lipski 2005

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

The African slave trade, beginning in the fifteenth century, brought Africanlanguages into contact with Spanish and Portuguese, resulting in the Africans’gradual acquisition of these languages. In this book, John Lipski describesthe major forms of Afro-Hispanic language found in the Iberian Peninsulaand Latin America over the last 500 years. As well as discussing pronuncia-tion, morphology, and syntax, he separates legitimate forms of Afro-Hispanicexpression from those that result from racist stereotyping, to assess how con-tact with the African diaspora has had a permanent impact on contemporarySpanish. A principal issue is the possibility that Spanish, in contact withspeakers of African languages, may have creolized and restructured – in theCaribbean and perhaps elsewhere – permanently affecting regional and socialvarieties of Spanish today. The book is accompanied by the largest knownanthology of primary Afro-Hispanic texts from the Iberian Peninsula, LatinAmerica, and former Afro-Hispanic contacts in Africa and Asia.

john lipsk i is Professor of Spanish and Linguistics and Head of the Depart-ment of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at Pennsylvania State University. Hisresearch interests include Spanish phonology, Spanish and Portuguese dialec-tology and language variation, the linguistic aspects of bilingualism, and theAfrican contribution to Spanish and Portuguese. He is the author of morethan 200 articles on all aspects of linguistics, and his previous books includeLinguistic Aspects of Spanish-English Language Switching (1983) and TheSpanish of Equatorial Guinea (1985).

A History of Afro-HispanicLanguageFive Centuries, Five Continents

John M. LipskiThe 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 ofmy parents, who made it all possible.

Contents

Acknowledgments page ixNote on the Appendix x

Introduction 1

1 Africans in the Iberian peninsula, the slave trade, andoverview 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 totwentieth 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 305Index 352

vii

Acknowledgments

My interest in Afro-Hispanic language was kindled many years ago by readingthe superb book El elemento afronegroide en el espanol de Puerto Rico by thelate Manuel Alvarez Nazario, and I offer this book in his memory. This workhas benefited from numerous encounters with students, colleagues, researchcollaborators, and members of the African diaspora throughout the world. I amparticularly grateful for the stimulating exchanges with my dear friends andcolleagues German de Granda, William Megenney, Luis Ortiz Lopez, MatthiasPerl, and Armin Schwegler. John Holm’s masterful handling of creole lan-guage studies has been an inspiration, and John McWhorter has provoked meinto rethinking issues I had thought already resolved. My wife Beverly andmy children Ursula and Michael have graciously and lovingly tolerated myobsessive 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 atwww.cambridge.org/9780521115582.

x

Introduction

Introduction

From the second half of the fifteenth century through the end of the nineteenthcentury, hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans traveled first to Spain,then to Spanish America. Most were slaves, taken as part of the Atlantic slavetrade, which displaced millions of Africans to Europe’s New World colonies.In the major cities of Spain, particularly in Andalusia, large slave and laterfree black populations arose, and in some cities remained as distinct ethnicminorities until the late eighteenth century. In Portugal, black communitiesand neighborhoods continued to exist until the turn of the twentieth century.1 InSpanish America, Africans were found in every colony, from the highland minesof Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Honduras, to the Argentine pampas, the docksof El Callao, the port attached to Lima, Peru, and the streets of Mexico City.Although demographic merger has blurred the traces of these earliest Africanarrivals, whose forced immigration reached a peak in the mid-seventeenth cen-tury, Spanish America underwent a frenzied importation of African laborers atthe turn of the nineteenth century, as part of the sugar plantation boom occa-sioned by the destruction of the world’s richest sugar producer, French Saint-Domingue (soon to become Haiti), and the scramble of the Spanish colonies toenter the lucrative sugar market. In contemporary Latin America, the popula-tion of African origin is most noticeable where the last wave of slave arrivalstouched shore – in the Caribbean islands, and along the Caribbean and upperPacific coasts of South America. Although living in the most humbling condi-tions, often physically outside the pale of mainstream Spanish society, blackAfricans made a lasting impression on the language and culture of the entireSpanish-speaking world. Their use of Spanish was depicted – never flatter-ingly and often with much exaggeration – from the early sixteenth century tothe middle of the twentieth century. Black soldiers were instrumental in theAmerican colonies’ wars of independence; black horsemen became some ofArgentina’s most renowned gauchos and payadores (song improvisers). Black

1 Lipski (1994c), Tinhorao (1988).

1

2 A History of Afro-Hispanic Language

dances and songs were the origin for the Argentine tango, today a highly styl-ized European dance form. Throughout southern Spain and Latin America, freeblacks for decades dominated small-scale commerce, representing the major-ity of street vendors and municipal maintenance employees. Descendants ofAfricans formed the original nuclei around which arose the Mexican citiesof Acapulco, Mazatlan, and Veracruz, and were also found in the most remotefrontier outposts – from New Mexico and Arizona to Patagonia. Blacks in Span-ish America fought against marauding pirates, and some chose to cast their lotwith the pirates, to combat their former oppressors.2 From the Rıo de la Plata toCuba, carnival traditions, religious ceremonies, and vocabulary items attest tothe African presence in Spanish America. And yet, despite the central impor-tance of Africans in the development of the Spanish language and its spreadthroughout the Americas, the African contribution to Spanish is rarely consid-ered on a par with more “traditional” language contact situations. At most, wefind lists of lexical items – often uncritical attributions – which in some tropicalcountries are conceded to be Africanisms. Latin American countries containingvisible Afro-American populations tend to adopt the position that any Africaninfluence in Spanish is to be found only among the Afro-Hispanic population,in popular songs and ceremonies. Nations which currently lack an ethnicallyidentifiable population of African origin, or where such groups live in remoteor little-known areas, find the notion of African contributions to Spanish pre-posterous. Taken as a whole, the African linguistic dimension has received littleserious attention in Latin America, and almost none in Spain. Recently in LatinAmerica, there has been an upsurge in interest in Afro-Hispanic historical andcultural events, an interest not unrelated to the fact that larger numbers of LatinAmericans of African origin are receiving higher education and themselvesengaging in serious scholarship. To date, the focus has been predominantlyregional, and a number of excellent studies and monographs have traced theAfrican populations throughout Latin America. In Spain as well, a series ofmonographs has begun to outline the full extent of the African presence inareas of Spain for which data had previously been unavailable.

The present study, which adopts a comparative historical perspective, has arelatively modest goal, in comparison with the enormity of the task at hand. Inthe following chapters, we will trace the first attestations of Africans learningSpanish, as the early stages of the Portuguese slave trade brought large numbersof blacks into southern Spain by the end of the fifteenth century. A study ofliterary documents, reinforced by comparative reconstruction based on existingAfro-Iberian language forms and known facts about African languages and thehistorical development of Spanish, will yield a tentative model of the sort oflanguage 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 attentionwill follow the routes of Spanish colonization of the Americas, and the develop-ment of African populations in the New World colonies. Finally, we will offeran assessment as to whether Afro-Hispanic language ever creolized (became –as a completely restructured offspring of Spanish – the native language of a sig-nificant speech community), and what permanent imprint – other than purelylexical – the totality of Afro-Hispanic linguistic manifestations may have leftupon 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 acrossthe globe, Spanish is the product of language contact. The Roman legionswho carried Latin – itself already flavored by Oscan, Umbrian, Ligurian, andGreek – to Hispania (as the Iberian Peninsula was known) set the language upona course which would rapidly bring it into contact with numerous peoples andcultures. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and native Basques and Iberians beganto leave their imprint on Latin before it began its gradual metamorphosis intoIbero-Romance, thence Spanish and its neighbors. Only a few centuries afterthe Roman domination of the Iberian Peninsula, Vandals, Suevi, and Visigothsswept down from the north; the latter group in particular had a lasting impacton the culture of what would eventually become Spain, as well as contributingseveral words to the emerging Spanish language. Following on the heels ofthe Visigoths were the moros – Arabic-speaking invaders from north Africawho continuously occupied parts of Spain and Portugal for nearly 800 years.The contact of early Ibero-Romance and Arabic gave rise to a distinctly fla-vored Romance language known as Mozarabic, which apparently differed fromCastilian in many significant ways – in phonology, morphology, lexicon, andpossibly syntax. During the reconquest of Moslem Spain by the Christian Castil-ians, the Castilian dialect came into contact with Mozarabic and both dialectsco-existed in some communities and perhaps even among the same speakers,since Mozarabic language and culture was more prestigious and representeda more highly advanced civilization than that carried by the hard-fighting butpoorly educated Castilians.3

In the years following the neutralization and expulsion of the Arabs, at the endof the fifteenth century, the Spanish language in Spain absorbed more Frenchand Italian lexical items (French words in particular had begun to enter theSpanish 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).


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, andespecially after being segregated into urban ghettoes, may well have developedethnolinguistically distinct varieties of Spanish.

At this point in the development of Peninsular Spanish, the study of externallanguage contact usually stops, except perhaps to mention the sporadic lexicalcontributions of Roma/Gypsy calo, and the recent influx of Anglicisms. In LatinAmerica, Spanish came into close contact with Native American languages –contact ranging from symbiotic to cannibalistic – and considerable research hasbeen devoted to tracing the indigenous contributions to Latin American Spanish.Although many Latin Americans reject the notion that indigenous contributionsgo beyond simple lexical borrowings for New World items, serious research hasrevealed profound and far-reaching substratum patterns in the Spanish languagethroughout Latin America.4 Contemporary observers frequently comment onthe incursions of English, even far from the borders of the United States, whilein many countries, the linguistic effects of immigrant languages upon Spanishhas been noted: Italian in Argentina and Uruguay, Chinese in Cuba and Peru,English in northern Chile, German and Japanese in Paraguay, etc. And yet thepicture is still not complete.

Even in their totality, the above-mentioned language contacts are not suffi-cient to explain both the diversity and the unity of the Spanish language as spo-ken across four continents. One of the most interesting chapters in the history ofSpanish dialect differentiation is the African contribution, the byproduct of hun-dreds of thousands of African slaves imported first into Spain and Portugal andthen to the New World, who spoke a variety of African languages and sometimesalso European languages. The African contribution to the Hispanic Americanlexicon is undisputed, since in addition to the hundreds of Africanisms foundin the local level in dialects of Spanish throughout the Caribbean and SouthAmerica, such words as marimba, mucama, guineo, congo, name, cachimbo/a,merengue, mandinga, mondongo and possibly chevere are more widely used.5

More controversial are the possible African contributions to Spanish Americansyntax and phonetics, with the latter possibility either overlooked or overem-phasized 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 testimonyon the earlier speech patterns of Africans, in Spain and Latin America. Filling

4 For example Cerron-Palomino (2003), Granda (1979, 1988), Lipski (1994d), among many others.5 Megenney (1983).

Introduction 5

in the pieces of the puzzle is not only important for ethnolinguistic and languagecontact studies, but is vital to the tracing of the historical development of Spanishin its broadest sense. Only by fully reconstructing the speech varieties usedby Afro-Hispanics during the formative periods of Latin American Spanishwill it be possible to isolate and evaluate the other influences that shaped thedevelopment of Spanish on four continents.

In contemporary Latin America, despite a considerable Afro-American pop-ulation in many regions, and notwithstanding racial stereotypes in literatureand popular culture, there is nowhere to be found an ethnically unique “BlackSpanish,” comparable to vernacular Black English in the United States.6 In morerecent times, the linguistic characteristics attributed to black Spanish speakershave been simply those of the lower socioeconomic classes, without any objec-tive racial connotations. The situation was different in the past, and there existsample evidence that distinctly Afro-Hispanic speech forms did exist. The great-est obstacle in the assessment of earlier Afro-Hispanic language is the high levelof prejudice, exaggeration, and stereotyping which has always surrounded thedescription of non-white speakers of Spanish, and which attributes to all ofthem a wide range of defects and distortions that frequently are no more thanan unrealistic repudiation of this group.

One group that did use a “special” language were the bozales, slaves bornin Africa, who spoke European languages only with difficulty. The word bozaloriginally meant “savage” or “untamed horse,” and ultimately came to referto the halting Spanish or Portuguese spoken by Africans. This term rapidlydropped from usage in Spain once the population of African-born slaves dwin-dled, but it continued in the Spanish Caribbean – particularly Cuba – wellinto the twentieth century. Bozal language first arose along the West Africancoast and in the Iberian Peninsula late in the fifteenth century; the earliestattestations come from Portugal. Bozal Spanish makes its written appearancein Spain early in the sixteenth century, and continues through the middle ofthe eighteenth century, being especially prominent in Golden Age plays andpoetry. Latin American bozal Spanish was first described by writers like SorJuan Ines de la Cruz, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Other survivingseventeenth-century documents demonstrate the existence of bozal Spanish inthe highland mining areas of Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Guatemala.Few documents representing Afro-Hispanic speech remain from eighteenth-century Latin America; Cuba and Mexico are among the regions so repre-sented. 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 manycoastal regions, resulted in an outpouring of Afro-Hispanic literary represen-tations. The geographical distribution of extant texts mirrors the profile of the

6 Lipski (1985b).


African slave trade in Latin America. The nineteenth-century texts come prin-cipally from three regions: Cuba (with a few additional texts from Puerto Rico),coastal Peru, and the Buenos Aires/Montevideo region. The turn of the twenti-eth century brought a scattering of texts from coastal Colombia, Venezuela, andEcuador, together with a large corpus of Cuban materials. Contemporary Afro-Hispanic writers who have alluded to possible speech differences within theAfro-American communities come mostly from Cuba (e.g. Nicolas Guillen),Peru (e.g. Nicomedes Santa Cruz), Colombia (e.g. Manuel Zapata Olivella) andEcuador (e.g. Adalberto Ortiz, Nelson Estupinan 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 char-acteristics 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 speak-ers of African languages,8 data from some Caribbean texts have given rise totwo controversial proposals, which are of great importance to general Spanishdialectology. The first is that Afro-Hispanic language in the Caribbean andpossibly elsewhere coalesced into a stable creole language (i.e. had consistentstructural characteristics differing from those of previous varieties of Spanishand was eventually acquired natively). A corollary is the claim that this creolelanguage 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,Sao Tome and Annobon, and in Latin America in Papiamento (spoken in theNetherlands Antilles) and Palenquero (spoken in the Afro-Colombian villageof Palenque de San Basilio).

The second proposal is that this earlier Afro-Hispanic pidgin or perhapscreole language extended beyond the pale of slave barracks and plantations,and permanently affected the evolution of all Caribbean Spanish, not onlycontributing vocabulary items, but also touching syntax and phonology.9 The

7 Lipski (1999d). 8 Lipski (1986a, 1986f, 1998a, 1998c, 2000a).9 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 generationof African-born slaves, is taken by Laurence (1974), Lipski (1986a, 1986f, 1993, 1998a, 1998c,1999a, 2000a), Lopez Morales (1980), Martınez Gordo (1982), Reinecke (1937), and ValdesBernal (1978, 1987), among others.

Introduction 7

present work will draw together the available evidence on the nature of Afro-Hispanic language over a period of more than four centuries, in an attempt toaddress the questions posed by the prior creole hypothesis.

The reasons for the current scarcity of Spanish-derived creole languages arethe subject of debate; McWhorter (1995, 2000) has recently suggested thatSpanish-based creoles did not form in Latin America because, according tohis analysis, most if not all Afro-Atlantic creoles formed in slaving stationson the West African coast, most of which were controlled by the Portuguese(whence the large number of Afro-Lusitanian creoles). Laurence (1974) andothers have pointed to the high demographic ratio of white native Spanishspeakers to black slaves in Spanish American colonies, in contrast to Frenchand English colonies in which creole languages developed. In recent work I haveproposed that Spanish may indeed have briefly creolized during the nineteenthcentury in some of the more labor-intensive Cuban sugar plantations, but thatthe subsequent abolition of slavery and the rapid collapse of the hermetic slavebarracks environment precluded extension of such embryonic creoles past thefirst 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 fleetingcontemporary holdovers in isolated Afro-Hispanic communities, which containcreole-like features that are unlikely to have appeared spontaneously. Moreover,many of the features in these texts are similar or identical to combinations foundin acknowledged Afro-Iberian creoles. The elusive nature of creole elementssurrounded by unconvincing examples of second-language Spanish makes fora most interesting journey, and will form the basis for the final sections of thisbook.

Obstacles to historical reconstruction

Several factors contribute to the high level of uncertainty concerning the possi-ble African contributions to Latin American Spanish. Near the top of the list isinadequate demographic information, including the number and distribution ofAfricans in colonial Latin America, the languages they spoke, their interactionwith native Spanish speakers, and the extent to which the speech of Africanswas able to influence those around them. Population shifts of Africans from oneregion of Latin America to another, particularly immediately following the colo-nial wars of independence, is another fuzzy area, as is the true dimension of theclandestine slave and quasi-forced labor trade that flourished in the Caribbeanregion in the mid-nineteenth century, largely drawing from New World slave

10 Lipski (1998c, 2000a).


depots such as Curacao and the Lesser Antilles, and including Afro-Americanswho already spoke European languages or creoles derived from them. Thereis even indirect evidence that during the same time period, the Pacific slaveraiders who carried Polynesians and Easter Islanders to coastal Peru andChile and even as far as Guatemala and Mexico may have brought speakersof Pacific languages into contact with Afro-Hispanic speakers, further compli-cating the picture.11

The reconstruction of early Afro-Hispanic language, from the sixteenth cen-tury through the beginning of the twentieth century, is severely hampered bytwo additional factors. The first is the relative scarcity of non-literary and non-humorous attestations, particularly prior to the late nineteenth century. Nearlyall indications of Afro-Hispanic speech are embedded in humorous or satiricalliterature. 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 (theatri-cal farces) and the negros catedraticos (literally “black professors,” referring topretentious language usage). Additional examples are found in the cancioneros(song collections) and pregones (street vendors’ calls) of the nineteenth-centuryRıo de la Plata, and the hundreds of anonymous pamphlets and song sheets thatspread stereotypical linguistic formulas across several continents and severalcenturies. Few indeed are the non-fictional representations of bozal Africans’use of Spanish, and fewer still are the accounts which did not depart fromthe premise of the negrito who spoke “bad” Spanish. Before the nineteenthcentury, purportedly objective observations of Afro-Hispanic speech can becounted on the fingers of one hand, and the total amount of text amounts to aparagraph at best. Matters are little better in the nineteenth century, except fora few travelers’ accounts and a handful of dictionary entries. Work done in thetwentieth century by writers such as the Cubans Lydia Cabrera and FernandoOrtiz based on interviews with elderly Afro-Cubans allows for a more accuratereconstruction of Afro-Cuban speech from the middle of the nineteenth centuryonward.

The second obstacle is that Afro-Hispanic speech was never considered sys-tematically “different” enough from natively spoken Spanish for any particularattention to be paid to this variety. Reconstruction of such creole languagesas Srnan Tongo, Negerhollands, Guyanese Creole, Jamaican Creole, HaitianCreole, 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 fromspeakers of these emergent creoles had to be properly “translated” for Europeanconsumption.

11 Lipski (1996b, 2000c).

Introduction 9

An Afro-Hispanic overview

When one society dominates and enslaves another, the languages of the enslavedgroup are automatically placed at a disadvantage, and can only seep into thelanguage of the dominant society to the extent that both demographic weight(a high ratio of slaves to master class) and direct social contact make suchtransfer possible. Simple demographic ratios are not enough to ensure lan-guage transfer. During the early colonial period, Native Americans outnum-bered Spaniards by as much as 100,000 to 1, but as long as the Spanish lived inwalled cities or fortified coastal enclaves, they might as well have been livingon a space station. Mexico City for example was originally walled off from themillions of surrounding indigenous residents, and Spaniards had contact withonly a tiny handful of bilingual Indian or mestizo (mixed-race) intermediaries.The Spaniards did not learn the indigenous language, and most of the indige-nous population learned no Spanish. The bilingual and bicultural individualswho served as bridges between the two societies allowed for a little cross-fertilization, but it was only when the walls came down and a large mestizoclass came into its own – and moved in among the Spaniards – that serious lin-guistic influence of indigenous languages on Spanish could become possible. Inmost instances this meant simply transfer of individual words such as chocolate,tomate, zacate, tecolote, poncho, jaguar, condor, but when a bilingual popula-tion – retaining structural features of the indigenous language while speakingSpanish – became numerically and socially predominant, even monolingualSpanish usage was affected. This occurred, for example, in Paraguay and muchof the Andean region, where grammatical patterns derived from the indigenouslanguages are used by Spanish speakers with no Native American heritage. Akey factor facilitating the transfer of structural patterns from the indigenouslanguages to Spanish was the fact that, in a given area, a single native lan-guage predominated. Indigenous residents continued to communicate with oneanother in their own language, and their approximations to Spanish all shareda common basis, reflecting the patterns of that native language.

For a variety of reasons, the relationship between African languages andSpanish in the Caribbean was substantially different than in the cases just men-tioned. First, Africans in Latin America usually did not enjoy the possibility ofa shared common language. More by circumstance than by deliberate design,slaving ships typically picked up loads of slaves from several West African portsbefore traversing the Atlantic, and a shipment of slaves could contain speak-ers of a dozen mutually unintelligible languages. Moreover, at least six majorAfrican language families were involved in the Afro-Hispanic mix (Atlantic,Mande, Kru, Kwa, Congo-Benue and Bantu), each of which has totally dif-ferent structures, and which share almost no common denominators at all.A typical heterogeneous group of Africans acquiring Spanish could not use


loan-translations from their native languages that would be widely understoodby Africans of different backgrounds.

Until the nineteenth century, Africans in the Spanish Caribbean usuallyworked 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 onmembership in a specific African ethnic group, which may have facilitatedretention of some African languages beyond the first generation, but in generalwhen Africans found themselves together in Latin America, they had to resortto 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 useof Africans in placer gold mining, pearl diving, and agriculture, the importationof Africans dropped drastically in all of these areas, except for the Colombianport of Cartagena de Indias, through which nearly all slaves destined for thenorthwestern part of South America passed. Thus although in some regions thepopulation of African origin was considerable, most Afro-Hispanics had beenborn in the colonies in close contact with native speakers of Spanish. Only ina few of the largest cities, such as Havana and Cartagena, did even a minimalamount of ghettoization take place, which may have fostered the retention ofcertain ethnically marked words or pronunciation, similar to inner city neigh-borhoods in the United States, or the townships of apartheid-era South Africa. Inthe remaining places, the ratio of African-born bozales – workers who learnedSpanish as a second language – was always small in comparison to the nativeSpanish-speaking population – black and white.

Matters changed rapidly following the Haitian revolution, which began in1791. 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 eighteenthcentury, and the ratio of black slaves to white masters was as high as 100:1 onsome plantations. Following the revolution and the establishment of the freenation of Haiti by the 1820s, sugar production dropped almost to zero, andother Latin American countries which had previously been reluctant to com-pete against the French near-monopoly rushed to fill the gap. This requiredthe immediate importation of hundreds of thousands of additional laborers,the majority of whom came directly from Africa, with a considerable numberalso drawn from other established Caribbean colonies. The two largest par-ticipants in the new sugar boom were Brazil and Cuba. Nearly 90 percent ofthe total number of African slaves – a figure of between one and two millionindividuals – brought to Cuba arrived between 1790 and 1840. Figures are pro-portionally similar although smaller in absolute numbers for Puerto Rico andVenezuela.

Introduction 11

Unlike in earlier times, the last wave of Africans arriving in the SpanishCaribbean was often divided into larger groups speaking a single language. Thisis because only a few large slave traders remained in business, and had estab-lished themselves in ethnically homogeneous African ports. In Cuba, Yorubaspeakers from southwestern Nigeria (known as lucumıes) represented the largestgroup, and provided the linguistic and cultural basis for the Afro-Cuban reli-gion santerıa. Igbo- and Efik-speaking carabalıes (from southeastern Nigeria)also arrived in large numbers, and their language contributed to the secretAfro-Cuban society known as Abakua. Groups of Kikongo speakers (known ascongos, from modern Zaire and northern Angola) and Fongbe speakers (knownas araras, from modern Benin and Togo) were also found in Cuba, and to this daymusical, cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions from these African ethnicgroups remain in Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, and other Caribbean areas. This createdthe conditions for wider use of African languages in the Caribbean colonies, andAfricans who spoke less common languages learned major African languagessuch as Yoruba and Kikongo in the Caribbean, much as major regional languagesare 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 thefact that the newly arrived African workers were highly concentrated in sprawl-ing sugar plantations known as ingenios, housed in barracks or barracones, anddeprived of the broad-based contact with native speakers of Spanish that earliergenerations of Africans had encountered. A description of one such estate writ-ten in 1849 by the English traveler Richard Madden (1849:156), graphicallydescribes the living conditions:

The appearance of the negroes on this estate was wretched in the extreme; they lookedjaded to death, listless, stupefied, haggard, and emaciated: how different from the looksof the pampered, petted, well-fed, idle, domestic slaves of the Dons of the Havana! Theclothing of the Olanda negroes was old and ragged . . . they lived here in huts, near theIngenio, but very miserable places, unfit for the habitation of wild beasts that it mightbe thought desirable to keep in health or comfort.

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


native competence in Spanish, although, even with the use of some Africanlanguages, the slaves inevitably had to use Spanish with the overseers, as wellas with some of the other Africans. The combination of a need to speak Spanishand the absence of sufficient native speakers resulted in the formation of apidgin or reduced form of Spanish. For more than half a century in the SpanishCaribbean, social and demographic conditions existed which necessitated theuse of a Spanish-based pidgin by African-born bozales. Their attempts at speak-ing Spanish are well documented. What is less clear is whether bozal pidginSpanish ever became a native language in the Caribbean, and whether subse-quent reentry into mainstream regional varieties of Spanish produced a perma-nent African imprint. In the most isolated slave barracks of large plantations,Spanish pidgin undoubtedly became the native languages of children born inthese difficult conditions, and given the social isolation of black plantationlaborers, a creolized Spanish may have existed for at least a generation in afew of the largest ingenios (sugar plantations). However, following the aboli-tion of slavery in the Spanish Caribbean around the middle of the nineteenthcentury, even African-born bozales were placed in contact with large numbersof native Spanish speakers. If a Spanish-based creole language ever existed inthe nineteenth-century Caribbean, it was a fleeting occurrence in a few of thelargest plantations, and quickly rejoined the mainstream of Spanish followingthe integration of the Afro-Hispanic population.

There is less likelihood that Spanish became a creole language in theCaribbean prior to the nineteenth century, except in highly unusual cases. Fromthe earliest colonial times, slaves often escaped and formed isolated maroon vil-lages, where Spanish-based pidgins and creoles undoubtedly flourished brieflybefore being extinguished or re-absorbed by the dominant population. A few ofthese “special” forms of Afro-Hispanic language made their way into historicalaccounts, and in addition to fragmentary hints scattered throughout remote Afro-American 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 inthe Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America, from the middle of the fifteenthcentury to the beginning of the twentieth century. Considerable attention is paidto the analysis of literary texts, travelers’ accounts, and folkloric documents,these being the sole surviving evidence of Afro-Hispanic contact languagesfrom earlier centuries. Although no single text can be taken at face value, theexistence of many recurring common denominators suggests that even the moststereotyped 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 ofwritten documents from previous centuries, and offer reasoned opinions asto whether Afro-Hispanic language ever creolized. The linguistic legacy ofAfro-Hispanic contacts can only be fully appreciated by casting the nets wide,encompassing Spain, Portugal, West Africa, and Latin America, across nearly400 years. The following studies represent only the first steps on this challengingjourney.

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, andblack Africans were exported from the continent as slaves as early as the RomanEmpire. At first, the slave trade was carried out by Moslem dealers followingthe spread of Islam to Africa in the eighth century, and primarily focused onnortheastern Africa. It is estimated that anywhere between 3.5 million and10 million Africans were shipped northward and eastward from the eighthto the fifteenth centuries. The final destiny and the tasks performed by theseslaves are only imperfectly known, but black Africans were present all acrossthe Indian Ocean and the Red Sea from the ninth century. Although the totalnumber of slaves taken from Africa during this seven-century period is largeeven by conservative estimates, the annual average was only a few thousand, andthis early slave trade appears to have had none of the destabilizing influenceson African societies that the later Euro-Atlantic traffic had.1

Slavery was a part of Europe throughout recorded history; the Greek andRoman empires made extensive use of slaves, and following the Moorish con-quest of several Mediterranean islands as well as Spain beginning in 711, agri-cultural slavery spread to the Iberian Peninsula. Slavery was also commonthroughout medieval Europe, beginning with the Crusades, which put centraland western European nations in contact with a variety of peoples deemedappropriate for enslavement. Genoese and Venetian traders led the way, andslaves were taken from the Balkans, Palestine, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey, and espe-cially southern Russia. The word slave itself refers to the common use of Slavicpeoples – particularly Russians – as slaves. Along the northern shore of theMediterranean, Italian and Sicilian kingdoms brought slaves from the MiddleEast and North Africa, as well as black Africans from points further south. Inparticular, the presence of black Africans in Italy and Sicily probably began asearly as the thirteenth century on an occasional basis, became somewhat morecommon in the fourteenth century,2 and assumed significant proportions in the

1 Klein (1986). 2 Origa (1955), Balbi (1966), Verlinden (1977:206), Gaudioso (1992).

14

Africans in the Iberian peninsula 15

fifteenth century. Italian and Sicilian kingdoms were importing black slaves dur-ing the early decades of the fifteenth century,3 even before Portugal had begunthe widespread importation of West African slaves. The kingdom of Naples alsobrought in large numbers of black Africans, as well as many North Africans.Sardinia took in many black slaves in the fifteenth century and thereafter, pri-marily 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. Throughoutthe seventeenth century, slavery (mostly of North Africans) was also commonin Liguria. Catalan traders were involved in much of this trans-Mediterraneanslave trade, and black slaves also made their way to Catalonia and southernFrance.4 At first, the two slave populations came from unrelated sources; theItalian and Sicilian slaves were largely purchased through contacts in the south-eastern Mediterranean, through the use of North African and Middle Easternintermediaries. By the middle of the fifteenth century, black slaves shippedthrough Portugal began arriving in central Italy. A slave transshipment depotwas set up in Pisa, and merchants from Florence, Rome, and other Italian citiescould purchase slaves of West African origin. Genoa also contained an impor-tant 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, espe-cially Majorca, where beginning around 1457 Portuguese West African tradersreplaced North African intermediaries as the prime suppliers of black slaves.In 1489, the arrival of a group of Wolofs is registered for Valencia, and theterm bozals, used to refer to African-born slaves, makes its first appearance inCatalan. It is estimated that nearly 2,500 Wolofs alone were taken to Valencia inthe last decades of the fifteenth century. Central and northern Italy thus becamea crossroads for slaves from West Africa and from northeastern Africa. Giventhe active participation of Genoese, Venetian, and Sicilian merchants in theMediterranean slave trade, black slaves were also sold from Italy to buyersin southern and southeastern Spain, although the total number of such saleswas small compared to the Portuguese supply of slaves to Spain. To cementthe Iberian-Italian slave connection even further, indigenous (Guanche) slavesfrom the Canary Islands were sold to Italian buyers, at roughly the same timethat black Africans began to arrive in the Canary Islands.6

3 Verlinden (1977:208–09), Livi (1928:137).4 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).5 Gioffre (1971), Verlinden (1977). 6 Verlinden (1977).


There are other Italo-Iberian connections in play as well. From the fifteenthcentury through the end of the seventeenth century – i.e. the time in whichPortuguese slave trading in West Africa reached its apogee, there were signif-icant cultural and commercial ties between Italian city-states such as Florenceand Venice and the Iberian Peninsula. Italian expatriates were concentratedin Lisbon and Seville, and Italian merchants and scholars contributed to thepolitical and intellectual life in these regions. These cultural and trade con-tacts provide additional mechanisms by means of which the language and waysof African slaves in Italy and Sicily could exert a tangible influence on thedeveloping Afro-Iberian language of Portugal and southern Spain.7

African slaves in Italy and Sicily were first predominantly female, used asconcubines and in domestic service. Before long, the preference shifted to maleslaves, used in agriculture and in domestic servitude. The living conditionsand demographic proportions were similar to those found in southern Spanishcities in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, from which it is notunlikely that African-born slaves in Italy progressed through the same linguisticcontinuum – from rudimentary pidgin in the first generation to ethnically neutralEuropean language in subsequent generations – as occurred throughout Spainand Portugal. To date, only one literary document has come to light, a sonnetby the Florentine poet Alessandro Braccesi (1455–1503), written towards theend 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 puzuonapur tella tiesse marita figliona.No puoza begnir chia buolla paiole.

– Sta cheta col malanno! – Tuo pertonedui 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 involvephonetic deformations (Ferrara 1950:324): potrono for patrona, ni for nuon,

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


begliuta for beiuta, mangliata for mangiata, sie for sei, fiaccia for faccia, bia-gascia for bagascia, and dui for cui. Although some of the distortions wereclearly intended for comic effect and probably were not actually used by slavesof any linguistic background, other modifications are consistent with knownAfro-Romance contacts. For example, in some of the local varieties of theAfro-Panamian negro congo speech, an epenthetic semivocalic /i/ (and some-times /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 withthe Portuguese-initiated Atlantic slave trade, in the second half of the fifteenthcentury. Matters are more complex, however, since sub-Saharan Africans, bothslave and free, were present in Spain long before the Portuguese explorationsof West Africa. Little direct documentation of their life, culture and languageis available, but the general facts are known.9

Arab and other Muslim traders had been involved in slave trading with sub-Saharan 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 Schiavoniapaisa,” 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,pero 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 vinae faite io buona compania.

Voglioti presa ancora una florina,ch’io venduto uno tassa e un laternoche furatosi io a patruna mia.

Oime, santa Maria!– Compania, male stai? Non posso caca.– E buona fe’, io cacata tutta braca.

According to Ferrara (1950:321), Marta was a name frequently given to African slaves in Italyduring the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. He speculates (p. 323) that the slave woman may bea Tartar, although admitting the possibility that she is African. Given the time period in whichthe poem was written, it is more likely that a black African slave was living in Florence than awoman of Tartar origin. In any event, the deformed Florentine dialect found in the poem doesnot contain identifying characteristics of any particular substratum.

9 F. Ortiz (1986:ch. VII); Seminario (1975) for an overview.


first during the Moorish occupation of Spain and Portugal and then as a resultof Portuguese contacts along the coast of present-day Mauritania, which wouldultimately provide a pattern for European initiatives in the African slave trade.Most of this early slave trade was carried out through contact with pow-erful African city-states, including the kingdoms of Mali (centered aroundTimbuktu), Takrur (along the Senegal River), Ghana (at the southern edge ofthe 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 oasisto 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 NileRiver, and through the Horn of Africa. The precise number of slaves exported tothe eastern Mediterranean (and later to Italy, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula)via trans-Saharan routes is not known, but Austen (1979:30–32), after review-ing available data, places a low estimate of 1,000+ and an upper figure of morethan 6,000 slaves per year, for the period 700–1700. Thus the most conserva-tive estimate indicates displacement of over one million slaves – mostly fromsub-Saharan regions, across the Sahara in medieval and renaissance times.

In practice, these trade routes reached all the way from the Mediterraneancoast of North Africa to the Bight of Benin, via a series of interlocking groupsand societies. When European explorers and entrepreneurs arrived along theWest African coast in the fifteenth century, they were able to immediatelytap into efficient trade systems, which had already been supplying the sameproducts, albeit via different routes, and did not need to set up any infrastructurein order to enter into immediate commerce. Indeed, Europeans were only ableto establish the most rudimentary installations on the African coast, usuallysimple barracks to hold slaves and trade goods awaiting transport (althoughsometimes nearby villages were used for this purpose). Thus for example thePortuguese fortress at Elmina was designed to protect Akan gold shipments,but local African leaders viewed this territorial incursion with considerableambivalence, and the Portuguese (and later the Dutch, who captured the fort)were never able to expand their presence in this region. European traders hadto depend on the goodwill of their African hosts, and went to great lengths toensure favorable treatment.

Black Africans were apparently first brought to Spain by the Moorish occu-pation forces, who acquired them from Ethiopia, and also from the trans-Saharatrade caravans that would later provide slaves and tropical products to ChristianPortugal and Spain. Moslem residents of Arab-dominated Cordoba protestedthat the royal bodyguards were mostly blacks who spoke no Arabic.10 The

10 Hitti (1963:514, fn. 6).


various Arab leaders of Moslem Spain possessed quantities of black slaves, whowere frequently offered as gifts to other dignitaries. Christian Spaniards firstcame to possess black slaves following the reconquest of Seville in 1248, whenthey acquired slaves formerly owned by the Moslems. Many of the descendantsof these slaves were present in Spain, some still in forced servitude, during thereign of the Catholic monarchs Fernando and Isabela. By the thirteenth century,black slaves were also present in Majorca, Aragon, and Valencia, coming largelyfrom Italy and Sicily. Through dealings with merchants, mostly Moslems andJews, who traded across the Sahara, residents of Catalonia possessed detailedinformation about sub-Saharan Africa, including the names of some principalkingdoms. According to indirect sources, blacks were so prevalent in Sevilleby 1401 that the first cofradıa or mutual aid society was formed in the Barrio deSan Roque, called the “Santısimo Cristo de la Fundacion” or “de los negritos,”also referred to as the “Cofradıa de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles.”11 In 1472,a group of black slaves petitioned the government of Aragon to form a cofradıanamed “Nuestra Senora 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, anda general awareness of black “Ethiopians” throughout southern Europe, directcontact between the Iberian Peninsula and sub-Saharan Africa was sporadicbefore the turn of the fifteenth century. With the Portuguese explorations ofthe West African coast, beginning in the early fifteenth century, black Africansbegan arriving in the Iberian Peninsula in ever increasing numbers. The firstlarge populations were found in Portugal, especially in Lisbon. The first blackAfricans arriving in fifteenth-century Portugal were free emissaries, but slaveswere soon to follow. Despite the free status of these blacks, prejudice againstblacks, based largely on vague travel accounts and semi-mythical stories of“Ethiopia,” pervaded medieval Spain and Portugal. We have no written recordsof how free Africans might have spoken Portuguese (and later, Spanish),although Portuguese documents written by Congolese scribes in the sixteenthcentury contain deviations from native usage that give hints of what was obvi-ously a more widespread interlanguage (see chapter 2). That Portuguese didbecome a significant linguistic presence in West Africa is attested by the numer-ous early Portuguese borrowings, in Akan, Kikongo, and later in Bantu lan-guages from South Africa to the Horn of Africa.12 Presumably, the most fluentAfrican speakers of Portuguese (such as the Christianized Manicongo or Kongo

11 Gonzalez de Leon (1852:9–10), Bermejo y Carballo (1882:7–9, 381–99), F. Ortiz (1986:158–59).

12 Atkins (1953), Martins (1958a, 1958b), Bradshaw (1965), Bal (1968, 1974), Cabral (1975),Kiraithe and Baden (1976), Prata (1983), Horta (1991a, 1991b).


emperor and his ministers) spoke with the substratal features observable in themodern speech of Angolans and Mozambicans who have attained fluency inPortuguese.13 Africans possessing only a passing acquaintance with Portuguesewould speak a rough pidgin. However, it is only with the introduction of slaves,human entities destined to be despised, that the historical record comments onblack Africans’ use of European languages.

Portugal’s early explorers in Africa regarded the native populations withcuriosity and amusement, but massive enslavement was not yet in the picture.When Portugal discovered wealthy and powerful African kindgoms, epitomizedby the Kingdom of the Kongo, they established diplomatic relations as with aEuropean or Asian power. African nations along the Gold Coast were alsotreated with some deference, and Portugal constructed the fortress at Elminaas a means of safeguarding access to these important groups. Constructionand maintenance of the castle required the continuing cooperation of Africanleaders.

When Portuguese, and then Spanish explorers reached the western coast ofsub-Saharan Africa, slavery was the last thing on their minds. They encountereda number of prosperous and well-established civilizations, which were wellsituated to provide luxury items such as gold, ivory, and, later, spices. Africanleaders were glad to provide the needed commodities, in return for guns andgunpowder, and other European trade goods. Since African societies nevercame to produce such goods themselves, the initial barter with Europe ultimatelyturned into a dependency, as tribal leaders staked their fortunes on the superiorityaccruing to the possession and distribution of desirable European goods.

When the Europeans entered into trade with West African leaders, theydiscovered that slavery was already a flourishing industry in many Africancommunities, and had been for centuries. Intra-African slavery was in manyways similar to practices found in imperial Rome and medieval eastern Europe.Slaves were taken en masse as prisoners of war. Some groups sold membersinto slavery to alleviate population pressures occasioned by crop failures orother 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 couldmuster. 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 consider-able. First, slaves within Africa were more closely integrated into the societiesin which they worked. Slaves were usually taken from outside the immediateethnic group, often in response to population pressures. Some scholars have

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


referred to slavery in sub-Saharan Africa as “institutionalization of marginal-ity.”14 Slaves usually worked alongside free community members. Under nocircumstances were they confined to labor gangs, whose sole function was toproduce a surplus of labor-intensive energy. Within Africa, slaves enjoyed ameasure of autonomy, were able to devote part of their time to their own sus-tenance, and could obtain their freedom much more easily than in Americanplantation societies. Although ethnic rivalries in Africa can create nearly impen-etrable barriers among groups, the racist reaction occasioned by strikingly dif-ferent physical characteristics between Europeans and black Africans did notenter into consideration. Nor was the ethnic fragmentation as massive in mostcases. In European and American slaveholdings, it was usual to find Africansfrom a wide variety of ethnic and linguistic groups, who had been throwntogether by mere chance. Within Africa, slaves were normally acquired eitherfrom geographically adjacent regions, or by established trade mechanisms thatpredictably yielded members of known ethnic groups. Thus communicationamong slaves, and between slaves and free community members, was usuallyfacilitated. Cultural practices could be similar or identical among slaves andslave owners. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, within Africa slaves werenot held as chattels, to be bought, sold, and bequeathed without the slightestpersonal consideration. In Africa, slaves were not normally separated from theirspouses or children, and in general their living conditions were approximatelyof the same order of magnitude as (at least the less fortunate) free communitymembers.

