liguria slavery in 15 language and people 3 Lima, Peru 91, 126 Lingala language 231, 257, 264 l´ıngua de guin´e Afro-Portuguese imitations 60 Lingua Franca, Mediterranean 80–81, 198, 274 Lipski, John 16–17, 130, 154, 288 liquid consonants in African languages 217 neutralization in Afro-Iberian language 59, 66, 147, 189, 196, 217–220, 241, 300 Lisbon, Africans in 16, 42, 55, 60 literatura de cordel 61, 71 Llanos Allende, Victorio 180, 183 Loango 101, 121, 126, 128, 192, 193 Lombardia slavery in 15 L´opez Alb´ujar, Enrique 135–136, 216, 268 L´opez Prudencio, J. 75 Louisiana Creole French 174

358

Index

Lower Guinea 201–202 Luanda 25, 27, 28, 34, 37, 66 Lubolo 103 Lucum´ı (Yoruba) language and people 11, 44, 96, 105, 107, 126, 148, 161, 206, 207 Luis, William 159 lunarios 61 Macao 30–32, 51, 69, 108–109 Portuguese creole 301, 303 Machado Filho, Aires da Mata 229 Madden, Richard 11 Madeira Islands 25, 45 Magari˜nos Cervantes, Alejandro 101 Majorca, Africans in 15, 19 Malacca 30–32, 69 M´alaga, slavery in 43 Malaysia 30, 51 Mali ancient kingdom 18, 23 modern nation 41, 199 Malinke language and people 47 Malpica la Barca, Domingo 163, 284, 293 Mande languages and people 9, 198–199, 201, 202, 246, 248–250, 253, 255, 270, 271 Mandinga, see Mandinka language and people Mandinka language and people 24, 39, 40, 44, 96, 97, 99, 103, 106–107, 115, 119, 122, 126, 199, 202, 214, 217, 246, 248, 249, 256, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269, 270 Mangalore 29, 68 manicongo 19, 22, 25–27, 63 Manila 43 Manjaku language and people 248 Manrique Cabrera, Francisco 183 Manzano, Juan Francisco 284 Mar´ıa Lionza, Afro-Venezuelan cult 127, 129 Marrero Aristy, Ram´on 149, 175 Martinique 36, 280 m´as nunca, m´as nada, m´as nadie 298 mayoral 11 mayordomo 11 Mazatl´an, Mexico, Africans in 2 Mbundu people 27, 28 McWhorter, John 7, 281–286 Megenney, William 138, 213, 223, 258, 291, 294 Melaka, see Malacca Mende language and people 44, 199, 204, 217, 246, 249, 253, 255, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269, 270 M´endez Qui˜nones, Ram´on 182 Men´endez y Pelayo, Marcelino 80 Merl´ın, Condesa de, see Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Mar´ıa de las Mercedes

Mesquita, Alfredo 212 metathesis 63, 66, 149, 229–230 Mexican-American Spanish dialects 78 Mexico Africans in 1, 2, 5, 46–49, 91, 95, 97–100, 111, 127, 129, 138–143, 187, 220, 285 Paciﬁc island labor 8 Spanish dialects 221, 222, 295, 300 Mexico City, Spaniards in 9, 91, 240 m´ı, subject pronoun, see (a)m´ı Milan, slavery in 15 mim, subject pronoun, see (a)m´ı Mina, language and people 60, 103, 105–106, 115, 122, 126, 198, 203 Mintz, Sidney 278 Mira de Amescua, Antonio 86 Mombasa 32 Monc´ın, Luis 89 Montejo, Esteban 106, 169–170 Montevideo, Uruguay Africans in 6, 39, 43, 81, 100–103, 242, 243 Spanish dialect 225 Moors (in the Iberian Peninsula) language and people 3, 18, 77, 92, 93, 274 Moreau de Saint-M´ery, M. L. 114 Moreno Fraginals, Manuel 105–106 Moreto, Agust´ın 88 Morocco 23 moros, see Moors (in the lberian Peninsula) language and people Mor´ua Delgado, Mart´ın 159–160 Moscoso Puello, Francisco 175 Mosonyi, Esteban Emilio 192 Mota, Henrique da 53–54, 248 Mozambique 32, 45, 47, 103, 126, 200, 247, 257 Portuguese dialects 20, 56, 63, 230, 232, 257 Mozarabic language and people 3 Mpumbu language and people 27 Muhammad, Jameelah 98 Murcia slavery in 43 Spanish dialect 89, 220 musseques, popular neighborhoods of Luanda, Angola 261, 268, 294 /˜n/, denasalization 58, 75 Nagˆo language and people 198 Nahuatl language, inﬂuence on Spanish 252 ˜ niguismo 161 Na˜ Naples, slavery in 15 Naro, Anthony 51 nasal vowels 58

Index nasalization, intrusive 78, 82, 85, 87, 90, 93, 135, 147, 178, 233–239 Naxara, Joseph de 66, 69 Ndjuka language 237 Ndongo 27, 28 Ndow´e language and people 211, 257, 261 Negapat˜ao 29, 31 negation double 62, 110, 194, 256–260, 293–294, 302 in African languages 255–258 postverbal 62, 257, 258 Negerhollands language 8, 107, 108, 116–117, 163, 303 Negra lectora, anonymous play 42 negrillo songs 8 negro catedr´atico, comic ﬁgure 8, 136, 151–152, 179 negros congos, Panama 17, 124, 148, 149, 220, 282, 295 negros curros, Cuba 286 Netherlands Antilles 6 neutralization of /l/ and /r/, see liquid consonants, neutralization in Afro-lberian language New Mexico Africans in 2 Spanish dialects 294 Ngala language and people 269 Ngola 27, 28 Ngombe language 269 Niger-Congo language family 198–199 Nigeria 11, 18, 32, 36, 39, 40, 44, 105, 115, 121, 148, 179, 199, 247 Niger-Kordofanian language family 198 Nilo-Saharan language family 198 Nombre de Dios, Panama 123 noun phrases 59, 65 null subjects, see subjects, null number agreement, loss of 275, 297, 300 Nupe language and people 256, 269 Nzinga, rebel queen 28 Nzinga a Nkuwa 26 Nzinga Mbemba 26 obstruent + liquid clusters 215 onset clusters in African languages 214–215 reduction 135, 141, 181, 188, 194, 216–217 Ortiz, Adalberto 6 Ortiz, Fernando 8, 109, 148, 156–157, 292 Ortiz L´opez, Luis 150, 171, 191, 282, 294, 303 Os preto astrologo 61 Oscan language and people 3 Otheguy, Ricardo 164, 290

359 Ovimbundu (Umbundu) people 28, 103, 200, 218, 247, 257, 258, 260 Oyo, kingdom 18 Palacios, Arnaldo 188 palangana, Afro-Peruvian slang 136 palatalization of /s/, see /s/, palatalization Palenque de San Basilio, Colombia 6, 12, 56, 121, 122, 187, 189, 258, 263, 275, 278 Palenquero language 6, 58, 59, 70, 76, 108, 140, 162, 181, 189, 192, 195, 213, 218, 220, 228, 231, 235–240, 251, 256–258, 263, 265, 266, 270–272, 277, 282, 285–287, 291, 294–297, 299 palenques, maroon villages 98 Palmer, Colin 97 Panama Africans in 10, 12, 16–17, 46, 123–126, 148, 149, 191 Spanish dialects 263, 282, 295 West Indians in 124 Papia Kristang language 69 Papiamento language 6, 8, 34, 56, 58, 107, 108, 113, 149, 154, 160, 162, 163, 176, 179, 181, 183–184, 190–193, 210, 213, 231, 234–236, 239, 260, 263, 265, 271, 272, 274, 282, 286, 287, 291, 293–297, 299, 301, 303 paragogic vowels 56–60, 67, 68, 82, 84, 144, 187, 214, 217, 225–227, 241, 294 Paraguay 4, 9, 46, 100, 279, 300 Pardo y Aliaga, Felipe 133–135 Parkvall, Mikael 258 particles, preverbal 68, 141, 298 past tense marking 271, 272, 293 Pastor, Juan 80 payadores 1, 100 Pepper Coast 39 Pereda Vald´es, Ildefonso 223 P´erez Cabral, Pedro Andr´es 150, 176 P´erez de la Riva, Juan 104 perfective aspect 272, 293 Perl, Matthias 164, 289–291 Pernambuco, Africans in 46 Peru Africans in 1, 5, 6, 46–49, 95–97, 111, 123, 126–137, 143, 148, 187, 216, 220, 242, 258 Chinese in 4 Paciﬁc island labor 8 Spanish dialects 221, 222, 295, 300 Philippine Creole Spanish, see Chabacano Phoenician language and people 3 Pichardo, Esteban 99, 109, 146, 150–151, 155, 234, 286, 289