Within Africa, clear regional hegemonies existed, and certain ethnic andcultural groups were in the ascendancy before the European-American slavetrade began. In many instances, some of these same structures of subordinationwere maintained in the slavery setting, particularly as regards linguistic usage,and religious practices. A clear case is the Kingdom of the Kongo, which hadenjoyed superiority over neighboring groups for a long time, perhaps centuries,before the arrival of Europeans. Members of neighboring ethnic groups paidtribute, imitated Kongo practices, and in groups containing Africans from sev-eral regions, usually looked to Bakongo as natural leaders. Once West Africansfound themselves thrown together by the slave trade, especially when Bantuspeakers from the Congo Basin area were involved, leadership often naturallygravitated to Bakongos. This accounts for the prevalence of Kikongo lexicalitems in regions of Latin America where Bantu-speaking slaves from manyregions 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 froma wide cross-section of African traditions adopted the designation congo.

14 Rawley (1981:12).


As a result of the growing trade in African slaves, Europeans came to seeblack Africans as nothing more than a virtually endless supply of cheap anddurable labor. The events that turned the tide are not known with certainty, butseveral plausible scenarios can be suggested. Europeans certainly observed thealready flourishing African practice of slavery, traditionally involving prisonersof war. Slaves, which African groups bartered among themselves, were offeredto the first European visitors in exchange for trade goods. The Portuguese andSpaniards were all too familiar with slavery, both during the Moorish occu-pation and its immediate aftermath. Thus there would be no psychological ormoral obstacles standing in the way of absorbing a new group of captives. Atthe same time, European explorers in Africa found, in addition to elaboratekingdoms, other groups of Africans who lacked the means of resisting foreignintrusions, and who lived in conditions that the Europeans could interpret asprimitive. Countering the view of the Manicongo and the Gold Coast chieftainsas powerful personages, came the notion of the African as savage, fit only forforced labor.15 The racist reaction of Europeans towards black Africans inten-sified once the latter were taken out of their element. In Europe, and later inthe Americas, blacks were seen as “different” and therefore – given naturalhuman xenophobia – inferior. If they attempted to maintain their native dressand cultural patterns, their strangeness only provoked laughter, while if theyadopted European styles, their attempts at cultural crossover were met withmockery and derision. Linguistic difficulties compounded the problem. WithinAfrica, although pidginized versions of European languages might be usedfor trade, African languages were the order of the day, and Europeans werealways at a disadvantage when surrounded by an African population that couldcompletely bypass foreign visitors by using African languages. In Europe andAmerica, where fluency in Spanish, Portuguese, etc. was tantamount to beingcivilized, and where such expressions as hablar en cristiano meant “to speak aEuropean language,” hence be Christian = in possession of a redeemable soul,Africans who spoke little or nothing of these European languages were brandedas bozales “untamed” and gente sin razon “people without reason.”

Paths of Portuguese exploration and exploitation in Africa

In Portugal, King Joao I began to look to North Africa as a possible zone ofexpansion, following the defeat of Moorish forces in Spain and Portugal. Thevision of sub-Saharan Africa as a land of great wealth – in particular gold –already existed in medieval Europe. Arab trading caravans that crossed theSahara from the grasslands and rain forests to the south often brought gold orna-ments for sale to Europeans in North Africa. Moreover, some African chieftains

15 Ibid. (13).


had amassed spectacular wealth, and ostentatious display of this wealth occurredon more than one occasion. For example, in 1324, Mansa Musa, the Islamicruler of the Kingdom of Mali, made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He took with hima retinue of some 60,000 individuals, including 500 men each carrying a goldstaff. 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 animage of Musa holding a gold nugget appeared in Europe.16 The Portuguese,through the invention of the caravelle and the development of advanced seafar-ing prowess, were the first European nation to directly probe for the sources ofAfrican gold by sea, and the voyages of exploration meant to secure wealth forEuropean merchants had unforeseen consequences for Afro-Iberian relations.

In 1415, Portugal successfully captured the enclave of Ceuta. King Joao’sson, Henry, was present at the capture of Ceuta, and came into contact withstories of fabulous wealth in the near-mythical city of Timbuktu, on the otherside of the great desert. The Arabs often referred to the wealthy land south of theSahara 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. Thelatter 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 befactual, although the extent of individual wealth in the sub-Saharan kingdomswas exaggerated.

Prince Henry was understandably enticed by the stories he heard in NorthAfrica. His motives for undertaking the maritime exploration of the WestAfrican coast have been disputed by historians, but a combination of religiouszeal, mercenary greed, and a powerful sense of impending adventure, impelledHenry to plan and underwrite the sea ventures which were to radically changelife on the Iberian Peninsula, in Africa, and in the Americas. The initial explo-ration of the West African coast was impeded by the superstitious fear of aboiling sea, scorching sun, and reputed dropoff of the ocean, which accordingto legend lay beyond Cape Bojador, in northwestern Morocco. Although nosuch supernatural forces in fact existed past Bojador, sea currents were fast andoften violent, and both sea and winds moved in a southeasterly direction. Thismade it impossible for early sailing vessels to return along the coast; they wouldhave to put far out to sea in unknown and dangerous waters in order to returnto European ports. The early ships were fragile and always hugged the coastwhile sailing, and medieval pilots were unaccustomed to the techniques of tack-ing, so that the nautical barrier represented by Cape Bojador was real enougheven without the mythological horror stories. In 1434, the Portuguese pilot GilEannes proved these stories to be false, by rounding the cape and returning

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


home to tell of no misadventures. In the following years, Portuguese sailorswould continue to inch their way forward along the Moroccan coast, withoutmaking any astounding discoveries. These feats of nautical prowess were madepossible by the development of new ships and sails, which allowed ships to sailagainst the strong westerly winds which blow along the African coast, far intothe Sargasso Sea and then northeastward toward Portugal thereby enabling asafe return to the Mediterranean. For several years, the Portuguese maintainedthis return route as a strict secret, to discourage other Europeans (particularlySpaniards) from dislodging Portuguese explorers from the African coasts.17

In 1441, Captain Antam Goncalvez decided to go ashore along the coastof what would later be the Spanish colony of Rio de Oro. Stumbling upon agroup of North Africans (probably Berbers) with black captives, Goncalvezand his crew, together with another Portuguese adventurer who happened uponthe scene (Nuno Tristao), succeeded in capturing several prisoners, includingone black African who claimed to be of royal blood.18 The sensation in Lisbonupon the return of these ships can scarcely be imagined, for here was tangibleevidence in support of the fabulous tales that had been in circulation since thefirst Portuguese presence in North Africa. Nuno Tristao eventually returned theAfrican captive to the area of Mauritania, where he was exchanged for ten blackhostages, all of whom were taken back to Portugal. In 1443–44, Nuno Tristaocame upon Arguim Island, which was to become the first slaving station forthe European slave trade in Africa. In a series of raids on the coast and nearbyinland areas, this expedition rounded up more than two hundred captives, whichdemonstrated to skeptical Europeans that large-scale cargoes of slaves could beobtained in West Africa.

After the initial raids, Portuguese explorers discovered that it was easier toobtain slaves by barter than by capture. Europeans traded in luxury goods thathad previously been obtained by trans-Sahara caravans: horses, silks, metalproducts, etc. At the same time, Portuguese sailors were pushing ever furtheralong the African coast, making contact directly with black African communi-ties and leaders, rather than with Arab and Berber traders.

The first sub-Saharan Africans brought to Portugal in quantity came withthe building of the trading station on Arguim Island. Direct contact with theSenegambia region had been made the year before, but permanent mainlandsettlements were not established until a few years later. The Arguim station wasimportant for the African slave trade from the very beginning, despite lying tothe north of black Africa. Slaving caravans brought slaves from the Senegambiato Arguim, whence they were shipped to Portugal. By 1455, more than 1,000slaves per year were passing through Arguim,19 so that the presence of Wolof-and 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).


Portuguese settlements in Senegambia. In addition to the Euro-African con-tacts occasioned by the slave trade, by the late 1450s Portugal was buyingconsiderable quantities of gold from the Gambian region.20 By the early 1460sPortuguese explorers had reached Sierra Leone, and a decade later the IvoryCoast and the Gold Coast (Ghana) were the subject of intense Portuguese inter-est. Gold-inspired trade with the latter region began immediately, and the Minaarea soon became one of the Portuguese crown’s major sources of gold. Shortlythereafter the fortress of Elmina was constructed, consolidating Portuguese con-trol in a zone that was being increasingly contested by Spain. Portuguese explor-ers first arrived in the Kongo Kingdom in 1483, and speakers of Congo Basinlanguages were taken to Portugal in the following years.21 The Portugueselearned of the Mani Congo (Muene Kongo in contemporary Kikongo), leaderof this kingdom, and by the beginning of the sixteenth century, considerableKongo nomenclature was in circulation among those concerned with the Africantrade. The first permanent Portuguese trading presence on the mainland of WestAfrica was in the Senegambia and Guinea-Bissau, and although the bulk ofPortuguese slave trading would ultimately shift to the Bight of Benin, CongoBasin, and Angola, Upper Guinea would continue to supply slaves through-out the colonial period (Rodney 1970). The majority of slaves taken from thisregion ended up in Cape Verde, the Madeiras, the Canaries, and the IberianPeninsula, which is why comparatively few slaves from this region appear inlists representing Spanish America. There is some indication that the earlyslave labor in the mines of Potosı drew heavily on Upper Guinea.22 By the turnof the eighteenth century, the French were the principal slave traders along theUpper Guinea coast, and the English also made incursions. By the middle of thecentury Bissau was exporting large quantities of slaves, principally to Brazil.

The next coastal African area to be exploited by the Portuguese, and the onewhich was to become the single largest source of slaves for the Atlantic trade,was the Angola/Congo region. Luanda rose to become the principal stagingarea for the slave trade, followed by Beneguela to the south. The island of SaoTome was important throughout the slave trade, but it is difficult to determinehow many of the slaves who apparently passed through this island (which was amajor holding station) had actually spent a significant amount of time there. SaoTome, with its rich volcanic soil and abundant rainfall, became an importantplantation colony for Portugal, surpassing Madeira in sugar production. For awhile, Sao Tome was Portugal’s main source of sugar, and the planters on thatisland (which was originally uninhabited) had a ready source of slaves from theneighboring African coast. Much of the slave trade to Sao Tome was handledby local traders and planters, circumventing official monopolies. Because SaoTome 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).


slaves from both regions were taken to the island. The creole language thatdeveloped on Sao Tome and Prıncipe, 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 adecade later the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast (Ghana) were the subjectof intense Portuguese interest. Gold-inspired trade with the latter region beganimmediately, and the Mina area soon became one of the Portuguese crown’smajor sources of gold. In 1482 the fortress of Sao Jorge da Mina (known popu-larly as Elmina) was constructed, consolidating Portuguese control of trade ina zone which was being increasingly contested by Spain. Portuguese explorersarrived at the mouth of the Congo River in 1482, and arrived in the Kongo King-dom in 1483, and speakers of Congo Basin languages were taken to Portugualin the following years. After several aborted attempts at making contact with theleaders of the coastal Congo populations, Diego Cao 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, anddetermined that he nominally controlled vast numbers of minions in coastaland inland regions of the Congo Basin. Diplomatic relations were immediatelyestablished between Portugal and the Kongo kingdom, in the person of theManicongo Nzinga a Nkuwa, whom the Portuguese referred to as Joao. A fewyears later the Congolese leader Nzinga Mbemba was baptized as a Christianand took the name of Dom Affonso. At the turn of the sixteenth century hebecame the next Manicongo, and for years he carried on an intense correspon-dence 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 highereducation and to study for religious orders. At the same time, the presence ofPortuguese priests and missionaries was increased in the Congo. This accountsfor the large number of Portuguese borrowings into Kikongo; in Portugal, mem-bers of the academic community often had first-hand contacts with free Africansthrough the limited “student exchange.” Early literary imitations of Portugueselanguage and habits could therefore have some basis in fact, and the presenceof free Africans of noble birth would inspire later Portuguese and Spanish writ-ers who argued against the notion that all Africans were uneducated heathensworthy of contempt.

23 Ferraz (1979), Gunther (1973), Morais-Barbosa (1963, 1975), Valkhoff (1966, 1975).24 Felgas (1958), Duffy (1961), Balandier (1968), Thornton (1983), Hilton (1985).


The Portuguese remained in Congo/Angola from the end of the fifteenthcentury until the second half of the twentieth century, and exported slaves fromthis region until nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. The Portuguesepresence in the former Kongo kingdom did not last as long, particularly at thenorthern edge of this territory, along the Congo River. In the entire region, thePortuguese fortunes rose and fell as conflicts with and among various Africangroups resulted in changing alliances. These events had profound consequencesfor the supply of slaves to foreign markets, and must be taken into account whenattempting to determine the ethnicity and languages of Congo/Angola slavestaken to the Americas at different time periods.25

Portuguese expansion into Angola

Immediately to the south of the Kongo kingdom was Dondo or Ndongo, whoseruler was known as the Ngola. Originally the Ngola was subordinate to theManicongo, but Portuguese intervention helped break this dependency. TheAfrican leaders in turn allowed the Portuguese to establish a mainland trad-ing settlement, in the territory that would thenceforth be known as Angola.The fort of Luanda was constructed in 1576, and became the main focus ofEuropean trade, and later the principal port of the Atlantic slave trade, withSouth 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 andthe supply of slaves for the Atlantic trade.

Portuguese slaving in the Kongo kingdom, at first perceived as advantageousby the Manicongo, was by the middle of the sixteenth century seen to have apernicious effect on the population of the kingdom, with the drain being partic-ularly heavy among young males. The Manicongo Affonso I had petitioned theking of Portugal to stop the trade, but by this time the momentum had grown toopowerful for any African leader to stop. Spurred on by the slave traders on SaoTome, who took slaves from the mainland with or without official Portuguesepermission, the slave trade continued to grow. Many of the slaves deliveredby the Kongo were obtained by trade or raid from interior groups, also speak-ing related Bantu languages (e.g. the Teke and Mpumbu). During the initialPortuguese recognition of the Kongo monarchy, the latter kingdom also drewslaves from the tributary Mbundu people, living under the dominion of theNgola, in the Ndongo kingdom just to the south. Thus for the majority of thesixteenth century, slaves delivered from the Congo region did not as frequentlyspeak Kikongo (the language of the dominant group, and thus the least likely

25 Birmingham (1966).


to be found among the slaves), as related Bantu languages. Kimbundu was theforemost 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 destroyingthe Kongo kingdom (although a series of powerless Kongo “kings” wouldcontinue to swear loyalty to Portugal until the early decades of the twentiethcentury). Portugal authorized a first visit to the land of the Ngola in 1520, butthis met with little success (the emissary was hostage for nearly six years), andaroused the ire of the Manicongo, who wished to retain his monopoly on alltrade with Europe, and to completely dominate the slaving business. However,by 1550, Portuguese traders were taking slaves from Angola, although no directrelationship with the Ngola had yet been established. This contact was finallymade in 1560, but relations soon degenerated, and hostilities between Portugaland a succession of Ngolas would mark the next two centuries.

Once direct contact with the Ngola had been made, the proportion of Mbunduslaves taken by the Portuguese appears to have dropped, since the Mbunduwere variously trade allies or adversaries who could only be captured dead.26

During the Dutch occupation of Luanda (1641–48) matters were further mud-dled. The Dutch tried to press their advantage with groups who were hostile tothe Portuguese. They made alliances with several Mbundu leaders, and thereforereceived slaves speaking other Bantu languages. When the Portuguese recap-tured Luanda, they launched full-scale attacks against the two principal Mbundufactions: a western group (which were ultimately referred to as “Angolas”) andan eastern group lead by the rebel queen Nzinga, who resisted Portuguese inter-vention. By 1671, the Angolan kingdom of Ndongo had been destroyed by thePortuguese, but the eastern group formed the powerful Kasanje kingdom, whichwas never fully dominated by the Portuguese. After many skirmishes, peaceand sustained trade with Kasanje was only achieved in 1683. Portuguese slavesources moved ever eastward, into the Lunda empire along the Kasai River. Por-tuguese slavers also took ever larger quantities from Ovimbundu (Umbundu)territory to the south, and the port of Benguela, in Ovimbunduland, at timesrivaled Luanda for total volume of slave exportation. Throughout the remainderof the eighteenth century, the Portuguese colony at Angola degenerated into acouple of slaving ports. This was the period of massive slave exportation toBrazil, and to a lesser extent the Spanish Rıo de la Plata colonies, but no oneethnic group predominated. Mbundu and Umbundu (Ovimbundu) were rep-resented, but exact proportions are not known. The Bantu languages spokenin Angola are closely related, and it is frequently impossible to assign a sin-gle 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).


lower proportion of Kikongo- and Kimbundu-speaking slaves than has beenproposed by accounts which are based only on the ethnic groups living near themain slaving ports.

By the eighteenth century at the very latest, Angola was supplying slavesdirectly to the Americas, and the Portuguese language ability of these slaveswas often very rudimentary. Unlike in Sao Tome, a creole Portuguese dialectnever developed in coastal Angola, principally because the majority of theAfrican population was never displaced from original homelands, and the nativelanguages were never fragmented through forced association with linguisticallydiverse slave populations. Slaves taken from the interior to be shipped fromAngolan ports knew little or no Portuguese prior to arriving in the slavingports, but acquired some basic skills on the Angolan coast or during the voyageto Brazil. This fact can be deduced not only by the indirect documentationof the sort of Portuguese spoken by Africans in Angola prior to the twentiethcentury, but also by the limited testimony on early bozal Portuguese in Brazil,at least some of which probably reflected the usage of slaves brought fromAngola with some prior knowledge of Portuguese. In early colonial Brazil,literary Afro-Portuguese pidgin appears in a few texts, most from around thefinal decades of the eighteenth century. By this time, Africanized varieties ofPortuguese were already well established in Brazil, in many cases exhibitingsignificant differences from earlier European Portuguese literary examples. Theuse of European-derived stereotypes in late eighteenth-century Brazil can mostprobably be ascribed to literary tradition, and should not be taken uncriticallyas a representation of how Africans actually spoke Portuguese at this time. Thepredominant literary model was an Africanized Portuguese pidgin formed inPortugal and West Africa, which eventually made its way into sixteenth centurySpain, and the literary representations of writers like Lope de Rueda and Rodrigode Reinosa. By the eighteenth century, however, a new Afro-Brazilian languagebegins to emerge, which is not simply a continuation (literary or historicallyaccurate) of Afro-Iberian patterns, but which also points to local developmentsin 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 outacross a vast territory far removed from the Africa-Europe-Americas trianglewhich is the usual source for Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles. From the earlysixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, the Portuguese main-tained a string of colonies in Asia, mostly along the coast of India (includingDamao, Diu, Goa, Mangalore, Cochin, Tecelaria, Chevai, Chaul, Negapatao,


Korlai, Bombay, and other areas), in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Malacca (modernMalaysia), Batavia and Timor (Indonesia), and Macao, as well as having out-posts as far up the Asian coast as Japan. In most of these areas, Portuguese-basedcreole languages developed, some of which lasted until the turn of the twen-tieth century, and a few of which survive in fragmentary form even today.27

Scholars who have studied Portuguese-based creoles agree that the Asian cre-oles in general are typologically different enough from Afro-Lusitanian creoles,and similar enough amongst themselves, to warrant a separate subclassifica-tion (irrespective of whether a broad-based monogenetic theory can ultimatelyaccount for the genesis of all Portuguese-derived creoles). To name but twoimportant differences, all Asian-Portuguese creoles use eu for the first personsingular subject pronoun, while all Afro-Iberian creoles use a derivative of (a)mim. At the same time, Asian Portuguese creoles (with the exception of Macaocreole) use derivatives of Portuguese tem “have” as copula, while Afro-Iberiancreoles use derivatives of Portuguese estar and ser (and occasionally sentar andficar).28

What is less well known is that all the Portuguese Asian enclaves, from north-western India to Macao, Malaysia, and Indonesia, contained significant numbersof black Africans throughout their history. Moreover, there were complex traderoutes among these colonies and Portuguese-controlled areas of southeasternAfrica and even with Portugal, thus setting the scene for an extraordinarilycomplex network of linguistic cross-fertilization which ultimately requires thatall Ibero-Romance based creoles be examined as part of an all-encompassingmatrix of language contact and transfer.

The Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama first arrived in India at the south-western port of Calicut, in 1498. He encountered a coastal region dominatedby hostile Arabs under the leadership of the Samuri. Calicut itself was underHindu rule, but Moslems held commercial and military power in the region.29

Between 1498 and 1505 the Portuguese realized many commercial voyages toIndia. In 1505, a Portuguese expedition under the command of Francisco deAlmeida (who had been named a Viceroy) arrived in Cochin, and establishedfriendly relations with the local Hindu ruler, who – perhaps in ignorance ofthe full consequences – was crowned by Almeida as the King of Cochin andbecame a Portuguese subject. The next major player in Portuguese India wasAlfonso de Albuquerque, who conquered Goa for Portugal in 1510, with thehelp of Hindu allies. Beginning in 1518, Portuguese settlement of Goa began

27 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).

28 Lipski (1999c, 2002c). 29 Rego (1965:25).


in earnest, and Goa was rapidly to develop into the centerpiece of Portugal’sAsian empire.30

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese had built fortressesat Cochin and Diu, as well as settlements at Goa and Bassein, thus consolidat-ing their presence on the western Indian coast. Beginning in 1531, intensivePortuguese settlement of the northern provinces was enacted. Portuguese con-tact 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 con-tinued their expansion in Ceylon, including the Jaffna region.31 During thesixteenth century, the Portuguese began to place colonies on the eastern IndianCoromandel Coast, beginning with the town of Mylapur, which the Portuguesecalled Sao Tome, believing that the Apostle St. Thomas was buried there.The Portuguese also established a fortress at Nagapattinam, which they calledNegapatao, both of which were very close to northern Ceylon, and were inte-grally linked with the colonization and later defense of Ceylon. In 1511, thePortuguese conquered Melaka (Malacca) on the Malaysian Peninsula, and thisbegan a flourishing trade between the Coromandel Coast and Melaka, whichextended still further to include Goa (and ultimately Portugal) on the west-ern end, and Indonesia, Macao, and – for a while – Japan at the eastern end.Melaka became the hub for further Portuguese explorations in Asia, includingMacao, Japan, and Indonesia.32 The Portuguese encouraged traders from India,Indonesia, and China to settle in Melaka. For many years, the principal routewas Goa-Pulicat (a town just to the north of Sao Tome)-Melaka, and back, thusbeginning the commercial, cultural, and linguistic links that would ultimatelylead to important structural similarities among Asian Portuguese creoles. Thetrade was expanded after the foundation of Macao around 1557, and regularcommerce between Macao, Melaka, and Goa was the hub of Portuguese Asiancommerce. Throughout much of the sixteenth century, Timor was also drawninto trade with China (including Macao) and the Coromandel coast, supplyingsandalwood.33 The heyday of the Portuguese enclaves in India was reachedtowards the end of the sixteenth century. Less than a century later, by 1666,Portuguese possessions in India were reduced to Goa, Diu, Damao, Bassein,and Chaul. Bassein was lost in 1739.34

All the Portuguese Asian colonies contained relatively tiny Portugueseenclaves surrounded by large indigenous populations, and the latter’s degreeof integration with the Portuguese and willingness to serve the needs of thecolonizers varied widely. Since most of the Portuguese colonies were coastalpockets that had to depend upon the good will of the indigenous populations for

30 D’Ayalla (1888:ch. I, III), Miranda (1863). 31 Boxer (1969:49), Silva (1972:2).32 Subrahmanyam (1990:103). 33 Boxer (1968).34 Subrahmanyam (1990:ch. 2), Boxer (1985:VI, 7), Pearson (1987:153).


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 east-ern coast (particularly from around the Portuguese settlements in Mozambique),but it is known with certainty that the Portuguese took slaves from the Gulf ofGuinea, the Slave Coast (Benin/Togo and western Nigeria) and as far awayas Cape Verde to fill labor needs in its Asian outposts. The slave trade fromMozambique to Portuguese India and Macao began in the sixteenth centuryand continued throughout most of the colonial period. This became particularlyintense in the late seventeenth century. Most of the slaves taken to Goa and otherPortuguese Indian colonies came from the relatively nearby Mozambique, butat least some continued to come from Portuguese outposts in West Africa.During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Portuguese “India” stretchedfrom the Cape of Good Hope, through Mozambique and part of contemporaryKenya (especially the port of Mombasa), through the easternmost territories ofMalacca and Macao. The administrative capital was Goa. This included twelvecities and twenty-three fortresses, of which three were in southeastern Africa(Mocambique, Sofala, and Mombasa).

The presence of sub-Saharan Africans in Portuguese settlements in Asia ismore than just a historical curiosity, and the linguistic importance of such mul-tilingual contact vernaculars extends beyond the domain of Asian Portuguesecreoles and in fact embraces the entire Portuguese-speaking world of the six-teenth to nineteenth centuries. Many of the Africans once held as slaves inthe Asian Portuguese enclaves returned to West Africa or Portugal as (freed)members of ships’ crews, and the cross-fertilization brought by these interconti-nental voyages is amply apparent in the genealogical relationships among Afro-Portuguese and Asian Portuguese creoles, in the presence of bozal Portuguesesongs and folktales in Asian Portuguese colonies, and in the literary represen-tations of early Afro-Portuguese speech.

Early challenges to leadership of the Atlantic slave trade

Although Portuguese explorations of the African coast were the first recordedin modern history, and laid the groundwork for the slave trade and the eventualEuropean colonization of Africa, this initial monopoly was short lived. Thefabulous profits obtained by the first Portuguese traders on the upper Guineacoast could simply not be kept secret for long. Sailors and entrepreneurs spreadthe word far beyond Portugal’s frontiers, aided by the fact that both in Portugaland in Spain, commercial expeditions were largely financed by foreigners,especially Venetians. Thus, as early as 1454 (and perhaps earlier, given thesparse record-keeping), a Spanish fleet set out from Andalusia to undertaketheir own reconnoitering of “Guinea.” Judging by all accounts, these explorers


traded successfully along the Senegambia coast, but upon their return, when theywere nearly in sight of Cadiz, they were attacked by a Portuguese armada, whichdestroyed part of the Spanish expedition. The damage had been done, however,since once the word was out, there would be no stopping clandestine Spanishattempts to further penetrate the lucrative African coastal trade. A diplomaticincident ensued, and the kings of both Spain and Portugal threatened war.Spain pressed an improvized claim to the Guinea coast, but this was not takenseriously outside of Spain. A series of papal bulls gave increasing recognitionto Portuguese monopoly in sub-Saharan Africa; the Inter Caetera of 1456essentially 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 Isabelain the 1470s, Spanish incursions along the West African coast increased infrequency and audacity. Matters were only settled in 1480, after which timeSpain officially ceased to interfere with Portuguese trade in Africa, althoughunauthorized ships continued to travel between Andalusia and the Guinea coast.

Beginning in 1530, the French mounted a significant challenge to Portuguesetrade in this region. By 1492, French pirates had captured Portuguese shipsreturning to Europe with African gold; by 1531, some 300 Portuguese shipshad been raided by French privateers. In 1530, the king of France commissionedthe first ship to legally travel to the Guinea coast, and despite Portuguese protestsand diplomatic pressures, French intervention continued, both trading voyagesand pirate attacks. At this juncture, the French were but little interested in slaves,since slavery was not a common practice in northern Europe. Their interestsin Africa were for trade goods, spices, ivory, and gold. Their advances werequickly followed by the English, beginning around 1553. Like the French, theEnglish were not much interested in slavery, although many English travelers’accounts document the Portuguese slave trade, as well as plantation slavery onSao Tome and Prıncipe.

Enter the Dutch slave traders

In 1580, the armies of Felipe II of Spain invaded Portugal, and quickly tookover that country. This domination lasted until 1640, when the Portuguese werefinally able to shake off the Spanish conquerors. From 1580 until 1640, theSpanish and Portuguese crowns were united, but Spain, the central source ofadministrative power, acknowledged the Portuguese monopoly on the Atlanticslave trade, and the Portuguese were the principal slave traders and holdersof asientos, slave-trading monopolies granted by the Spanish crown. In 1640,Portugal was able to break free of Spanish domination once more (althoughSpain never officially recognized Portuguese independence until 1672), butits defensive capabilities were stretched very thin, especially in its African


trading positions. The partial vacuum created on the West African coast wasrapidly filled by the Dutch, who had recently become one of the world’s leadingcommercial and maritime powers. The Amsterdam merchants and bankers hadthe necessary infrastructure, as well as the motivation, for entering into theAfrican trade, first in natural products and then in slaves. The Dutch West IndiaCompany was chartered in 1621, signaling the beginning of an aggressive Dutchintervention in the Atlantic market. Dutch shipping and naval forces were upto the challenge, and so in the first decades of the seventeenth century, theDutch began direct attacks on Portuguese colonial enclaves. In 1621 the Dutchdisplaced the Portuguese from the island of Goree, off the coast of Senegal,establishing a small fort. This fort would later become famous under Frenchcontrol, being the point through which thousands of Africans passed on theirway to the French Caribbean.

The first major assault came in 1630, on Pernambuco, the rich sugar-producing region of northeastern Brazil. Recognizing the need for a continuedsource of African slave labor, the new Dutch plantation owners clamored fordirect Dutch participation in the slave trade. In 1637, a Dutch fleet sailing fromPernambuco attacked and defeated the Portuguese garrison at Elmina, on theGold Coast. The Dutch destroyed the Portuguese feitoria and in its place builtone 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 Araras wereshipped to Spanish America during the seventeenth century. In 1641, the Dutchcaptured Luanda and Benguela, assuring control over the Angola slave market,which was considered more valuable by Dutch planters and merchants. TheDutch were ultimately expelled from Angola in 1648, but moved their slavingenterprise offshore to tiny Annobon island, as well as to occasional coastalenclaves.35

Meanwhile in Brazil the Portuguese residents rebelled against the Dutch in1645, and finally ousted them from Pernambuco in 1654. Many of the Dutchleft for sugar-producing regions of the Caribbean, as well as for the Dutchcolonies of Curacao, Surinam, Essequibo, Berbice, Demerara, and St. Eustatius.A number of Sephardic Jews accompanied the Dutch exodus, settling in Curacaoand Surinam, and possibly influencing the development of the Ibero-Romancebased creoles Papiamento and Saramaccan, respectively.36

Although the Dutch were ultimately thwarted in their attempts to take overPortuguese colonies and trading posts, their entry into the slave trade was tobecome permanent. At the height of Dutch presence in Africa, they controlled,in one way or another, the slave trade from Cape Verde to Angola, includingthe 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).


superiority, and the establishment of strategically located Curacao as a slavingdepot for the entire Caribbean, the Dutch were able to continue the slave tradethroughout the New World. An illicit slave trade on Curacao thrived in the firsthalf of the seventeenth century.37 In 1662, Spain returned to the asiento systemof slave procurement, and a Dutch company successfully won the contract. Areorganized West India Company (WIC) obtained another asiento in 1675, andheld it until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when France became theofficial supplier of slaves to Spanish America. Even after this period, however,the Dutch continued to supply slaves to Spanish American colonies, both legallyand clandestinely, using the depot on Curacao.

Over the years, the Dutch drew slaves from different areas of Africa. Untilthe end of the seventeenth century, the majority of slaves (nearly three quarters)were taken from the Slave Coast (Benin/Togo). Another quarter came fromthe Loango/Angola area, and only about 2 percent of all slaves came from theGold 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. TheWindward Coast/Ivory Coast stretch, which had previously not been tapped forslaves, rose to represent half of the total Dutch slave exports; Angola representedsome 30 percent, and the Slave Coast dropped to around 1 percent.38

Toward the end of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese made a briefreappearance as asiento holders and principal suppliers of slaves to SpanishAmerica. Portuguese entrepreneurs formed the Cacheu Company (based in themodern Guinea Bissau) in 1675. The company failed in a few years, and was res-urrected in 1690 as the Cacheu and Cape Verde Company. Officially, this com-pany was to supply slaves to the ports of Cartagena, Cumana, Havana, Portobelo,Honduras (i.e. Puerto Caballos, modern Puerto Cortes) and Veracruz; in prac-tice, slaves were also taken to La Guaira (Venezuela), Riohacha (Colombia),Santo Domingo, and other Caribbean ports, together with large amounts ofcontraband merchandise.39 With the rise in French power, the Portuguese slavemonopoly to Spanish America ended once and for all, although individualPortuguese traders continued to supply slaves until the very end of the Atlanticslaving period.

French and English entry into the slave trade

War with England was one of the major causes of the diminution of Dutchslave trading. Another rapidly developing sea power, England sought to repeatthe Dutch successes in muscling into the Atlantic trade. English and Dutchforces engaged in skirmishes on land and at sea during much of the seventeenth

37 Goslinga (1979, 1990), Hartog (1961, 1968).38 Rawley (1981:ch. IV). 39 Escalante (1964:42).


century, and England gained footholds in the Gambia (establishing the fort ofSt. James at the mouth of the Gambia River in 1664), the Gold Coast (estab-lishing a fort at Accra in 1673), and the Niger Delta area. Although the BritishRoyal Africa Company was founded in 1672, it was not the English but ratherthe French who were the next major European participants in the Atlantic slavetrade.

During the reign of Louis XIV, France fought the Dutch and won the islandsof Tobago and, on the African coast, Goree and Arguin. This prompted theformation of the French Senegal Company, later reorganized as the FrenchGuinea Company, which initially provided slaves for the newly acquired Frenchcolony of Saint-Domingue. The French began to expand the trade to the SpanishAmerican colonies, and in 1701 they obtained the asiento for official slavedeliveries to Spanish America. This asiento only lasted until 1713; both beforeand especially after this period, French slave traders primarily supplied non-Spanish colonies in Latin America, especially the sugar-growing islands ofthe Caribbean, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Kitts. Although some ofthese Africans would ultimately end up in Spanish Santo Domingo, particularlyafter the Haitian revolution, the direct French contribution to the slave supply inSpanish America was relatively brief, falling off sharply after the early eight-eenth century.40 It was at this point that England became the last Europeannation to enjoy a clear supremacy in the supply of African labor to Spain’sAmerican colonies.

English ships had traded along the African coast since the middle of the six-teenth century, and English privateers had engaged in small-scale slave raidingduring the entire period. However, it was not until the early decades of theseventeenth century that England began to establish permanent trading postson the African coast, first in the Gambia and later (ca. 1651) at the Gold Coastvillage of Coromantine. The Guinea Company was constituted in 1651, to befollowed by the Company of Royal Adventurers (1671), the Royal AfricanCompany (1672), and finally the South Sea Company. By this time Englandsuccessfully controlled several trading posts from the Gambia to the Cape ofGood Hope. The typical triangular trade developed: slaves from Africa weretaken to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar, which was then taken toEngland. The principal regions from which the English drew slaves were theGambia, the Windward Coast (Sierra Leone), the Gold Coast (Ghana), Ardraand Whydah (Benin), Calabar (eastern Nigeria), and Angola. During the sev-enteenth century, the Gold Coast and Windward Coast together supplied halfof the English slaves, with the Benin area supplying most of the rest; com-paratively few slaves were taken from Angola or the Bight of Benin. In theeighteenth century, continuing until the first decade of the nineteenth century,

40 Garcıa (1990:21–22).


when official British slave trading came to an end, the demographic distributionwas changed.41 The Bight of Biafra (Calabar) area provided by far the greatestnumber of slaves (more than 30 percent), with the Gold (17 percent) and Wind-ward (13 percent) Coasts supplying nearly the same number. Angola supplied15 percent, Benin 11 percent, Sierra Leone 7 percent, and the Gambia 5 per-cent. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, the South Sea Company held theSpanish asiento for a while, ending in 1739, and both before and after this briefinterlude British participation in the supply of slaves to Spanish America wasconsiderable. One of the areas receiving large numbers of slaves via the Britishtraffic was Buenos Aires, although this city more often tapped the Portuguesesources passing through neighboring Brazil.

The last century of the slave trade

Until about 1773, the slave trade to Spanish America was successively under thecontrol of specific nations and slaving companies: Portuguese, Dutch, French,English, etc. There was a significant difference between the trade of the Dutchand the Portuguese on the one hand, and British, French, Danish, and other slavetraders on the other hand. The Portuguese and the Dutch established stable fortsand cities on the African coast and largely drew slaves through these ports andtheir hinterlands. This was nowhere more true than in the Portuguese settlementsof Luanda and Benguela, which shipped tens of thousands of slaves speakingclosely related Bantu languages and engaging in similar cultural practices. Thus,reconstructing the demographics of slaves supplied by Portuguese and Dutchtraders allows for a certain degree of accuracy. The remaining European nationsestablished fewer forts or trading posts on the African coast (the French slavingstation at Goree was a noteworthy exception), and in acquiring slaves preferredto 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 competedin Spanish American markets without the monopolistic asiento system. Sincethis is the period in which many of the ethnically viable Afro-Hispanic groupsarrived in the Americas, it is important to underscore the fact that no one nationor slaving company was the principal supplier of African labor to the Spanishcolonies, nor did any one specific region of Africa predominate for the finaltime period. In certain instances (e.g. the Angola-Brazilian connection), thesupply 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 inthe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were as diverse as were thesuppliers themselves.

41 Rawley (1981:166).


Although the Portuguese had lost the monopolistic control of the Atlanticslave trade by the middle of the seventeenth century, and never regained theirformer position, Portuguese traders continued to supply African slaves to theAmericas until the early decades of the nineteenth century. They held no asientosafter the middle of the seventeenth century, but continued to support slavingcompanies, such as the Companhia de Cacheu, which during the brief interval1696–1703 supplied more than 10,000 slaves from the region of modern Guinea-Bissau. The majority of the Portuguese slave traffic followed the straightforwardAngola-Brazil route, but some also found their way into Spanish Americancolonies. The greatest number arrived in Montevideo and Buenos Aires viaBrazil in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, providing in factthe bulk of the considerable Afro-Rıo de la Plata population which dominatedthese two cities during this time period.

By the second half of the eighteenth century, a time period in which manystill-surviving Afro-Hispanic communities arose in the Americas, the coastof Africa was fairly regularly divided up among the major European slavingpowers; the skirmishes, counterattacks, and pirate incursions of the past wereover, and the African coast began to resemble a shopping mall in which tradersfrom several nations occupied quasi-permanent positions, each supplying thesame product. From Cabo Blanco to the Senegal River, as well as on GoreeIsland, the French held the coastal slave trade. The British were establishedat the mouth of the Gambia, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal,and in Sierra Leone. Between Sierra Leone and Cabo Palmas, a number ofEuropean nations drew small numbers of slaves, but this region was never amajor source of slaves. The Dutch maintained control from Cabo Palmas toCabo 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 nofewer than twenty-three Dutch, British, and Danish forts were founded, withthe British occupying the most important posts, at Coromantine and Accra. TheSlave Coast, including the kingdoms of Arda and Ajuda, was by this time sharedamong French, British, and Portuguese slavers, with each nation maintaining afort at Ajuda. The British were firmly in control of the coast between Benin andCape Formosa. Although the Portuguese still maintained slaving stations onthe Congo/Angola coast, British, Dutch and French slavers also frequented thisregion, thus accounting for the large numbers of Congo/Angola slaves taken toall parts of the Americas in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In the nineteenth century, the Atlantic slave trade was complicated by the sud-den anti-slaving legislation in several European nations, followed by an activepersecution of the slaving activities of other nations. In 1805 Denmark passedthe first anti-slaving law, and Britain joined in three years later. This move tookmany Africans by surprise, and those who had profited by the sustained slavetrade pleaded with British authorities to not abandon this lucrative enterprise.


The British authorities were unmoved, although British entrepreneurs con-tinued a contraband slave traffic far beyond this time. The remaining slavingnations of Europe, especially Spain and Portugal, made treaties with Britainwhich temporarily forestalled active British assaults on Atlantic slave ships.One such treaty guaranteed to Portugal safe passage of slaving ships south ofthe equator until 1839; Brazil obtained a similar concession which ran until1845. Given the voracious demand for slaves in the sugar-producing areas ofLatin America, some of the highest annual figures for slave importation camein the years following the abolition of slaving in much of Europe.

Overview of slaving regions and ethnic designations inPortuguese and Spanish literature

A brief overview of areas from which slaves were taken, and the designationsof the regions, is a necessary preliminary to more detailed investigation ofAfro-Iberian linguistic contacts. The first area of Portuguese penetration, alongthe Senegambia coast, was referred to as Upper Guinea, or Guine de CaboVerde, referring to the Cape Verde peninsula of modern Senegal (after whichthe Cape Verde islands were named). Occasionally ethnic designations suchas 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 andSierra Leone), the Ivory Coast (modern nation of the same name), the Gold Coast(roughly modern Ghana), and the Slave Coast (the Bight of Benin, centeringaround the modern nations of Togo, Benin, and extreme western Nigeria). TheGrain Coast was at first known as the Pepper Coast, or by the Portuguese termMalagueta (a spice related to pepper). British sailors began to refer to the pepperas “Guinea grains,” or “grains of Paradise,” whence the eventual name of GrainCoast. The Ivory Coast was for a time known to French traders as the Coste desDents, referring to the trade in elephant tusks. The Slave Coast did not get itspopular 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 dosEscravos. 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 Kingdomof Benin in the Niger delta (leading to construction of a fort at Oghoton, in1486).42

Some ethnic designations appear in Portuguese and Spanish literary doc-uments, written in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, and purporting torepresent the speech of Africans who attempted to learn European languages.

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


The first known written example of Afro-Portuguese pidgin is found in theCancioneiro geral of Garcia de Resende (Chapter Two Appendix #1), publishedin 1516; it is a poem written by the court official Fernam da Silveira, and dated1455. If this dating is accurate,43 it means that an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin wasalready in use only a few decades after Portugal had begun exploration of thesub-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 speakersof African languages would bring to Ibero-Romance. Gil Vicente provides thelargest single corpus of early Afro-Portuguese language, in plays written inthe 1520s and 1530s (Chapter Two Appendix #5–7).44 The Nao d’amores con-tains 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 oncepowerful African kingdom.