360

Index

Pidgin English 109–110, 148, 161, 178, 211, 231, 232, 248, 301, 303 Pidgin Portuguese 51 Piemonte, slavery in 15 Pipil language, inﬂuence on Spanish 252 Pires, Sebasti˜ao 58 Pisa, slavery in 15 plural marking noun phrases 59–61, 65, 194, 196, 265–267, 296 verb phrases 65, 85 Polynesian forced labor 8 Popay´an, Colombia 281 Pop´o language and people 126 poror´o Afro-Dominican dialect 303 Portobelo, Panama 35, 43, 120, 123, 125 Portugal Africans in 1, 19–20, 62 history of 13, 17, 18 Portuguese-derived creoles, Asia 30 Portuguese language elements in Afro-Hispanic language 139 words in African languages 19, 207–208 postpositions 274 Potos´ı 25, 132, 240 pregones, street vendors 8, 144, 212, 216 prenasalized consonants 84, 89, 149 prepositions 171, 274, 297–298, 300 present tense marking 271, 299 Pr´ıncipe creole language 26, 54, 66, 226, 231, 267, 275 Island 33 Proclama que en un cablido de negros congos de la ciudad de La Habana pronunci´o su presidente, Rey Monfundi Siliman, anonymous document 147–150, 283 progn´osticos 61 progressive aspect 271, 272, 292 pronouns clitic 57, 65, 151, 249, 251–252, 275 invariant 149, 300 object, disjunctive 57, 65, 275, 276, 295, 300 subject 30, 53, 54, 57, 58, 67, 73, 82, 93, 158, 162, 249, 252–253, 265, 275, 296, 297, 303; invariant 296 Puebla, Mexico 91 Puerto Rico Africans in 6, 10, 45, 46, 49, 115–117, 129, 148, 172, 177–184, 190, 278, 279, 301 Spanish dialects 221, 233, 263, 294, 295

Quechua language in contact with Spanish 133, 252, 260 questions in situ 109, 260–262 non-inverted 262–263, 295 yes-no 263–265 Quevedo, Francisco de 66, 88, 90, 221 Qui˜nones de Benavente, Luis 88–89 /r/ loss of ﬁnal 53, 56, 59, 67, 76, 82, 139–141, 143, 186, 187, 191, 196, 221–222, 242, 300 realized as [l] 59, 61, 66, 67, 82, 84, 85, 87–90, 93, 109, 131, 135, 137, 138, 140, 143, 186, 187, 192, 220 /r/-/rr/, neutralization 241, 300 Raimundo, Jacques 230 Ram´on y Rivera, Luis Felipe 193 Ramos, Arthur 229 Ramos, Jos´e Antonio 161 Rawley, James 46 Reinecke, John 286, 291 Reinosa, Rodrigo de 29, 40, 71–73, 248, 252, 267, 268 Resende, Garcia de 40, 52, 252 R´ıo de la Plata Africans in 2, 8, 28, 45, 46, 242, 288 language of 102–103, 243 Spanish dialects 222 R´ıo de Oro 24 R´ıo Muni 257 Robertson, Irvine 247 Rodney, Walter 25 Rodr´ıguez Demorizi, Emilio 172, 174 Rodr´ıguez de Nolla, Olga 193 Rodr´ıguez Herrera, Esteban 158 Roma language and people 4, 87, 89, 92, 93 Rome ancient empire 14 slavery in 15 Romero, Fernando 129, 233 Ronga language and people 264 Rosario, Rub´en del 233 Rossi y Rub´ı, Joseph 96 Rowlands, E. C. 249 Rueda, Lope de 29, 42, 70, 74, 76–79, 85, 88, 155–156, 159, 218, 223, 252, 262, 267 Ru´ız Garc´ıa, Armanda 162 Russell, P. E. 71, 72 /s/, aspiration 141, 148, 187 /s/ loss of ﬁnal 56–57, 59, 61, 65, 73, 77–78, 82–85, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 109, 132, 137,

Index 139, 140, 143–144, 186, 187, 189, 196, 223–225, 241–242, 300 palatalization 53, 73, 81, 82 sa as Afro-Iberian copula 53, 57–61, 65–70, 73, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 93, 193, 275, 297 sainete, Afro-Hispanic 8 S˜a qui turo, anonymous song 59 Saint-Domingue 1, 10, 36, 46, 49, 111, 115, 279, 280 Salamanca 74 Salvador, Gregorio 223 sam as ﬁrst person singular of ser 65 Saman´a, Dominican Republic 112, 114, 148, 172, 174, 177, 259, 303 San Basilio de Palenque, see Palenque de San Basilio, Colombia S´anchez de Badajoz, Diego 73–76, 218, 223, 224 Sandoval, Alonso de 106, 122–123, 288–289 Sango language and people 199, 256, 261, 264 Santa Cruz, Mar´ıa de 163, 292 Santa Cruz, Nicomedes 6, 96, 268 Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Mar´ıa de las Mercedes 157–158 santar/sentar as Afro-Iberian copula 58 santer´ıa, Afro-Cuban 11, 207 Santillana, Gabriel de 140 Santo Domingo, see Dominican Republic S˜ao Tom´e creole language 6, 26, 29, 54, 66, 70, 84, 108, 154, 181, 219, 220, 226, 228, 231, 235, 258, 263, 270, 275, 285, 287, 294, 299 Island 25, 33, 41, 45, 48, 55, 122, 138, 219, 288 Portuguese dialect 230 Saramaccan language 34, 85, 206, 207, 213, 219, 228, 299 Sardinia, slavery in 15 Sarr´o L´opez, Pilar 77 Savoia, Rafael 120 sayagu´es literary dialect 73, 75, 87, 88, 93, 218 Schuchardt, Hugo 68, 155, 234, 284 Schwegler, Armin 258, 260, 282, 294 second person pronouns 295 Sena language and people 264 Senegal 38, 103, 199 Senegambia 25, 33, 34, 40, 44, 47, 48, 127, 129, 246 Sephardic Jews 34, 113 Sephardic Spanish (see Judeo Spanish) Serer language and people 47, 199, 205

361 ser/estar, confusion 73, 80, 82 Serial verbs, see verbs, serial seseo 89 Setse, Theophilus Kwadzo 210 Seville, Africans in 16, 19, 43, 72, 76, 83, 84, 97 Sicily, slavery in 14–16, 18, 19 Sierra Leone 25, 26, 36–40, 44, 52, 103, 115, 199, 203, 206, 207, 247 Silva, Feliciano de 81, 262 Silveira, Fernam da 40, 52–54, 72 Singapore 51 slave, origin of term 14 Slave Coast 32, 35, 38, 39, 44, 66, 70, 103, 121, 126, 127 Smith, Norval 247 Sofﬁa, Bernardo 134 Sojo, Juan Pablo 193 Soko language and people 269 Sol´ıs, Antonio 88 son as invariant copula 135, 147–151, 160, 162, 178, 181, 182, 190, 276 Songhai, kingdom 18 Songhay language 264, 266, 267, 269 SOV word order 245–249, 254, 274 Spain Africans in 17–20 dialects of Spanish 56 history of 13 slavery in 14 Spedding, Alison 138 Sri Lanka 30–31 Srnan Tongo 8, 85, 206, 207, 219 St. Eustatius 34, 107 St. Kitts 36 Stewart, William 114 stress, in African languages 205–206 Su´arez y Romero, Anselmo 159, 292 subject pronouns, see pronouns, subject subjects grammatical 249–252 null 249 Suevi 3 Surinam 34 Sur´o, Ram´on 150, 154–176 Susu language and people 199, 266 SVO word order 245, 247, 254–255, 274 Swahili language and people 205, 231, 257, 269 syllable structure, African languages 213–216 ta, preverbal particle 68, 151, 162, 163, 178, 189–190, 276, 292, 303