After these initial indications of ethnic origins, the Afro-Portuguese corpuscontains no other ethnic identifications, which would permit direct verificationof 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 refer-ence to African ethnic groups reappears.45 By this time, bozal Afro-Portuguesepidgin had all but disappeared in Portugal.

In Spain, the first black Africans whose speech has been documented arrivedvia Portugal, coming from the original foci of Portuguese slave trading. Inthe first known Afro-Hispanic documents, the coplas of Rodrigo de Reinosa(probably written at the end of the fifteenth century), we find the ethnic/regionaldesignations Gelofe, Mandinga, and Guinea (Chapter Three Appendix #1).Although Gelofe Mandinga appears as a single designation, in reality two ethnicgroups and languages are represented: Wolof and Mandinga, the latter part ofa much larger group of related languages. These terms are consistent with thefirst phase of the Portuguese slave trade, since they represent languages of theSenegambia region. The term Guinea is more vague; this word has been usedto 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 roughlybetween the Senegambia and Sierra Leone, but subsequently the term was usedas a general reference to sub-Saharan Africa.46 In all of these instances, the

43 Teyssier (1959:228–29).44 Baird (1975), Brasio (1944), Costa e Sa (1948), Saunders (1982:98–102), Teyssier (1959),

Vicente (1834, 1912).45 Tinhorao (1988:191).46 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 GarcıaMontero Solano (1673), in the song “Negro de Navidad” by the mid-seventeenth-century com-poser 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 villancicodated 1654 (Chapter Three Appendix #54).


reference is not to a particular geographic or ethnic region, but rather to a vaguesense of “black Africa,” the source of musical celebration and dancing whichformed an integral part of the villancicos, entremeses, and other short pieces inwhich bozal language predominated.

Following these early ethnic terms, the Afro-Hispanic corpus contains noother verifiable indications of origin until the early seventeenth century. The“Entremes de los negros” (ca. 1602) of Simon Aguado (Chapter Three Appendix#14) contains the line “Dominga me yamo, Manicongo nacimo.” The same playalso contains reference to “Dominga de Tumbucuto,” an area in present-dayMali which supplied some slaves to southern Spain, either via Arguim or trans-Sahara slaving caravans. Gongora’s sonnet “A lo mismo” [al nacimiento deCristo nuestro senor] (Chapter Three Appendix #16) contains the line “Somemee vendome a rosa de Gericongo Marıa,” possibly a reference to the Congoregion. In the sonnet “A la ‘Jerusalem conquistada’ de Lope de Vega” (ChapterThree Appendix #18) we find the designations morenica gelofa and Rey deCongo, as well as one of the first references to Sao Tome: “Corpo de sanTome con tanta Reya . . .” Sao Tome, originally an uninhabited island far offthe coast of Angola, became one of the major Portuguese slaving stations,supplying Bantu- and Kwa-speaking African slaves to southern Europe andLatin America for several centuries. Although the designation San Tome becameas geographically nonspecific as the terms Guinea and Congo, there is reasonto believe that many of the slaves so designated had indeed passed through SaoTome.47

The term Angola is also found in several Afro-Hispanic literary representa-tions of the Golden Age. For example, in El Santo Negro Rosambuco of Lopede Vega (Chapter Three Appendix #27), we find the line “Samo de Santa Tame,de Angola samo, maluco?”48 The terms congo/manicongo are also frequent inGolden Age bozal texts. In El Santo Negro Rosambuco we find “decimo logoa la niegra si samo de monicongo,” “en Manicongo tenemo al sol que vemo,por Dioso . . . ,” “alla en Congo me dijeron que era Dioso el sole craros . . .” InLope’s Madre de la mejor (Chapter Three Appendix #25) we find “. . . hacia

47 Other literary works to use this term include Limpieza no manchada by Lope de Vega (VegaCarpio 1893:t. V), the song “Eso rigor” by Gaspar Fernandes (Stevenson 1975), and the anony-mous fragments “Entremes de los negros de Santo Tome” and “El negro” (Cotarelo y Morı ed.1911:vol. 1).

48 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” ofEsteban Redondo (ca. 1783) (Tejerizo Robles 1989:307) contains the verse “si no eles de cololneglo vienes de Angola tambien.” An anonymous song (ca. 1676), “Desde Angola benimo,”also contains reference to Angola (Bravo-Villa-Sante 1978:88–89), while in a villancico dated1654 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 anonymousvillancico (ca. 1697) contains the verse “podlemos cantal tonadillas de Angola y de Panama . . .”(Ripodas Ardanaz ed. 1991:215–16).


la banda del Congo . . . ,” “. . . lo neglo de Manicongo . . .” In Gongora’s“Sacramento” (Chapter Three Appendix #15) we find “Zambambu, morenicade Congo,” and “en Congo aun sera bien quista.” In the “Soneto Jerusalen”(Chapter Three Appendix #18) we find “. . . do Rey de Congo canta don Gor-gorio.” The Entremes de los negros of Simon Aguado presents “Manicongonacimo, Seviya batizamolo.” In the Comedia de los enganados of Lope deRueda (Chapter Three Appendix #6) we find “. . . aya en mi terra de Man-icongo . . .” 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 andcircumstance by the Portuguese, had been virtually abandoned by both religiousand 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 ampleevidence of this situation:50

En esta Corte (Madrid) avia un Rey de Congo, que estuvo en una posada bien desaco-modado . . . y estava toda aquella Magestade assistida de dos Negros bocales, y un Mulatoladino, que era el fausto, y pompa Real suya, quando tenia en su Imperio inumerablesvassalos, pero todos desnudos, y pobres como el. Era Rey coronado con numerosa mul-tidud 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 Spainand early colonial Latin America do not provide an accurate demographic profileof the African population, but simply represent well-known place names thatwere meant to connote all of sub-Saharan Africa. The true demographics ofsub-Saharan Africans represented a much wider cross-section of West Africanethnic and linguistic groups, as the various European slave traders roamed alongthe entire African coast.

Profile of slave trade and slave traders

By the end of the fifteenth century, Portuguese traders and slavers had recon-noitered the entire western coast of Africa, and black slaves were being carriedto Lisbon in ever larger numbers. According to some estimates, nearly 50 per-cent of the population of metropolitan Lisbon was African by the end of thefifteenth 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 The song “Con el zon” gives us Monicongo, el Chato (Bravo-Villa-Sante 1978). The “Nadadoresde Sevilla” of Gil Lopez de Armesto y Castro (ca. 1674) presents “molenica di Congo” (RipodasArdanaz 1991:189–97). The “Villancico cantado en el real convento de la Encarnacion deMadrid en los maitines de navidad” (1689) gives “¿Y vene de Congo?” (Ripodas Ardanaz1991:199–201).

50 Manso (1877:251).


Spain, where significant concentrations were found in Seville, Cadiz, Huelva,Cordoba, Malaga, and as far east as Valencia. By the time that Spain begancolonizing the New World, the idea of using Africans in forced labor waswell established. Ultimately, black slaves and freedmen would be found allover Castile, from Extremadura and Valladolid to Murcia, cutting all the wayacross Andalusia to include Valencia. Proportionately smaller numbers werealso found in places such as Ciudad Real, Burgos, Toledo, Guadalajara, Leon,Avila, and even Galicia and the Basque country.51

In the early colonial period, Spain attempted to enslave indigenous work-ers, 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 resistedin others. By the early sixteenth century the Spanish government authorizedthe first importation of African slaves to the New World colonies. AlthoughSpain attempted direct slave trading in Africa on several occasions, the effortswere never successful, and nearly all Africans carried to Spanish Americahad passed through the slaving enterprises of other nations. In keeping withthe complex and monopolistic Spanish bureaucratic structure, the first Africanslaves had to be shipped to Seville first, thence transshipped on official Spanishships. In order to simplify this cumbersome process, the Spanish governmentthen authorized three American ports to receive slaves: Veracruz, Cartagena deIndias, and Portobelo. Havana and several Venezuelan ports were soon added tothe 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 slavesdisembarked at other locations, these ports handled the bulk of the slave tradeuntil well into the eighteenth century, when de facto liberalization of the slavetrade caused other ports to be opened, among them Buenos Aires and laterMontevideo.

The first mechanism for the importation of African slaves was the licen-cia or individual slave-trading authorization, whereby an individual colonist ormerchant paid a fee to the government in return for an authorization to importa 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 deContratacion and the Consulado de Sevilla. These licencias were not exclusive,but rather were authorized through a combination of monetary payments and

51 Larrea Palacın (1952), Carriazo (1954), Chaunu and Chaunu (1955–60), Sancho de Sopranis(1958), Cortes Alonso (1964, 1966, 1972), Pike (1967), Ndamba Kabongo (1970, 1975),Graullera Sanz (1978), Molina Molina (1978), Franco Silva (1979, 1980), Cortes Lopez (1986,1989), Cortes Cortes (1987), Fernandez Martın (1988), Penafiel Ramon (1992), Gomez Garcıay Martın Vergara (1993).

52 Del Castillo Matthieu (1981:189).


political favors. Although the Spanish government profited by this arrangement,the number of slaves that could be imported was far lower than the demand, andthe asiento system was instituted. Under this arrangement, the Spanish govern-ment contracted with an asentista, usually a trading company but sometimes anindividual, to provide a certain quantity of slaves over a stipulated period. Thetypical asiento ran for thirty years, and many were renewed. The first groupof asentistas included Spaniards and Portuguese, as well as Italians and otherEuropeans. The predominance of Portuguese among the first holders of asientosgave way to French, British, and Dutch slaving companies, as these nationsmoved into the African slave trade.

In the past, many plantation owners had attempted to buy slaves from diverseethnic groups speaking no common language, in order to minimize the pos-sibility of uprisings and the formation of maroon communities. These effortswere never entirely successful, and some slave owners deliberately chose theirslaves 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 slavesfrom a single ethnic group were disembarked in the Caribbean. Regardless ofthe circumstances, religious and cultural practices, as well as linguistic differ-ences, often kept African slaves from finding common cause. Ethnic rivalrieswhich had seethed in Africa resurfaced in Latin America, and members ofgroups known as warriors and trendsetters in Africa became natural leaders inslave communities, often exerting a linguistic and cultural influence far beyondtheir demographic representation. Thus although hundreds of African languageswere carried to Spanish America, only a handful made lasting contributions todeveloping Afro-Hispanic language. A summary of the principal slaving areasand languages is:

Senegambia (particularly early): Mandinga/Fula languages (Atlanticgroup).

Grain Coast (Sierra Leone/Liberia): Vai, Mende, Temne (Kru languages).More of these were brought to the British-held Caribbean, whence to theUnited States.

Slave Coast (Dahomey/Benin): Ewe/Fon (Kwa languages). These werecommon throughout Latin America, as well as in Haiti and Brazil.

Calabar Coast /Bonny (Nigeria): Yoruba (Lucumı), Igbo, Efik, Ijo(Carabalı) (Kwa languages). These groups were particularly common dur-ing the late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century trade to the Caribbean,and to Brazil.

Congo Bas in /Angola : Kikongo and Kimbundu (Bantu languages). Thisarea returned to prominence several times. It was first a major area in the


early sixteenth century, then again in the seventeenth century. It supplieda majority of slaves to the Rıo de la Plata in the late eighteenth century, aswell as supplying much of Brazil.

Mozambique/East Afr ica . Languages of the eastern Bantu group.These slaves were never as common, but were found in significant numbersin Latin America, particularly during the eighteenth century.

African slavery in Spanish America

How many Africans were transported to the Americas during the Atlanticslave trade? What were the demographic proportions, representing the differentAfrican zones and ethnic groups? How did ethnic origin correlate with even-tual destination in the Americas? The search for answers is fraught with manydifficulties, all revolving around the sketchy and often deliberately incompletedocumentation which was produced during the slave trade itself. Publishedestimates of the total number of slaves taken to North and South Americarange between 3.5 million and 25 million. The majority of studies are basedon secondary sources, and there has been much perpetuation of originallyinaccurate figures. Political and ideological considerations have entered intomany calculations, some tending to inflate the figures while others have adiminishing effect. The huge but indeterminate clandestine slave traffic is thesingle factor which renders an accurate count virtually impossible to obtain.Particularly during the nineteenth century, when slave importations into Cubaand 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 terri-tory to another, frequently in violation of the law. This demographic churn-ing causes the potential for a slave (perhaps even born in the Americas)transferred from one island to another to be indistinguishable from a slaveborn in Africa. However, recent research, combining archival records, trav-elers’ accounts, census data, and demographic extrapolations, permit somereasonable guesswork.

Some of the most thoroughly researched and carefully documented quanti-tative 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 duringthe entire period of the slave trade. Of these, some 175,000 were taken to theOld World. This includes 50,000 taken to Europe (mostly Spain and Portugal),25,000 to Atlantic islands (Canary Islands, Madeira, Cape Verde), and 100,000taken to the island of Sao Tome. Some 651,000 slaves were taken to continen-tal North America, 4 million to Caribbean islands, and 4.7 million to South


America. Breaking down the figures for Spanish America further, Curtin’s esti-mates are:

Mexico: 200,000Central America: 24,000Dominican Republic: 30,000Cuba: 702,000Puerto Rico: 77,000Argentina/Uruguay/Paraguay/ Bolivia: 100,000Chile: 6,000Peru: 95,000Colombia/Panama/Ecuador: 200,000Venezuela: 121,000

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Total: 1,555,000% of Atlantic trade: 16.3Brazil: 3,647,000% of Atlantic trade: 38.1

Rawley (1981:53), using additional data, ups the total figure for slave impor-tations into Spanish America to approximately 1,687,000, roughly one sixthof the total volume. This increase comes from a revised upward estimate forCuba: 837,000. Eltis et al. (1999) provides the most comprehensive databaseyet available on the demographics of the Atlantic slave trade, containing dataon more than 27,000 slave voyages from 1595 and 1866. Although includingmany of the same sources as used to arrive at the estimates cited earlier, Eltiset al. makes reference to new data sources as well as extrapolative techniques; asa result this database represents the most accurate estimates currently availableor likely to appear based on known documentation. This database emphasizesslaves sent to English and French colonies in the Americas, and a country-by-country comparison with the figures cited earlier is not always possible. Somerepresentative comparisons are:

Cuba: 684,000 embarked; 564,000 disembarkedPuerto Rico: 11,800 embarked; 10,000 disembarkedRıo de la Plata: 64,400 embarked; 53,700 disembarkedSan [Santo] Domingo: 6,900 embarked; 6,000 disembarkedSpanish-America main: 117,000 embarked; 99,000 disembarkedNortheast Brazil: 26,300 embarked; 22,600 disembarkedPernambuco: 69,000 embarked; 61,800 disembarkedBahia: 251,000 embarked; 224,000 disembarkedSoutheast Brazil: 1,171,000 embarked; 1,047,000 disembarkedAll Brazil: 1,517,300 embarked; 1,355,400 disembarkedSaint-Domingue: 791,000 embarked; 687,000 disembarked

These figures represent only the port of first arrival in the Americas, and donot take into consideration the considerable transshipment of slaves, e.g. fromCuracao. For example, during the same period, 86,500 slaves embarked for


the Dutch Caribbean (of which nearly 75,000 disembarked), most of whompresumably went to Spanish American colonies.

During the fifteenth century, the African slave trade was limited in quan-tity. Most slaves were taken from the Senegambia region, with considerablysmaller numbers from the Gold Coast, near the fort of Elmina, and fromthe Congo/Angola region. Beginning in the sixteenth century, with the open-ing of the Spanish American colonies to African slave labor, the quantita-tive requirements were much greater, and slaves were taken from points alongthe entire West African coast, from the Senegal River to Angola; some Por-tuguese slave trading even rounded the Cape of Good Hope to bring Africansfrom “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 localsocieties, and where African slave dealers were able to supply sufficient quanti-ties 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 fromthe Senegambia area. Of these, some 22 percent were listed as Jelof (Wolof),nearly 9 percent as Berbesi (Serer), 19 percent as Biafara, and 11 percentas Bran. Other West African areas (the extended “Guinea Coast”) supplied15.5 percent of the slaves, while central and southern Africa supplied10 percent, of which 6 percent came from the BaKongo zone.53

Aguirre Beltran (1972:244–45) provides comparative figures for Africanslaves in Mexico, circa 1549. Of these, 88 percent came from the Senegambia(17 percent Wolof, 7 percent Serer, 11 percent Malinke, 28 percent Bram, 17percent Biafada), 6 percent from other West African regions, and fewer than 5percent from central and southern Africa. By the end of the seventeenth cen-tury, the demographic proportions had shifted considerably. All of West Africasupplied only 21 percent of the total, with no particular ethnic group standingout 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. SoutheasternAfrica accounted for nearly 4 percent of the total.

Curtin (1969:104–05)54 has plotted percentages for regions of Africa fromwhich (authorized) slave ships departed. This provides a rough measure of broadregional ethnic groupings. In the period 1551–1640, for example, approximately12 percent of the ships left from Cape Verde (which also represents the mainlandSenegambia/Guinea-Bissau zone), almost 25 percent from “Guinea” (presum-ably the remainder of the West African coast, centered around the Gold Coast),and 32 percent from Angola. Based on comparative evidence from severalsources, including information on early African slavery in Bolivia and Chile,

53 Lockhart (1968:173).54 Based on data from Chaunu and Chaunu (1955–60:vol. 6, 402–03).


Curtin confirms that a dramatic shift from the Senegambia to the Congo/Angolaregion took place early in the seventeenth century, and the change occurred firstin the South American colonies. Geographical proximity of South America toAngola 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 flour-ishing of the Sao Tome sugar production, which drew intensively on Angolafor slave labor, declined in the early seventeenth century due to competitionfrom Brazil. This in turn made more Angolan laborers available for export tothe Americas.

Profile of African populations in Latin America

The first large populations of African slaves in Latin America were used inhighland mining operations, principally in Peru and Alto Peru (Bolivia), and inMexico. 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 high-land mines. Few linguistic or cultural traits remain from the first African slavepopulations in Latin America, except for some seventeenth-century songs andpoems surveyed in the preceding chapter, which as both linguistic documentsand literary works properly belong to Golden Age Spain. Following these earlyhints of Afro-Hispanic language, the record is silent for more than a centuryand a half, with the next round of Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America notemerging until the turn of the nineteenth century. By this time, the Latin Amer-ican dialects of Spanish had developed into essentially their present forms, andAfro-Hispanic language was quantitatively and qualitatively different from itsGolden Age predecessors. Verification possibilities are also enhanced for thelatter period of Afro-Hispanic textual evidence, since the very end of the periodoverlaps with objectively acceptable anthropological descriptions, and, in a fewcases, with materials transcribed from the last survivors of the bozal generation.

Black Africans continued to work in mines and placer gold deposits through-out the colonial period, but the proportions dropped drastically after the six-teenth century. From the seventeenth century onwards, the only significantgroups of black slaves engaged in mining activities were found in Colombia,Ecuador, and Brazil, in remote jungle areas where placer mining was handledby large labor gangs. Under these conditions, the black population – augmentedby a significant number of females – was able to maintain itself demographi-cally, and the descendants of these laborers are still the dominant populationin the Colombian Choco, in northwestern Ecuador, and in much of Brazil’s

55 Leiva Vivas (1982, 1993). 56 D. Palma (1974).


interior. The working conditions were difficult but not impossible, and blackslaves often worked side by side with white fortune seekers. Individual libertyfor slaves was higher than in most other slave holdings, and rather than formingdiscrete maroon communities, black gold miners often drifted away from thesettlements and lived off the land. This was a significantly different arrangementthan had prevailed in the early highland silver and gold mining operations, inwhich slaves were closely confined, and it also differed from later plantationsocieties. With the exception of Brazil – which had been a major player in theworld sugar market since the seventeenth century – the greatest use of Africanslaves in Spanish America from the middle of the seventeenth century to thebeginning of the nineteenth century took place in urban labor settings. Blackslaves worked as domestic employees, municipal workers, artisans, and daylaborers. Many slave owners allowed their slaves to work for wages, requiringonly that a fixed income be returned to the owner. This gave to many slaves arelative autonomy during much of the day, and also more fully integrated blacksinto all aspects of colonial Latin American society. It was impossible to exist ina colonial Latin American city without coming into constant contact with blackslaves – in markets, ports, artisans’ stalls, and in private dwellings. Blacksworked as street vendors, teamsters, stevedores, tradesmen’s helpers (some-times as apprentices and even journeymen). They had their own churches andsocio-religious societies, and organized dances and processions. In many ways,the life of the urban black slave in colonial Latin America was not unlike thesituation of the slave in ancient Greece and Rome. Linguistically, blacks werein constant contact with local varieties of Spanish and Portuguese, althoughAmerican-born blacks may have retained certain ethnolinguistic markers as aconsequence of their inevitably marginalized status.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the proportion of African slaves working inagriculture was quite small, and large plantations had yet to come into existence.The exceptions were the sugar estates of Brazil, the smaller sugar haciendasof coastal Mexico and Peru, and the cacao plantations of Venezuela. WithinLatin America, none of the plantations were large, with the biggest employingno more than a few dozen slaves, and the social microcosm of the giganticslave plantation had yet to come into being. With the sharp dropoff in worldsugar production following the Haitian revolution of the 1790s, Brazil, Cuba,and Puerto Rico rushed to fill the gap. Cuba in particular increased its slaveimportations and its sugar production so as to rival the output of Brazil andJamaica, then the world’s largest sugar exporters. Coffee, another of FrenchSaint-Domingue’s key exports, also became an important cash crop in Cuba,Puerto Rico, and Brazil. Peruvian estate owners also increased their sugar pro-duction, and also planted thousands of acres of cotton, all of which requiredAfrican slaves and indentured Chinese laborers.


Afro-Iberian language: from the fifteenth century tothe twentieth

The cultural encounters between sub-Saharan Africans and speakers ofPortuguese and Spanish gave rise to numerous contact vernaculars, ranging fromrudimentary jargons and pidgins to stable creoles which continue to be spokeneven today. As thousands of Africans and their descendants acquired Portugueseand Spanish in the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and particularly Latin America,they incorporated characteristics common to all second-language varieties ofIbero-Romance languages. Most of these traits did not survive as descendantsof Africans acquired Spanish and Portuguese natively, but in areas of heavyAfro-Latin concentration, partial restructuring may have occurred. Linguisticevidence for earlier centuries of Afro-Iberian language contact is scarce andunreliable, consisting almost entirely of literary parodies and occasional travel-ers’ observations. The following chapters will survey the available evidence inan attempt to establish a reasonable baseline description of Afro-Iberian speechacross time and space.

2 Early Afro-Portuguese texts

The earliest Afro-Portuguese texts

The initial Afro-Portuguese linguistic contacts, and the concomitant formationof contact vernaculars, pidgins, and lingua francas, took place in West Africa,as well as aboard trading ships which plied the waters between southern Europeand the sub-Saharan African coast. Little is known about the specifics of thelanguages used by Africans and Europeans, but native and foreigner varietiesof Portuguese were widely used throughout Africa, eventually extending alongthe entire Portuguese trade route, encompassing the South Asian subcontinent,Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macao, Indonesia, and many Pacificislands. Naro (1978) has documented the use of many forms of Portuguesebeginning in the fifteenth century, by ships’ crews, slave traders, African andEuropean merchants, slaves, and so forth. Frequently Portuguese was used asa lingua franca among individuals who did not use this language natively, thuscontributing to the incipient pidginization of Portuguese outside of Europe, andthe widespread acceptance of pidgin Portuguese forms as part of an emergingmaritime vernacular whose traces are found in creole languages and nauticaljargon throughout the world. The discussion involving Naro (1978, 1988, 1993),Goodman (1987a, 1987b), and Clements (1992, 1993) provides a good surveyof the issues involved, as well as of the controversy surrounding both the inputand the output of these multilingual contacts.

It is known through historical accounts that some Africans in coastal areasvisited by the Portuguese, as well as inland in the Kongo kingdom, began learn-ing the rudiments of Portuguese around the midpoint of the fifteenth century.Unfortunately, the record is silent on the linguistic peculiarities of Portugueseas learned by Africans, although almost certainly this emergent language con-tained many of the same traits found in contemporary learners’ speech. Thefirst written attestations of Afro-Iberian language comes not from Africa butfrom Portugal, and not in a historical narrative but rather in a stylized literaryimitation. This early text foreshadows what would become a flourishing liter-ary trade first in Portugal and then in Spain, exploiting the attempts of Africansto speak European languages. For more than two centuries, Portuguese and

51


Spanish authors, both in Europe and in the Americas, would embellish theirpoems and plays with the fala de preto/habla de negros; the black characterspeaking broken Spanish or Portuguese became such an established stereotypethat by the middle of the sixteenth century it was not even necessary to explicitlyidentify the language as representing the speech of blacks. In speaking of theearliest imitations of Africans’ approximations to Spanish, Johnson (1969:69)observes that “. . . the linguistic caricature here may be due to the more vital rea-sons than might initially be assumed. The most obvious factor was, of course,an illiterate exposure to Spanish. This would lead to phonetic and syntacticdistortion in any case. What gave the bozal’s distortion its peculiar featuresare perhaps linguistic and artistic interferences from his origins. The Spanishcaricature developed a fine ear for the consequences of that interference andof oral transmission in the bozal’s disfraces negros.” For Johnson, then, theremight be some element of linguistic truth in the literary stereotypes. In Spainand Portugal, these literary imitations persisted long after African-born blacksceased to be a commonplace in the Iberian Peninsula, while in seventeenth- andeighteenth-century Latin America songs imitating bozal language were sung inchurches, cathedrals, and Christmas and Easter processions.

In the midst of this literary underbrush comes a small number of observationswritten by priests, sailors, and travelers, in which Africans’ use of Spanish andPortuguese is attested. There are also a few documents written by well-trainedAfricans, in which occasional lapses from correct grammatical usage providea glimpse at the sort of obstacles faced by Africans in dealing with unfamiliarlanguages. In the balance, Africans’ use of Portuguese and Spanish from theend of the fifteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century can onlybe reconstructed by picking through the quagmire of parodies and stereotypesand comparing the results with independently observed Afro-Iberian contactenvironments.

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 ofGarcia de Resende, published in 1516; it is a poem written by the court officialFernam da Silveira, and dated 1455. If this dating is accurate,1 it means that anAfro-Lusitanian pidgin was already in use only a few decades after Portugalhad begun exploration of the sub-Saharan African coast. The poem imitatesthe speech of a tribal king from “Sierra Leone” (one of the first West Africanareas touched by the Portuguese, and bearing a Portuguese name), and containsthe 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 wouldbring to Ibero-Romance (Chapter Two Appendix #1). This text is of inter-est both for the language contact phenomena it contains and for the strikingabsence of other processes. There is no indication of phonetic deformation(with the possible exception of the rendering of Lisboa as Lixboa, hinting atan early palatalization of preconsonantal /s/). In later Afro-Iberian texts, pho-netic modifications were essential components, and although some exaggera-tion and stereotyping occurred, these literary manipulations provide collateralevidence of evolving sound changes in Portuguese and Spanish. The use ofleyxar for deixar may constitute a scribal error in this early text, although theinterchange 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 lan-guages. In sixteenth century Portuguese texts, leixar appears from time to timein the absence of known African contributions, making this attestation morebelievable.

Silveira’s rendering of Africanized Portuguese presages many of the gram-matical modifications that would become hallmarks of Afro-Iberian pidginsand creoles. For example, this text uses the uninflected infinitive nearly exclu-sively. Most Spanish- and Portuguese-based creole verbs are based on the Ibero-Romance infinitive, although the third-person singular is a frequent alternative.2

This text also contains use of a mim as subject pronoun, anticipating a com-mon event in most Afro-Iberian creoles.3 Finally, the Silveira text exemplifieswidespread elimination of prepositions and conjunctions, relying on the simplejuxtaposition of nouns, adjectives, and uninflected verbs to convey basic mean-ing. The poem provides limited opportunities for noun-adjective concord, butseveral lapses are noted. In general, Silveira’s poem provides a realistic sampleof what the first groping linguistic contacts between Africans and Portuguesespeakers 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 halfa century after Silveira’s poem. This is a humorous account in which an Africanpleads with a European, claiming innocence in an incident in which a jar ofwine was spilled (Chapter Two Appendix #2). This text shows similarity withthe earlier Silveira example, but important innovations are also present. LikeSilveira, da Mota’s “African” speaker uses mim as subject pronoun, togetherwith uninflected infinitives. The use of augoa < aguar “to water” hints at theeventually widespread loss of the final /-r/ in verbal infinitives, characteristicof Ibero-Romance based creoles. The most important feature of this text isthe 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).


< sou de Serra Leoa ‘[I] am from Sierra Leone’), but later Afro-Iberian textsoften employ sar, which in Golden Age Spain at times acquired the first personplural form samo. That this form was not just a fanciful literary creation isshown by its retention in the Afro-Lusitanian creole languages of the Gulf ofGuinea, spoken on Sao Tome, Prıncipe, and Annobon.

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 lessdeveloped, and show almost no signs of consistent pidginization. Aside fromthe use of unconjugated infinitives, the Monssanto fragment shows only use ofmy 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 ofVasco da Gama’s trips between east Africa and India in the 1480s. Accordingto the chronicle of Gaspar Correa, during one of Vasco da Gama’s voyagesto India he picked up an Arabic-speaking Moslem, who eventually learnedPortuguese and served as an interpreter. At one point, a (black) cafre, refer-ring to the interpreter in pidgin Portuguese, stated “Senhor, este homem muitotaibo”.5 In addition to the use of the Afro-Arabic word taibo ‘good’ (< Arabictayyib), which is found in other earlier Afro-Lusitanian texts,6 this brief sen-tence demonstrates a zero copula, one of the many options found in bozalPortuguese.

Gil Vicente: the bulwark of the Afro-Lusitanian literary corpus

Gil Vicente provides the largest single corpus of early Afro-Portuguese lan-guage, 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 clerigo da Beyra (1530). Gil Vicente’s texts are important since they rep-resent the bridge between Portugal and Spain as regards the development ofAfro-Iberian language. Vicente was a prolific writer who used both Portugueseand 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 intothe first purportedly “Afro-Hispanic” texts which began to appear in Spain atapproximately the same time. Due to this seamless transition between Por-tuguese and Spanish in the representation of Africans’ speech in the earlysixteenth century, a perusal of Vicente’s Afro-Portuguese examples promisesto shed light on the origins of Africanized Spanish. Thornton (1992:214) assertsthat Vicente’s literary language

5 Correa (1858:60), Michaelis de Vasconcellos (1909:134). 6 Santos Domınguez (1986).


. . . 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 maturitymight never have been reached on the Atlantic coast of Africa, where conditions wouldnot favor it being learned as a native language by anyone. However, it probably didbecome the language of the islands offshore, and given their extensive commerce withthe mainland, including long-term settlement, probably came to be a lingua franca ratherthan just a contact pidgin.

In fact, Vicente’s literary jargon is not representative of a true creole, in thesense of a grammatically restructured language, formed through extensive con-tacts and an ever-distant native-speaker model of the lexifier language. Nor doesit fit the definition of rough pidgin, unlike the texts in the Cancioneiro geral.Rather, Vicente’s examples show a rather wide range of dispersion, rangingfrom standard (sixteenth-century) Portuguese forms to drastically reduced ormisinterpreted elements. Given the constant influx of Africans into sixteenth-century Lisbon, as well as the ready availability of native-speaker models (eventhe most socially marginalized blacks in southern Portugal were never linguis-tically isolated from native speakers of Portuguese), Vicente’s examples proba-bly represent the furthest point on the road to creolization that Africans’ use ofPortuguese ever attained in Europe. It was precisely in the offshore islands,such as Sao Tome, Annobon, and the Cape Verde group that Portuguese-basedcreoles developed, but there is indirect evidence that some reduced and some-what Africanized Portuguese also took root on the mainland, in the formerPortuguese Congo and Angola.7 There are some differences among the texts,but nothing suggests any form of linguistic evolution, either in Vicente’s rep-resentation of Africanized Portuguese, or in the linguistic abilities of Africansresident in Portugal. Vicente’s texts provide the earliest examples of a realis-tic Afro-Lusitanian pidgin, complete with phonetic, grammatical, and lexicaltraits reflecting both the imperfect acquisition of Portuguese by adult speakersof other languages, and direct interference from African areal characteristics.

Vicente’s texts exemplify nearly all the phonetic modifications that wouldcharacterize later more stable Afro-Iberian language. Briefly, these include thefollowing:

(1) Prevocalic /d/, normally a dental stop or fricative, depending upon thephonetic environment, is reduced to an alveolar flap [r], written r: rinheiro <

dinheiro, rira < dira, turo < tudo(s), firalgo < fidalgo, vira < vida, riabo <

diablo, maruro < maduro, vontare < vontade, passaro < passado, etc. Thischange became canonical in Afro-Iberian texts, continuing through the end ofthe nineteenth century. This realization of /d/ stems from the fact that the usualIbero-Romance conversion to a voiced fricative does not occur among Africanlanguages. The resulting intervocalic stop, in rapid speech, approximates [r], and

7 Lipski (1995b).


was so depicted by Portuguese and Spanish writers. The same pronunciationcharacterizes 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 Choco, Villa Mella in theDominican Republic, Afro-Peruvian villages, etc.

(2) Vicente’s texts contain many examples of paragogic vowels, used to breakup consonant clusters and yield a series of open syllables of the general formCV-: boso < vos, deoso < deus, Furunando < Fernando, sapantaro < espan-tado, senhoro < senhor, furutai < furtai, faramosa < formosa, Purutuga <

Portugal, etc. The addition of paragogic vowels became an important and long-lasting 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, Purutuga < Portugal,etc. Vowel harmony is frequent in many Kwa languages, and in some Bantulanguages. It can be found in the Portuguese-based creoles of the Gulf of Guinea,and in Papiamento. Vowel harmony, often involving paragogic vowels, is afrequent 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/ (yeısmo) began in Andalusia prob-ably towards the end of the sixteenth century, and appears in Latin Americantexts beginning in the seventeenth century. There is no comparable evidenceof delateralization of /λ/ in Portugal, where the palatal lateral pronunciation of/λ/ continues in the majority of dialects even today. In Brazil, however, ver-nacular pronunciation typically realizes /λ/ as [y], and this pronunciation isexclusive in areas of strong African influence. Delateralization of /λ/ in Brazilhas been attributed to African influence, at times uncritically, but the earlyAfro-Portuguese texts suggest that Africans did indeed frequently realize /λ/as [y]; naturally, an African influence is not the only source for such a pro-nunciation in other Spanish and Portuguese dialects. Portuguese /λ/ was almostalways 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 ofAfro-Iberian creoles, as well as in vernacular Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Hispanicspeech, appears occasionally in Gil Vicente: dormi < dormir, come < comer,bebe < beber, mette < meter, quere < querer, furta/furuta < furtar, farta <

fartar, traze < trazer, fala < falar, etc.(6) The Vicente texts provide the first examples of loss of syllable-final

/s/, but with morphological conditioning: vamo < vamos, temo < temos. Theissue of /s/-reduction is an important concern in Spanish dialectology, where

8 Lipski (2002b).


the possible African contribution to loss of syllable-final /s/ in Latin America(principally in coastal regions where both African and Andalusian influencewas strong) continues to be debated. Afro-Lusitanian creoles do not exhibitwidespread loss of syllable-final /s/, although inflectional plural /s/ is not usu-ally present. In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, particularly in areas of heavyAfrican presence, syllable-final /s/ often disappears. Morphological condition-ing is often present, since the first /s/ in noun phrases usually remains to signalplural. 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 nos e “we are,”nos tem “we have,” etc.). In Afro-Hispanic texts, the earliest of which coincidewith 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 majorityof African languages which came into contact with Ibero-Romance, was fur-ther accelerated by grammatically irrelevant consonants, such as the final /s/in /-mos/. The Vicente fragments also provide several examples of obviouslyplural noun phrases in which no plural /s/ appears (Teyssier 1959:243). Thesecases illustrate the general avoidance of inflectional morphology by second-language learners of Ibero-Romance, especially speakers of African languageswhen plurality, when signalled at all, is more often realized by means of pre-fixes. Also at issue is the fact that word-final /s/ was most frequently droppedin unstressed syllables, both noun/adjective plurals and in the ending -mos.Final /s/ in stressed syllables more often triggered a paragogic vowel, as in theomnipresent deoso/dioso < Deus/Dios.

A number of grammatical modifications appear in the Vicente texts, nearly allof which are consistent with other Afro-Iberian literary examples, and are foundin Afro-Iberian creoles. Use of (a) mi as subject pronoun continues the traditionfirst seen in the examples from the Cancioneiro geral. Mi is also used as adisjunctive object pronoun; the Portuguese clitic pronouns rarely appear in Afro-Lusitanian texts. The portmanteau copula sa has become solidified in Vicente.Definite articles are rarely used, conjunctions are frequently eliminated, andnoun-adjective concord is seldom found. The majority of these morphosyntacticfeatures are typical of foreign-language varieties of Portuguese, but use of saand subject (a) mi foreshadow the eventual creolization of Portuguese alongthe West African coast.

Other sixteenth-century Afro-Portuguese literary texts

Another key Afro-Lusitanian text is the “Auto das regateiras” (ca. 1550)by Antonio Ribeiro Chiado (Chapter Two Appendix #8). The lesser-known“Pratica de oito figuras” by the same author (Chapter Two Appendix #9) also


contains “Africanized” Portuguese. In Chiado’s “Auto da natural invenccao,” acharacter imitating early Afro-Portuguese pidgin says:9

Eu sam o que tenho saibo,o vos, Senhor, sentar raybo . . .

This text makes use of the early Afro-Iberian copula senta(r),10 and containsa variant of the Afro-Arabic element taybo, with the initial consonant realizedas a flap. These examples continue the linguistic developments found in GilVicente, with almost no deviations. There are also several innovations, the mostimportant of which are the use of santa(r) as copula (Prutuga santar diabo),and the denasalization of /n/: seora < senhora, gallia < galinha, nigrio <

negrinho, bonitia < bonitinha. Although Afro-Hispanic language frequentlyintroduced intrusive non-etymological nasal consonants, loss of nasal elementsalso occurred. Portuguese borrowings into African languages typically denasal-ized Portuguese nasal vowels, and /n/ also became [y] with some frequency.Among surviving Afro-Iberian creoles, etymological /n/ is often represented bya nasalized glide; this is the case in Papiamento and sometimes Palenquero. Thesame pronunciation is also found in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, in con-junction with other phonetic features which may possibly reflect an Africancontribution. Realization of /n/ as a nasalized glide also occurs in HaitianCreole.

The “Auto da bella menina” by Sebastiao Pires is approximately contempo-raneous with the writings of Gil Vicente, and provides corroborative data on thestatus of Africanized Portuguese of the early sixteenth century (Chapter TwoAppendix #10). This fragment is considerably different from the previouslyconsidered texts, containing a greater amount of distorted and barely intelligi-ble material. At the same time, it contains striking similarities with the Vicenteand Chiado examples, including use of mi(m) as subject pronoun (alternatingwith 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 thirdperson 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 intomany Afro-Iberian creoles, including Cape Verdean Creole, Palenquero, andPapiamento.

An anonymous text, “Auto de Vicente Anes Joeira,” appears to come fromapproximately the same time period (Chapter Two Appendix #11). This text,unusual in many respects, contains recurring Afro-Portuguese elements, includ-ing the generic copulas sentar and sa, uninflected bai, paragogic vowels, useof bare infinitives as invariant verbs, and delateralization of /λ/. In this text euis generally used as subject pronoun.

9 Chiado (1917:73). 10 Lipski (1999c, 2002c).


Afro-Portuguese texts from the seventeenthand 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 andpoem fragments, evidently part of a much larger corpus that was performed inmusical and stage presentations. Beginning with the seventeenth century, thesurviving Afro-Portuguese texts are anonymous; none of the major Portuguesewriters used the lıngua de preto following the plays of Gil Vicente, althoughthe parodies continued in literature aimed at the masses, and actually reacheda high point around the turn of the nineteenth century, long after the African-born population which had inspired Vicente’s writings had been linguisticallyassimilated in Portugal.

An early seventeenth-century Afro-Portuguese literary imitation is an anony-mous song from ca. 1647, “Sa qui turo” (Chapter Two Appendix #12). This textshows considerable phonological modification, as well as grammatical formsfound in earlier texts. These include the invariant copula sa, loss of final /s/ inthe verbal desinence /-mos/ and of final /r/ in verbal infinitives, replacementof the groove fricative [z] by [z] (zente < gente, Zuze < Jose), replacement ofprevocalic /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 alsowidely 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 onlyon the first word of noun phrases: huns may donzera, huns rey, huns fessa. Ingeneral, this text, which comes more than a century after Gil Vicente’s earlyexamples, is consistent with the notion that Africans resident in Portugal wouldhave acquired greater fluency in Portuguese, with remaining problems beingrelegated to phonology, and to occasional grammatical lapses. The languageof this song is a far cry from the broken Portuguese of the sixteenth centuryexamples; there is a greater use of functional elements such as prepositions andarticles, verbs are conjugated, and there is some noun-adjective concordance.