362

Index

taibo 54 Takrur, kingdom 18 tango 100 teatro bufo, Cuba 8, 152 Tecelaria 29 Tejeira, Gil Blas 190 Teke language and people 27 Temne language and people 44, 199, 217, 247, 256, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271 Terranovo 96 Teyssier, Paul 54, 57 third person pronoun as plural marker 296 third person verb forms 65 singular as invariant verb 57, 58, 135, 151, 171, 176, 177, 179, 189, 195, 253, 275, 276, 300 Thornton, John 54, 201 Timor 30, 31 Tiv language and people 217, 247 Tobago 36 Togo 11, 32, 35, 39, 103, 199 Toledo, slavery in 43 tone, lexical in African languages 205–206 tones European loan-words in African languages 206–208 in Afro-Hispanic language 208–210, 241 Torices, Alonso 91, 130 Trinidad 11, 105, 126, 128, 259, 263, 303 Trist˜ao, Nuno 24 Turin, slavery in 15 Turner, Lorenzo Dow 213 Twi language 264, 266, 267, 269, 271 type A languages 245–246 type B languages 246 Umbria, slavery in 15 Umbrian language and people 3 Umbundu, see Ovimbundu (Umbundu) people Upper Guinea 201–202 Uruguay Africans in 46, 100–103, 129, 142–145, 148, 216, 220, 229, 243, 258 Italians in 4 Spanish dialects 295 vai, see bai Vai language and people 44, 126, 199, 217, 246, 256, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271 Vald´es, Miguelito 169 Vald´es Bernal, Sergio 289–290 Vald´es-Cruz, Rosa 168 Valencia, Spain slavery in 15, 19, 43 Spanish dialects 230

Valkhoff, Marius 181, 291 Valladolid, Spain, slavery in 43 Van Name, Addison 286 Vandals 3 Vega, Lope de 41–42, 83–88, 218, 224 V´elez de Guevara, Luis 86, 223 Venezuela Africans in 6, 10, 12, 35, 43, 46, 49, 126–128, 149, 191–196, 220, 242, 279, 285 Spanish dialects 221, 222, 259, 263, 294, 295, 300, 303 Venice, slavery in 15, 16 Veracruz, Mexico, Africans in 2, 43, 97–99 verbs African languages 270–274 serial 273 Veres, Ernesto 77–78, 223 Vicente, Gil 40, 54–59, 70, 71, 74, 75, 79, 219, 223, 260, 272 Villa, Ignacio (Bola de Nieve) 169, 292 Villa Mella, Dominican Republic 56, 114, 173, 213, 303 villancicos 90–93 Villaverde, Cirilo 149, 158–159 Visigoths 3 vizca´ıno literary dialect, see Basque dialect of Spanish Von Hagen, Victor 118–120 vos, pronoun 295 vowel harmony 56 Wagner, Max 234, 288, 290 Walsh, Thomas 81 Weber de Kurlat, Frida 71, 72, 75, 77 Weil, Thomas 185 West, Robert 118 West Atlantic language family 9, 44, 197, 199, 201, 202, 204, 246–248, 256, 271 Whinnom, Keith 282 Whitten, Norman 118 Whydah 36, 66, 115 Wilde, Jos´e Antonio 101 Williamson, Kay 247 Windward Coast 35–37, 103, 115, 121, 125–127, 217, 247 Wolof language and people 15, 24, 39, 40, 47, 115, 126, 199, 202, 205, 214, 217, 247, 248, 256, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271 word order 64, 137, 245–248 Xhosa language and people 257, 264 Xilenge language and people 264

Index Yanga 98 ye´ısmo 56, 89, 131 yes-no questions, see questions, yes-no yijo (hijo) 160 Yoruba language and people 11, 44, 97, 102, 105, 106, 115, 148, 194, 200, 202, 206, 207, 217, 247, 254, 256, 258, 259, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269, 270, 272–274

363 Yucatan, Africans in 97–100 Yungas, region of Bolivia 137 /ˇz/, realizations of 59 Zaire 11, 103 Zapata Olivella, Manuel 6 Ziegler, Douglas-Val 272, 291 Zielina, Mar´ıa Carmen 92, 93