A number of anonymous poems from the seventeenth to eighteenth centurieshave been published by Hatherly (1990) (Chapter Two Appendix #13–18).These poems, although apparently written by different authors over a consid-erable time period, share many important common features. All are found inAfro-Lusitanian creoles, particularly in the Gulf of Guinea, and most appear inearlier Afro-Portuguese texts.11 The key recurring features include replacementof prevocalic /r/ by [l], signaling of plural /s/ only on the first element of nounphrases, paragogic vowels (particularly in boso < vos and Diozo < Deus), of saas uninflected copula, magi [mazi], apparently derived from mas ‘but’ through

11 Megenney (1990a).


addition of a paragogic vowel, delateralization of /λ/. Similar paragogic vowelsare found in the Gulf of Guinea creoles, and in the contemporary vernacularPortuguese spoken in Angola.12

A tantalizing document which purports to represent the speech of Africansin eighteenth-century Portugal is a letter apparently written in Lisbon by the“Rei Angola” to the “Rei Minas” in 1730 (Chapter Two Appendix #19). Thewriter and recipient would be leaders of the African cofradias or religiousbrotherhoods and mutual aid societies that arose whenever Africans lived inPortuguese or Hispanic societies. In cities containing large African popula-tions, these societies were divided along ethnic lines, with the language andculture of particular African groups being partially retained in each group. Inthis case, the term Angola refers most probably to speakers of Kimbundu, butpossibly to Kikongo, while Mina refers to members of the Akan group, frompresent-day Ghana (the former Gold Coast). The letter in question is an invita-tion to join in a religious procession, possibly during Holy Week. It is unlikelythat this text was written by an African, since it was eventually published in acollection of vignettes to which black authors would have little access. At thesame time, the consistent use of recognized Afro-Portuguese pidgin elementssuggests that such a language was well enough known to non-African observersin Portugal as to enable a reasonably accurate imitation. If authentic, this textwould demonstrate that a distinctly Africanized Portuguese existed in Portugalwell into the eighteenth century, and not simply as a long-disappeared stereo-type remembered only in literary documents. Even more crucially, it woulddemonstrate that Africans in Portugal (at least those born in Africa) used apidgin Portuguese with consistent structural characteristics when communicat-ing with Africans of other ethnic groups, rather than simply approximating thereceived language of metropolitan Portugal. The letter contains many structuralelements which were present in earlier Afro-Lusitanian texts, including the lex-ical items seoro < senhor, vozo < vos, signaling of plurality in noun phrasesonly on the first element (at times with hypercorrect /s/, as in dos may Zozefa),rendering of the groove fricative [z] as [z], use of sa as copula, delateralizationof /λ/, and finally signaling of future with ha de, a combination which also madeits way to several Asian Portuguese creoles.

The last phase of Afro-Portuguese texts: calendarsand pamphlets

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing until nearly themiddle of the nineteenth century, pidginized lıngua de preto or lıngua de

12 (Lipski 1995b).


guine found its most consistent manifestation in hundreds of pamphlets andbroadsides, known collectively as literatura de cordel ‘literature on a string.’Most of these texts contain a formulaic use of stereotyped elements, muchas in other ethnic “eye-dialect” literature meant for out-group consumption,13

but their very persistence, side by side with the existence of a considerableblack community, attests to at least some real survival of Afro-Portuguesespeech forms. The most common manifestations were the equivalent of farmers’almanacs and astrological forecasts, known as prognosticos and lunarios. Thisliterary form first began in 1756, as a result of the earthquake that had devas-tated Lisbon a year earlier. Known at first as Os preto astrologo, these pamphletsoffered humorous comments, mostly making fun of the precarious living con-ditions of blacks, e.g. “Fevereiro 6 (seg.), vento e frio, coitado dos preta quenao tem roupa.”14 Subsequent reincarnations of this literary form included theSarrabal portugues and Plonostico curiozo. The original pamphlets faded outafter 1760, but reappeared in 1803 with the Plonostico curiozo, e lunario palaos anno de 1804, pelo pleto Flancisco Suza Halley. These crude broadsideswere published until the middle of the nineteenth century, after which the lit-erary 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 unrealistictraits are carried over (e.g. the massive replacement of /r/ by /l/), there arealso indications that a stable Afro-Portuguese speech mode was stabilizingin Portugal by the end of the seventeenth century. This is suggested by theconsistent 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 theprobability that some identifiable ethnolinguistic features were retained in theAfro-Portuguese community at least until the early decades of the nineteenthcentury and perhaps later. Although written imitations of ethnically markedspeech varieties may persist in some forms of literature long after the groups

13 Strictly speaking, “eye-dialect” refers to spelling alterations meant to suggest ethnic or socio-linguistically marked speech, whether or not an actual change in pronunciation would result.Thus, for example, writing English comin’ for coming and Spanish trabajao for trabajadoactually represent alternative pronunciations, while writing English was as wuz or Spanishhasta 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’ attemptsat speaking Spanish and Portuguese employed both techniques.

14 Tinhorao (1988:210).


in question have ceased to use the marked forms, this is rarely the case forpamphlet literature (and such modern-day equivalents as comic books, tabloids,and trading cards), which is designed to satisfy the immediate pleasures andprejudices of the masses. In Portugal, the thriving market for the lıngua depreto until the middle of the nineteenth century effectively brackets the realuse of some sort of ethnolinguistically identifiable “black Portuguese traits.”Even allowing for the exaggeration and outright misrepresentation inherentin these racist parodies, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that at leastsome blacks in Portugal, most notably those born and raised in that countryand not influenced by foreign-born bozal speech, natively used forms whichwere identified with earlier Afro-Portuguese pidgin. Whether these forms wereused exclusively, or in parallel with non-African Portuguese (e.g. as an in-groupmanifestation of ethnic solidarity) is impossible to determine from the availabledocumentation.

The preceding evidence suggests that an Afro-Portuguese pidgin was evi-dently used in continental Portugal at least through the early part of theeighteenth century, although the most publicly visible manifestations had dis-appeared nearly a century earlier. Moreover, features identifiable as “blackPortuguese” continued to be used by the more marginalized members ofPortugal’s black community well into the nineteenth century and perhapseven later. Literary representations of this speech tended to exaggerate thecomic element, but the linguistic features are consistent with accurately docu-mented Afro-Iberian language contacts. Africans taken to Brazil also spoke aPortuguese pidgin during the first stages of their language acquisition, and manyof the features of the pidgin documented for Portugal probably arose in Brazilas well. At the same time, the demographic profile of Africans in Brazil quicklyshifted to favor speakers from the Congo Basin, providing a more homoge-neous substrate than the apparently heterogeneous mix of African languagefamilies represented in Portugal. The extent to which a Bantu-influenced Afro-Portuguese pidgin permanently affected vernacular Brazilian Portuguese is stillan open question, but several features, such as double and postverbal negation(of the form [nao] sei nao), are arguably derived from such a restructuringprocess.

In the early twentieth century, a number of folksongs and skits were tran-scribed throughout rural regions of Portugal (Chapter Two Appendix #21).Some of these songs retain vestiges of an earlier Afro-Portuguese pidgin, andwere sung on feast days often accompanied by “African” costumes and dances.These fragments have obviously undergone considerable distortion across timeand space, and can no longer be considered as reasonable approximations tothe former speech of blacks in Portugal. However, most of the basic features ofAfro-Portuguese pidgin are found in these fragments.


Glimpses of Portuguese as used in sixteenth- toseventeenth-century Africa

Among the first black Africans arriving in fifteenth-century Portugal were freeemissaries, but slaves were soon to follow. There are no known written recordsof how free Africans might have spoken Portuguese (and later, Spanish). ThatPortuguese did become a significant linguistic presence in West Africa isattested by the numerous early Portuguese borrowings, in Akan, Kikongo,and later in Bantu languages from South Africa to the Horn of Africa. Pre-sumably, the most fluent African speakers of Portuguese (such as the leadersof the Kongo Kingdom – the Manicongos – and their ministers) spoke withthe substratal features observable, for example, in the contemporary speech ofAngolans and Mozambicans who have attained fluency in Portuguese.15 Begin-ning with the first Christianized Manicongo, Congo kings wrote extensive lettersin Portuguese to the King of Portugal, to the Pope, and to other European lead-ers. Most of these texts, however, do not shed light on the Portuguese spokenby Africans, since they were often prepared by Portuguese-born or Portuguese-educated scribes, and are written in the flowery formulaic language typical ofEuropean diplomacy in centuries past (Chapter Two Appendix #22). Africanspossessing only a passing acquaintance with Portuguese would speak a roughpidgin, similar to that found in rural regions of contemporary Angola. Theirlanguage does not appear in documents of the time, but it is unlikely that thisrudimentary Portuguese was much different than present-day phenomena undersimilar circumstances.

Despite the highly artificial language of the “diplomatic” correspondencebetween Congo kings and the Portuguese crown in the late fifteenth and earlysixteenth centuries, there are occasional glimpses of how Africans may actuallyhave used Portuguese. One of the clerks of King Afonso of Congo, Joao Teix-era, was himself Congolese,16 and texts authored by him contain a considerablenumber of pidginized elements, interspersed with the formulaic scribal lan-guage that forms the bulwark of these texts. Other African scribes also produceddeviant elements. Phonological modifications such as metathesis or substitu-tion of consonants and vowels was common. For example, in a letter from theKongo king to the Portuguese king written in 1514 we find espriuver for escr-ever (Brasio 1952:297). A 1539 letter has autos for aptos (Brasio 1953a:74).From 1548 comes mos praz < nos praz, exemplifying an analogical change thathas occurred in other dialects of Spanish and Portuguese (Brasio 1953a:207).17

15 (Lipski 1995b, 2000b, Perl 1989b). 16 Thornton (1992:213–14), Brasio (1952:323).17 Among other examples, in a 1515 letter popas appears instead of poucas (Brasio 1952:336)

and celestryall for celestial (Manso 1877:32). A document from 1547 has dinas < dignas


Incorrectly conjugated or unconjugated (bare infinitive) verbs also occur fromtime to time. For example, from the same 1514 letter we find chamas for chama(Brasio 1952:312), madaramos and cheguaramos for mandarmos and chegar-mos, respectively (Brasio 1952:314).18 An early and grammatically question-able use of the progressive form of estar + gerund comes in a 1550 letter:“. . . he verdade que elle vio estar fallando por muitas veses dom bastiam edom pedro . . .” (Manso 1877:102).

Deviations from normal Portuguese word order are found in several earlydocuments written on behalf of the Kongo kings. A 1516 letter has “. . . semho eu ver . . .” (Manso 1877:34). In a 1516 letter we find “. . . ja comprey vyntee cymquo pecas do dinheiro que me vossa Senhorya deu . . .” (Manso 1877:35). A 1548 letter has “. . . como dito he logo ele ouvidor mandou a mim esprivo abaixo nomeado que fyzese este auto . . .” (Manso 1877:85). A 1550 letteroffers “. . . que diese a dom pedro que se nam saise da Igreja ate lhe ele nammandar Seu Recado . . .” (Manso 1877:105), and “. . . rogou o dito dom pedroa ele testemunha que fosse fallar a manipemba que viese a fallar com elle aquia comguo . . .” (Manso 1877:108). In a 1610 letter we find “. . . aonde me eucriey em companhia dos Religiosos . . .” (Manso 1877:156).

(Brasio 1953a:155). A 1549 document has dynos < dignos and benyna < benigna (Brasio1953a:219). A 1550 document has pormjtio < permitiu (Brasio 1953a:244). In a 1526 letterresdondesa appears instead of redondeza (Manso 1877:50). A 1535 letter has liagoa for lıngua(Manso 1877:65). A 1548 letter has avangelhos for evangelios (Manso 1877:86) and Belltesarfor Baltasar (Manso 1877:89). A 1550 letter has Jeshum < Jesu and ganeiro for janeiro (Manso1877:101). The spelling Anguola for Angola also occurs, e.g. in 1558 (Brasio 1953a:415).A 1615 document has christa for cristao (Manso 1877:160). In 1688 a Congo king wrotechega for chegada (Manso 1877:290). We also find comiguo for conmigo, etc., in 1566 (Brasio1953a:545), guosto for gosto in 1530 (Manso 1877:59), catolyqua for catolica in 1517 (Manso1877:44), branquos for brancos in 1548 (Manso 1877:85), lloguo for logo and fidallguo < fidalgo(Manso 1877:103–04), comguo for Congo and soquorrer for socorrer (Manso 1877:108–09) in1550.

18 Another 1514 letter has cortyse for cortasse (Manso 1877:27). In another letter from the Kongoking to his Portuguese counterpart, written in 1515, we find Nos recebam for nos recebemos(Brasio 1952:335), veo for vieram, dar for deram, crucyficado for crucificaram, recebam forrecebe, dar for dao, naceo for nascemos (Brasio 1952:336), passar for passado, mjnystrar foradministram, tomar for tomam (Brasio 1952:337), acudir for acudais, etc. (Brasio 1952:338).Another 1515 letter has os gentes viveu, “as . . . ryquezas som estroycam . . . ,” dar for darem,tomar for tomarem, todos naceu, and acudir for acudirdes (Manso 1877:32–33). A third 1515letter has “. . . e a nosa gente toda estar bem com elle e elle nos ter muito bem servydo . . .”(Manso 1877:33). A 1525 letter has receba for recebam (Brasio 1952:455), a letter of 1526has poderam for podera (Brasio 1952:459), faram for fara, salluaram for salvara, desparemfor desampare (Brasio 1952:462). Another letter of 1526 has conprara for comprar (Brasio1952:490). A 1535 letter has emvyando for enviado and facam for faca (Brasio 1953a:53–54).A 1540 letter has eu more for morra, hordenou for ordenaram and venha for vem (Brasio1953a:105). A 1543 letter has ser for sendo (Brasio 1953a:120). A document from 1550 hasser falar for ter falado and castjremos for castigarmos (Brasio 1953a:243). In a 1575 documentescrever appears instead of escrevo (Brasio 1953a:127). A 1550 text has fize for fizesse (Manso1877:106).


Use of disjunctive object pronouns instead of clitics occasionally occurs inthe 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 ele-ments of plural noun phrases, a feature of Afro-Portuguese language elsewhere,occasionally appears in scribal documents sent by Kongo kings during the six-teenth century. For example, in one 1515 text, we find nese[s] reynos (Brasio1952:333). In another, we encounter tanta[s] trybu[la]c es (Brasio 1952:337)and os pedreyro[s] (338).20 Unusually, /s/ appears only on the second elementof a noun phrase in a 1540 document: “. . . lhe foram tomadas por o framce-ses . . .” (Manso 1877:76). Hypercorrect /s/ appears in a 1532 document: “. . .dom manuell meus Irmao . . .” (Manso 1877:61).

The use of sam as first person singular, a feature which was on its way outin early sixteenth-century Portugal (many fifteenth-century examples occur inthe Cancioneiro geral), occurs in letters written by Kongo kings. For exam-ple, in a 1516 letter (Brasio 1952:359; Manso 1877:36–37): “. . . que melanca em rostro que se eu sam crystaom e vasallo delrrey nosso Jrm . . .”21

In the third person plural, both sam and sao are used. For example, from 1549:“. . . hos que bem servem sam dynos de gualardam . . .” (Brasio 1953a:218). Inanother document from the same year, we have “. . . sao t o desausalutos . . .”(Brasio 1953a:226). Occasionally, sam is used where a form of estar wouldbe expected, partially reflecting old Portuguese and Spanish usage, but alsopresaging the single copula sa of the Gulf of Guinea creoles. For example in a1517 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 santidadee a seus subcesores . . .” (Manso 1877:82). The first person plural samos alsooccurs; for example in a 1550 document: “. . . nos nos dias samos muy velhopera tamto sofrermos” (Brasio 1953a:244). The diphthong -ao was sometimeswritten -a, for example Bastia[o] (Brasio 1953a:251, 257), in 1550.

19 Manso (1877:41).20 A third 1515 letter has todallas cousas boas santas sam feyta . . . (Manso 1877:31). A letter from

the Kongo king in 1535 contains meus yrmao and meus subceso[res] (Brasio 1953a:39–40).A 1540 letter contains the phrase dos franceis (Manso 1877:73). A 1547 document has lhe[s]dou (Brasio 1953a:175). A 1549 document has “. . . tem r do[s] que n fyzerm . . .” (Brasio1953a:227). In a 1550 document we find seus samtos madamento[s] (Brasio 1953a:244; Manso1877:100). The opposite also occurs; in a letter from the Kongo king written in 1526, we findreynos instead of reyno (Brasio 1952:470). A 1587 document las “ne lhe[s] ua a mao . . .” (Brasio1953b:344).

21 A letter dated 1517 contains the line “. . . que deles se n seguja nenh prouejto, do que sammujto desconsolado . . .” (Brasio 1952:406). The (phonetically similar or identical) som alsoappears, in a letter from the Kongo king written in 1530 (Brasio 1952:540): “. . . por que de suacomvercassam som muyto comssollado . . .” A 1547 document has “. . . como Rey christ o perdireito sam obrigado que eu poder a sua santidade e a seus subcesores . . .” (Brasio 1953a:175).A letter from a Kongo king in 1575 has “[eu] Sao imformado que pera comseruac o do Reynode Comguo . . .” (Brasio 1953b:125).


Kikongo (the native language of the Kongo kings and their scribes) andKimbundu (the native language of the Luanda area of Angola) do not containthe liquid /r/, do not distinguish /r/ and /l/, and exhibit phonological alternationbetween [l] and [d]. Bantu influence on early Portuguese and Spanish bozalspeech involved the change of /r/ > [l], as typified by the Spanish humoristQuevedo. There are many examples of this shift in early Afro-Hispanic andAfro-Portuguese literary imitations, as well as in the Portuguese-based creolelanguages of Sao Tome, Prıncipe, and Annobon, in which the Bantu contribu-tion was significant.22 A reasonable extrapolation of Bantu phonotactics wouldsuggest that the change /r/ > [l] would be a common occurrence among Kikongoand Kimbundu learners of Portuguese. This fact notwithstanding, in contem-porary Angolan Portuguese (largely characterized by a Kimbundu substratum,together with related Bantu languages), the shift of /r/ > [l] is very rare, while theopposite change of /l/ > [r] occurs rather frequently. In the early Portuguese textswritten 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 isthe ambiguous gualardam < guardarem (?) in a 1549 letter (Manso 1877:91).Also, a document from 1547 has pruuica < publica, showing metathesis aswell as liquid neutralization (Brasio 1953a:153). In a letter of 1535 we finddecrarar < declarar (Brasio 1953a:54). A 1540 letter has craro < claro (Brasio1953a:101). Another 1540 letter has lear < leal (Brasio 1953a:103), fraldas <

faldas, natarar < natural (Brasio 1953a:105). A 1548 document has groria forgloria, contrairo for contrario and decrarado for declarado (Manso 1877:85).A 1549 letter has comfrimar < confirmar (Manso 1877:92). Neutralizationwithout metathesis is found in pubryco < publico in 1550 (Brasio 1953a:244,248–49). Also found in 1550 is decrarrou < declarou (Brasio 1953a:24,257–59).

Direct testimony as to Africans’ use of pidginized Portuguese during theseventeenth century comes in a curious document written by Joseph de Naxara,a Spanish Capuchin priest, who lived in Allada (Ardra, later Whydah, alongthe coast of modern Benin) in 1659–60 (Naxara 1672). Naxara describes anAfrican who spoke Portuguese and understood Spanish, and gave an exampleof his use of Portuguese (1672:239):

Nao me chegue a ela, porque sa Ramera . . . e meu Pai me votara a o tronco, se sabeque mi fale 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 Italked 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 theAngola/Gulf of Guinea region, but rather from the Portuguese Slave coast,

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


where Kwa languages (e.g. Ewe/Fon) are spoken. There is no indication thatNaxara was simply imitating literary examples of the period; indeed, since hespent much of his missionary career in Africa, it is not known how much ofthe rather frivolous Spanish and Portuguese literature in which “Africanized”language occurred he was familiar with. Naxara also gives an example ofAfricans’ use of Spanish in Ardra; the brief glimpse is much more brokenthan the Portuguese example, containing principally unconjugated verbs(1672:239):

Espanol esta tanto mal Christiano, tiene una Margarita en Madrid, otra en Cadiz, otraen las Indias; mi, no tener mas que vna Margarita en Olanda, y auer treinta anos que mecase, y no aver conocido otra Margarita . . .

[Spaniards are bad Christians; they have one woman in Madrid, another in Cadiz, anotherin the Indies, I only have one woman in Holland and I am married to her for thirty yearsand have known no other woman]

Early Afro-Brazilian literary texts

In comparison with the vast outpouring of Afro-Hispanic literary language fromcolonial Spanish America, only a couple of colonial Afro-Brazilian texts havecome to light. This is also rather unusual, given the liklihood that vernacularBrazilian Portuguese of many regions was permanently affected by the earlybozal African presence, probably via restructuring or “semicreolization” in thesense of Holm (1988:9) rather than passing through a stage of true creolization.Literary representations of “Africanized” Portuguese continued well into theeighteenth century in Portugal, and in Brazil appear to have been used until thefinal decades of the eighteenth century. By this time, Africanized varieties ofPortuguese were already well established in Brazil, in many cases exhibitingsignificant differences from earlier European Portuguese literary examples. Theuse of European-derived stereotypes in late eighteenth-century Brazil can mostprobably be ascribed to literary tradition, and should not be taken uncriticallyas a representation of how Africans actually spoke Portuguese at this time. Oneinteresting Brazilian document is a fragment of “O preto, e o bugio ambos nomato discorrendo sobre a arte de ter dinheiro sem ir ao Brazil,” published in1789 (Chapter Two Appendix #23). This example contains most of the keyelements identified in earlier Afro-Lusitanian texts, including use of (a) mim assubject pronoun, paragogic vowels, including the pronouns nozo and vozo, shiftof 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 inthis text is the key use of sa as copula; otherwise, the example could have comefrom the sixteenth or seventeenth century.


In colonial Brazil, literary Afro-Portuguese pidgin appears in a few texts untilthe final decades of the eighteenth century. A few other purported Afro-Braziliantexts have come to light, none of which may be taken at face value (ChapterTwo Appendix #24). A very curious text claims to represent a Portuguese-based indigenous interlanguage of the early seventeenth century,23 but in fact thelinguistic 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 ofother phonological and grammatical modifications acknowledged for Afro-Portuguese pidgin. Several folkloric fragments collected in the early part ofthe twentieth century in Brazil also contain vestiges of earlier Afro-Brazilianpidgin (Chapter Two Appendix #26–27). Both poems exhibit loss of nominaland verbal agreement; the second text also makes extensive use of paragogicvowels.

Afro-Portuguese texts from Asia

Most attributions of African influence in Asian-Portuguese creoles must bedone through inference and comparative reconstruction, since primary texts areall but nonexistent. An important exception to this lack of documentation comesfrom the colony of Damao in Portuguese India (Chapter Two Appendix #28).In a song formerly used by black slaves on the feast of St. Benedict, beginningin the seventeenth century, we find examples of Afro-Portuguese pidgin similarto those attested for Europe. This text also gives evidence of having been influ-enced by the Indo-Portuguese creoles, in particular use of the preverbal particleta. The Damao text gives an inkling that Afro-Portuguese pidgin followed thetrade routes of the Portuguese empire, perhaps leaving traces (long since dis-appeared) in other regions as well. Schuchardt (1883a:13) gives an example ofnineteenth-century songs collected in Diu and attributed to blacks (Chapter TwoAppendix #29). Schuchardt gives no analysis of these texts, but the languageis notably simpler than the established Portuguese creole of Diu, suggestinga reasonable approximation to an earlier unstable Portuguese pidgin spokenby black slaves taken to the Portuguese fort at Diu. Schuchardt (1883b:11–12)gives examples of Afro-Portuguese songs from the former Portuguese Indiancolony at Mangalore (Chapter Two Appendix #30). Again, the texts are pre-sented without analysis, but they suggest that Africanized Portuguese songsand dances were not uncommon in the Portuguese Indian colonies, with the lastmemories of these song fragments persisting well beyond the actual Africanslave populations.

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


African slaves were also taken in large numbers to the Portuguese colonyat Macao, beginning in the sixteenth century.24 In general, Macao creolePortuguese bears the strongest resemblance to Papia Kristang of Malacca.25 It isknown that Malay/Malaccan natives formed the largest foreign-born populationduring the formative period of Macao creole Portuguese, and it appears likelythat Malay settlers brought to Macao at least the rudiments of the Portuguese-based creole formed in Malacca. Batalha (1974:21) believes that Macao creolePortuguese was “uma linguagem ja para aquı trazida em pleno desenvolvi-mento.” Macao was also home to settlers from Portuguese colonies in southAsia, where Portuguese-based creoles also arose. However, the African culturaland linguistic contribution was also important; Batalha (1974:24) explains:

Havendo entre eles muitos indıgenas africanos . . . isso explica em parte certas semel-hancas, a primeira vista surpreendentes, entre o velho crioulo de Macao e os crioulosafro-portugueses, sobre tudo os de Cabo Verde. Explicara ate algumas coincidenciascom o falar popular do Brasil, uma vez que este paıs . . . recebeu ao tempo da suacolonizacao grande contingente de mao-de-obra africana.

The author adds the following clarification:

Mas em parte . . . porque certos fenomenos que se repetem em varios crioulos naoviajaram, mas resultam de leis psicologicas em todos os povos identicos, como sejaa tendencia para a simplificacao. Nao e, pois, necessariamente de origem africana areducao de verbos, em Macao, a uma so forma que serve para todas as pessoas gram-maticais (do tipo de eu sabe, nos sabe, eles sabe), ou a formacao de perıfrases parasubstituir os tempos verbais simples (como ta vai paro o presente, logo vai ou lo vaipara o futuro e ja vai o ja vai ja para especificar a accao passada). (1974:24–25)

These comments add to the already growing evidence of an African-SouthAsian connection in the development, evolution, and spread of Portuguese-based creoles.

The presence of sa in Macao also reflects an African carryover; this copulais not present in any other Asian Portuguese creole, but is found in the Gulf ofGuinea creoles, currently as denasalized sa (or xa in Annbonese) but previouslyalso as nasalized sam. The latter spelling is also found in early Macao texts, aswell as sao, and sang.26 Azevedo (1984) also notes that Macao was for a longperiod administered and supplied directly from Goa; he also gives examples oflinguistic elements possibly transferred straight from Goa to Macao. Thus someform of Indo-Portuguese creole may have arrived in Macao from Goa, in addi-tion to the indirect influence through Malaccan Papia Kristang. The presence ofthe copula sa in the Naxara text is revealing in both its geographical location and

24 Batalha (1974), Teixeira (1976), Amaro (1980).25 Chaves (1933), Rego (1943), Hancock (1973, 1975), Wexler (1983), Baxter (1988).26 Schuchardt (1888:196), Franca (1897:201), Coelho (1967:62), Batalha (1974:26), Ferreira

(1978:28), Azevedo (1984:55).


the time period for which it is attested, and may provide a clue as to the presenceand absence of sa in Afro-Iberian creoles. The data surveyed to this point pro-vide a puzzling distribution of the invariant copula sa: it is present in the Gulfof Guinea creoles, but not in Palenquero (with strong Bantu roots), nor in anyknown variety of Angolan Portuguese. It is also absent from the Portuguese-based creoles of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. At the same time, sa makes itsappearance in literary texts early in the sixteenth century, beginning with GilVicente. Finally, this element is present in Macao Portuguese creole, havingskipped over the intervening Asian Portuguese creoles. Everything points tothe Bight of Benin/Slave Coast as the origin of sa in pidgin Portuguese, whenceit was taken to Portugal and Spain and reproduced by early writers such as GilVicente and Lope de Rueda. The Gulf of Guinea creoles (Sao Tomense in par-ticular) contain approximately equal proportions of linguistic material from theSlave Coast and from Bantu languages of Congo/Angola, while the obviouslyBantu-influenced Palenquero contains few if any Kwa-derived elements. Thecopula sa could have been taken to Macao directly from the Bight of Beninby African slaves. This is a more likely source than Sao Tome, since no otherfeatures of the latter creole appear in Macaense. Amaro (1980) has discoveredsimilarities between traditional board games formerly played in Macao andsimilar games in West Africa.

3 Early Afro-Hispanic texts

The first Afro-Hispanic texts, sixteenth century: Rodrigode Reinosa

In Spain, the literary representation of “Africanized” Spanish began early inthe sixteenth century, although it is conceivable that some non-surviving textsmight have been produced in the late fifteenth century. The earliest examplesshow the definite traces of the already established Afro-Portuguese languageproduced by such writers as Gil Vicente. This fact is unremarkable in light ofthe slave trade from Portugal to southern Spain, in the late fifteenth and earlysixteenth centuries, although some investigators (e.g. Granda 1969) claim thatmost Afro-Hispanic literary language, including the earliest texts, stems fromdirect contact between Spanish and native Africans, without the mediation ofpidginized Portuguese. Among the earliest Afro-Hispanic texts are some coplasby Rodrigo de Reinosa (Chapter Three Appendix #1). The poems in question arecontained 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 writtenin the last decades of the fifteenth century; in any case, they were written no laterthan about 1510, which makes them the oldest Afro-Hispanic texts discoveredto date. Nothing is known about the life of Rodrigo de Reinosa. Weber de Kurlat(1968) surmises that the “Africanized” coplas were written after the publicationof the Cancioneiro geral in 1516. Menendez y Pelayo surmised that Reinosa wasa montanes, from the highlands of modern Santander (Cantabria) province, anidea echoed by Cossıo (1950). Little substantive evidence supports this claim,but it is obvious from the coplas that Reinosa had indeed experienced Afro-Iberian pidgin language, most probably in person. Cabrales Arteaga (1980:25)suggests that Reinosa may have spent time in Seville, since he was obviouslyfamiliar with the speech of several marginalized groups that were found inurban Andalusia. If the late fifteenth-century dates proposed for his coplas areaccurate, Reinosa could not have been inspired by the Cancioneiro geral, nor bythe writings of Gil Vicente, both of which were to appear several decades later.Although Reinosa’s own coplas were apparently only published as literaturade cordel pamphlets, there is some indication that these seminal Afro-Hispanic

71


texts were the source of direct inspiration, if not imitation, by some of the firstSpanish writers to make use of Afro-Hispanic pidgin. The coplas are ostensiblydirected to blacks living in the already large black community of Seville. Thisfact is important since, although the pamphlets were clearly directed at least inpart at the literate white public (or at least that subclass which routinely readthe humorous pamphlets sold on the street), there is at least some indicationthat Africans themselves were contemplated among potential readers. Thatblack slaves might be literate at a time when literacy was a skill not enjoyedeven by many members of the aristocracy is not entirely impossible, since themajority of blacks in Seville at the turn of the sixteenth century were employedas domestic servants. Africans were often entrusted with raising the childrenof affluent families, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that at least some ofthe more favored servants and slaves might have been taught to read, at leastsimple texts. The existence of cofradıas among the African community wouldensure that group members who were literate might read these simple texts toilliterate compatriots. However, the crude and vulgar language of the coplasmakes it more likely that a white working-class readership (or listenership) wasthe intended audience.

Referring to the language of the coplas, Cossıo (1950:lxxvii) speaks of “. . . laimitacion convencional de su lenguaje, y aun mas de su fonetica.” This isa surprising affirmation in light of the fact that Reinosa employs virtually nophonetic deformation, other than the use of some Portuguese rather than Spanishforms. 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 areused in their normal phonetic forms, either because Reinosa did not know thepidgin versions or, more probably, because of the need to achieve a measure ofintelligibility for a Spanish-speaking audience.” This is unlikely, since most ofthe Portuguese words employed by Reinosa are transparently cognate with theirSpanish counterparts. If any aspect of the coplas would produce confusion in theSpanish reader, it was the grammatical distortions, which, however, constitutethe essence of the habla de negros. Cabrales Arteaga (1980:232–33) analyzes‘phonetic’ aspects of Reinosa’s bozal language, most of which can be attributedto vernacular Portuguese or sayagues of the early sixteenth century. Weber deKurlat (1962a:385, fn. 17) suggests that Reinosa may have read Silveira’s poemin the Cancioneiro geral, which would place Reinosa’s writings well into thesixteenth century, and would also cast some measure of doubt on the authenticityof the language as used by Africans in Seville. Russell (1973:228–29) disputesthis assertion, insisting that the structures used by the two writers are sufficientlydifferent as to preclude a simple copy of Silveira by Reinosa. The base languageof the coplas is clearly Spanish, but unmistakable Afro-Lusitanian elements arealso found:

Early Afro-Hispanic texts 73

(1) use of terra instead of tierra, ferro instead of fierro/hierro, esterco insteadof estiercol, 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 simpledeformations inspired by foreigners’ difficulties in acquiring Spanish. Amongthe more consistently pidgin traits are:(1) Use of (a) mı as subject pronoun, alternating with yo. (a) mı as subject

pronoun occurs only in the earliest Afro-Hispanic texts, disappearing bythe middle of the sixteenth century, while this pronoun was used as subjectin Afro-Portuguese texts until the eighteenth century.

(2) There is considerable confusion of ser and estar, although the hybrid Afro-Lusitanian verb sa(r) has yet to make an appearance.

(3) Most verbs are left in the infinitive; occasional defective attempts at conju-gation (e.g. sabo) also occur. The verb juro is the only correctly conjugatedform.

Reinosa’s texts mix Afro-Portuguese and foreigner-talk Spanish. To theextent that these coplas possess any historical and linguistic authenticity, theyindicate that the first African slaves arriving in Seville via Portugal had acquiredat least the rudiments of a Portuguese pidgin, but rapidly acquired Spanishlexical overlays. Most phonetic deformations can be attributed to Portuguese.However, there is one example of eta, apparently derived from esta, whichCabrales Arteaga (1980:232) analyzes as loss of preconsonantal /s/. The formJesu could be a Portuguese form, or a shortened version of Jesucristo; there areno other examples of loss of final consonants in Reinosa’s coplas. Palataliza-tion of preconsonantal /s/ appears in moxquito and moxca, but these forms werecommon in sayagues of the time period, and cannot be taken as embodyingAfrican phonetic interference without further substantiation.

The farsas of Sanchez de Badajoz

Following Reinosa, another Spanish writer to make abundant use of “African-ized” Spanish was Diego Sanchez de Badajoz, in a series of farsas, includingthe “Farsa teologal,” “Farsa del moysen,” “Farsa de la hechicera,” and “Farsade la ventera.” All were apparently composed between 1533 and 1548, which,extrapolating backwards, would place the dates of the language just past theexamples of Reinosa (Chapter Three Appendix #2–5). Diego Sanchez was bornnear 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


probably in the last decade or two of the fifteenth century. Sanchez was proud ofhis 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 exposedto the writings of Juan del Encina and Lucas Fernandez, who were active inSalamanca at that time.1 At almost any university of the time, Sanchez wouldhave encountered the works of Gil Vicente, and significant parallels betweenthe two writers are not difficult to point out. In all of his dramatic writings,Diego Sanchez demonstrated a keen awareness of popular speech. The Africancharacters who appear in Sanchez’s plays derive their pidginized language asmuch from the rustic vernacular as from the learned Spanish of their masters,and the “African” component of their language must be evaluated against thebackdrop of these nonstandard rustic variants. Sanchez de Badajoz’s Africancharacters also employ a certain number of Portuguese linguistic traits, as dosome of his rustic characters. This element must be treated cautiously, sincealready by the the early sixteenth century the use of vernacular Portuguese inSpanish plays was becoming a comic stereotype. The fact that Diego Sanchezlived and worked only a few miles from Portugal is also not irrelevant in hischoice of vernacular language.2 Finally, it is almost certain that Sanchez basedat least part of his “Africanized” Spanish on the language of African slavesliving in the area. Although it is possible that Sanchez derived the inspirationfor the use of African characters speaking pidginized language from early writ-ers such as Gil Vicente and Lope de Rueda, the fact remains that the localchurch audiences who appreciated Sanchez’s plays were presumed to alreadybe familiar with the mannerisms of African slaves. In the sixteenth and seven-teenth centuries, southern Extremadura had a small but important African slavepopulation, most of whose members worked as domestic servants in affluentfamilies. In the sixteenth century, the slave population of southern Extremadurawas at times as high as 7 percent.3 Some of the slaves had arrived directly fromAfrica, perhaps after spending time in other regions of Spain, but a signif-icant proportion had come from Portugal, where they may have acquired atleast some pidginized Portuguese. For the seventeenth century, Cortes Cortes(1987:145) shows that more than 30 percent of the slaves imported into southernExtremadura came from Portugal, some 20 percent arrived from Andalusia, andmore than 40 percent came from other parts of Extremadura. Among the lattergroup, a Portuguese origin is certain for at least some. In the sixteenth century,when Portugal still effectively controlled the African slave trade, the proportionof slaves arriving from Portugal would have been even higher. Despite this fact,Sanchez 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 Lopez Prudencio (1915:52).2 Weber de Kurlat (1968, 1971, 1974). 3 Cortes Cortes (1987:96–97).


can be attributed to the prevailing sayagues flavor of Sanchez’s marginalizedcharacters. Nor is the Afro-Hispanic pidgin a simple literary invention, devoidof linguistic reality, as some have affirmed.4 Lopez Prudencio (1915:147–48)refers to this language as “una incomprensible algarabıa” and “la acaso arbi-traria monserga.” Weber de Kurlat (1968:350) observes that among authors ofthe early sixteenth century, “Lo que interesa es dar impresion de portugues: nopreocupa la fidelidad o la precision o el hacer gala del conocimiento de unalengua extranjera, sino la presencia, tampoco sistematica, de unos pocos rasgosmuy caracterısticos.” The linguistic characteristics of Sanchez’s “Africanized”Spanish is consistent with foreign learners’ attempts to speak Spanish, andreveals several African areal characteristics that recur in later examples.

Sanchez’s farsas contain a language which is indisputably pidginizedSpanish, in which Portuguese elements are minimal, and those few possiblyPortuguese traces which do occur may well reflect regional rustic dialects ofSpain (e.g. Sayagues and Extremeno), following well-established trends inSpanish theatre. Thus, the diminutive bonino suggests Galician/Asturian, asdo 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. Inany case, it is clear that Sanchez de Badajoz was not blindly imitating literarymodels formed in Portugal, and available through the works of Gil Vicenteand the Cancioneiro geral. Sanchez de Badajoz evidently was exposed to truepidginized Spanish, formed spontaneously as Africans in Spain attempted toproduce comprehensible utterances in this new and hostile language. Sanchezde Badajoz’s examples provide the first attempt to portray the phonetic char-acteristics of Afro-Hispanic speech. Most of the traits had already surfaced inAfro-Portuguese texts, given the cognate nature of Spanish and Portuguese, andthe predictable interference of areal characteristics among the principal Africanlanguage families. Sanchez de Badajoz’s characters use a modified pronuncia-tion consistently, in combinations which suggest formation in situ, rather thanimitation of Afro-Portuguese speech. Among the salient phonetic traits are:(1) Realization of prevocalic /d/ as [r](2) Realization of fricative [z]/affricates [j] and [c] as [s] (sesu < Jesus, museres

< mugeres, vırsen < virgen, nose < noche)(3) Denasalization of /n/ (siora < senora)(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), Dıez Borque (1978:95–96).


reduction of syllable-final /s/ in Andalusian Spanish. The next convincingset of examples of /s/-reduction in Afro-Hispanic language (other than inthe verbal desinence -mos, and in the frequent pronunciation of Jesus asJesu, possibly influenced by Portuguese) do not come until nearly a centurylater.

(6) These texts also provide the first Afro-Hispanic examples of loss of pre-consonantal /r/: mueto < muerto. As with loss of final /s/, loss of word-final/r/ is a typically Andalusian characteristic, which may be traced in Afro-Hispanic texts in the frequent loss of final /r/ in verbal infinitives. AndalusianSpanish usually retains word-internal preconsonantal /r/ (and also realizespreconsonantal /l/ as [r]).

(7) The pronunciation of madre as magre is also found in contemporary Afro-Hispanic language, e.g. in Palenquero, in the Colombian Choco, in partsof the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. This pronunciation, however,pertains to rustic Spanish in general, and is widespread in rural areas withno African substrate.

The farsas also demonstrate grammatical modifications, most of which arecharacteristic of second-language varieties of Spanish. These include verbs inthe uninflected infinitive form, defective subject-verb concordance, and unsta-ble noun-adjective concordance. Despite the occasional presence of elements ofPortuguese origin, Sanchez de Badajoz’s habla de negros bears the earmarks of aspontaneously formed Spanish pidgin, representing the speech of African boza-les who encountered European languages for the first time in Spain. Althoughthey must be treated with care, these texts can tentatively be labeled as corrobo-rative evidence that at least some Afro-Hispanic language arose spontaneouslyin 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 comefrom Lope de Rueda, in plays written in between 1538 and 1545 (ChapterThree Appendix #6–8). Rueda evidently had firsthand knowledge of the speechof Africans in Spain, and it has been suggested that he himself may have playedthe part of Africans in productions of his plays. “Africanized” Spanish occursin the Comedia de los enganados, the Comedia de Eufemia, and the Comediade Tymbria. Together, the three plays provide a high degree of consistencyin the use of Afro-Hispanic pidgin, which makes these texts among the mostimportant early literary documents.

Of all the early Spanish and Portuguese writers, Lope de Rueda was in thebest position to accurately describe the language of African bozales residing inSpain. Rueda was born and apparently raised in Seville. After trying his handat various trades, he formed a theatre company in which he was one of the


principal actors, an expert at portraying the linguistically and culturallymarginalized characters which fill Spanish Golden Age theatre. As in the major-ity of Spanish drama, the negros in Rueda’s plays are always cast in comicalroles, are nearly always women, and stand out by their wildly improbablemalapropisms, incoherent asides, and constant preoccupation with food, drink,love, and dancing. The texts contain such a density of mocking humor andcrude puns that it is easy to dismiss the entire corpus as xenophobic rambling.Veres (1950:207) says that the jerga de los negros: “. . . presenta caracterısticasmas arbitrarias todavıa y es difıcil deducir que es lo que puede haber de reali-dad en la transcripcion de esta habla jergal; encontramos vulgarismos comunesen varias regiones dialectales, al mismo tiempo que otros fenomenos difıcilesde explicar fonologicamente.” While Veres is correct in noticing the use ofrustic and dialectal forms in Rueda’s literary “Africanized” language, he appar-ently was not familiar with African areal characteristics that might have influ-enced bozal Spanish; this stands in contrast to Veres’ analysis of the jerga demoros. Cotarelo y Morı (1908:312) dismisses the “formas caprichosas que deseguro no usaban las interesadas, y que aunque ası no fuese, en nada puedenilustrar el idioma, porque eran tan variables como distintos los individuos.”Sarro Lopez (1988:610), on the other hand, believes that Rueda made use ofactually existing linguistic modalities; she distinguishes (i) normal sixteenth-century Spanish; (ii) vulgar or rustic language of the time; and (iii) a possiblyPortuguese-influenced Afro-Hispanic pidgin. Other investigators, e.g. Chasca(1946), Weber de Kurlat (1962a), have focused only on the phonetic componentof these and other Afro-Hispanic literary texts, concluding that at least someAfrican areal characteristics are in evidence.

Close inspection of Lope de Rueda’s habla de negros reveals complete con-sistency with Afro-Iberian texts from all time periods, as well as the first inklingsof phenomena which became common in later texts. Rueda’s examples give thefirst convincing evidence that something resembling a coherent Afro-Hispanicpidgin might once have been spoken by first-generation Africans in Spain.Excluding phenomena which are simply the results of foreign-talk Spanish (e.guninflected infinitives, lack of agreement, loss of prepositions), the recurringpidgin traits, almost all of which can be independently verified, include:(1) loss of /s/ in the verbal ending -mos. This compares to the nearly cate-

gorical retention of syllable-final /s/ in other contexts. The use of apue <

despues may also represent systematic loss of /s/ in this near-automatism.Veres (1950:212) dismisses this loss of /s/ as a “rasgo completamente con-vencional, ya que Lope de Rueda hace hablar continuamente a sus negrasarticulando la -s final.” This observation fails to note the particular morpho-logical 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 “simplesfenomenos foneticos.” Weber de Kurlat (1962b:161) recognizes the clear


morphological conditioning of the loss of /s/ in -mos and also in nounsin which the final /s/ is lexicalized, and is not part of the singular-pluralopposition (e.g. Jesus, mas, etc.). The pronunciation Jesu for Jesus wasfound among non-African rustic characters of the time period, and can-not be taken as evidence of Africans’ pronunciation of final /s/. Rueda’sAfricanized imitations contain a few other possible instances of loss ofpreconsonantal /s/. For example Celetinas < Celestina, in the Comediade Eufemia, and refriados < resfriado in Tymbria, may be metathesis (asin 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 theComedia de los enganados, the African character Guiomar uses jamın <

jazmın, another isolated instance which is set against the general reten-tion of final /s/ by all of Rueda’s characters.6 Rueda’s African charactersalso exhibit many instances of hypercorrect final /s/. Rueda’s texts do notgive evidence of widespread loss of syllable-final /s/ in sixteenth-centuryAndalusia, even among Africans, so the hypercorrect [s] which appearsin the habla de negros is more likely due to Africans’ unfamiliarity withSpanish (suffix-based) inflectional systems, and the consequent haphazarduse of final /s/, felt to be authentically “Spanish” without regard for itsgrammatical function.

(2) Use of sa (with rare variant san) as uninflected copula, replacing both serand estar. The occasional samo also occurs. Veres (1950:216) attributesuse 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 infact a key common element in most Afro-Iberian texts, dismissing it as a“pintoresca conjugacion de las negras.”

(3) Intrusive nasalization, usually before obstruents: dalen diabro, tan diabro,por an mar, Punto Rico, etc. These literary representations usually rep-resented either a prenasalized stop or a nasalized vowel, both transcribedas an intrusive nasal consonant by Spanish writers. Rueda was the firstSpanish writer to accurately observe the full range of nasal phenomena inAfro-Hispanic pidgin.7

(4) Delateralization of /λ/ is the rule among the African characters, while not yetattributed to rustic or Andalusian Spanish. In the Comedia de los enganados,

5 Nunez Cedeno (1986, 1987a).6 Sarro Lopez (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 unmarkedand uninflected verb in early Afro-Hispanic language. Some examples are clear; for example inthe Comedia de los enganados, Guiomar says “. . . ya tenemo un prima mıa . . .” and “yo, sinor,queremos muntipricar mundos.” In Tymbria, Fulgencia says “¿No mira que samo refriados ypechigona?” This would correspond to use of invariant am in early Black English of the UnitedStates, a phenomenon apparently more frequent in literary imitations than in actual usage.

7 Dunzo (1978), Lipski (1992b).


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 senor mosamo; this is strikingly similar to the use of misuamoin later Afro-Hispanic texts, particularly in the Caribbean, and hints that thebozal expression may not result from simple analogy and wrong division,but rather from an already existent vernacular combination in use amongpeasants.

Lope de Rueda’s Africanized Spanish texts are undoubtedly the most com-plete, most consistent, and arguably most authentic to come out of sixteenth-century Spain. They give evidence of the incipient formation of a stable pidgin,although not with the degree of consistency that could eventually coalesce intoa creole. Africans in sixteenth-century Spain never lived in such isolation fromnative speakers of Spanish, nor did large groups of Africans sharing no com-mon language gather together. The pidginized language depicted by Ruedaand other early dramatists was quite rudimentary, but common elements didtie these speakers together. In the seventeenth century, many of the originalcommon elements, some of which may be of Afro-Portuguese origin, vanishedfrom Afro-Hispanic speech. The resulting language was at the same time morerandom in its departures from Spanish usage, and more Spanish-like in its mor-phology and syntax. In some cases, this may signal that the habla de negroswas no longer as common in the streets of southern Spain, and that the remain-ing literary stereotype was losing continuity with the original model. In otherinstances, it appears that fewer bozal Africans were arriving in Spain, and thatblacks born in Spain either acquired regional Spanish with no ethnolinguistictraits, or retained at most a phonetic accent, while using reasonably standardSpanish grammar. There is no question that, especially after Lope de Rueda(and, in Portugal, Gil Vicente), the literary stereotype of the habla de negrosbecame a stock in trade, which needed no introduction. Thus for example in GilVicente’s play Floresta de enganos (1536), a doctor (who is having an affairwith a married woman), reverts to the habla de negros in front of her husband.This language is immediately recognized by the audience, despite there beingno other ethnic references:

Porque vos, mia Senora,estar tanto destemplada?Ya tudo estar peneirada,que bradar comigo aora?Que cosa estar vos hablando?A mı llama Caterina Furnando,nunca a mı cadela nao.


Minor ‘Africanized’ texts from the sixteenth century

A number of minor texts from approximately the same time period give briefexamples 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 toprobe for consistent pidgin traits, shows some Afro-Portuguese characteris-tics, including non-diphthongized forms (dente, quere, bona, be, vene), someapparently Portuguese words (fogir, meyior < melhor), and two instances ofthe copula sa. The fragment also uses uninflected infinitives, confuses ser andestar, and shows some phonetic modification (e.g. delateralization of /λ/, andthe unusual change of /s/ > [y] in yinor < senor). It is possible that the author hada vague awareness that blacks in Spain spoke a highly broken language withsome Portuguese elements thrown in, and that he created such a concoctionwithout ever having heard Africanized Spanish firsthand.

A very brief fragment of Afro-Hispanic imitation appears in the Retrato de lalocana andaluza by Francisco Delicado, first published in 1528 and evidentlywritten between 1513 and 1527. The work was first published anonymously,and authorship was not determined until the nineteenth century. A single copyof the work survives, and contains the following brief fragment:8

– Xenora llamar.– ¡O que linda tez de negra! ¿Como llamar tu? ¿Conba?– No, llamar Penda, de xenora.– Yo dar a ti cosa bona.– Xenora, xı. Venir, venir, xenora dezir venir.

In this brief exchange between the “esclava” and Locana, the former beginsby speaking normal Spanish (e.g. “Senora, allı esta una gentil muger, que dizeno se que de vuestra madre”), then switches to pidginized Spanish (with more“Moorish” and Lingua Franca characteristics than sub-Saharan African traits)when Locana addresses her in broken Spanish. This fragment is principallyof interest for sociolinguistic reasons, hinting that Spaniards may have deliber-ately spoken Spanish “baby talk” to African slaves without regard for the latter’sachievements in Spanish. Little is known of Delicado’s life or of the circum-stances in which he may have been exposed to Africanized Spanish. Belongingto a Jewish converso family, Delicado (born ca. 1480 around Cordoba) left forItaly by the end of the fifteenth century, and it may have been in this countrythat he acquired familiarity with the Italianized Mediterranean Lingua Francathat appears to permeate his “African” Spanish imitation. Indeed, most of theLocana is set in Rome, and the characters speak a fluid mixture of Spanish andItalian, together with fragments of Portuguese, Catalan, and Latin. Menendez

8 Damiani (1974:21), Morua Delgado (1975:199–200).


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 Italo-Hispanic jargon used in Rome by the Spaniards of the lowest classes who hadbeen residing there a long time, and who, without really having learned the for-eign language, muddled their own language with all types of Italianisms . . .” TheItalo-Spanish fragments which pepper the Locana presage the hybrid cocolichelanguage which became popular in Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the firstdecades of the twentieth century. Thus, Delicado’s representation of “African-ized Spanish” may well have been intended to depict a more Italian-basedLingua Franca used by the not-inconsiderable black slave population of Italyduring the sixteenth century.

Two of the spinoffs of the Celestina also contain brief fragments of putativelyAfricanized Spanish. The Segunda Celestina (1534–36) of Feliciano de Silvaprovides several examples (Chapter Three Appendix #10). Despite the assertionthat this is the speech of blacks in Spain, these fragments show characteristicsof “Moorish” or Arabic-influenced pronunciation (especially the writing ofsyllable-final /s/ as x, which represented the sound [s]). Arabic words are alsoincluded, e.g. guala < wa allah “by Allah”.10 Most of the features are nottypical of the sub-Saharan African speech found in earlier works, but given thatblack Africans in southern Europe had often arrived overland through Arabic-speaking North Africa, the text may not be totally irrelevant.11 The remainderof the features are unremarkable: unconjugated infinitives, vocalic instability,defective concordance. Only the use of (a) mı as subject pronoun provides alink with other legitimately Afro-Iberian texts.

The Tercera parte de la tragicomedia de Celestina, by Gaspar Gomez deToledo, was written at about the same time (ca. 1536). In this work, a few brieffragments of presumed bozal Spanish are found (Chapter Three Appendix #11).The replacement of syllable-final and syllable-initial /s/ by x [s] is part ofthe “Moorish” literary stereotype, and is unlikely to have represented legiti-mate Afro-Hispanic speech of any time period.12 Nor can this be uncriticallyattributed to an early Portuguese palatalization of syllable-final /s/, which didnot emerge in Portugal until some two centuries later (although occasional hintsof palatalized /s/ appear in the earliest Afro-Portuguese texts). Rustic charactersin sixteenth-century Spain occasionally palatalized syllable-final /s/; in Lopede Rueda’s works, for example, the pastores use such forms as oyxte < oiste,moxquito < mosquito, etc. Of the latter form, Cotarelo y Morı (1908:324) statesthat it was common at the time, and suggests that the Andalusian pronunciationwith 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 Cited by Damiani and Allegra in Delicado (1975:83). 10 Silva (1988:127).11 Sloman (1949). 12 Barrick (1973:22, 447–48).


use of a mı as subject pronoun falls more in line with Afro-Iberian pidgin, notwith 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 ratherconfused example of “alien” Spanish, evoking the speech of foreigners whowere not held in repute, but unlikely to be an accurate representation of anyparticular 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 ear-lier imitations of African and Moorish speech, but consistent with no otherpurported “Africanized” speech. The palatalization of /s/ harks back to moroimitations, the uninflected infinitives are common to all foreign imitations ofSpanish, as is the confusion of ser and estar. Yo and mı are both used as sub-ject pronouns (this is one of the last times that use of mı as subject pronounappears in Afro-Hispanic language), and few of the phonetic modifications pointunequivocally to an African substrate. A manuscript dated 1590 and containingan Africanized romancerillo rounds out the picture for sixteenth-century Spain(Chapter Three Appendix #13). This poem offers no new insights into earlyAfro-Hispanic language. The majority of the departures from standard Spanishinvolve phonetic deformations, including loss of final /r/ in the infinitive, andapparent loss of preconsonantal /s/ (paqua < pasqua, and piritu < espıritu).

The turn of the seventeenth century: Aguado’s Entremes delos negros

The turn of the seventeenth century brought a flourishing of the habla de negrosas a viable literary device in Spain, and the greatest writers of the Golden Agewere quick to join the tradition. The first well-known seventeenth-century rep-resentation of Afro-Hispanic speech is the Entremes de los negros of Simon deAguado (Chapter Three Appendix #14; ca. 1602). This is also the first play inwhich Africans, and their pidginized speech, rise to become main characters.Many of the stereotypical names, words, and phrases which became associatedwith the literary habla de negros make their first appearance in this skit. Thepidginized language of the black characters reveals a much closer approximationto normal Spanish than most of the preceding examples, as well as a wide rangeof phonetic and morphological distortions. Most pidgin forms continue those ofearlier texts: paragogic vowels (siolo/sinolo < senor, dioso < Dios), the copulassa(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 (usuallyvoiced) obstruents (e.g. a Dios > andioso > an dioso), delateralization of /λ/,and flap pronunciation of prevocalic /d/. There is also frequent hypercorrectfinal [s], although loss of syllable-final /s/ in other contexts does not occur.


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 min-imal accommodation of Spanish phonotactic patterns, may have resulted inAfricans’ failure to pronounce final [s], which was still strong in local varietiesof Spanish. By the time Aguado wrote his skits, a native-born black populationwas in existence, and while most if not all spoke Spanish with no “African”characteristics, those ethnolinguistic traits that did remain evidently did notinclude widespread loss of /s/. Among the stereotyped expressions are the useof primo as a term of address among blacks, and the lament aunque negro, samohonraro. Variants of this refrain would be used in imitations of Afro-Hispanicspeech until the end of the nineteenth century.13

Gongora weighs in

Just a few years after the Entremes de los negros, two of the most promi-nent writers of the Golden Age turned their hand to imitations of “black”Spanish; Gongora in poetry, and Lope de Vega in drama. Gongora mockedAfro-Hispanic pidgin in the poems “En la fiesta del Santısimo Sacramento”(1609), “A lo mismo [al nacimiento de Cristo nuestro senor]” (1615), “En lafiesta de la adoracion de los reyes” (1615), and the sonnet “A la ‘Jerusalem con-quistada’ de Lope de Vega” (1609). In the last-mentioned poem, Gongora tradesblows with Lope de Vega, continuing a long-standing polemic (Chapter ThreeAppendix #15–18). Luis de Gongora (1561–1627) was a native of Cordoba,where he lived for the better part of his life. He subsequently traveled to Sevilleand Madrid on several occasions, and thus was exposed to writers who wereemploying the habla de negros, as well as possibly coming into contact withspeakers of Afro-Hispanic pidgin. Gongora’s parents and uncle owned slaves,so perhaps he observed this language at close range.14 The mocking tone ofhis verses leads us to believe that he did not always take this challenge veryseriously. The least convincing example is the satirical sonnet “A la ‘Jerusalemconquistada’ de Lope de Vega,” where Gongora takes a cheap shot at Lope deVega, using only the most hackneyed stereotypes. Ciplijauskaite (1976:273)describes the language as “escrito imitando el dialecto que hablan los negrosde las colonias portuguesas . . . en varias composiciones de verso menor usaeste dialecto, que no hemos logrado descifrar.” Jammes (1980:180), speakingof the other poems, observes “numerosos lusismos, como en las demas poesıasde Gongora en que intervienen esclavos negros.” In reality, the Portugueseelement is minimal (except for isolated passages, such as se chora o meninJesu), in comparison to earlier Afro-Hispanic texts, and the language is easy to

13 Jammes (1980:154) traces this stanza back to the Cantar de los cantares.14 Jammes (1967:241).


comprehend, despite the phonetic and morphological modifications. Gongora’shabla de negros contains a handful of well-established traits, which had becomeincorporated as stock literary devices: dropping of /s/ in the verbal suffix-mos, use of the copulas sa/samo, chaotic use of paragogic vowels, unstableconcordance and final vowels of nouns, etc. In the 1615 poem “A lo mismo,” wefind por en Diosa, indicating a prenasalized consonant. Gongora may actuallyhave heard this common variant, or may have copied this particular combina-tion from earlier writers. It is virtually certain that Gongora actually heard bozalSpanish, 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 deVega, in numerous major and minor dramatic works. In many of Lope’s plays,black characters speak standard Spanish, but Afro-Hispanic pidgin appears inthe following works, written in the general time period 1602–18: El amanteagradecido, El mayor rey de los reyes, La siega, Vitoria de la honra, Madre dela mejor, El negro del mejor amo, El Santo Negro Rosambuco, La limpieza nomanchada, El capellan de la virgen (Chapter Three Appendix #19–27). Lopede 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 careertook him to many other parts of Spain, including Seville, where the largestblack population of Spain was to be found, and where the pidginized Spanishattributed to Africans in Golden Age drama was most likely to be encountered.Prior to writing the plays in which Africanized Spanish occurs, Lope took partin two military campaigns that may have put him in close contact with Afro-Portuguese pidgin. In 1583, after enlisting in the armed forces, he took partin a campaign to suppress an insurrection in the Azores. In 1588, Lope joinedthe Spanish Armada, via a considerable stopover in Lisbon. This was the timeperiod in which Lisbon was teeming with African-born slaves and workers,many of whom undoubtedly worked on and for the ships which were preparingto sail.

Taken together with Gongora’s poems, Lope de Vega’s representations ofbozal Spanish represent the most complete statement on the state of Afro-Hispanic language in the early seventeenth century. Like his contemporaries,Lope de Vega made abundant use of vulgar puns and linguistic stereotypes thatwere unlikely to have represented the speech of Africans in Spain. The use ofcagayera for caballero was becoming a stock device, as was the pronunciationneglo. In the latter case, although /r/ in onset clusters was indeed shifted to [l] insome Afro-Iberian varieties (e.g. Sao Tome creole), a more common strategy,which can still be observed in regions where Spanish and Portuguese are incontact with African languages, is elimination of the liquid; thus negro > nego.


The latter development, prominent in contemporary Afro-Iberian dialects, wasnever used by Golden Age writers, suggesting that the facile stereotypes oftentook precedence over observable Afro-Hispanic language. Lope de Vega wasclearly aware of intrusive nasalization, more so than any other Golden Agewriter except Lope de Rueda. His plays contain clear indications of prenasalizedconsonants (e.g. ensa, en samo [El Santo Negro Rosambuco]). Lope is also theonly Golden Age writer to indicate progressive nasalization in nenglo < negro(Vitoria de la honra, El Santo Negro Rosambuco). Half a century later, Sor JuanaInes de la Cruz would present the same pronunciation in the Spanish Caribbean,and nasalized variants such as nengro, nengre, nengue, nenglo, etc. abound inlater Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America. That these were not just fancifulliterary inventions is demonstrated by the survival of similar forms in severalCaribbean creoles, e.g. Sranan Tongo and Saramaccan. Lope de Vega’s textsshow frequent use of first-person-plural verb forms with singular meaning,although this usage is suspect as a stock stereotype. It is possible that Africanbozales occasionally hit upon the longer plural forms, in view of the prominentverbal affix lacking in most other verb forms, but the main preference was forthe 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 verbalending -mos and loss of /r/ in verbal infinitives, sporadic errors of concor-dance. Like Gongora, Lope de Vega had abundant opportunities to experienceAfro-Hispanic language of the time, and several innovative features of his lit-erary 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 allhis contemporaries) increases the likelihood that his writings are padded withestablished stereotypes that may not have accurately represented Afro-Hispaniclanguage in the early seventeenth century.

Less authentic seventeenth-century “Africanized” language

After these early seventeenth-century examples, changes in the literary repre-sentation of Africans become evident, although some later texts continue toduplicate earlier patters, well into the eighteenth century. In general, grammat-ical deformations become less frequent, except for stereotyped morphologicaldistortions such as diosa < Dios. Greater emphasis is placed on phonetic pat-terns. Taken at face value, this would indicate that by the middle of the seven-teenth century, “black Spanish” in Spain was mostly a phonetically influenced“accent,” comparable perhaps to Black English in the United States, rather thanconstituting the pidginized speech of foreign-born slaves. There is abundant evi-dence that by this time, several generations of native Spanish-speaking blacks


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 inte-grated into Spanish society, a grudging acceptance of blacks as unremarkablehuman beings began to occur. Spanish writers began to differentiate betweenEuropean-born blacks, whose speech was usually rendered in standard Span-ish, and (African-born) slaves, who continued to speak a pidginized Spanish,sometimes laced with Portuguese elements. A good example of the contrastis El valiente negro en Flandes, by Andres de Claramonte (ca. 1640; ChapterThree Appendix #28). The protagonist of the play, Juan de Merida, is a free-born black from a town which gave Latin America some of its conquistadores.He speaks in sublime, oratorical Spanish, far superior to the rustic speech ofwhite peasants and soldiers. Throughout the play, he reaffirms that blacks areat least the equal of whites, and offers his services to the Duque de Alba, atwar in Flanders. The Duke acknowledges Juan’s valor and gives him severalpromotions, which infuriates the bigoted white soldiers. In the end, Juan istriumphant over his adversaries, and his point is driven home. The other blackcharacter, Anton, is a slave, and judging by his speech, is a true bozal. His lan-guage reflects the usual comic devices, including cagayera for caballero and theoath 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,Anton fulfills the destiny of the buffoon, the role assigned to all blacks in earlierworks. In El valiente negro en Flandes, however, the dual perspective begunby Lope de Vega in El santo negro Rosambuco (where pidgin-speaking blacksare contrasted with the impeccable Spanish of the African king) is continued.“Black” Spanish was becoming the language of foreign-born slaves, and asthe latter group shrank in size and importance, the literary habla de negrosremained behind as a folkloric memory, ever distant from linguistic reality,but which was to endure in poetry, drama, and music for another century anda half.

The seventeenth century saw several other plays and skits in which bozallanguage was used. Many were patent imitations of earlier works which hadachieved popularity. Lope de Vega’s El negro del mejor amo gave rise to at leasttwo offshoots. The first, with the same title (Chapter Three Appendix #29),is attributed to Antonio Mira de Amescua 1574?–1644), although Cotareloy Morı (1931:167–69) rejects this authorship. Many critics attribute the playin question to Luis Velez de Guevara, whose Negro del seraphın (1643) isnearly identical (Chapter Three Appendix #30). A glance at the two texts suf-fices to demonstrate that one has been copied from the other, or both from acommon source. It is unlikely, however, that both were written by the sameauthor, since no other Golden Age writer who used habla de negros so dras-tically changed the linguistic features of this stage dialect from one work toanother; the possibility that printers’ errors or modifications lie behind the


systematic differences between the two texts is very remote. Moreover, Span-ish playwrights did not publish essentially identical plays under different titles,although it was not uncommon for plays by the same author to share greatplot similarities. Both the second Negro del mejor amo and the Negro del ser-aphın fall in line with other seventeenth-century portrayals of Afro-Hispanicpidgin. Both exhibit a greater attention to phonetic modification, together witha closer approximation to standard Spanish grammar and morphology. Of thetwo plays, the Negro del seraphın exaggerates the phonetic distortion beyondall reasonable expectations; the bozal character combines ceceo, yeısmo, para-gogic vowels, replacement of virtually all /r/ and /d/ by [l], and all the standardpuns and key words. At the same time, this play consistently uses the copulasa/samo, has more examples of plausible intrusive nasalization, and exhibits useof first-person-plural verbs with singular meaning (e.g. yo tambien me persi-namo). Both plays eliminate the final /s/ of -mos; in El negro del seraphın,the final /s/ of second-person verb forms is also variably elided. Neither playshows other examples of /s/-reduction where no morphological conditioningis 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, writtenseveral decades before, it is possible that neither of the later playwrights hadfirsthand experience with bozal language, which by all indications was fadingout by the middle of the seventeenth century. By this time, the accumulatedintertext of habla de negros, in drama, poetry, and music, was so considerable,that writers could and undoubtedly did invent passages in this dialect withoutever having heard an African speak Spanish. The same of course holds for theimitations of Gypsies, Moors, and shepherds who used sayagues.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, Pedro Calderon de la Barcaincluded brief passages of bozal Spanish in several skits written between about1650 and 1670 (Chapter Three Appendix #31–35). The plays in question areLa rabia – primera parte, Las carnestolendas, La pandera, and La casa de loslinajes.15 Another brief fragment comes in the play La sibila de oriente y granreyna de Saba. Calderon did not place the same emphasis on stage dialects asLope de Vega, and his literary attempts at imitating Africanized Spanish arehardly to be taken as accurate specimens of Afro-Hispanic speech in the secondhalf 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 sibilantsto a non-apical [s]), a trait by that time not confined to literary representationof Gypsies’ speech, but becoming the norm for Andalusia. In sharp contrast tothe generally correct verb conjugations, including use of subjunctive, past, andperfect forms, Calderon employs the copula za to occasionally replace both ser

15 Lobato (1989).


and estar. It is hard to imagine that Africans who so deftly handled Spanishverb morphology would at the same time use this pidgin form.

Several poems, plays and skits of approximately the same time period roundout the use of Africanized Spanish in seventeenth-century Spanish drama. Oneis the “Entremes septimo: de los negros de Santo Tome,” appearing in an earlyvolume of Lope de Vega’s plays and attributed to him by some scholars (ChapterThree Appendix #36). Ana Caro de Mallen used brief fragments of habla denegros in her writings (ca. 1639; Chapter Three Appendix #37), as did Avel-laneda in the “Negros,” Agustın Moreto in the “La fiesta de palacio” (ca. 1658),Antonio de Solıs, in the “Entremes del nino cavallero” (1658), and a numberof others. The language is unremarkable, continuing the stereotypes found inother texts of the time period. Indirect accounts of Golden Age literary pro-duction reveal that literally hundreds of short pieces containing imitations ofAfricanized Spanish were written; past a point, most writers simply learned thislanguage as a stage device, completely removed from reality.

Afro-Hispanic language as phonetic distortion: Quinonesde Benavente

Afro-Hispanic language took on a new turn in several of the entremeses of LuisQuinones de Benavente, the master of the Spanish short skit. Bozal languageappears briefly in El borracho and in the Sacristanes burlados; a considerableuse of pidginized Spanish occurs in El negrito hablador, y sin color anda lanina (Chapter Three Appendix #38–40). Quinones, a native of Toledo, wrote theworks in question during the 1640s, following on the heels of Lope de Vega’ssuccess with the habla de negros, as well as many other contemporary playsin which this literary device was increasingly familiar. In his many entremeses,Quinones also employed sayagues, Basque-influenced Spanish (the vizcaıno),thieves’ jargon (lenguaje de germanıa), and the rambling asides typical of thedimwit or bobo. It is obvious that Quinones was adopting for his own useliterary tools which had already become well established in the seventeenthcentury, and which the theatre-going public expected in large quantities. Giventhe facts of Quinones’ own life, inasmuch as they are known, his contact withAfricanized Spanish was most probably confined to second-hand imitations byother writers, although in Madrid he could have encountered legitimate bozalspeakers. A glance at his imitation of this language shows both similarities andsome differences, in comparison with the by now canonical patterns set downby Lope de Rueda, Lope de Vega, and other earlier writers.

Bergman (1965:97, fn. 3) feels that Quinones’ habla de negros scarcely goesbeyond 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 theLibro de todas las cosas, that “sabras guineo [= bozal Spanish] en volviendo las rr ll, y alcontrario: como Francisco, Flancico; primo, plimo.”


the matter would be that phonetic modifications predominate over grammati-cal distortions. There is a much higher degree of correct verb conjugation andnoun-adjective concord. Gone are the uninflected infinitives, the hybrid copulasa, use of first person plural with singular meaning, and wildly improbablemalapropisms. Quinones’ negrito uses seseo and yeısmo, traits also attributedto Andalusians and Gypsies. The shift /d/ > [r] is found in other Afro-Hispanictexts, and in Quinones de Benavente we find the highest proportion of shift /r/ >[l]. Quinones breaks from most earlier writers by also indicating lateralizationof /r/ in preconsonantal and word-final position: impeltinensia, goldos, cuelpo,pielnas, etc. This change is much more Hispanic in character, occurring nowa-days in the vernacular speech of several Caribbean dialects, as well as in partsof the Canary Islands and occasionally Murcia. It is hard to take Quinones’bozal language seriously, since the known facts of Spanish-African languagecontacts do not support the notion that a speaker who so accurately commandsSpanish verb, noun and adjective morphology (typically among the most dif-ficult for the foreign language learner) would so completely mispronounce thelanguage.

Literary leftovers: eighteenth-century habla de negros in Spain

During the course of the eighteenth century, bozal language continued to appearin plays, songs, and poems, in Spain, Portugal, and sporadically in LatinAmerica, following the same basic patterns established during the Golden Age.In addition to the Portuguese examples discussed earlier, several Spanish skitscarry the Golden Age habla de negros well through the eighteenth century,although it is all but certain that legitimate Afro-Hispanic pidgin had long dis-appeared from Spain by this time.

One eighteenth-century play employing Afro-Hispanic language, writtenaround 1762–63, is the anonymous “Un vizcaıno, un indiano, un gallego, unmercader, una tapada y un negro.” Another is “El indiano de la oliva,” by PedroAntonio Gonzalez Rubı, written during the last third of the eighteenth century.Around 1792, Luis Moncın published “El chasco por el honor o el indianoescarmentado” (Chapter Three Appendix #41–43). None of the texts departssignificantly from earlier examples, showing great similarity with fragmentswritten as much as 200 years previously. By this time, the literary habla denegros was not only a stereotype, but was so far removed from daily reality inSpain that few if any living authors had ever heard such language. The bozallanguage is limited to phonetic deformations, including loss of /s/ in the ending-mos, yeısmo, seseo, rather haphazard replacement of /r/ by /l/, and hackneyedlexical items such as siolo, Dioso, etc. Pampagaya < papagayo in “El indianode la oliva” demonstrates prenasalized consonants, but this is the only sugges-tion of legitimate Afro-Hispanic language. In “El chasco por el honor . . . ,”for example, the “African” character of the language consists of formulaically


replacing all instances of /r/ by /l/, following Quevedo’s maxim, and producingthe effect of a speech defect rather than a foreign accent.

In 1764, Manuel Vicente Guerrero published his Comedia famosa: el negrovaliente en Flandes, segunda parte, following the tradition of writing sequels towell-received plays by other authors. The plot is similar to the original work byClaramonte, although the linguistic details are somewhat different. The play hastwo black characters, Don Juan de Alba, a caballero, and Antonillo, a “negrogracioso.” Don Juan generally speaks high-sounding Spanish, while Antonillooscillates between a stereotypical bozal speech and standard Spanish. It is thisalternation which makes his speech at once questionable as an approximationto actual Afro-Hispanic pidgin, and potentially important as a sociolinguisticcommentary on the speech of the native black population in early eighteenth-century Spain. Most of Antonillo’s deviations from standard Spanish come in theform of isolated words, particularly sioro, plimo, juro an Diosa, neglo, and thequintessential Afro-Hispanic stereotype cagayera [caballero], which Antonilloutters in his first sentence. There are also several instances of intrusive nasalelements in determiners, suggesting prenasalized consonants (an Diosa, londiabla, den miedo tirito, Jesun Crisa, men daba dulce, vengo an siora, yo nonpuedo, cangayera). Throughout his lines, Antonillo omits the final -s of thefirst person plural verb endings in -mos. At one point, Don Juan dresses as anaguador (water carrier), and enters into a dialogue with Antonillo. Don Juanlapses 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 sioraand plimo to underscore his disguise; when speaking to Dona Leonor, he says:“Aunque moreno, torpe, bozal, de rustiqueces lleno, vera todo lo mundo a tudefense lo que ahora, siora, en mı no piensa . . .” Although the second Valientenegro adds little to the literary dimension of the Spanish Golden Age, it suggeststhat as late as the eighteenth century, a nativized “black Spanish” may haveexisted in Spain, in which certain ethnolinguistic markers such as sioro andneglo 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 sev-enteenth and eighteenth centuries is the Spanish musical repertoire. Curiously,for the modern reader, the most fecund source of “black” language was thechurch and cathedral performance, where villancicos and other songs of a reli-gious nature were routinely performed on key feast days. Literally hundredsof songs were composed and performed during the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies in all the major cathedrals of Spain, as well as throughout SpanishAmerica. In the colonies, for example, “Africanized” villancicos cast in the


Golden Age mold were produced and performed in great numbers in the cathe-drals of Lima, Cuzco, La Paz, Bogota, Mexico City, Puebla, Guatemala City,etc. Even the songs composed on American soil bear the indelible mark ofSpanish Golden Age literature; many of the composers had been born in Spain,and all were familiar with the “Africanized” villancico and the bailes de negrosof the Peninsular literary tradition. One of the major composers was AlonsoTorices, whose musical activities reached their peak around the middle of theseventeenth century. He worked in Malaga and Zaragoza, and apparently latermoved to Spanish America, where his works were performed at the Bogotacathedral, and perhaps elsewhere.17 Gaspar Fernandes (1546–1629), anothercomposer who liberally used “Africanized” language in his songs, was born inPortugal. He rose to become choirmaster in Portugal, and later in Mexico; hissongs reflect both Spanish and Portuguese elements. Juan Bautista Comes, amid-seventeenth-century Spanish composer, also wrote a number of African-ized songs.18 Many anonymous villancicos were found in the cathedrals ofMadrid, 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 piecesare indistinguishable from the standard choral repertoire, except by paying closeattention to the lyrics. A modern spectator may find it difficult to comprehendhow crudely humorous dialect poetry, mocking the halting speech of slaves andservants who spoke Spanish as a second language, could find a place in themidst of a religious ceremony, and even be performed in cathedrals as part ofthe most revered rite, the mass. During the Spanish Baroque period, a muchdifferent attitude was taken toward sacred objects and celebrations. Statues ofthe Virgin Mary and saints were often dressed in costumes more appropriate fora wedding or a costume ball than for a church,19 and street processions duringChristmas time, Holy Week, All Saints Day, etc., were accompanied by car-nivalesque dancing, mime, and music. The poems of Gongora and Sor Juana,meant to be sung during religious festivals, give testimony to the merging ofsacred and profane, and underscore the fact that a writer with profound religioussentiments could make use of barroom humor, including parodies of sociallymarginalized groups. The language of the “Africanized” villancicos is in noway different from the remainder of the Golden Age corpus, and the piecescomposed in Spanish America are identical to those written and performed inSpain, with all the aforementioned stereotypes firmly in place.

17 Claro (1974).18 Comes (1977), Lopez-Calo (1983:118). Other villancicos include (Tejerizo Robles 1989) “¡Ah

Flansiquiya!” by Francisco Garcıa Montero Solano (1673), “Aquellos negros que dieron,” “Quegente, plima, que gente?,” and “Azı Flaziquiya” by Alonso de Blas y Sandoval (1694–1701),“Los narcisos de Guinea,” by Antonio Navarro (1717), “Apalte la gente branca” and “Losnegrillos esta noche,” by Esteban Redondo (ca. 1783), etc.

19 Crow (1985:232).


The Golden Age in the colonies: Afro-Hispanic texts fromseventeenth-century Latin America

In Latin America, several seventeenth-century writers and composers continuedthe Spanish tradition of using bozal language. Some were undoubtedly influ-enced by the speech of Africans whom they actually encountered in the NewWorld setting, while others merely continued traditions learned in Spain. Sincenearly all the writers in question were born in Spain, or had received highereducation in the Iberian Peninsula, it is not feasible to consider most of theseventeenth-century Afro-Latin American texts as constituting a substantiallydifferent corpus from the Peninsular materials. The fact that virtually none ofthe linguistic traits represented in these early Afro-Latin American texts canbe independently verified, for example in surviving Afro-Iberian creoles orvestigial Afro-Hispanic isolates, places additional constraints of credibility onthese Latin American Baroque texts as anything other than imitations of literarystereotypes transported from Spain along with printing presses and paper.

The only well-known seventeenth-century Latin American writer to use bozalSpanish was Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, in several villancicos written around1676 (Chapter Three Appendix #46).20 The similarities between Sor Juana’spoems and earlier Peninsular texts is too great to be due to chance, even assum-ing that such language was actually used by Africans as late as the end ofthe seventeenth century. Jimenez Torres (1998:281) refers to Sor Juana’s bozalimitations as “un pseudodialecto afro-hispanoportugues, recreacion poetica delhabla de los negros de la Colonia, que aunque no corresponde exactamente aun dialecto real . . . procede de la observacion de las variantes dialectales delhabla de los negros de la epoca.” Some inconsistencies in the text (for examplethe alternation of Dios and Dioso) are due to metrical considerations. Zielina(1998) examines the serious and rather complex nature of the black charac-ters in Sor Juana’s villancicos, who stand in sharp contrast to the humorouslinguistic simplifications attributed to their speech. Many of the puns, and thestereotypical names, are identical. There are some innovations in Sor Juana’swritings, which hint at an ongoing evolution of Afro-Hispanic language in theLatin American setting, where it would soon evolve into patterns never attestedfor 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-Hispaniccorpus: Flasica [Francisca], fieta [fiesta] (alongside fiesa and fiesta), naquete[en aqueste], etc. In Sor Juana, we find some of the first consistent cases ofanother 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).


/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], lobillaco [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 vernac-ular Brazilian Portuguese, and is found in many basilectal varieties of LatinAmerican Spanish, particularly those with a strong African connection, in theDominican Republic, Colombia, Ecuador, and in the Spanish of EquatorialGuinea.

Final assessment of Golden Age habla de negros

The last of the Golden Age imitations of Africanized Spanish were writtennearly three centuries ago, during a time in which no independent verification ofAfro-Hispanic speech existed. Given the high degree of parody and plagiarismevidenced by Golden Age habla de negros texts, the issue of their usefulness tothe linguistic reconstruction of Afro-Hispanic pidgin becomes crucial. A com-parison of bozal texts representing more than three centuries of Afro-Hispaniccontacts suggests that these documents may, if used with caution, represent akey component in the assessment of the African contribution to Spanish dialectdifferentiation. Although bozal characters became frozen as a literary stereo-type, authors’ depictions of Afro-Hispanic pronunciation continued to evolvein parallel with regional language. To this end, several observations combineto justify a cautious consideration of Golden Age literary texts as sources ofevidence on earlier Afro-Hispanic speech. First, although no single text canbe taken as a faithful transcription of bozal language, most of the early textscontain phonetic and morphological traits which are empirically documentedin existing Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles, or which are logical extensionsof African areal characteristics. Second, the African traits found in the liter-ary habla de negros has no obvious non-African source; the remaining dialectimitations found in Golden Age literature (e.g. of Moorish, Basque, Galician,Gypsy, Sayagues, Italian, etc.) are not only internally consistent and compat-ible with actual instances of contact with the languages in question, they alsodiffer qualitatively from all but a handful of habla de negros imitations (i.e.those which are clear parodies of Moorish speech). Such phenomena as mas-sive conversion of prevocalic /r/ to [l], intrusive nasalization, use of (a) mı assubject pronoun, invariant copular sa, and flapping of prevocalic [d] are foundin existing Afro-Iberian creoles, and (with the exception of the last trait, foundin nearly all non-native varieties of Spanish) are not attested for other contactvarieties of Spanish. Finally, the historical and social circumstances surround-ing 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


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

21 Vodovozova (1996) provides a thorough and useful linguistic analysis of bozal language innumerous 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 pop-ulations in Latin America, beginning with the areas in which the largest andlinguistically most important concentrations were found during colonial times.These are the regions for which the greatest amount of written descriptions ofAfricans’ speech is available.

Africans in colonial Peru

African slaves and their descendants were found in Peru from the earliest colo-nial periods to well into postcolonial independence, but the demographic distri-bution and geographical location varied across time, as did the interaction withspeakers of Spanish.1 The use of African slaves had already been authorized forother areas of Spanish America, to replace dwindling indigenous workers, andAfrican slaves were carried to the highland mines of Bolivia and Peru.2 Fewdemographic traces remain of these first African arrivals for several reasons.Nearly all were adult males, who were deprived of opportunities for procre-ation. Mortality rates were extremely high; the combination of altitude, coldtemperatures, inadequate nourishment and harsh working conditions ravagedthe slave population. At the same time, more stable nuclei of Africans beganarriving in Cuzco and other developing colonial centers such as La Paz. Asin other colonial towns, African slaves worked as domestic servants and arti-sans’ assistants, living patterns which were conducive to learning Spanish, andto leaving some linguistic and cultural legacy. A small but interesting collec-tion of songs and indirect descriptions of Africans’ dances and language, tobe analyzed in the following chapter, survives as testimony of a much largercultural patrimony. As occurred, for example in Mexico and central Colombia,

1 Lipski (1994b).2 Harth-Terre (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 Rodrıguez Pastor(1995), Angola Maconde (2000), Delgado Aparicio (2000), del Busto Duthurburu (2001).

95


the population of African descent blended into the overwhelmingly mestizopopulation. No documented permanent linguistic phenomena can be attributedto this earlier African population, but the data provided by the early languagesamples gives a first glimpse into language in early seventeenth-century Peru.Later African arrivals in Peru were concentrated along the coast, particularly inLima, where the increasingly affluent lifestyle of the city’s elite permitted theuse of slaves as household servants.3 In other coastal regions, African slaves andfree laborers worked in agriculture, including sugar and cotton plantations, andAfro-Peruvian communities are still found along the coast.4 The full extent ofAfro-Hispanic cultural remnants preserved by these groups has yet to be deter-mined.5 Although Peru was not the scene of massive slave importation duringthe nineteenth century, such as occurred in Cuba, African-born slaves were stillto be found throughout the century, and in some instances even American-bornblacks retained African languages. Rossi y Rubı (1791) gave ample evidenceof 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 acolonial official. In one of his own poems, “En la era colonial,” Santa Cruz(1982:434–35) gives examples of the African-based calo used among Peruvianslaves.

The primary mechanism for the concentration and retention of African lan-guages in colonial Peru were the societies formed by members of the sameAfrican ethnic groups. As in other Latin American cities with large Africanslave and free populations, Africans in colonial Lima formed cofradıas orbrotherhoods, ostensibly religious organizations that served as mutual aid soci-eties and cultural gatherings. Each society was formed by the members of asingle nacion or ethnic group, and was associated with a particular parish andchurch. Rossi y Rubı (1791), in describing Afro-Peruvian cofradıas, refers toseveral 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:Lucume, Mandinga, Cambunda (Kimbundu), Carabalı, Canga, Terranovo, andCongo. A Spanish official, military or religious, was nominally in charge of eachAfrican society, but internally the groups were ruled by hierarchical structuresmodeled on African patterns. Within these societies, African languages werespoken during many ceremonies, together with whatever Spanish was knownby the participants. For example, speaking of funeral ceremonies, we have:6

“Los condolientes saltan, y dan vuelta al rededor, parandose algunas veces paramurmurar en voz baxa algunas preces segun su idioma nativo y sus ritos.” There

3 Flores Galindo (1984:chap. IV), Romero (1987), Blanchard (1992), Hunefeldt (1992).4 Romero (1904), MacLean y Estenos (1947), Centurion Vallejo (1954), Cushner (1980), Arroyo

(1981), Aranda de los Rıos (1990).5 Cuche (1981), Tompkins (1981), Vazquez Rodrıguez (1982), Feldman (2001).6 Rossi y Rubı (1791:123).

Africans in colonial Spanish America 97

is no indication of the languages used by these cofradıas, but given the namesof 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 populationwas equal to or greater than the white European population, a proportion whichrises even more when the mulatto population is taken into account.7 Veracruzwas one of the three ports authorized to receive African slaves during much ofthe Spanish colonial era,8 and once trans-Pacific trade with the Philippines wasestablished, Africans also entered Mexico through the ports of Campeche andAcapulco.9 Africans worked in mines and agriculture, and then in cities andtowns throughout Mexico, from the Gulf of Mexico to areas which are now partof the United States.10 In some areas, the African presence is noticeable eventoday, in regional music, folklore, and cultural practices.11

Palmer (1976:3) divides African slavery in Mexico into three periods. Thefirst period extends from 1519 (the date of the first slave arrival) to 1580, theend of an epidemic which devasted white, African, and indigenous populations.The second period extends from 1580 to 1650, and represents the heyday ofMexican slavery. It was during this period that Mexico was the second-largestslave importer in Spanish America (second only to Peru), and the period in whichAfricans greatly outnumbered Europeans in much of Mexico. The final period,stretching from 1650 to the official abolition of slavery in 1827, was marked bya rapid decline in slave importation, the development of an Afro-mestizo classwith increasingly weaker cultural ties to Africa, and the absorption of much ofthe African population into the mestizo classes of Mexico. It is impossible toknow 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 neverbe known.

At the beginning, Africans in Mexico worked primarily in domestic servi-tude, with a few working in small-scale agriculture. Slaves were found primarilyin urban areas, and were a status symbol for families who could afford them.Mexican society reproduced patterns found in contemporary Spain, particu-larly Seville. As the number of large estates, ranches and haciendas grew, so

7 Mendoza (1956), Aguirre Beltran (1958, 1972), Brady (1965) Carroll (1991), Brading (1971),Mayer (1974), Naveda Chavez-Hita (1979, 1987), Gutierrez Avila (1988), Herrera Casasus(1989, 1991), Valdes and Davila (1989), Serrano Lopez (1993), the articles in Martınez Montieland Reyes (1993), and Martınez Montiel (1995).

8 Carroll (1991), Winfield Capitaine (1993).9 Ngou-Mve (1994:150–52), Aguirre Beltran (1972). 10 Palmer (1976).

11 E.g. Gutierrez Avila (1988), Aparicio et al. (1993), Martınez Maranto (1995).12 E.g. Palmer (1976:3).


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 fora wage or jornal, most of which was passed on to the owner. By the eight-eenth century, the black population in Mexico was largely concentrated in thesugar plantations of Veracruz state: in Jalapa, Cordoba, and Veracruz.13 Theseplantations continued to buy some slaves from Africa, but for the most partrelied on an already existing Mexican-born black population. For all intentsand purposes, following the middle of the seventeenth century, the presence ofAfrican-born bozales in Mexico was a rare occurrence. This partially explainsthe lack of identifiable vestigial Afro-Hispanic linguistic traits even in isolatedAfro-Mexican villages; the absence of an African substrate has characterizedthese regions for several centuries. Muhammad (1995:175) observes that “thelanguage of Afro-Mexicans is sometimes said to be ‘unintelligible Spanish . . .this unique Spanish dialect . . . developed because maroon communities wereisolated from the rest of the country.’ ” In reality these modern Afro-Mexicandialects are in no way “unintelligible,” but merely show the signs of isolationand lack of prestige.14

Beginning with the first stages of colonial slavery, Africans in Mexicorebelled against their captors and escaped bondage. As early as 1560 – only afew decades after the initial colonization of Mexico – bands of escaped blackswere attacking travelers around Guanajuato. Earlier accounts of such bands hadcome from Nueva Galicia (around Zacatecas) in 1549. Mexico was also hometo numerous maroon communities, the most famous of which was named afterthe Maroon slave leader Yanga in the early seventeenth century. The villagesurvives today in the state of Veracruz, and while few Afro-Mexicans live inYanga, there are several small afromestizo communities in the surrounding area.Cuajicuinalapa (Cuijla) was another palenque (Maroon village) formed in thelate sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Vestigial Afro-Hispanic languageand culture are found in this and other nearby towns in Guerrero and Oaxacastates. Two other maroon communities straddled the boundary between modernOaxaca and Veracruz states: Amapa and Mandinga. The latter community sur-vived well into the nineteenth century, providing a safe haven for the lastof postcolonial Mexico’s black slaves. Smaller maroon communities existedthroughout the country, particularly during the height of the African slave tradeto Mexico, in the early seventeenth century.15

13 Carroll (1979, 1991), Naveda Chavez-Hita (1979, 1987), Martınez Maranto (1995).14 Aguirre Beltran (1958), Althoff (1994).15 Powell (1952:62), Cruz Carretero et al. (1990), Laurencio (1974), Corro (1951), Aguirre Beltran

(1958), Davidson (1973), Carroll (1977). It is even conceivable that the once sizable Afro-Mexican population contributed to the weakening of syllable- and word-final /s/ in some partsof the country; see Lipski (1994d) for some ideas.


Afro-European creole languages in Mexico

Africans in colonial Mexico usually arrived directly from Africa, via the portof Veracruz and later Campeche. There is little documented evidence of thearrival of Caribbean creole languages in Mexico, unlike what occurred in thenineteenth-century Spanish Caribbean. There are a few isolated instances, how-ever, where such contacts may have briefly affected Afro-Mexican speech. In theearly 1800s, a group of Gullah-speaking Afro-Seminoles migrated southwardfrom Texas and the Oklahoma Territory and founded the village of Nacimientode los Negros, near Melchor Muzquiz, Coahuila.16 This group had been forciblyrelocated from the southeastern United States at the end of the eighteenth cen-tury. Immigration from Bracketville, Texas continued throughout the nineteenthand twentieth centuries, bringing in modern varieties of English, but, partic-ularly in religious contacts, some Gullah (known locally as “Seminole”) wasretained. Today, all speakers in Nacimiento, most of whom retain some Africanphysical traits, speak the regional dialect of Spanish with no distinguishingcharacteristics, but it is likely that earlier generations spoke with the second-language traits found, for example, among the black English-speaking residentsof the Samana Peninsula in the Dominican Republic. Strictly speaking, the Afro-American population of Nacimiento does not fit the traditional Afro-colonialpattern, but at the time the town was founded, black Afro-Mexican descendentsof colonial slavery were still to be found in this part of northern Mexico, andsome cross-fertilization may have occurred.

In the mid-nineteenth century, during the Cuban sugar plantation boom and asthe African slave trade was gradually abolished, Cuban planters briefly importedMayan Indian laborers from the Yucatan;17 their approximations to Spanishwere even documented by the lexicographer Esteban Pichardo (1849). Lesswell known is the fact that a group of rebellious Afro-Cubans were exiledto the Yucatan region in 1795, following the Haitian slave uprisings.18 Theblack Cubans were relocated in a settlement known as San Fernando Ake,near Tizimın. This location was chosen since it was far from both Merida andCampeche, and its isolation would prevent any further uprisings by its residents.Although the climate and working conditions evidently precluded a significantpopulation increase, blacks from other areas eventually made their way to Ake.At the high point of population, in the early nineteenth century, the town con-tained Mandingas, “Senegales,” Congos, “criollos de Santo Domingo,” and(presumed free blacks) from Charleston, New York, and Jamaica. The prin-cipal language of the community was reported to be “French,” but given themakeup of the community it is more likely that Creole French was in use. Further

16 Gavaldon (1970), Hancock (1980, 1986) . 17 Menendez (1928, 1932).18 Fernandez Repetto and Negroe Sierra (1995:54–57).


research may reveal the true nature of this transitory Afro-creole community inthe Yucatan.

Blacks in colonial Argentina and Uruguay

The second largest corpus of Latin American bozal language comes from theRıo de la Plata zone of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Until the middle ofthe nineteenth century these urban areas contained some of the largest blackcommunities in all of Latin America. In the flourishing literary environment ofnineteenth-century Argentina and Uruguay, imitations of bozal speech prolifer-ated. 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 asfound in texts from Spain and other Latin American areas. This fact, combinedwith the very high degree of internal consistency among Afro-Rıo de la Platatexts allows for a relatively high degree of linguistic credibility to be assignedto this corpus.19 During much of colonial and early postcolonial period, thepopulation of African origin represented a significant demographic proportionin Montevideo and Buenos Aires, approaching 40 percent of the total in thelate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Argentines and Uruguayans ofAfrican descent fought in the wars of colonial liberation, contributed to theGaucho lifestyle and culture (particularly to the payada song tradition), andfigured in the political and literary life of the Rıo de la Plata nations. The tango,enjoying worldwide fame and intimately part of the Rıo de la Plata cultural tradi-tion, almost certainly received a strong African contribution, and several wordsof African origin figure prominently in the porteno lexicon. When rememberedtoday, however, the Afro-Hispanic contribution is usually limited to Carnivalcomparsas (the groups presenting individual carnival floats), and many mis-takenly feel that the only African presence in Montevideo and Buenos Airesrepresents a recent contribution from Brazil.

African slaves were brought to the Rıo de la Plata colony at Buenos Airesthroughout 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 adegree of affluence that would permit slaves to be used in large quantities. MostAfricans arriving at Buenos Aires were shipped to the hinterlands, includingParaguay and Bolivia.20 When the Banda Oriental colony at Montevideo wassettled from Buenos Aires, beginning in 1726, few Africans were found oneither side of the Rıo de la Plata, but the black population of Montevideo rose

19 Lipski (2001c).20 Masini (1962), Sempat Assadourian (1966), Zavalıa Matienzo (1973), Mayo (1980), Rojas

(1985).


sharply in the course of the eighteenth century, peaking at figures estimated atbetween 30 percent and 40 percent for the turn of the nineteenth century.21

In both Montevideo and Buenos Aires, black slaves worked as domesticservants and as laborers. As the free black population grew, many Africansthemselves became artisans, others became itinerant vendors, water-carriers,camungueros (emptiers of chamber pots), chimney-sweeps, lamplighters,coachmen, pest exterminators, and household servants. Black women workedas itinerant washerwomen, as well as in private homes. With the coming ofindependence, black soldiers fought against Spain, then in the myriad civilconflicts marking the first half century of the postcolonial Rıo de la Plata. Therole of African soldiers has been acknowledged in poems such as “Los negrosfederales” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #8), and in military andsocial records of the time. Despite the disproportionately high representation ofblack soldiers in these wars, the promised liberation from slavery and discrimi-nation was long delayed, and many Afro-Argentines and Afro-Uruguayans feltcompletely betrayed by their white compatriots. As happened in the AmericanWest, many Africans in the Rıo de la Plata chose the Gaucho life, some escapingslavery and others, already free, opting for greater personal freedom in an arenawhere individual prowess was valued over racial stereotypes.

During the early part of the eighteenth century, the majority of Africans in theRıo de la Plata were still bozales, speaking African languages and little or noSpanish. A Spanish missionary arriving in Buenos Aires in 1730 observed thatmost Africans spoke no Spanish.22 Noticing that the majority of the Africanswere from “Angola, Congo y Loango,” he was forced to learn “la lengua deAngola,” presumably Kimbundu, but possibly Kikongo. Well into the nine-teenth century, interpreters were required for African-born slaves who spokeno Spanish,23 and African languages continued to be spoken in Buenos Airesand Montevideo past the middle of the nineteenth century. Some form of bozalSpanish was also in existence well into the second half of the nineteenth century.For example Wilde (1960:126), writing in 1881 and describing earlier decadesof Buenos Aires life, speaks of meetings among members of candombe groups,commenting that “era digno de presenciarse las discusiones allı sostenidas yde oır perorar en su media lengua al senor presidente y a los senores conse-jeros.” Elsewhere (128), Wilde describes conversations among Afro-Argentinehormigueros or pest exterminators: “pero el interes del espectador y oyenteaumentaba cuando se juntaban dos profesores, y en los casos difıciles, tenıanuna consulta, en castellano chapurreado.” In Montevideo, Magarinos Cervantes

21 Pereda Valdes (1937, 1941, 1965); for modern Uruguay Graceras (1980), Montano (1987),Porzecanski and Santos (1994).

22 Muhn (1946:153). 23 Fontanella de Weinberg (1987a:85).


(1878:387), commenting on the bozal representations by the poet Acuna deFigueroa, declares: “El Canto de los Negros ofrece una curiosa muestra de laespecie de dialecto inventado en nuestro continente por los africanos bozales . . .nuestros nietos ya no oiran hablar esa graciosa jerga . . .” The media lengua(“half speech”), jerga (“jargon”), and castellano chapurreado (“brokenSpanish”) refer to bozal Spanish pidgin. Residents of Montevideo and BuenosAires were aware of the general characteristics of Afro-Hispanic bozal speechduring the period in which these texts were produced, which ensures a certainmeasure of accuracy in the literary representations, which were meant to beunderstood and appreciated by residents of the two cities. In Afro-Americanreligious ceremonies, including Afro-Brazilian Yoruba cults transplanted to theRıo de la Plata,24 vestigal remnants of African languages could even be found inthe twentieth century, but an Afro-Hispanic linguistic contact could no longerbe postulated.

In view of the demographics of the African population in the Rıo de laPlata, it is doubtful that a coherent bozal Spanish was found in Montevideo orBuenos Aires much before the second half of the eighteenth century, althoughindividual African slaves would speak a rudimentary approximation to Spanishwhen first learning this language. By the end of the eighteenth century, Afro-Hispanic speech in the Rıo de la Plata was more than a minimal pidgin, andappears to have had some consistent traits which were recognized by nativeSpanish speakers and used in literary representations of bozal speech. Afro-Rioplatense texts, mostly representing Buenos Aires and Montevideo, recurthroughout the nineteenth century and continue into the first decades of thetwentieth century, representing little more than a century of Afro-Hispaniclanguage, during which time little evolution can be noted. By the end of thisperiod, only a few true bozales remained in the Rıo de la Plata, but given defacto social and cultural segregation of the black population in Buenos Airesand Montevideo, it is conceivable that second-generation Afro-Americans inthese cities exhibited speech patterns that did not entirely coincide with thoseof white criollos (colonists of European descent).

In urban areas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, blacks in the postcolonialera lived predominantly in poorer areas such as conventillo tenement housing,retaining an ethnic unity well past the abolition of slavery and postdating thearrival of bozales from Africa.25 Although it is unlikely that a stable “blackSpanish” was retained more than a single generation beyond bozal Africanswho learned Spanish as a second language, collective awareness of bozal andneo-bozal language was tenacious among both black and white residents. Forwhites, as in other Spanish-speaking areas, imitation of bozal speech was mostlyfrequently employed in humorous, condescending portrayals of blacks. These

24 Moro and Ramırez (1981), Pallavicino (1987). 25 Luz (1995, 2001).


representations, even if well-meaning, often create an image of buffoonery andmental incompetence by drawing too close a parallel between Afro-RioplatenseSpanish and baby-talk or deranged rambling.

Available documentation on the African slave trade to Latin America suggeststhat most African slaves taken to the Rıo de la Plata came from the Congo Basinor Angola,26 although Andrews (1980) claims that at least 25 percent of theAfricans in Buenos Aires came from West Africa and Mozambique. In 1787, thecabildo (municipal government) of Montevideo authorized the construction of alarge walled-in area just outside the city limits of the time, known as the Caserıode Negros.27 This zone was to serve both as a quarantine zone for disease-riddenslaves, and as a holding station from which slaves would be sent to their eventualdestination within the city or in rural regions. The Caserıo was in operation forseveral decades, bringing together Africans of various ethnic groups, amongwhich 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 Rıo de la Plata is reflected by the namesof the principal naciones or mutual aid societies, among which the most promi-ment were the Congo, Angola, Lubolo, Benguela and Cambunda, all repre-senting groups from the Congo-Angola region. Among the smaller societies,other regions of Africa were represented: Mina, Mozambique, etc.28 Early slavearrivals were mostly from the Windward Coast, ranging from contemporarySenegal to Sierra Leone. The Slave Coast (Togo and Benin) was importantthroughout the slave trade, as was the Bight of Benin and Niger Delta regions.Among the principal African groups in the Rıo de la Plata were the “Congos,” aterm usually applying to speakers of Kikongo but sometimes also encompass-ing Kimbundu and other Angolan languages, although the ethnic designationUmbundu does not appear as frequently as Congo, Mandinga, Mina, etc., exceptin Brazil. Slaves taken from the Kimbundu-speaking region of Africa were morefrequently referred to as Angolas, although the latter designation occasionallyapplied to speakers of other languages.

Africans in Cuba

Figures regarding the total number of African slaves imported into Cuba varywidely, as do claims as to the relative proportions of various African ethnicgroups 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 embarkedand 564,000 landed offered by Eltis et al. (1999). Aimes (1907:264), adding up

26 Scheuss de Studer (1958), Molinari (1944).27 Pereda Valdes (1965:41–42). 28 Andrews (1980:144).


approximate annual figures, came up with a total of around 528,000 Africansbrought to Cuba up until 1865. According to Perez de la Riva (1974a:78–79;1979:41–44), up until 1761, approximately 60,000 African slaves had beentaken 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 Africanbozales arrived during this period, bringing the total number of slaves takenbetween the first colonization and 1820 to around 390,000. By 1861, this num-ber had jumped again, to an astonishing 849,000, which means that nearly86 percent of all slaves taken to Cuba arrived during the first half of the nine-teenth century. Extrapolating to allow for underreporting and clandestine traf-fic, Perez de la Riva estimates a total of 1,310,000 African bozales taken toCuba during the entire slave trade. Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:137) usesomewhat lower figures, suggesting that between 850,000 and 921,000 blackAfricans arrived in Cuba during the slaving period. These figures demonstratethat 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 literatureof the time. However, slave mortality was relatively high, and once importationof slaves from Africa ceased for all intents and purposes, the number of bozalesfell off dramatically. For example in 1873 it is estimated that there were some136,000 African-born blacks in Cuba; by the end of the century this number haddropped to 13,000, and by 1907 there were fewer than 8,000 native Africans inCuba.29

Blacks in colonial Cuba were drawn from all parts of Africa, as well asfrom other Caribbean territories, but at least during the nineteenth century,the majority of the bozal population came from a handful of well-delimitedgeographical and ethnic regions of Africa. Curtin (1969:247) gave the followingproportional breakdown for slaves imported into Cuba in the period 1817–43,which represents the most intense period of slave importation in the entirehistory of Spanish America:30

Bight of Benin (Yoruba, Fon, etc.): 31.1%Mozambique (Macua, etc.): 29.5%Northern Congo: 13.0%Angola/Congo: 11.3%Bight of Biafra (Igbo, Ijo, etc.): 9.9%Sierra Leone: 3.3%

29 Perez de la Riva (1979:38–39); also Franco (1985).30 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 ofthe nineteenth century. It is known that towards the end of the slave trade, Mozambique andother east African venues rose in importance in supplying the Atlantic slave trade, particularlyto Portuguese possessions, but there is no evidence that such a high proportion of southeastAfrican slaves ever arrived in Cuba. In particular, the linguistic panorama is quite bare asregards the possible influence of Mozambican languages in the development of bozal Spanishin the Caribbean.


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

West Guinea Bt. of Benin Bt. of Biafra North Congo Angola SE Africa

1821–25 27.9 26.8 45.4 — — —1826–30 34.8 20.9 44.2 — — —1831–35 18.7 18.7 46.2 6.6 9.8 —1836–40 28.8 24.3 21.9 6.5 3.5 14.91841–43 34.0 36.0 3.1 22.0 — 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:

Lucumı: 34.52%Carabalı: 17.37%Congo: 16.71%Ganga: 11.45%Mina: 3.93%Bibı: 2.84%Other groups: 13.18%

African ethnic designations in colonial Cuba require some comment, sincenot all coincide exactly with established African linguistic and cultural bound-aries. The major terms, and the corresponding linguistic and cultural referents,are as follows:

Lucum ı . This term was invariably applied to Yoruba-speaking Africans frompresent-day Nigeria, but the origins of the term itself are unclear.31 Oneplausible etymology comes from the Yoruba salutation oluku mi “myfriend.”32 In Cuba, the term lucumı was used by whites and blacks alike,while the term yoruba referred only to the language. The Yoruba languagein Cuba represents a conservative and archaic form of varieties currentlyspoken in Nigeria. In this respect, it is similar to vestigial forms of Yorubaspoken in Trinidad and Brazil.33

Arara . This term is apparently derived from the historical area of Ardra, inDahomey (modern Benin). In Cuba, this term was usually applied to speak-ers of Ewe/Fon, and mixture with the dominant lucumı/Yoruba culture wasfrequent.34

Carabal ı . This term derives from Calabar, the eastern coastal region ofmodern Nigeria. The linguistic referents of this term are not as clear. Incontemporary Africa, the term refers to a dialect zone of Ijo. , a language

31 Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:28–30). 32 Law (1991:23).33 Olmsted (1953), Silva (1958), Warner-Lewis (1971, 1982), Yai (1978).34 Ortiz (1916), Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:31), Vinueza (1988).


important in the formation of Berbice Dutch creole,35 and carabalıes werefound throughout Spanish America. Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:35)suggest that the term referred to a heterogeneous mix of ethnic groupsfrom southeastern Nigeria, including Igbo, Ibibio, Ijo. , and possibly Efik,quoting the remark of the Colombian priest Sandoval who as early as 1627remarked that “los caravalıes son incontables y no se entienden unos aotros, ni hablan lenguas mutuamente inteligibles . . .” In Cuba, carabalıculture gave rise to the religious and social ceremonies known as abakuaand naniguismo.36

Mandinga . This is one of the most widely used and imprecise terms inall of Afro-Hispanic literature. Objectively, this term currently refers to awell-delimited group speaking Mandinkan languages, generally profess-ing Islam, and living in the Senegambia region. However, since earliestcolonial times, Mandinga was loosely used to designate any black fromnorthwestern Africa. In Cuba, the term usually referred to black prac-titioners of Islam, from the Senegambia region, but not limited to theMandinkan languages and cultures; speakers of Bambara and Diola werealso included.37

Congo . This is another term which has enjoyed a long history of vagueand often contradictory reference to African ethnic and linguistic groups.In Cuba, congos were definitely Bantu speakers, most of whom spokeKikongo and related languages from the northern Congo (former Por-tuguese Congo) region. The religious and cultural practices of the congoswere known variously as regla de congo, palo monte, or mayombe, and aredescribed by Cabrera (1979), as well as by many earlier travelers and evenparticipants, such as the former slave Esteban Montejo.38 Together withYoruba, Kikongo is one of the few African languages which survived pastthe last bozal generation in Cuba, largely in the form of religious ritualsand songs.39

Mina . This term usually referred to members of the Akan group (Asante, Fanti,Twi) from the former Gold Coast (modern Ghana), particularly those fromaround the old Portuguese fort at Elmina.

Ganga . This term was used frequently in colonial Cuba, and according toMoreno Fraginals (1978 vol. 2:9), ganga slaves represented some 11.5percent of the workers on Cuban sugar estates during the period 1850–60.

35 Robertson (1979), Smith, Robertson and Williamson (1987). 36 Perez et al. (1982).37 Castellanos and Castellanos (1988:30). 38 Barnet (1966).39 Gonzalez Huguet and Baudry (1967), Garcıa Herrera (1972), Granda (1973b), Garcıa Gonzalez

(1974), Valdes Acosta (1974), Garcıa Gonzalez and Valdes Acosta (1978), Perl (1984). In field-work carried out in Cuba in late 2002 Armin Schwegler (personal communication) discoveredat least one Afro-Cuban able to converse in Kikongo, thereby indicating that this language maystill survive in more than ritualistically fossilized form.


For many Cubans, the term ganga was synonymous with black Africans, inthe same category as Mandinga, Congo, Lucumı, etc. Unlike the remainingethnolinguistic designations used to describe Africans in Cuba, ganga doesnot derive directly from the name of any specific African ethnic group, norapparently to any single region of Africa. Slaves designated as ganga didnot participate in recognizably unique cultural or religious practices, norwas a particular language or group of languages ever associated with thisgroup.

Afro-European creole languages in Cuba

By the first few decades of the nineteenth century, anti-slavery movements inEurope were strong, and slaving ships en route to the Americas were routinelyintercepted and confiscated. The African slave trade could not provide sufficientworkers to satisfy Cuban demands, and laborers from all over the Caribbeanwere sought. A burgeoning contraband labor trade ensued, and the Dutch stationat Curacao was instrumental in making up the difference between the slavescoming from Africa and the total needs of the Spanish colonies. For much of thecolonial period, the Dutch had maintained an asiento or franchized slave marketon Curacao, from which slaves were reshipped to Spanish, French, and Englishpossessions in the Caribbean. The asiento was revoked in 1713, but clandestinetraffic from Curacao and St. Eustatius continued past this point, transshippingAfricans throughout the Caribbean. For nearly two centuries, the Dutch depot atCuracao supplied both authorized and clandestine slave traffic to Cuba and, ona much reduced scale, to Puerto Rico. The participation of Curacao in the labortrade to Cuba added the already established creole language Papiamento to themix of languages present in Cuba.40 Papiamento is documented for Cuba, byboth residents and visitors. For example, in the first decades of the nineteenthcentury, the Dutch traveler Gerardus Bosch (1836:226) encountered Papia-mento speakers in Cienfuegos.41 According to Granda (1973a), Bosch’s previ-ous knowledge of Papiamento as spoken in Curacao would assure that he wasnot mistaking a local Afro-Cuban creole or pidgin for legitimate Papiamento.Hesseling himself did not rule out the possibility that Bosch was confusingthe Dutch-based creole Negerhollands with Papiamento, although accordingscant probability to such a hypothesis. Other, briefer, descriptions documentthe presence of Papiamento speakers in other parts of Cuba. Papiamento wasrarely commented on by Cubans themselves; those few who had ever heard thelanguage referred to it as espanol aranado. Given Cubans’ negative attitudestoward 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).


the experience or the inclination to differentiate the halting pidgin spoken byAfrican-born laborers from the well-established Afro-Iberian creole in use onCuracao.

In addition to the well-organized slave and plantation laborer supplies offeredby commercial traders, Cuba attracted thousands of workers from throughoutthe Caribbean, who emigrated to Cuba voluntarily and individually. The largestcontingent came from Haiti and settled in eastern Cuba. This immigration beganin the latter part of the nineteenth century, but in the early decades of thetwentieth century the Cuban and Haitian governments entered into accordswhich guaranteed a steady annual supply of Haitian contract laborers, not onlyin Oriente but also in the sugar-growing areas of central Cuba. The plight ofthese hapless workers is documented in Alejo Carpentier’s first novel, Ecue-Yamba-O. Another major source of laborers for eastern Cuba was Jamaica,although the Jamaican contingents in Cuba were never as numerous as in theDominican Republic.42 In Cuba, the heaviest Jamaican immigration occurredin the early decades of the twentieth century, and coincided with the influx ofHaitian cane cutters. Smaller numbers of laborers came from the Virgin Islandsand from the lesser Antilles.

Of all the Spanish Caribbean, nineteenth-century Cuba was also the largestrecipient of non-black plantation laborers, in the form of Chinese recruits. In thesecond half of the nineteenth century, Cuba received at least 150,000 Chineselaborers, known as culıes (English coolie), who worked in the sugar plantationsand mills as virtual slaves, side by side with Africans and workers from otherCaribbean islands. The linguistic conditions surrounding the lives of Chineselaborers in Cuba closely parallels that of African bozales, and, according toavailable evidence, Chinese workers’ acquisition of Spanish followed similarpaths. Moreover, the linguistic model for Chinese workers was frequently thespeech of bozales who had already learned some Spanish, as well as the Spanishspoken as a second language by workers from Caribbean territories, who spokeother creole languages. Finally, since most of the Chinese were recruited throughthe Portuguese colony of Macao, where a Portuguese-based pidgin and creolewas spoken among the native Chinese population, there exists the possibilitythat some of the Chinese workers added their knowledge of a Portuguese creoleto the already rich mix of creole and creoloid elements present in nineteenth-century Cuba. Macao creole Portuguese shares many of the patterns common toAfro-European creoles implicated in the formation of Afro-Lusitanian varietiesin Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean, including Cape Verdean, Papiamento,Palenquero, and more distantly Sao Tomense and Annobonese. There are alsonoteworthy parallels with Haitian Creole, Jamaican Creole, Negerhollands andother creoles known or suspected to have been spoken in nineteenth-century

42 Serviat (1986:ch. 6), Alvarez Estevez (1988).


Cuba. The implications for the study of bozal Spanish are immediate andfar-reaching, for if it can be demonstrated that Chinese workers in Cuba broughtwith them, at least some fragments of Macao creole Portuguese, and added itto the linguistic mix in which bozal Spanish was formed in the Caribbean, thisprovides yet another route of entry of certain creoloid constructions in attes-tations of Afro-Cuban Spanish. Such a demonstration – whose full realizationis as yet beyond the grasp of currently available documentation – would notinvalidate claims that bozal Spanish derives from an Afro-Lusitanian pidginoriginally 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 smallindeed, although once the Chinese moved to urban environments, theirpidginized Spanish became nearly as familiar to middle-class Cubans as thespeech of African bozales. So familiar was the habla de chino to the averageCuban, that a literary stereotype quickly developed, almost always portrayingthe Chinese in a somewhat comical but never totally unfavorable light. As withbozal literary texts, even some transparently derivative literary texts depictingpidgin-speaking Chinese characters show substantially the same linguistic char-acteristics as authenticated instances of Chinese interference in Spanish.43 Someof 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 ¿tu fuiste donde?“where did you go?” in which the interrogative word has not been movedto the beginning of the sentence. Throughout Latin America, the stereotypeof 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 lexicographerPichardo (1849: liv):

Los Chinos o Asiaticos, que ya superabundan principalmente en La Habana, no hanformado dialecto, ni el vulgo les ha pillado mas que alguna rara palabra . . . ellospronuncian con claridad las Vozes Castellans que aprenden pronto, aunque con el acentocriollo como los Yucatecos, y trocando rr y a veces la r y la d por la l, cuyo ultimo sonidoprodigan exesivamente diciendo, (v.g.) “luce de sopa bolacha; alo con flijole:” Dulcede sopa borracha: arroz con frijoles.

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

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


least since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Ortiz claimed that PidginEnglish items formed the true lingua franca used by slaves while acquiringSpanish on Cuban plantations. If true, this considerably antedates the arrivalof free creole-English-speaking laborers from other Caribbean islands. Thereare two known routes of arrival of Pidgin English in nineteenth-century Cuba.The first is coastal Nigeria, where Pidgin English was already flourishing in thenineteenth century, and whence came the largest number of slaves brought toCuba in the final stage of the slave trade. The second is a more indirect route, viathe West African island of Fernando Poo. In the 1860s, the Spanish governmentdeported white Cuban revolutionaries to this distant land, together with somerebellious Afro-Cubans. Many languished and died from tropical diseases, someeventually emigrated to Spain, and others finally made it back to Cuba. By thistime, West African Pidgin English was already well-established on FernandoPoo, being the lingua franca of most of the African-born population. This inturn is due to the fact that England had been using the island as part of its anti-slaving activities, and had recruited Pidgin-English-speaking Africans fromLiberia and Sierra Leone to work in their colony. It is very likely that at leastsome West African Pidgin English entered nineteenth-century Cuba throughreturning exiles.44 There are also reports of isolated black English speakers inrural southern Cuba. Such groups were attested on the Isle of Pines (Isla de laJuventud) in early decades of the last century.45

In Cuba, French Creole speakers were more common in the late nineteenthand early twentieth century, forming a significant portion of the population ofeastern Cuba, including Santiago.46 (Creole-) French-speaking blacks in Cubaeven organized into musical societies known as the tumba francesa.47 Thesesocieties still exist, and although many of the musicians are no longer com-pletely fluent in Haitian Creole, some of the songs mix Spanish and HaitianCreole.48 These texts cannot be confused with bozal Spanish, but rather consti-tute Spanish-Haitian code switching. In earlier periods, however, native speak-ers of Haitian who arrived in Cuba and learned Spanish as a second languagespoke 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 pre-verbal pa with cliticized phrase-final -non (ending affirmative sentences withcliticized -wi is an even more common strategy). Some of the modern Cubantumba francesa songs exmplify this:49

44 Balmaseda (1869), Saluvet (1892), Gonzalez Echegaray (1959:22), Leon (1976), Liniger-Goumaz (1988:25), Sarracino (1988), Fayer (1990), Sundiata (1990), Lipski (1992e).

45 Carlson (1941), Martınez Gordo (1985b), Castellanos and Castellanos (1988), Perl and Valdes(1991).

46 E.g. Wallace (1898:14).47 Franco (1959:76–77); Martınez Gordo (1985a, 1985b, 1989); Alen Rodrıguez (1986, 1991);

Betancur Alvarez (1993:43–48).48 Alen (1986), Martınez Gordo (1989:18). 49 Alen (1986:57).


yo di mue contan ‘they say I am happy’mue pa capa contan no . . . ‘I can’t be happy’mue pa capa ri no ‘I can’t laugh’

Given that Spanish no is cognate with Haitian non, while Spanish no occupiesthe same syntactic position as Haitian pa and is easily acquired by speakers ofthe latter language, the pathway to the formation of double negation in Haitian-Spanish contact situations is straightforward.

The songs and poems characteristic of these groups combine Spanish andHaitian Creole in a fashion reminiscent of texts produced in the DominicanRepublic, and without proper context could be confused with earlier bozal lan-guage in which no Caribbean creole language served as intermediary betweenAfrica and the Americas.

Africans in the Dominican Republic

Among the Latin American nations whose Afro-Hispanic populations form amajor part of the national profile, no country figures more prominently than theDominican Republic, and yet to date not a single example of true bozal lan-guage has been found in the Dominican literary and folkloric corpus, despite theabundant documentation of Dominican popular culture, in the form of stories,songs, poems, legends, and the like, and the equally rich tradition of negristaliterature in the Dominican Republic.50 This startling gap in an otherwise well-documented Afro-Dominican cultural tradition should arouse inquiry, but in factthe topic has been scarcely mentioned. In the Dominican Republic, althoughAfrican-born bozales were still found in the nineteenth century, they were pro-portionately few in comparison to criollo blacks (born in the colonies), andno verifiable corpus of Dominican bozal language is known to exist. More-over, many remnants of highly non-standard language among contemporaryAfro-Dominicans are much more likely to derive from contact with Haitianor varieties of English than to represent a direct continuation of earlier bozalSpanish.51

Following the initial importance of Santo Domingo as Spain’s front doorto the New World, the Spanish colony rapidly declined in both prosperity andpopulation. Small gold deposits discovered by the first Spanish explorers weresoon exhausted, and the discovery of fabulous wealth in Mexico and Peruenticed colonists away from the Antilles. On the French side of the island,the proportion of African slaves grew astronomically, and blacks came to faroutnumber whites at an early period in the history of Saint-Domingue. TheFrench were aware of the potential danger in such a demographic imbalance,

50 Caamano de Fernandez (1989). 51 Lipski (1994a).


and Spanish observers at the other end of the island grew increasingly uneasyat the prospect of a large-scale slave revolt that might overrun the entire island.Slave uprisings had already occurred in Spanish Santo Domingo; the firstreported revolt occurred in 1521 when the slaves on Diego Colon’s sugarplantation rebelled.52 Beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing fortwo centuries thereafter, rebellious slaves or cimarrones escaped to fortifiedvillages known as manieles. As early as the seventeenth century, marooncommunities were found along the northern coast, including the SamanaPeninsula.53

Spanish fears of even larger uprisings, if the proportion of Africans to Euro-peans were to attain the levels found in the French colony, were in large mea-sure responsible for the Spanish reluctance to import African slaves in quanti-ties similar to those found in French Saint-Domingue. Ultimately, however, itwas the economic marginality of Spanish Santo Domingo, and the inability toprosper under the Spanish monopolistic system, which dictated the patterns ofslave importation. As a consequence, the proportion of blacks in Spanish SantoDomingo never came close to the figures found in French Saint-Domingue.Bozal importations in the Spanish colony slowed to a trickle by the eighteenthcentury, and although African-born slaves could still be found in Santo Domingowell past the time of independence, they did not form a large proportion of thepopulation, unlike Cuba and Saint-Domingue during the same time period.Of equal importance is the fact that at no time in earlier colonial history didAfrican-born bozales (the group most likely to permanently affect the devel-oping Dominican Spanish dialect) represent a very large or sociolinguisticallyprominent segment of the Dominican population.

Beginning with the Haitian revolts of the late eighteenth century and con-tinuing through the nominal transfer of Santo Domingo to French and thenHaitian control, the population of the Spanish colony dropped drastically. Thusfrom a high of some 120,000 residents in Spanish Santo Domingo registered in1782, and the approximately 180,000 residents found in the last decade of theeighteenth century, a census of 1819 revealed only 71,000 people in the Spanishcolony. By 1844, i.e. the end of the Haitian occupation, the population had risento 126,000; in 1863 the population was 207,000, and in 1887 more than 380,000residents of the Dominican Republic were counted. Jose Alvarez de Peralta, vis-iting Santo Domingo in 1860, estimated (probably too high) a total populationof 400,000, of which 200,000 were white or mestizo, 70,000 were black, andthe remainder mulatto.54 Most of the repopulation which occurred during thefirst half of the nineteenth century was the result of settlement by Haitians. Thisis amply documented in testimony from the time period. To cite but a singleexample, in 1884 the statesman Pedro Bono commented that the southwestern

52 Deive (1989a:33). 53 Ibid. (80). 54 Rodrıguez Demorizi ed. (1970:162).


border region of the Dominican Republic was “expuesta a una invasion perenney progresiva de poblacion extranjera (haitiana), que hace desfallecer cada dıamas el elemento dominicano, el cual, desarmado y exhausto, desaparecera porcompleto de esa region.”55 Toward the end of the century, occasional immi-gration from Cuba and Puerto Rico occurred, following aborted independencemovements in those colonies. This was also the period when Sephardic Jewsand traders from Curacao, Chinese, Syrians, and other groups immigrated toSanto Domingo.

Afro-European creole languages in the Dominican Republic

Spanish Santo Domingo never experienced the last-ditch importation of sugarplantation laborers from all over the Caribbean, as occurred in Cuba and PuertoRico. Eltis et al. (1999) document only 6,000 African slaves sent directly toSanto Domingo during the colonial period. As French Saint-Domingue becamethe world’s richest sugar colony, the Spanish side of the island could not com-pete, and instead Dominican farmers devoted themselves to supplying meat,hides and other agricultural products to French planters. Following the HaitianRevolution, Spanish planters were not inclined to repeat the mistakes that hadled to the destruction of the French sugar colony. The Spaniards had alreadyexperienced smaller-scale slave revolts, and invasions by Haitian troops werealready on the horizon. There were probably a few speakers of Papiamento inSanto Domingo, since a number of merchants and traders, largely SephardicJews, arrived from Curacao, and lived in a neighborhood called Punda, recall-ing a similarly named neighborhood on Curacao. However, in the DominicanRepublic, these (presumed) Papiamento speakers formed part of the urban bour-geoisie, unlike in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where Papiamento-speaking labor-ers worked in the canefields side by side with African- and American-bornworkers. There is little likelihood that Papiamento ever affected DominicanSpanish.

The major extra-Hispanic influence on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Dominican Spanish was Haitian Creole, carried first by invading Haitianarmies, then by settlers who arrived from the western end of the island duringthe Haitian occupation, and in the twentieth century by migrant sugar plantationlaborers. It was during the period 1822–44, more so than in earlier decades, thatthe definitive Haitian-Dominican linguistic and cultural contacts were firmlycemented.56 It is impossible to precisely date the emergence of Haitian as astable creole language systematically different from French, but a date some-where towards the end of the seventeenth century does not appear unreasonable.

55 Rodrıguez Demorizi (ed.) (1964:280); also Hoetink (1972:63–64).56 See Granda (1991) for some additional thoughts.


By the middle of the eighteenth century, Haitian was an established language,and when Moreau de Saint-Mery visited French Saint-Domingue (Moreau deSaint-Mery 1958) in 1783, he observed a language which does not greatly dif-fer from contemporary Haitian (e.g. Carden and Stewart 1988). Illiterate slaveleaders such as Boukman, as well as the former slaves who became incor-porated into Toussaint’s army, presumably spoke only Haitian Creole. In hisreconstruction of the Dominican resistance to Haitian occupation, HenrıquezUrena (1951:236) observed that “en todo el occidente de la isla la gran mayorıadel pueblo solo habla patois o creole . . .”

The Samana Peninsula, scene of earlier French attacks, received a predom-inantly Haitian-speaking population; as early as 1862, a document describ-ing Samana states that “la poblacion la supone de 2.000 almas, entre france-ses, canarios, negros de la Florida y Haitianos . . .” The Spanish languagehas survived unchallenged as the official language of the Dominican Repub-lic, as well as the de facto language in all urban and most rural regions, butHaitian Creole has always maintained a vigorous presence in rural villages,and has affected regional varieties of Spanish as well. Only the effects of animproved educational system, better means of transportation and communica-tion, and an effective network of radio broadcasting, have purged the tracesof Haitian Creole from all but the most marginalized varieties of DominicanSpanish.57

United States Black English also made its way into the nineteenth-centuryDominican Republic. The presence of black Americans began with the Haitianoccupation, part of an ambitious plan initiated in 1824 by Haitian presidentBoyer to create a settler-state of dispossessed blacks from throughout theAmericas, who would owe unswerving allegiance to the Haitian revolution.58

Although today the only speakers of black English are found in Samana, theAfro-Dominican village of Villa Mella was also the scene of immigration ofspeakers of United States Black English.

A more recent source of creole English in the Dominican Republic arrivedthrough the importation of workers from the British West Indies, especiallyBarbados and Jamaica. In the Dominican Republic, these workers are usuallyreferred to as cocolos, and although they often work together with Haitians(referred to as congos or manes), the West Indian laborers enjoy greater free-dom and a higher standard of living. West Indians’ approximations to Spanish,however, are scarcely distinguishable from Haitianized Spanish. This language,

57 Hoetink (1972:ch. 2), Rodrıguez Demorizi (1973:333), De la Cruz (1978:30), Moya Pons (1978),Marınez (1986).

58 Rodrıguez Demorizi (1973, 1975), Puig Ortiz (1978), Tejeda Ortiz (1984). For recent linguisticobservations, Benavides (1973, 1985), Poplack and Sankoff (1980, 1987), DeBose (1983, 1992,1995), Tagliamonte and Poplack (1988), Poplack and Tagliamonte (1989), Tagliamonte (1991,1997).


spoken by socially stigmatized foreign laborers, is unlikely to have perma-nently influenced Dominican Spanish, but it does form a prominent part ofthe Dominican linguistic landscape. As the children of these workers grow upin the Dominican Republic, there exists a potential for subtle transfers fromthe pidginized Spanish of their parents to the most marginalized sociolects ofDominican Spanish.

Africans in Puerto Rico

The history of black slaves in Puerto Rico is rather similar to that of SantoDomingo. Puerto Rico remained as a backwater during most of the Spanish colo-nial period, and slave importation only became important towards the middleof the nineteenth century, as Puerto Rico took a small piece of the sugar plan-tation boom that followed the uprising in French Saint-Domingue. Accord-ing to Alvarez Nazario (1974:72–77), some 6,000–8,000 African slaves weretaken to Puerto Rico during the sixteenth century, some 8,000–12,000 in theseventeenth century, between 20,000 and 30,000 in the eighteenth century, andbetween 20,000 and 30,000 in the nineteenth century, for a maximal total of75,000 African slaves taken to Puerto Rico. Eltis et al. (1999) documents only10,000 African slaves arriving in Puerto Rico, with the majority disembarkingbetween 1780 and 1840.

The African population in Puerto Rico came from various African ethnicand cultural groups, basically following the patterns found elsewhere in LatinAmerica. Wolofs (Jelofe), Biafras, Fulas, Mandingas, and other slaves fromthe Senegambia region were represented among the earliest slaves taken tothe island. In the eighteenth century, British slavers brought Mende-speakingslaves (known in Puerto Rico as ganga) from the Windward Coast of SierraLeone. The Portuguese also brought in slaves from the Gold Coast (Minas),and when the French became established in Dahomey (Whydah), Yorubas andother Kwa-speaking groups were sent to Puerto Rico, together with Carabalıes(Igbo- and Efik-speaking Africans from the Calabar Coast of Nigeria). Finally,slaves from the Congo and Angola region arrived in large numbers in PuertoRico.59 In Puerto Rico it is still possible to find African cultural remnants, butthere is none of the ethnically homogeneous ceremonies and songs, found forexample in Cuba, where Yoruba, Efik, and Kikongo carryovers survived slaveryto form the basis for Afro-Cuban religious practices. The demographic figurestell the story: there was never a large enough number of African bozales, muchless a group of slaves from a single ethnic or linguistic area of Africa, for anAfrican culture to be transplanted to Puerto Rican soil.

59 Alvarez Nazario (1974:44–47), Giron (n.d.), Sued Badillo and Lopez Cantos (1986).


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, Curacao, St. Martin, Haiti,Guadalupe, and St. Thomas, with Guadalupe being the largest non-Puerto Ricansupplier from the Caribbean.60 Among free foreigners living in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, significant numbers came from Antigua, Barbados,Curacao, 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 themslaves from their respective islands. The greatest concentrations of foreignerswere in San Juan and Ponce; Fajardo also contained numerous natives of theVirgin Islands, while Carolina was home to many natives of Antigua. In 1872 theBritish consul affirmed that 90 percent of the population of Vieques consisted ofBritish (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 labor-ers from Antigua alone working in Puerto Rico.63 Earlier in the century, manyresidents were “Danes” (i.e. from the Danish Virgin Islands).64 In addition,western Puerto Rico received numerous slaves from Curacao, as well as fromthe Danish colony in the Virgin Islands, and from St. Barthelmy, Martiniqueand Guadeloupe.65

Both during and after the slaving period, the greatest number of non-Spanishspeaking blacks in Puerto Rico came from the neighboring Virgin Islands, afact with some linguistic consequences for reconstruction of Afro-Puerto Ricanspeech. While the islands were still a Danish slave-holding territory, slaves fre-quently escaped to the Puerto Rican islet of Vieques,66 which is easily reachedby swimming. Following the aboltion of slavery in the Virgin Islands, socialand economic upheavals caused large numbers of Virgin Islanders to seek workin Puerto Rico, and the trend continues even today. During the early nine-teenth century, slaves on St. Croix and St. John mostly spoke the Dutch creoleNegerhollands; English-based creoles later came to dominate the Virgin Islands.During the nineteenth century Negerhollands was still the principal language ofthe black population, and was also spoken by a not inconsiderable proportionof the white population. After the abolition of slavery and the dismantling of

60 Carbonell Fernandez (1988:26–27). 61 Cifre de Loubriel (1962), Marazzi (n.d.).62 Brau (1912), Carrillo de Carle (1974:16), Ramos Mattei (1981:134).63 Ramos Mattei (1981:138). 64 Langhorne (1987:33).65 Morales Carrion (1978:39), Dıaz Soler (1981). Echevarrıa Alvarado (1984:74) partially attributes

the origin of the Puerto Rican musical form the plena to nineteenth-century Ponce, in particularsome musicians descendent from Virgin Islanders or natives of St. Kitts.

66 Westergaard (1917:160–64), Hall (1992:126–28).


large plantations, many Negerhollands-speaking Virgin Islanders emigrated toother islands in search of work; some went to Cuba, and an even larger numberarrived in nearby Puerto Rico. Although to date there is no direct evidence ofNegerhollands being used in Cuba and Puerto Rico, it should be noted that thegrammatical structures of this quintessential Afro-Atlantic creole coincide withthose of other creole languages used in the Caribbean, and the traces of a formerNegerhollands presence could not always be distinguished from the remnantsof better-known creoles. A speaker of Negerhollands, upon encountering vari-eties of Spanish already influenced by other Caribbean creoles, would find thestructural patterns to be identical, and even some core vocabulary would be rec-ognized, especially if, as suggested by Hesseling, Negerhollands already borethe earlier imprint of contact with Papiamento. Hesseling (1933) analyzed manyfeatures of nineteenth-century Negerhollands as bearing the earlier influenceof Papiamento, stemming from a time when the Dutch also controlled parts ofthe Virgin Islands, and transfers of Africans from Curacao to St. Thomas andSt. Croix were frequent.

During the twentieth century, groups of Haitians have always been present inPuerto Rico, but their numbers are small in comparison to the Haitian presencein Cuba and especially the Dominican Republic, and their linguistic impact isnegligible.

Beginning toward the end of the nineteenth century and continuing throughthe first decades of the twentieth century, Atlantic creole-speaking laborers frommany Caribbean islands began to migrate in significant numbers to Cuba, theDominican Republic, and Puerto Rico to work in the sugar harvests. Althoughby this time bozal Spanish had nearly ceased to exist, the presence of thesecreole speakers who acquired the rudiments of Spanish in plantation-like con-ditions reinforced vestigial Afro-Hispanic language throughout the SpanishCaribbean. Emigration from St. Martin to the Spanish Caribbean began around1890. Arubans migrated in large numbers to Cuba but also to the DominicanRepublic and Puerto Rico, where a small group of Arubans remains in Catano,near San Juan.67 Emigration from Curacao, an island which had already suppliedlaborers to nineteenth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico, and whose Papiamentolanguage had contributed to bozal Spanish, intensified in the early twentieth cen-tury.68 The numbers are not large, but illustrate the continuing linguistic impactof creole-speaking immigrants among the most marginalized Afro-Hispanicpopulations of the early twentieth-century Caribbean.

67 Hartog (1961:230), Pietersz (1985:57–59), Sypkens Smit (1995:126).68 As an example, in 1917 144 workers from Curacao 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, morethan 2,400 residents of Curacao and more than 2,800 from Aruba went to Cuba; smaller numbersarrived in Puerto Rico (Romer 1981:95).


Africans in colonial Ecuador

The contemporary Afro-Ecuadoran component may be as high as 25 percentof the national total, and was higher during the colonial period.69 The majorityof the black and mulatto population is concentrated in the northwest sector,principally in Esmeraldas province, where over 80 percent of the residentsare of African origin. Guayaquil once contained a large black population,70

although subsequent events changed the demographic profile of that city. EvenQuito contained a considerable black population, not only in the early colo-nial years, but through the end of the eighteenth century.71 Smaller Africanpopulations were found in other highland towns, such as Loja.72 The originof Ecuador’s black population is surrounded by some controversy and doubt,since although it is evident that black Ecuadorans arrived from the north, datesof arrival and region of origin have yet to be determined satisfactorily. Onetheory, as yet unproved,73 maintains that the first permanent black residentsarrived on the Ecuadoran coast as the result of a shipwreck at the end of thesixteenth century, and of another in l600, although it is known that the firstblacks arrived in Ecuador in l533–36. Von Hagen (1940:282) believes that theblacks of Esmeraldas come from a shipwreck that took place off the coast in1650. Whitten (1965:22–24) reviews some of the competing accounts for theblack 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 blacksfrom the highlands to the coast.

In highland Ecuador, blacks are documented as early as 1550, but little isknown as to how they arrived there. Subsequently, the Jesuits were respon-sible for large-scale importation of black slaves to work on plantations bothon the coast and in the central highlands, and this example was followed byother planters and landowners, since indigenous labor was scarce in certainareas and rebellious in many others. Early in the nineteenth century, the warsof colonial liberation brought contingents of black soldiers to Ecuador, comingsubstantially from Colombia, and when manumission of slaves came to Ecuadorin 1852, many of these black subjects remained in Esmeraldas province. Yetanother group of black citizens arrived in the late nineteenth century, when some4,000–5,000 Jamaican laborers were brought to work on plantations and on con-struction projects; this was the last significant migration of Afro-Americansto Ecuador. Other scholars have maintained that the black population ofEsmeraldas province results from the immigration of laborers from plantations

69 Rout (1976:211, 232), Preciado Bedoya (1995), Whitten et al. (1995).70 Garay Arellano (1988a, 1998b, 1992), Jurado Noboa (1990a).71 Jibaja Rubio (1988, 1990), Castro Chiriboga (1990), Garcıa (1990), Lucena Salmoral (1994).72 Anda Aguirre (1993). 73 Toscano Mateus (1953:19–20), Estupinan Tello (1967:45–48).


in the central highlands;74 this theory, however, is difficult to reconcile with thehistorical and demographical facts of colonial and postcolonial Ecuador.75

In the highlands, the predominant racial type is the indigeneous or mestizoconfiguration, together with the small European population, and black ormulatto residents are quite rare in highland Ecuador. The one exception tothis demographic trend is the Chota river valley and its environs, in north-central Ecuador in the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi. This valley, formerlyknown as El Valle Sangriento and Coangue, is a tropical lowland surroundedby Andean uplands, and the population of the Chota region is almost entirelyblack with some mulattoes, in contrast to the exclusively indigeneous/mestizopopulation of neighboring areas.76 The origin of this singular black populationin highland Ecuador is surrounded by a great uncertainty; some investigatorshave suggested that chotenos are descended from freed or escaped slaves fromthe coastal province of Esmeraldas, but it appears that most of the blacks inImbabura and Carchi provinces are descendents of slaves held by the Jesuits ontheir extensive plantations. Another fact shrouded in intrigue is the establish-ment of black slave breeding centers owned and supervised by the Jesuits in thehighland areas, with the aim of maintaining an adequate slave population whileimproving racial properties whenever possible. It is difficult to uncover accu-rate documentation of this enterprise, which is nonetheless well-attested bothin oral tradition and in historical references, but the fact is that when the Jesuitsleft Ecuador, behind them stayed a considerable group of slaves, freedmen andcimarrones, all of whom gradually came to form the unified population nucleiof the Chota valley. It has even been claimed that much of the black populationof Esmeraldas province derives from chotenos who immigrated to the coast,but this remains to be demonstrated conclusively.77

On the Ecuadoran coast, the population of African origin is concentrated inthe northwestern province of Esmeraldas, although smaller numbers of Afro-Ecuadorans can be found all along the coast. For most Ecuadorans, Esmeraldasis synonymous with black culture; this province is also the home of the indige-nous Cayapa and Colorado peoples, whose life has been even more marginalthan that of black Ecuadorans. The first black slaves in Esmeraldas arrivedearly in the sixteenth century, as Spaniards were attracted by the emeralds thatgave the province its name.78 The number of African slaves brought to workon 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 Wolf (1892:525), West (1957:106).75 Franklin (1943:269), Penaherrera de Costales and Costales Samaniego (1959), Whitten

(1965:22–25).76 Klumpp (1970). 77 Estupinan Tello (1967:49).78 Jurado (Noboa 1992a); Rahier (1985:30–32); Savoia (1988).


Angolas. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, some small gold mines wereopened in Cachavı, Playa de Oro and Uimbı (Jurado Noboa 1992a:37; Savoia1990), in which some African slaves were taken to work. The total number ofAfrican slaves taken to the villages of Esmeraldas in the eighteenth centurydid not exceed a few hundred (Jurado Noboa 1992a:38), but given the evensmaller white population and the subsequent abandonment, the population ofAfrican 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, alreadydescribe the province in terms of its heavy African concentration. A descriptionwritten in the later decades of the eighteenth century by a Jesuit priest affirmedthat:79

. . . los negros venidos de la Africa retienen la lengua de su Guinea. Esta hablan entresı, con ella se entienden y de ella retienen sus cantinelas, y aunque se les procura imbuirel castellano, en que muchos con el tiempo se hacen muy ladinos, pero los mas de ellosse mantienen muy bozales toda la vida, de manera que le pronuncian muy truncado ylleno de barbarismos.

These descriptions say nothing of the languages spoken by the Africans inEsmeraldas; in the eighteenth century, a high proportion of Bantu-speakingAfricans from the Congo/Angola region is to be suspected, although the Spanishof even the most isolated areas of Esmeraldas province shows few defini-tive Africanisms. Following the independence of Colombia and Ecuador,black Colombians – principally from Barbacoas – continued migrating toEsmeraldas.80 Many of the decimas (improvised ten-line songs in verse) whichform part of the Afro-Ecuadoran folk tradition in Esmeraldas make reference toColombian towns and villages. For this reason it is difficult to separate authenti-cally Ecuadoran Afro-Hispanic remnants which may shed light on earlier bozallanguage in this region from late nineteenth-century Afro-Colombian Spanish,natively spoken by ex-slaves and their descendants and carried southward toEcuador.

Africans in colonial Colombia

The port of Cartagena de Indias was the principal entry of African slaves tomuch of South America during the Spanish colonial period, and Colombiaitself received a large number of slaves. Other important Colombian ports werePortobelo (in what would later become Panama), Rıo de Hacha, and SantaMarta. The earliest slave arrivals worked in highland mines and placer deposits,in Popayan, the Choco, around Bogota, and in other interior areas. The

79 Savoia (1992:19–20). 80 Rahier (1985:38–39).


Caribbean coast was always home to large numbers of Africans, especiallyCartagena, which grew and prospered as the Spanish colonial enterprise inSouth America took hold.81

A large proportion of the slaves in Cartagena is presumed to have comefrom Angola, especially during the seventeenth century, when Portugal stillcontrolled the slave trade to Latin America. Many of these slaves made theirway to mines in Zaragoza and Antioquia.82 Escalante (1964:chaps. 9–10)has demonstrated that slaves from all the major slaving regions of West andCentral Africa arrived in Colombia, with differing groups predominating atany given time, due to the asiento system of slaving monopolies. During thefirst Portuguese asientos, slaves from the Senegambia, the Windward Coast,and the Gold Coast predominated. Africans from the Slave Coast and Nigeriaentered the mix by the seventeenth century, and later in the century, slavesfrom the Congo/Angola region arrived in large numbers. The funeral rites ofthe former maroon village of San Basilio de Palenque recall the people fromCongo, Loango, and Angola,83 and toponyms from all major coastal Africanareas are found throughout Colombia.

Slaves taken to Colombia worked in both agriculture and in mines. The latterwere located both in coastal regions and in the interior. Placer gold extractionwas also a frequent occupation of slaves, in the Cauca Valley and in the Choco.Some of the richest gold deposits were found in Popayan, which received thegreatest number of African slaves of any interior area of Colombia. The mines ofBucaramanga in Santander were also productive, and even far-flung Boyaca, onthe Venezuelan border, had gold mines worked by African slaves. The miningtown of Barbacoas was also a heavy consumer of African slave labor. Thefirst slaves in this region were evidently from the Congo/Angola region. Inlater years, many of the slaves were supplied from Guayaquil, whence somehad arrived from Africa, while others were American-born. In the eighteenthcentury, many minas were taken to this region, in the belief (real or imagined)that they possessed previous experience in placer gold mining. African slavesalso worked in haciendas and mines around Cali; from this town, many slavesalso passed in to the cuadrillas of the Choco. In the Choco, there was a dramaticincrease in the number of African slaves in the eighteenth century.

Maroon communities or palenques were found throughout highland andcoastal Colombia during the colonial period, and allowed for many Africancultural retentions and – in such places as San Basilio de Palenque – for theformation and retention of creole languages. In the cities, black slaves formedcabildos, ethnically based cultural and religious societies that were reluctantlytolerated by the ruling classes. Cartagena contained cabildos based on the

81 Friedemann (1992, 1993), Friedemann and Arocha (1995).82 Toribio Medina (1978:60–61), Wade (1993:75). 83 Schwegler (1996b).


Carabalı, Arara, Angola, Mandinga, Mina, and other ethnic/linguistic groups,84

and cities with smaller black populations had fewer such organizations. Africanlanguages were still present in Colombia throughout the colonial period, espe-cially in Cartagena, although blacks born or raised in the colonies often learnedonly Spanish. For instance, a 1693 document refers to a black slave namedFrancisco Gangora . . . “que es de Guinea y vino pequeno, le llamavan sus amosel Congo no save lengua . . . ,”85 meaning that he did not speak an African lan-guage. Sandoval (1956:335), writing in the late seventeenth century, noted that“la dificultad esta en que de ordinario sus amos no tienen interpretes ni se les danada por buscarlos; y nosotros parece moralmente imposible que aprendamostodas estas lenguas por ser tanta su multitud y no haber alguna general, comopor no haber quien pueda ensenarlas ni ser la comunicacion que con los negrostenemos la que baste para pegarsenos naturalmente,” a clear admission thatmost bozales in Cartagena spoke no Spanish or Portuguese. Further on (338),Sandoval reiterates: “. . . tambien conviene advirtamos la diferencia de castasque hablan algunas, para que ası una pueda servir por muchas y ahorrar trabajoy molestia. Y porque ası como las lenguas e interpretes ladinos suelen hablarvarias lenguas, ası los negros bozales tambien 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,” asWest Africa was still called. He indicates (90) that most slaves arriving inCartagena came from Cape Verde, Cacheu, Sao Tome, and Angola. He notes(94) that from Cape Verde and Sao Tome came bozales (who speak noPortuguese or Spanish), ladinos raised on the islands, “que hablan lenguaportuguesa,” 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 deaprender nuestra lengua . . .” Referring to the Kongo kingdom, he notes that“. . . las mujeres de los grandes se precian mucho de saber leer y oır misa cadadıa” (86) evidently in Portuguese. He makes reference to the Angolan use of theterm encombo for cattle (88), a term which survives as ngombe in the lenguaof San Basilio de Palenque. On several occasions, Sandoval makes referenceto the diversity of African ethnic groups and languages spoken on Sao Tome.For example (83): “De aquı [ = Sao Tome] . . . salen al rescate de todas lasvarias naciones que desde la sierra Leona hemos referido y demarcado en estey aquel capıtulo.” He also states (94) that “los negros de la isla de San Thome(que es como puerto de donde salen los navıos para el rescate de los negros quecomunmente decimos venir de San Thome, y no son sino de la tierra firme, reinosy puertos que hemos dicho, donde los espanoles van a su rescate) son de menosque ley que los que hemos nombrado venir de los rıos de Guinea, y de menos

84 Arrazola (1970:163), Wade (1993:88). 85 Arrazola (1970:233).


valor . . . las castas que de ordinario traen de aquellas partes son minas, popoos,fulaos, ardas or araraes, que todo es uno, offons, tambien casta arda; lucumies oterranovas; barba, temnes, binis, mosiacos, agares, gueres, zarabas, iabus, car-avalies naturales o puros que decimos . . .” On another occasion (347) Sandovalrefers to “los que vienen de la isla de San Thome, araraes, lucumies y caravaliespuros . . .” Yet again (379): “Si son de San Thome, ardas o araraes, caravalies,lucumies, minas y otras innumerables castas que de aquella isla vienen . . .”Sao Tome even served as a transshipment point for slaves from East Africa andIndia: “En estas embarcaciones de San Thome suelen de ordinario venir algunosnegros de los reinos y naciones que tratamos de la Etiopıa Oriental, sobre Egipto,como son mozambiques, melindes, etc., y tambien de alla de la India, comoceilanes . . .”

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 enjoyedde facto autonomy during the colonial period. Panama was the site of oneof the most prolonged Afro-Hispanic demographic contacts, since almost allslaves destined for the Pacific coast of Spanish America passed through Pana-manian ports. With Balboa’s discovery of the narrow crossing to the PacificOcean in 1513, the slender isthmus of Panama immediately became impor-tant to the Spanish colonial effort. To reach the wealthy colony of Peru, itwas more feasible to land on Panama’s Caribbean shore and transport goodsoverland 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 theport at Panama City. The treasure was unloaded and carried overland by muletrain and then along the Chagres River to the Caribbean shore, reloaded ontowaiting Spanish vessels, and shipped to Spain. The first Spanish port on theCaribbean side was Nombre de Dios, but this village lacks a good natural har-bor, and frequent pirate attacks forced the treasure-shipping operation out ofthe area. The next Spanish port was established at Portobelo, on a deep bayproviding an excellent natural harbor. Once a year ships from Spain dockedat Portobelo, to receive the treasure and to sell goods from Spain and otherLatin American colonies. This event drew citizens from all over Panama, andgrew into a festive feria, the memory of which is still preserved in local folktraditions.86 Reflecting its colonial and postcolonial history, modern Panamahas a large population of African origin. Afro-Panamanians descend from twodifferent groups. Spanish-speaking Afro-Panamanians, referred to in anthro-pological documents as afrocoloniales, descend from slaves held during the

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


colonial period.87 Although found throughout Panama, the largest concentra-tions are along the Caribbean coast, particularly in the towns of Portobelo andNombre de Dios. These Panamanians speak only Spanish, of the rural variety,with only a slightly higher proportion of African lexical items than found else-where in the country. Part of regional Afro-Panamanian culture are the negroscongos, community members who participate in folkloric rituals during theannual Carnival season, and which is a partial reproduction of the life of slavesin colonial Portobelo, during the annual feria or trade fair. As part of the congoritual comes a special way of speaking, the hablar congo, which local residentsclaim is derived from the earlier Afro-Hispanic pidgin or bozal speech.88

During the construction of the Panama Canal, thousands of black West Indianlaborers were recruited, most of whom spoke creole English.89 Many subse-quently obtained jobs in the US Canal Zone, due to their ability to communicatein English and the perception that, as “foreigners,” their loyalties would not bechallenged by Panamanian nationalism. This in turn caused resentment amongthe remaining Panamanian population, which had already borne the brunt ofAmerican racial discrimination, and resulted in a backlash against the chombos,a derogatory term applied to the afroantillanos. The latter retreated to theEnglish language, learning Spanish only imperfectly and continuing to iden-tify with the West Indies rather than with Panama. Eventually, frictions wereameliorated, Afro-Antilleans were granted Panamanian citizenship, and manyhave risen to positions of prominence in both the US Canal Zone and inPanamanian governmental and private sectors. Most younger Afro-Antilleansspeak Spanish natively, although English continues to be used frequently whenspeaking to community members.90

A smaller but also significant number of workers were brought to Panamafrom the French Antilles, particularly Martinique and Guadaloupe, beginning inthe last decades of the nineteenth century, when a French company attemptedthe construction of the first interoceanic canal. In the single year 1906–07,for example, more than 2,800 workers from Martinique and more than 2,000from Guadaloupe arrived in Panama.91 These workers spoke the French-derivedcreoles of their home islands (these creoles were referred to as patois by otherPanamanians), and most eventually settled on the Caribbean coast, in and aroundColon.92

87 Castillero Calvo (1969), De la Guardia (1977).88 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 distortionof words taking precedence over historically accurate retentions from Afro-colonial speech. Seealso Drolet (1980a, 1980b), Joly (1981).

89 Westerman (1951), Dıez Castillo (1968), Davis (1980), Conniff (1985), Lewis (1980).90 Cohen (1971, 1976b), Fuentes de Ho (1976), Jones (1976).91 Marrero Lobinot (1984:24). 92 Ibid. (35–39).


The black population of colonial Panama was frequently as large or largerthan 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 slaveswere acquired in small numbers; later, the asiento or slaving monopoly broughthundreds of African slaves through the port of Portobelo, originally one of thethree points officially designated as slave entry ports (together with Veracruz andCartagena de Indias). Determining the total number of Africans imported intoPanama is rendered difficult by the fact that most of the African slaves listedas arriving at Portobelo were destined for transshipment to South Americandestinations. Some approximate figures have been obtained, however, whichdemonstrate that throughout most of the colonial period, until the last decadesof the nineteenth century, Panama’s black population was at least equal tothe population of European origin. In the decade 1703–13, the French asientobrought nearly 7,000 slaves to Panama. The subsequent British asiento broughtnearly 16,000 slaves between 1718 and 1726. More than 2,000 slaves arrived inPanama in 1734–38; the following decade brought some 1,600 more. Between1743 and 1757, some 7,200 black slaves were legally imported into Panama; thetrue figures were higher. The remainder of the century saw some 5,000 Africanslaves 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, atleast by a factor of ten. The African origins of the Panamanian slaves are equallyuncertain.93 The terms Guinea and Congo were used in Panama with the samevague reference as in the rest of Spanish America. As the major crossover pointfor slaves destined for western South America, Panama received the full cross-section of slaves sent to other colonies, and the demographic profile changedover time as the Spanish obtained slaves from various European traders, deal-ing respectively with different areas of the West African coast. For example,Guzman Navarro (1982:ch. 2) feels that many of the slaves who arrived dur-ing the seventeenth century and early eighteenth century were supplied by theFrench, through slaving stations in the Senegambia, particularly Goree. Duringthe 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 yearsof the eighteenth century, the Companıa Gaditana was authorized to importslaves, mostly from sources in the New World. This included slaves trans-shipped from Cartagena, Havana, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and French Antilleanports. By the end of the eighteenth century, importation of slaves from Africahad all but ceased in Panama, although thousands of slaves still remained, andnew arrivals from Caribbean ports were to continue during the first decades ofthe nineteenth century. De la Guardia (1977) provides a variety of documents

93 Fortune (1993:219–36).


showing that slaves in colonial Panama represented the same basic cross-section of African ethnic and linguistic groups as were found in other SpanishAmerican areas. These include Vai, Mina, Lucumı, Carabalı, Congo, Mozam-bique, Mandinga, Wolof, Arara, Biafra, Popo, Angola, Cuango, Fula, etc. How-ever, 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 itwas never a major agricultural producer, nor did it have large urban centers toabsorb the huge quantities of slave laborers found in such cities as Lima andlater Buenos Aires and Havana. African slaves were first brought to Venezuelain the early sixteenth century as pearl divers around Margarita Island. Africansalso worked in agricultural production, including cacao, tobacco, coffee, sugarcane, and other products, but no large-scale plantation agriculture was found.Indeed, more than a single coherent colony, Venezuela was in reality a seriesof mini-colonies, each centered around a developing city (Cumana, Caracas,Maracaibo, etc.), and with local commercial and agricultural interests. AlthoughVenezuela was officially prohibited by Spanish monopolistic practices fromselling its products to other colonies, with the help of Portuguese interme-diaries, Venezuelan cacao was sold in large quantities to Mexican buyers.The seventeenth-century cacao “boom” resulted in the largest importation ofAfrican slaves to Venezuela. By the end of the century, the coastal area aroundCaracas contained a majority black and mulatto population. Social and eco-nomic distinctions between most whites and most blacks in Venezuela were notas marked as in wealthier colonies, and racial mixture was immediate and con-tinuous. There were some maroon (cimarron) communities formed by escapedslaves, but those Africans who remained in the colonial labor force – includingAfrican-born bozales – were not as segregated from native speakers of Spanishas in the large plantations of Cuba, Brazil, and Peru.94

The distribution of African slaves in Venezuela was well delimited, withthe overwhelming majority concentrated in the coastal strip on either sideof Caracas.95 Smaller but significant numbers were found in the interior ofMiranda state, in Cotro, and along the eastern and southern shores of LakeMaracaibo. The total number of slaves and their descendants present inVenezuela at any given time has never been accurately calculated. The explorerHumboldt calculated some 60,000 slaves in Venezuela at the beginning of thenineteenth century,96 but this figure is at best a rough approximation. What

94 Wright (1990:16–17), Bermudez and Suarez (1995).95 Acosta Saignes (1967:104). 96 Acosta Saignes (1967:178).


is known is that a significant proportion of Africans in colonial Venezuela –perhaps as much as one third at times – lived in maroon communities knownas cumbes or quilombos, creating the possibility for the retention of Africanlinguistic and cultural elements beyond the usual period of transculturation andassimilation which affected Afro-Venezuelans living in constant contact withthe white population. Given the heavy African presence in much of coastalVenezuela, particularly in the eighteenth century, Venezuelan Spanish absorbedsome African lexical items, as well as cultural and musical practices.97 Thereis a rich Afro-Venezuelan linguistic, literary, and folkloric tradition, which isnot widely known outside of the immediate area. For example, the festivalsof San Juan and San Pedro, celebrated in June along the coastal region tothe east of Caracas, typify the Afro-Hispanic syncretism found in much ofVenezuelan culture. At the southern end of Lake Maracaibo, the festival of SanBenito, celebrated in December particularly in the town of Bobures, involvesthe chimbangueles, a word which refers to the musical groups which performduring the fiesta, and to the drums which they play.98 The religious cult ofMarıa Lionza (a syncretic accretion based originally on indigenous legends),prominent among the working classes throughout Venezuela, represents syn-cretic aspects of contact among Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans. OnDecember 28, many Afro-Venezuelan communities celebrate the locaina, wilddances and festivals which date back to early slave-owning days when masterspermitted their slaves certain days in which the usual rules of Christian conductwere temporarily suspended.99

The arrival of African slaves into Venezuela began during the sixteenthcentury, and by the seventeenth century was a regularly established practice.According to Acosta Saignes (1967:33–34), during the first century and a halfof slave trading in Venezuela, slaves predominantly came from West Africa,including the Senegambia, the Gold Coast, and the Slave Coast. During theeighteenth century, the numbers of African bozales introduced into coastalVenezuelan cities, from Cumana to Maracaibo, became significant enough toraise the possibility of longer-lasting linguistic influences. Well into the eight-eenth century, the principal slave-trading group in Venezuela was the FrenchGuinea Company, who drew slaves mainly from the Senegambia. By 1713,the official monopoly on slave trading in Venezuela had passed to the BritishWest Indies Company, which was drawing slaves from the Windward and GoldCoasts. Many slaves were also transshipped from Barbados, where some mighthave already acquired the English-based creole that had developed on that island

97 Sojo (1943), Ramon y Rivera (1971), Pollak-Eltz (1972), Megenney (1979, 1980, 1985c, 1989a,1990c, 1999), Martınez Suarez (1986b), Alvarez (1987).

98 Martınez Suarez (1983, 1994), Salazar (1990).99 Pollak-Eltz (1991:64). Other aspects of Afro-Venezuelan culture and folklore are covered by

Pollak-Eltz (1972, 1991) and Brandt (1987).


prior to the eighteenth century. Later in the eighteenth century, slaves were alsotaken from British Trinidad to Venezuela; once more, it is uncertain whetherthese slaves spoke the English- and French-based creoles of that island. Bythe end of the colonial period, around 1800, Venezuela still had a population18 percent slave, and as much as 60 percent of the remaining population hadsome African blood.100

The Venezuelan-Trinidad linguistic connection extended well into the post-independence period, particularly in the mining town of El Callao in Guayanaprovince and the Paria Peninsula. The former town was founded around 1850 bygold-seekers, and brought in English and French creole-speaking Trinidadiansto work in the newly opened mines. The mines were soon closed, but the workersremained, speaking vestiges of creole English and French patois.101 In Guiria,in the Paria Peninsula, creole-English-speaking residents continue to maintainfamily ties with Trinidad and St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. Calypsomusic predominates in this region, including many innovative songs mixingSpanish, Antillean English and French creole.

Although certain well-defined African areas predominated in the slave tradeto Venezuela, due to the shifting alliances with European slaving companiesestablished at particular points along the African coast, Venezuela eventuallyreceived Africans from most major linguistic and cultural groupings.102 Fewwell-defined cultural traits from specific African ethnic groups survived inVenezuela, with the exception of some Loango ceremonies.103

100 Brito Figueroa (1961:32). 101 Pollak-Eltz (1991:80) Llorente (1994, 1995).102 Acosta Saignes (1967:95–106). 103 Domınguez (1989).

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, Portu-gal, and southern Spain, it was in Spanish America that successive generationsof African-born slaves and free laborers acquired the Spanish language in themost diverse circumstances, and impressed those around them by their approx-imations to natively spoken Spanish. The earliest Latin American bozal textscome from highland mining regions in Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, and Colombia,and probably owe more to imitation of the already well-established stereo-type 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 evi-dence on Afro-Hispanic language as to incorporate plausible (although probablyexaggerated) imitations in their literary works. Occasional travelers’ accounts,court transcriptions, legal documents, military reports, and sundry letters andtestimonies provide non-literary corroboration of bozal language. The trickleof texts antedating the nineteenth century quickly became a torrent of literary,musical, and folkloric production during the nineteenth century, as thousands ofAfro-Argentines, Afro-Uruguayans, Afro-Peruvians, Afro-Puerto Ricans, andespecially Afro-Cubans took their places in poems, songs, stories, and novels,reflecting demographic events which brought large numbers of African-bornslaves to these regions in a relatively short period of time. The present chaptersurveys the most salient Afro-Latin American bozal texts as well as variousless easily classifiable linguistic byproducts of the African diaspora in SpanishAmerica. The data will be presented in the same country-by-country order asin the preceding chapter.

The Afro-Peruvian linguistic corpus

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

129


1988) and Lipski (1994b). The African population in highland Peru reachedits height in the mid-seventeenth century, diminishing rapidly thereafter dueto a combination of high mortality, minimal reproductive possibilities, andintermingling with the indigenous population. There are, however, importantdocuments which purport to represent the speech of bozal Afro-Peruvian speechof this time. These are primarily songs or poems associated with religiousservices. Particularly popular was the villancico, especially Christmas songsbased on the birth of Christ and the arrival of the Reyes Magos. One text comesfrom Juan de Araujo (1646–1712), apparently written in the second half of theseventeenth century. This song was performed in Cuzco and possibly elsewhere,and claims to portray the speech of African bozales in seventeenth-centuryPeru (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #1). Another song from the same timeperiod comes from the Cuzco seminary (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #2).Possibly also composed in the same time period, but not performed in Cuzcountil 1753, is the anonymous “Pasacualillo” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #3). These early texts exemplify many key bozal features well attestedin Afro-Hispanic literature from other regions. Imitation of Peninsular modelswas frequently at work, given the close contact between the Cuzco clergy andtheir counterparts in Spain. At least one example supports this notion, the song“Negro de Navidad” (text #6) by the mid-seventeenth-century Spanish com-poser Alonso Torices, who lived in Malaga and Zaragoza, then apparentlyin many areas of Latin America. The manuscript in question was found inthe Bogota cathedral, but apparently was also performed in Peru. Most of theAfro-Peruvian texts do not support the hypothesis of direct imitation, since therecurring traits are found in nearly all Afro-Hispanic linguistic encounters ofthe sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The degree of consistency among thesebozal texts is worth considering systematically, since it suggests a relativelyhigh degree of authenticity of the early Afro-Peruvian texts, and helps providea picture of the language used by Africans in the first two centuries of Spain’swealthiest colony.

Early Peruvian bozal texts show little resemblance to any contemporarySpanish dialect, but share many similarities with Afro-Hispanic language ofother regions and time periods. Grammatically, there are no signs of stablecreolization; common to all contact varieties of Spanish is instability of agree-ment, including subject-verb and noun-adjective inflectional agreement. Similarfeatures are found in contemporary Peru, among Spanish-recessive bilingualsin the Andean region. There is no indication that syntactic features of earlybozal Spanish survived past the first generation. The phonological similaritieswith other forms of Afro-Hispanic language are more significant, since in someregions transfer to local Spanish varieties spoken natively has been postulated.Noteworthy throughout the bozal texts is the representation of intervocalic /d/

Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America 131

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 incoastal regions where an Afro-American population still remains, loss of inter-vocalic /d/ (presumably following an intermediate fricative stage) prevails.2

In some areas, however, the change of /d/ > [r] is found, together with theopposite shift of intervocalic /r/ > [d] (e.g. quiero > quiedo); this is exam-plified for the Afro-Peruvian population of Chincha by the stories of GalvezRonceros (1975, 1986),3 and in folkloric texts from the Ica region (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Peru #16). Although most coastal areas of Peru ultimatelyadopted the “lowland/Andalusian” weakening and loss of /d/, vestiges of theocclusive or flap articulation have survived vestigially among Afro-Peruvians.This suggests an accurate representation of early Afro-Hispanic pronunciationin 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 separatephoneme in most of the Andean highlands, including Cuzco and Puno. Thephoneme /λ/ is retained in all of Bolivia. Along the Peruvian coast, /λ/ hasmerged with /y/, a change that began in the sixteenth century. Texts from theseventeenth-century Peruvian writer Juan del Valle Caviedes are often citedas among the first indications of yeısmo in either Spain or Latin America,4

suggesting that Lima may have been in the vanguard in the loss of /λ/. TheAfro-Peruvian texts are of particular importance, since most other bozal textscome from regions where yeısmo already affected the surrounding Spanishdialects.

In the early Afro-Peruvian texts, lateralization of /r/ to [l] occurs in two con-texts not found in any former or contemporary dialect of Spanish, but which arefound in the majority of Afro-Iberian languages and dialects. The first is in pre-vocalic environments (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #18-2). The same textsshow lateralization of /r/ as the second member of obstruent+l iquidonset clusters (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #18-3).5

Among seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian texts, some lateralization ofsyllable-final /r/ is found. No Andean dialect of Spanish lateralizes syllable-final /r/; assibilation is the only commonly occurring modification of /r/. CoastalPeruvian dialects, even those in predominantly Afro-American areas, often elidefinal /r/, but lateralization of syllable-final /r/ is vanishingly rare.

1 Mendoza (1976:71–81), Escobar (1978:35–36). 2 Mendoza (1976, 1978).3 Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #17, also Cuba (1996).4 Alonso (1953:247–51), Guitarte (1971), Lapesa (1980:571), Rivarola (1990:54–55).5 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 someLeonese dialects, and occurs in early Peninsular Afro-Hispanic imitations.


Highland Spanish in Peru and elsewhere in the Andean zone is noted forthe extreme resistance of syllable-final /s/ to erosion, unlike Peruvian coastaldialects, which pattern with Caribbean and Andalusian varieties. In seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian bozal texts, the limitation of /s/-reduction to verb formsin -mos suggests more than just an unprincipled elimination of /s/ by Africanswhose native languages did not permit this consonant in syllable-final position(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #18-4); in such a situation, one would expecta more randomly distributed pattern of /s/-reduction, rather than the tightly con-strained category which actually occurs. The conclusion to be drawn is that inregional Spanish of the time (a strong component of which was derived fromAndalusia), word-final /s/ in the weak unstressed syllable of -mos was alreadyperceptually imprecise. Bozal speakers, acquiring Spanish under far from idealconditions, failed to perceive the weakened sound (probably an aspiration alter-nating 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 Perushifted from the highland mines and the settlements at Potosı and Cuzco to thecoastal areas centering on Lima. The documentation of Afro-Peruvian languageis not continuous; following the seventeenth-century texts, no bozal examplesare found until the very end of the eighteenth century, although indirect evi-dence of Afro-Hispanic speech for Lima and its environs appears earlier inthe eighteenth century. By the final decades of the colonial period, Africansworked throughout Lima, as domestic servants, in public works, as street ven-dors, as teamsters and laborers. Under these circumstances, Spanish speakerswould be in frequent contact not only with Africans and Afro-Americans, butalso with their speech patterns. For instance, street vendors or pregones devel-oped characteristic chants to sell their wares.6 Each vendor used some formof Africanized Spanish, ranging from rudimentary bozal speech to more fluentvarieties, but the fact that citizens could remember these chants decades after thevendors had disappeared is testimony to the deep-seated penetration of bozalspeech patterns (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #15). Indirect comments onthe speech, music and other behavior of Africans in nineteenth-century Perupermit some conclusions as to bozal language at this time.7

Beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century, a new group of bozal Peruviantexts emerges, representing a more evolved Afro-Hispanic language, concen-trated in coastal regions. The nineteenth-century Afro-Peruvian texts bear amuch closer resemblance to contemporary vernacular speech of the Peruviancoast, as well as to Afro-Hispanic dialects elsewhere in Latin America. The firstsurviving text from the second period of Afro-Peruvian documentation is actu-ally from a highland region, an anonymous entremes from 1797 (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Peru #7). The “Entremes del Huamanguino entre un Huantino

6 Ayarza de Morales (1939). 7 Estenssoro Fuchs (1988).


y una Negra para la Navidad en el Monasterio del Carmen de Huamanga, anode 1797” was signed by “una R. R. Madre del Monasterio de Santa Teresa parasu representacion en la Navidad del ano 1797.” If this attribution is correct,then at least some Peruvian nuns were engaged in literary pastimes similar tothose of Sor Juana, in another American colony, a century earlier. Unfortu-nately, nothing is known about the author of this work, or the circumstancesof its composition. The Quechua of the Huamanguino is accurate, as is theintercalation of Spanish and Quechua segments in the speech of the indigenouscharacters. Neither the indigenous characters nor the Negra are portrayed flat-teringly, but neither does the play contain the crude stereotyping and puns ofthe Golden Age habla de negros. The linguistic characteristics of bozal speechare all found in independently verified specimens of Afro-Hispanic speech, andthe black woman’s use of occasional Quechua elements is consistent with theliving patterns of black servants and slaves in highland areas. In the balance,this text provides an important insight into a period of Afro-colonial historythat is scarcely represented by other documentation.

The other highland Afro-Peruvian language fragment comes from the“Entremes para la Navidad que se ha de representar en el Monasterio delCarmen, siendo recreacionera la senora Sor Manuela Galvez” (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Peru #8). This play was written in 1828 in Ayacucho, and islinguistically very similar to the play from Huamanga. Despite the apparentattribution of authorship, this text is essentially as anonymous as its predeces-sor, since nothing is known about “Sor Manuela Galvez.”8 In this entremes,the black character speaks much more Quechua, but a broken Quechua thatcan be reconstructed by contemporary speakers only with some difficulty. Thelanguage, although not as highly deformed as in the Huamanga text, is consis-tent with other reproductions of Afro-Hispanic pidgin, which lends credenceto the author’s depiction of the black servant’s broken Quechua. The authors ofboth plays were evidently Quechua-Spanish bilinguals, who found Africans’limited proficiency in either language amusing and worthy of inclusion in theirliterary texts. Presumably, these two surviving plays are merely part of whatwas once a much more widespread literary production, more of which maycome to light one day. In these texts, the black characters shift into Quechua,thus constituting the only known Afro-Hispanic texts which document whatmust have been a much more widespread phenomenon, the use of indigenouslanguages 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 wasFelipe Pardo y Aliaga, a satirical writer who also imitated the speech of indige-nous Peruvians. Pardo did not portray Africans in a favorable light, but his

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


purported imitation of Peruvian bozal Spanish of the late eighteenth and earlynineteenth centuries is completely consistent with independently verified Afro-Hispanic texts from other regions. Any exaggeration or distortion is probablyin the area of lexicon and plot, rather than syntactic and phonological structure.Pardo employed bozal language in several texts, including the skit “Frutos dela educacion” of 1829, and some humorous poems (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Peru #9, #11). Pardo was born in Lima in 1806, of a Galician father anda Peruvian mother. Shortly after his birth his family moved to Cuzco, whereFelipe spent the first years of his life. In 1815 the family temporarily returned toLima, and in 1821, after San Martın’s declaration of independence, the Pardofamily traveled to Madrid. Felipe Pardo y Aliaga continued his education inSpain until his return to Peru in 1828. The young Pardo was variously a teacherand a lawyer, and began his literary activities immediately upon arriving inLima. He was editor or publisher of several important newspapers, the mostfamous of which is the Mercurio Peruano. Throughout his career, Pardo wasa keen observer of social and political life in Lima, and his satirical remarksrarely missed their target. His satirical writings reached their culmination inEl espejo de mi tierra, a collection of local-color articles which first came outin 1840. The Afro-Hispanic language of the poem “Mi amo seno Benarito,”as well as other satirical pieces in El espejo de mi tierra prompted the acerbicreply 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 woulduse bozal language in print.

Pardo was clearly in the right place at the right time to observe the finalhalf-century or so of Peruvian bozal language, as well as the possibly nativizedAfro-Peruvian language which persists vestigially even today. Moreover, theitinerant steeet vendors typified by “El tamalero” were usually blacks, andfollowing the abolition of slavery often were free bozales who could find nobetter work opportunities. The Diccionario de peruanismos of Juan de Arona(1883:469) defines tamalero as “el vendedor ambulante (generalmente un negrobozal 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 toridicule the African characters in question (a servant in Frutos de la educacionand a street vendor in “El tamalero”), but merely to add realism to the cross-sections of Peruvian life that had become his stock in trade.

The longest single running text of Afro-Peruvian bozal language comes in thepoem “La libertad,” by Manuel Atanasio Fuentes (born 1820), evidently writ-ten 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 Monguio (1973:423).


aspirations of blacks freed by abolition and the wars of colonial independence:Yo quiele se diputa . . . lo blanco a tira calesa . . . neglo sera presilente, and simi-lar lines, reveal the author’s scorn. Born in Lima of upper-middle-class parents,Fuentes was for a time the protege of important politicians. Throughout, he wasinvolved in polemical and satirical wars of words with other writers. Fuentes’portrayals of black Peruvians’ speech in “La libertad” is far from flattering, andthe prevalence of the shift /r/ > [l] combined with relatively standard gram-mar arouses the suspicion of a crude literary stereotype. However, the poemdoes contain some elements that coincide with Afro-Hispanic texts from otherregions (e.g. the invariant copula so, corresponding to the use of invariant sonin 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 righttime to have observed authentic Afro-Peruvian speech, the last generation ofbozales who still worked as street vendors and servants, and his racist parodycannot be dismissed out of hand as linguistically irrelevant.

Another work providing fragments of Afro-Peruvian speech, El gran doc-tor Copaiba: protomedico de la Lima jaranera, by Eudocio Carrera Vergara(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #13), was apparently written in the earlyyears of the twentieth century, although it was not published until 1943. Theauthor was from Ica, a region of heavy Afro-Peruvian presence, and the hometo some of the last twentieth-century vestiges of Afro-Peruvian language. Hisliterary activities were concentrated in Lima, but the solitary example of Afro-Peruvian language in El gran doctor Copaiba occurs in a scene set in Canete,another region of heavy black population. The brief bozal passage in El grandoctor Copaiba is not proferred by a bozal speaker, since presumably at thetime 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 lan-guage, including reduction of onset clusters (negrito > neguito), flapping ofintervocalic /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 thispassage is consistent with other two- and three-sentence fragments of Afro-Hispanic language which have been collected in Ica and other Peruvian regionswith a significant rural black population. The text gives ample evidence of theauthor’s intimate knowledge of the folklore and customs of Ica and Canete, andit is likely that this bozal morsel is more than a mere literary invention.

Another brief glimpse into what might have been Afro-Peruvian bozal lan-guage in the nineteenth century comes in the neo-realist novel Matalache, byEnrique Lopez Albujar (1872–1969). Lopez Albujar was born in the coastalPeruvian city of Chiclayo, and from 1873 until 1886 he lived in Piura, a city towhich he would continue to return, and which forms the setting for Matalache.


The novel is set in the early nineteenth century, beginning in 1816, when aslave-fed plantation society still prevailed in Piura and other coastal areas ofPeru. The title comes from the nickname given to Jose Manuel, a mulatto slavethat Lopez Albujar (himself a mulatto) partially modeled after himself. Like somany other literary works dealing with Afro-Hispanic populations, Matalachedeals with illicit cross-racial intimacy during the most strictly enforced racialseparation of the slaving period. Perhaps because of his own racial background,Lopez Albujar does not treat this theme as luridly as in the writings of manyother Latin American authors; instead, he seeks to make Matalache an extensionof his entire literary production, designed to portray all aspects of the Peruvianpopulation.

Although Afro-Peruvian speech does not figure prominently in this novel,several key characters are made to speak in fashions differing from the neutrallanguage of the narration and of the white characters. Jose Manuel himselfspeaks a vernacular coastal Spanish, replete with lost consonants and contrac-tions. This is not “Afro-Peruvian” language except inasmuch as it representsthe most colloquial speech of the lower classes on the coast, among whichAfro-Americans are disproportionately represented. A bozal slave (a “congo”),speaks with definitive Afro-Hispanic pidgin traits (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #14). In other works, Lopez Albujar proved to be an accurate and carefulobserver of indigenous-influenced highland Spanish, and given his personalbackground, the reader will not suspect him of overt racism and facile stereo-typing in his historical portrayal of the Peruvian bozal population.

The history of African slavery in Peru did not experience the sudden infusionof African-born laborers at the end of the eighteenth century, such as happened inthe Caribbean as a result of the sugar plantation boom. By the first decades of thenineteenth century, African-born bozal Peruvians were increasingly scarce. Insome isolated cases, Africans, free and slave, retained some aspects of bozal lan-guage beyond the first generation, but approximation to local Spanish dialectswas increasingly close. Given the high density of native Spanish speakers ascompared to the small number of bozales, the latter had more opportunitiesfor acquiring typical Spanish phonological patterns. Africans in Lima absorbedlinguistic features of the lowest working classes, some of whom worked in thesame professions, while Africans working as domestic servants often acquiredan incongruous overlay of aristocratic expressions and mannerisms, giving riseto the habla palangana,10 the Peruvian equivalent to the Cuban stereotype ofthe negro catedratico. Acquisition of Spanish grammatical structures, in par-ticular morphological agreement and syntactic patterns involving prepositions,articles, and relative pronouns, lagged behind pronunciation in the developmentof bozal language. Afro-Peruvian language of the nineteenth century contains

10 Romero (1987:159–60).


frequent grammatical distortion, but even the order of major syntactic con-stituents and overall complexity of sentences is closer to Spanish than in theseventeenth-century examples, with truncated sentences and limited syntacticcomplexity.

The Afro-Bolivian corpus

The African population rapidly dwindled in modern Bolivia (known in colonialtimes as Alto Peru), although an identifiable Afro-American population stillremains in the Yungas to the east of La Paz.11 It is difficult to distinguish thoseearly colonial Afro-Hispanic texts from Bolivia and those from the remainderof Peru. Only two anonymous seventeenth-century songs, both written in thePeninsular habla de negros, can be traced to Bolivia. One is the bozal song “Esanoche yo baila” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #4). Yet another anonymoustext from Alto Peru, apparently written in the late seventeenth or early eighteenthcentury, 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 isthe most likely source for these “Bolivian” documents. Following these earlyexamples, which suggest no independent Afro-Hispanic language in Bolivia,but rather the literary imitation of established Peninsular stereotypes, the Afro-Bolivian corpus is nonexistent until the beginning of the twentieth century, whena few stories representing the late nineteenth century uncritically attribute toblack Bolivians a language which contains some bozal characteristics (ChapterFive Appendix Afro-Bolivia #1). Most of the features represent the speech of theBolivian lowlands or llanos, including aspiration/loss of final /s/ and diminutivesin -ingo, but a few cases of intervocalic /r/ > [l] as well as the extent of phoneticerosion may reflect a legitimate Africanized Spanish, perhaps spoken nativelyby descendants of slaves in isolated Bolivian villages.

The contemporary Afro-Bolivian population has intermarried with theAymaras, most speak Aymara as well as Spanish, and identify themselves asmore Aymara than black. The preceding examples contain legitimate easternBolivian regional characteristics. Within the central Yungas valleys, however,reduction of /s/ is not a normal concomitant; in fact this region shares withthe Bolivian Altiplano a very resistant syllable-final /s/. Among the remainingfeatures of the Afro-Bolivian texts, few are typical of Aymara interference,which is usually characterized by reduction of the Spanish 5-vowel systemto three vowels, a tendency towards OV word order, pleonastic or non-agreeingdirect object lo in combination with inanimate object noun phrases, and awide gamut of lapses in subject-verb and noun-adjective agreement. This is

11 Leons (1984a, 1984b).


exemplified in a Bolivian story (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Bolivia #2), whoseblack character speaks “en su castellano peculiar y tonadeante que posee estaraza de color” (Pizarroso 1977:111), but which is in reality an Aymara-basedinterlanguage. Despite these examples, Spedding (1995:324) asserts that Afro-Bolivians “speak a dialect of local Spanish with an acent and styles of expressiondifferent from those used by Aymara-Spanish bilingual speakers,” while the lan-guage of the Afro-Bolivian community of Chicaloma is described as “. . . elaymara y el castellano con ciertas variantes fonologicas.”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 inBolivia, while the shift /r/ > [l] in onset clusters and the change of intervocalic/d/ to [l] are exclusively Afro-Hispanic phenomena, documented since the earlyseventeenth century. It would appear that some form of Africanized Spanishcharacterized by these phonetic traits may have at the very least persisted inisolated 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, begin-ning with the superb study of Aguirre Beltran (1972; first edn. 1946), and schol-ars continue to delve into this little-known dimension of Mexican history. Inthe linguistic realm, however, there has been surprisingly little work done onwhat was once a rich mosaic of Afro-Hispanic contact phenomena. In fact, withone exception, the only “Afro-Mexican” linguistic studies have focused on con-temporary manifestations of Afro-mestizo culture in Mexico: Aguirre Beltran’s(1958) ethnographic study of the Afro-mestizo town of Cuajicuinalapa makesbrief mention of vestigial Afro-Hispanic language; Althoff (1994) describesthe contemporary speech of this area, in which nearly all the most un-Spanishtraits have disappeared, but in which the suprasegmental characteristics stillsound remarkably like vernacular Caribbean Spanish, with a strong Africanbackground.13 One of the early Afro-Mexican texts discussed by Megenney(1985b) contains clearly Portuguese elements (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #1). The reference to Sao Tome is relevant, since the Portuguese slavingstation on that island reached its peak around 1640, and slaves who had beenheld on that island would be expected to speak a Portuguese-based pidgin or

12 Gobierno Municipal de la Paz (1993:6).13 Aparicio Prudente et al. (1993) provide a glossary of Costa Chica Afro-mestizo lexical items.

Afro-mestizo musicology and culture is also described by Gutierrez Avila (1988) and PerezFernandez (1990). The language of earlier generations of Africans is covered only in the ground-breaking work of Megenney (1985b), which brings to light several previously unknown Afro-Mexican texts. Zimmermann (1993, 1995) provides additional commentary on Afro-Mexicantexts. Mendoza (1956) contains other unanalyzed Afro-Mexican texts.


creole, possibly even as a native language. The remaining bozal texts fromcolonial Mexico are indisputably Spanish.

The principal Afro-Mexican bozal texts are all anonymous songs, whose timeand place of composition can only be approximately determined. One is a song,apparently from Puebla, which once had the second-largest black population ofMexico, after Mexico City (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #2). There isno date of composition for this song, but the language is both modern and devoidof the most non-Spanish bozal characteristics. Most verbs are nearly or totallyconjugated in accordance with normal Spanish usage. Noteworthy above all isthe loss of word-final /s/ and /r/, typical of coastal Caribbean pronunciation aswell 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 fromMorelia, Michoacan, where blacks once worked in mining and domestic servi-tude. There is no date for this text, but the language is identical with that ofseventeenth-century Spanish Peninsular habla de negros, with the addition of afew possibly Portuguese items (home < homem for hombre, quere < quer forquiere, etc.). It is possible that blacks in early colonial Mexico once spoke inthis fashion (Sor Juana’s villancicos, if accurate, would point in this direction),but given the formulaic repetition of elements found in Golden Age literaryparodies, the text is suspect.

Coastal Oaxaca state in Mexico still contains the last remnants of the Afro-mestizo population, and one surviving text purportedly from Oaxaca containsphonetic deformations typical of the rural coastal speech which exists even todayalong the coasts of Oaxaca and Guerrero (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico#4). As with the song from Puebla, this text is probably a reasonable approx-imation to Afro-Mexican speech sometime during the eighteenth century.Most of the modifications are phonetic and consistent with prevailing tendenciesin this region.

The remaining Afro-Mexican bozal texts consist of Baroque villancicos,following Peninsular patterns, and which represent at best a highly exagger-ated version of the Spanish pidgin spoken by bozales in seventeenth-centuryMexico (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #5). The pronunciation Zuzefor Jose in (#5) suggests a Portuguese influence, as does the mention of theAfro-Brazilian musical instrument birimbao (berimbau). Thus this text maynot 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 iscast in the Peninsular habla de negros mold, and contains no elements sugges-tive of a developing Afro-Mexican language. From 1653 comes the song “Asiolo Flasiquiyo” by Juan Gutierrez de Padilla (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #7); as with the other seventeenth-century “Afro-Mexican” texts, the


verses typify the Peninsular stereotypes.14 Although following in the estab-lished Golden Age pattern, these texts contain demonstrably Afro-Hispanicelements, such as magre < madre, pagre < padre also found in Palenquero, aswell as in some vernacular varieties of Spanish. From the seventeenth centurycome some anonymous songs (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #10). Byfar the most extensive “Afro-Mexican” songs are the villancicos of Sor JuanaInes 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 typi-cal of Afro-Hispanic language elsewhere, albeit not surviving to the present inany non-creole dialect of Spanish. The first involves the frequent shift of inter-vocalic /d/ to [r] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-1), conversion ofprevocalic /r/ to /l/) (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-2), and in onsetclusters (e.g. negro > neglo) (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-3).Among phonetic modifications which are still to be found among Spanishdialects, albeit not in highland Mexico, early Afro-Mexican texts demonstratelateralization of syllable-final /r/ > [l] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico#15-4). Erosion of final /r/ is commonplace, not only in infinitives but also inwords ending in – or (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-5). Among thefirst Afro-Mexican texts, loss of /s/ was primarily found in the verbal desinence/-mos/, following the patterns established in Golden Age Spain and found incontemporaneous bozal texts from Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Mexico #15-6). A few of the Afro-Mexican texts from laterperiods reflect a more systematic loss of final /s/, in which the original mor-phological conditioning is disappearing. For example, from Puebla comes lamujere; from the Costa Chica de Oaxaca come adio, vite, pue, que baila este son,langohta, mihtequito, Dio, eta, cota. The texts in question are apparently fromthe eighteenth century, and contain other examples of a more Caribbean/coastalpronunciation, including loss of final /r/ and occasional elision of /d/. Althoughtoday 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, Pueblais noted for its strong retention of /s/ and /r/ in all positions. Finally, a fewearly Afro-Mexican texts show paragogic vowels instead of final consonantloss (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico #15-7), following trends found inother seventeenth- to eighteenth-century bozal examples.

A couple of more modern texts also present vestigial or remembered Afro-Mexican speech. A son jarocho from Veracruz state (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Mexico #12) is primarily in standard Spanish, except for the eliminationof final /r/ in verbal infinitives. However, in the first line, “Jesus Marı queme espanta,” the unconjugated infinitive is clearly a bozal carryover. Most

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


modern imitations of Afro-Mexicans simply make use of phonetic traits such asaspiration of syllable-final /s/ and loss of word-final /r/, for example in a coupleof stories from Colima, on the Pacific coast of Mexico (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Mexico #13). Much more significant as a linguistic and cultural documentis the Guaranducha of Juan de la Cabada (1980), a musical drama meant to bea comparsa from the Campeche carnival (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Mexico#11). Most of the characters are black, and they alternate between regionalcoastal Spanish (with much loss of /s/, /r/, and /d/), “African” speech (includingsome elements recognizably Yoruba or pertaining to other Afro-Cuban rituals),and bozal Spanish. Little is known about this work, which depicts Afro-Mexicancarnivals which survived until the first decades of the twentieth century. Theauthor declares that the work is based on his memory of comparsas which hewitnessed during his childhood: “Para entonces, en la ciudad de Campeche, losparticipantes no eran negros. Vecinos de los barrios de Santana, San Roman,San Francisco, Santa Lucıa, se pintaban para figurar serlo algun mulato, uno queotro cuarteron, 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 senora, de tanto que yo te ama . . .¿Que yo lo tene econdıo, Candemo?¿Y a’onde nanganda tu?

(2) Use of unconjugated infinitives with auxiliary verbs, similar to creolepart icle+verb constructions:

no me siga’ mole’ta.(3) Reduction of onset clusters:

recorda que yo te comp’a tu sombreritoTu querıa un neguito

(4) Use of infinitive with explicit preverbal subject, a combination virtuallynonexistent in Mexican Spanish:

ahora vera pinon de la mata pa yo cura . . .(5) Use of the portmanteau article/determiner nan. This element was sometimes

included as a prefix to nouns and verbs, possibly suggesting prenasalizedconsonants; it dœs not appear to be related to the portmanteau item lan/nanfound in Golden Age and some nineteenth-century Caribbean bozal texts:16

preguntando po’ la casa ’e nan Figueremo.

Pue’ nanaita, seno’ jue’, que ya nananse tre’ dıa se salı’ nanchiquitın de nancasa.

Ese mero nandi-querıa yo decı’, seno.

Bueno’ dıa’ nanpapaıto.

Bueno’ dıa’, nanchiquitın. ¿Y a’onde nanganda tu?

Nanpasiando.

15 De la Cabada (1980:9). 16 Lipski (1987c, 1992b).


(6) Use of voseo verbs ending in dithongs -ai and -ei. These forms were foundby Aguirre Beltran (1958) for the Afro-Mexican village of Cuijla, althoughthey have since disappeared:17 Ora recordai que tenei padre.

Although the bozal population has long since disappeared from Mexico, theisolated Afro-mestizo communities of the Costa Chica of Guerrero and Oaxacaand the existence of former maroon villages such as Yanga and its environs arereceptacles of language which differs subtly but noticeably from the remain-der of Mexican Spanish dialects. The existence of plays and carnival songsfrom less than a century ago in which unmistakably Afro-Hispanic languageappears unglossed suggests that the trail may not be entirely cold, and it is notinconceivable 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 BuenosAires and Montevideo from the middle of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. A few Afro-Porteno (Afro-Rioplatense) texts give an ideaof what native-born Afro-Hispanic language may have sounded like in the latenineteenth-century Rıo de la Plata zone.18 Many of these texts are humorous oreven derisive, and must be utilized with the same caution which applies to anymaterials claiming to represent the speech of socially marginalized groups.19

The earliest known bozal texts from the Rıo de la Plata come from the firstdecades of the nineteenth century, which, extrapolating backwards, can be takento represent Afro-Rioplatense speech of the final decades of the eighteenth cen-tury. In view of the demographics of the African population in the Rıo de la Plata,it is doubtful that a coherent bozal Spanish was found in Montevideo or BuenosAires much before the second half of the eighteenth century, although individ-ual African slaves would speak a rudimentary approximation to Spanish whenfirst learning this language. By the end of the eighteenth century, Afro-Hispanicspeech in the Rıo de la Plata was more than a minimal pidgin, and appears tohave had some consistent traits which were recognized by native Spanish speak-ers and used in literary representations of bozal speech. Afro-Porteno texts recurthroughout the nineteenth century and continue into the first decades of the twen-tieth 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 Althoff (1994). 18 Lipski(2001c).19 Despite the large Afro-Porteno corpus, and the importance of this area for Afro-Hispanic studies,

prior to the insightful study of Fontanella de Weinberg (1987b), the Afro-Rioplatense bibliog-raphy consisted only of speculative lexical lists of putative Africanisms (e.g. Pereda Valdes1965:181–86), together with a handful of amateurish surveys (e.g. Carambula 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 questionableauthenticity.


a few true bozales remained in the Rıo de la Plata, but given de facto social andcultural segregation of the black population in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, itis conceivable that second-generation Afro-Americans in these cities exhibitedspeech patterns that did not entirely coincide with those of white criollos.

Afro-Hispanic language in the Rıo de la Plata exhibits several phonologi-cal traits not found in any contemporary variety of Argentine or UruguayanSpanish, but which are typical of bozal texts from other Latin American areas(e.g. Peru, Mexico, the Caribbean), from Golden Age Spain, and from existentAfro-Iberian pidgins and creoles. These include conversion of prevocalic /d/ to[r] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-1), shift of word-initial andintervocalic /r/ to [l] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-2), and intwo-element syllable-initial consonant clusters (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-3), lateralization of syllable-final /r/ (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Rioplatense #16-4). There is some textual evidence that interchange ofsyllable-final /l/ and /r/ may once have been more common in the Rıo de la Platain the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,20 but the examples adduced as evi-dence are common in nonstandard Spanish worldwide, and may be archaisms,the results of dissimilation, or non-Castilian survivals. A number of such wordsappear, for example, in Martın Fierro, the quintessential representation ofrustic Argentine speech. In none of the non-African texts does a categorical/r/ > [l] shift appear; liquids interchange almost randomly and quite often rep-resent the change /l/ > [r]. Examples of syllable-final liquid neutralization inAfro-Rioplatense bozal texts invariably favor /r/ > [l], the same as found inother positions, reinforcing the consistency of the literary representations andthe likelihood that a high degree of phonetic accuracy is involved.

Also found in Afro-Rioplatense bozal texts is the loss of word-final /r/, espe-cially in verbal infinitives and in forms ending in – or (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Rioplatense #16-5). Afro-Rioplatense texts show widespread loss of final/-s/, particularly in the verbal desinence /-mos/, where loss of /s/ in Afro-Hispanic texts was common since the latter decades of the sixteenth centuryin Spain and Latin America (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-6).In Afro-Rioplatense, elision of /s/ is also found when -/s/ signals nominal oradjectival plural, and much less frequently in word-internal preconsonantalposition. None of the cases of loss of final /s/ would be out of place in contem-porary vernacular Rıo de la Plata speech, but two centuries ago it is likely thatfinal /s/ received a stronger articulation in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Com-plete loss of preconsonantal /s/ is rare today even at the vernacular level, andwas certainly not typical of received Rıo de la Plata speech of the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries. Afro-Rioplatense bozal texts, while reducing /s/ inthe same environments where /s/-reduction occurs in popular Rıo de la Plata

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


speech, carried the reduction to far greater extremes than the pronunciation ofany known dialect of Spanish in Argentina or Uruguay.

Afro-Rioplatense bozal imitations show a few instances of paragogic vow-els (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Rioplatense #16-7). The items shicoba andseclava, embodying metathesis, are almost identical to the form taken by thecognate Portuguese words in Kikongo. Since the Congo nacion was the largestand most organized in nineteenth-century Buenos Aires and Montevideo, theproposed legitimacy of Afro-Rioplatense bozal texts as linguistic reflectionsof 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 whenfinal /s/ follows a stressed vowel, which suggests a differential interpretationof Spanish /s/ by Africans, depending upon the prosodic structure of the word.The Afro-Rioplatense data permit the inference that /s/-weakening was alreadywell underway in the Rıo de la Plata area by the end of the eighteenth century,but affected principally preconsonantal /s/.

Linguistic transculturation of Africans in the Rıo de la Plata was rapid, with“Africanized” registers of Spanish not surviving beyond the first generation ofAmerican-born blacks. As a consequence, the proportion of Afro-Hispanicsin Buenos Aires or Montevideo who spoke any type of bozal Spanish wouldbe quite limited at any given time period. Judging both by the data on theslave trade and on written attestations of Afro-Rioplatense language, the bozal-speaking population reached its peak at the turn of the nineteenth century, withthe last large importation of slaves coming directly from Africa, or via Brazil. Inearlier centuries, African-born slaves must have spoken bozal Spanish, but theirnumbers were small enough and acquisition of Spanish was rapid enough as topreclude any literary representation. The last wave of African slaves, comingat a time when literary representation of vernacular language was very intense,gave rise to a fleeting moment of bozal language immortalized by observers ofthe time. Several factors combined to thrust the language of these newly arrivedAfricans into a position of prominence transcending the demographic strengthof the African-born population. One was the frequent employment of Africansas pregones or street vendors, shouting their services and bringing their versionof the Spanish language from house to house.22 Another was the important roleplayed by black soldiers in the wars of independence and in the internecinewars 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 aspectsof Afro-Rioplatense bozal speech, which at this time was not demographicallypredominant in any region of the Rıo de la Plata.

21 Lanuza (1967), Pereda Valdes (1965), Rodrıguez Molas 1957, 1961).22 E.g. Carambula (1952a, 1952b).


Afro-Rioplatense bozal speech began its decline even before the Afro-American population of Montevideo and Buenos Aires started on the roadto ethnic oblivion. The “window of opportunity” for observation of bozal lan-guage is the turn of the nineteenth century, although the black population of theRıo de la Plata continued to be a significant demographic and political forcethrough the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, bozal lan-guage and Afro-Hispanic cultural patterns have faded from memory, and eventhe last cultural remnants no longer bring before the public the sociolinguisticreality of a century and a half ago. The Buenos Aires Carnival is no more, andthe “African” comparsas of the Montevideo Carnival have more white thanblack participants.23 Citizens of Argentina and Uruguay are often unaware ofan earlier Afro-Hispanic linguistic and cultural presence in their nations, andfew would link features of contemporary Rıo de la Plata Spanish and any typeof African speech. That Afro-Hispanic language was once prominently, if notfrequently, heard in Buenos Aires and Montevideo has been obscured by polit-ical and demographic events that have profoundly changed the character of Rıode la Plata society and language.

The Afro-Cuban bozal corpus

By far the greatest number of Afro-Hispanic bozal representations come fromnineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba. The literary outpouring of Cubancostumbrista literature, together with travel narratives, anthropological works,popular songs, and even a few religious texts, placed the speech of Cuban boza-les in a prominent position. Brief fragments of Afro-Cuban language occasion-ally appeared in stories, newspaper articles, and travelers’ descriptions.24 Arepresentative selection of these texts is found in the appendix; several of themost important texts will be analyzed in this chapter. The accuracy of manyof the texts is questionable, but the common denominators are also many, andgiven the high degree of consistency among the texts, as well as the possibilityof verifying some of the linguistic traits in vestigial Afro-Hispanic language ofthe twentieth century, it appears that at least some Cuban authors gave a rea-sonable approximation to bozal language. The first known explicit reference toCuban bozal Spanish comes in one of the most curious linguistic documents ofall times, the Explicacion de la doctrina christiana acomodada a la capacidadde los negros bozales, written by Nicolas Duque de Estrada and published in

23 Ayestaran (1990).24 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 (Bonafoux1990:390). While not clearly pertaining to bozal language rather than to phonetically reducedvernacular 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.


1797, with a second edition published in 1818, and a third (upon which nearly allsubsequent 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 tomost Cubans of the time – including the clergy – he felt that bozal Africans werenot only in urgent need of Christian redemption, but were mentally and morallyfit to receive catechism. The premise of his pamphlet was that any priest couldteach the Catholic catechism to the rudest bozal, if only the language and stylewere simplified, and the arcane metaphors and allegories of the Bible replacedby commonplace situations found in the Cuban ingenios. Much of the text ineffect constitutes a training manual for Cuban priests: instructions on the propermethod of imparting Christian doctrine to African slaves are interspersed withsample sermons and explanations. By today’s standards, Duque de Estrada wasa racist who adopted a condescending and paternalistic stance toward Africans,and who was cruelly indifferent to the onerous labor performed by blacks onCuban sugar estates, and indeed tacitly accepted slavery itself. Castellanos andCastellanos (1988:101) note that the book “refleja una insensibilidad aterradorahacia los derechos mas elementales de los esclavos. Jesucristo . . . es un mayoralbueno . . . la obligacion del siervo, si quiere salvarse, es trabajar intensamentepara 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 mostsubtle forms of religious instruction, and deserved such training.

It is not clear how carefully Duque had observed bozal speech as used byblacks in Cuba. The author describes bozal speech as “aquel lenguaje de q. usanellos sin casos, sin tpos., sin conjunciones, sin concordancias, sin orden . . .”25

This general characterization is similar to later accounts by Pichardo, Bachillery Morales, and other observers of Afro-Cuban speech (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #65). The Doctrina contains only a single purported example ofbozal language as used by Cuban blacks: “pa nuetro ta seno cielo.”26 Thephonetic deformations are consistent with Afro-Hispanic pidgin of other areas,but when Duque de Estrada offered examples of sermons which might be offeredto Cuban bozales in a contrived version of their own speech patterns, there areno phonetic modifications, only the most general grammatical reductions (useof third person singular as invariant verb stem, loss of articles, and very simplephrase structure), e.g.: “yo soi un pobre esclavo, yo tiene dos gallinas no mas,gente tiene suelto su cochino, cochino come mi gallina. Yo ya no tiene con quecomprar tabaco ni nada . . . yo va andando en cueros?”27 In the balance, theDuque de Estrada text is more important for the elements which are lacking,rather than for the presence of definitive bozal characteristics. A careful perusalof the Doctrina reveals no hint – direct or indirect – that anything remotelyresembling a stable creole was used by Cuban blacks as of the end of theeighteenth century.

25 Lavina (1989:67). 26 Ibid. (75). 27 Ibid. (119).


One of the earliest surviving bozal texts from Cuba is an anonymouseighteenth-century canto de cabildo (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #1). Inaddition to exhibiting many vernacular Cuban phonetic traits, including gem-ination of obstruents following the reduction of syllable-final liquids, this textgives the first hint of what was to be a commonly recurring feature of Cubanbozal Spanish, the use of so(n) as an uninflected copula. In this example, nocreoloid features appear.

Evidently written in Havana around the turn of the nineteenth century,28 dur-ing the Napoleonic period, comes the mysterious document “Proclama que enun cabildo de negros congos de la ciudad de La Habana pronuncio su presidente,Rey Monfundi Siliman” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #2). For AlvarezNazario (1974:137), this document is the oldest specimen of Afro-AntilleanSpanish, 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 transla-tion in Spanish in a parallel column, casts some doubt on the authenticity ofthe examples, or at the very least of the authorship, since the text appears tohave been written by a white native speaker of Spanish, rather than by a trueCongo, whether bozal or ladino. The language of the text bears a striking resem-blance to the pseudo-bozal writings of Creto Ganga (Jose Crespo y Borbon) afew decades later, although the humorous and self-mocking tone is absent. Inthe “Proclama” the supposed author exhorts other Afro-Cubans to join in thedefense 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 theword-play or outrageous distortion of elements found in other putative bozalexamples, and which often represent white speakers’ crude parodies of second-language Spanish. Among the authentic elements of the “Proclama” that canbe verified with other authenticated specimens of Afro-Hispanic language arethe following:

(1) Intrusive nasalization. This occasionally takes place word-internally(mingo < amigo, unte < usted, traindo < traidor), but more often signals theprenasalization of word-initial obstruents, a process common in many Afro-Hispanic idiolects for several centuries: graciandio < gracias a Dios, ingrita< gritar, ancanta < cantar, anbaila < bailar, lan grecia < la(s) iglesia(s),lan pare < lo(s) padre(s), lan Vrige < la Virgen, lan dinela < el dinero, lancrabo < el esclavo, endice < dice, and others.

(2) Use of the bare infinitive as invariant verb form instead of conjugatedverbs: venı [venimos, hemos venido], ingrita [gritaba(n)], currı [corrıa], sabı[saben], mata [matan/han matado] etc. The bare infinitive was one of the mani-festations of the Afro-Hispanic verb, together with the invariant third personsingular 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.


(3) Use of other inappropriately conjugated verb forms or innovativecreations: viti [han visto], me vita [he visto], tingue [tiene], vite [han visto].These deformations are not commonly attested in other written imitations ofAfro-Hispanic language, but are frequent, for example, in the speech of thenegros congos of Panama.29

(4) Use of so(n) as invariant copula. This form has been attested in Afro-Cuban texts, and is also found in some Afro-Puerto Rican specimens, as wellas in Chinese pidgin Spanish examples from Cuba, the Spanish spoken bydescendants of black Americans in Samana, Dominican Republic, and veryoccasionally in Afro-Peruvian and Afro-Uruguayan texts):30 “. . . rice que sonsu mrece una larron.”

(5) Use of the pidgin English verb tifi-tifi “to rob” (< English thief ), an earlymanifestation of the presence of West African pidgin English (presumablybrought from the coast of Nigeria, by Yoruba-speaking lucumıes and Efik-, Ijo-and Igbo-speaking carabalıes), later documented by Ortiz (1916) for the earlytwentieth century. The presence of this item in the “Proclama” is particularlysignificant since the pamphlet was presumably written at the beginning of theperiod of intensive slave importation from Nigeria, and may suggest an evenearlier pidgin English presence in Cuba than has previously been acknowledged.

(6) Change of intervocalic /d/ to [r]: jurı [judıos], trairo [traidor], rise [dice],marita [malditos], Romingo [Domingo], etc.

(7) Shift /r/ and /rr/ > [l] in intervocalic position and in onset clusters: bolacha[borrachos], flance [franceses], bandela [bandera], palente [parientes], Flan-cico [Francisco], dinela [dinero], mila [mirar], picalo [pıcaro], belaco [berra-cos], and many others. That this was not a simple stereotype is reflected by themany remaining instances of [r] in the text, including dire, senore, Carabalı,pareci, quiere, and negro, the latter being the item most frequently stereotypedas neglo in literary texts far removed from actual speech. This change, well-documented for Golden Age bozal texts, is indicative of the Bantu influence,since this language family does not distinguish /l/ and /r/ and normally instan-tiates the sole liquid phoneme as [l], often alternating allophonically with [d].Later Afro-Cuban bozal texts do not as frequently exhibit this change, reflectingthe predominance of Kwa/Congue-Benue languages (e.g. Yoruba, Igbo, Efik)which routinely distinguish /l/ and /r/. The appearance of the /r/ > [l] shift ina document attributed to “Negros Congos” (i.e. speakers of Kikongo or relatedBantu languages) suggests an authentic rendering of this group’s phoneticapproximations to Spanish. The “Proclama” also contains several instancesof /l/ > [r] in onset clusters, a shift which harks back to early Afro-Portuguesetexts, and which indicates that neutralization of liquids in Afro-Iberian speech

29 Lipski (1989). 30 Lipski (1999c, 2002c).


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-personpronoun eye, widely found in Afro-Cuban texts and still used by some elderlyAfro-Cubans in isolated areas.31 At times eye is used as a disjunctive objectpronoun instead of the usual object clitics, similar to vernacular BrazilianPortuguese: para quita eye su tierra ‘to take their land away from them,’ da eyecopeta ‘give them muskets,’ da eye tambo ‘give them drums.’

(9) The text embodies the word jurumiga [hormigas], containing an other-wise unattested epenthetic vowel, also found in the word jurumingue of thenegros congos of Panama and in the Afro-Venezuelan dances tamunangue andjurumunga.32

(10) The “Proclama” offers several examples of metathesis involvingobstruent+l iquid combinations: froma [formado], mrece [merced],jrocao [ahorcado], proque [por que]. These are frequent in the rustic vernacu-lar Spanish that often provided the input for bozal language, but Afro-Iberianlanguage frequently extended methathesis even further, as evidenced by manyPapiamento words.

(11) There are instances of /b/ > [m], a change not unheard of in vernac-ular Spanish of other regions, but particularly characteristic of the interfacewith African languages which prefer initial prenasalized obstruents over sim-ple voiced stops: Manapate [Bonaparte], matisa [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 navıo [el navıo], la jento [lagente], la brancos [los blancos], caballere [caballeros], bolacha [borrachos], laflance [los franceses], la pano [los espanoles], una larron [un ladron], la belaco[el berraco], la Santa Romingo [el Santo Domingo], lan dinela [el dinero], yomima [yo mismo].

(14) The substitution of caballere for caballeros is attested in other Afro-Cuban texts, such as Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdes: gueve [huevos], dinere[dinero], bonite [bonito], jierre [hierros]. The same shift is found in the writ-ings 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 imi-tation of Haitians’ Spanish (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #1) alsocontains examples such as un cose [una cosa], while in the Dominican novelOver by Marrero Aristy (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #4), a Haitianrefers to la dominicane [los dominicanos] (although conceivably referring to

31 Ortiz Lopez (1998). 32 Lipski (1997).


la Dominicanie, “Dominican Republic” in Haitian Creole. the novel Jengibreby Pedro Andres Perez Cabral (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #8)contains items like papasite [papacito], attributed to Haitians, while the mock-ing poem “Rabiaca del haitiano que espanta mosquitos” by the DominicanRamon Suro (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #9) provides exam-ples like maldite moquite [malditos mosquitos]. Data collected by Ortiz Lopezamong contemporary Haitian L2 speakers of Spanish in the Dominican Repub-lic confirm that the neutralization of Spanish morphological markers -o and -ato -e does indeed occur, although not to the extent found in some literary imita-tions.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 prefaceto one of the first dictionaries of Cuban Spanish, the Diccionario provisionalcasi-razonado de vozes cubanas, by Esteban Pichardo. The first edition of theDiccionario was published in 1836, but the remarks in question do not appearuntil the second edition, of 1849. In speaking of Afro-Cuban language, Pichardoremarked: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 sucedıa con el Frances Criollode Santo Domingo: este lenguaje es comun e identico en los Negros, sean de la Nacionque fuesen, y que se conservan eternamente, a menos que hayan venido mui ninos:es un Castellano desfigurado, chapurrado, sin concordancia, numero, declinacion niconjugacion, sin R fuerte, S ni D final, frecuentemente trocadas la Ll por la N, la E porla I, la G por la V &; en fin, una jerga mas confusa mientras mas reciente la inmigracion;pero que se deja entender de cualquiera Espanol fuera de algunas palabras comunes atodos, que necesitan de traduccion. Para formarse una ligera idea de esto, vertiremos unarespuesta de las menos difıciles: “yo mi nama Frasico Mandinga, neglito reburujaoro,crabo musuamo no Mingue, de la Cribanerı, branco como carabon, suna como nangato, poco poco mira ote, cribi papele toro ri toro ri, Frasico dale dinele, non gurbiadinele, e laja cabesa, e bebe guariente, e coje la cuelo, guanta qui guanta” . . . los negroscriollos hablan como los blancos del paıs de su nacimiento o vecindad: aunque en laHabana y Matanzas algunos de los que se titulan Curros usan la i por la r y la l, v.g.“poique ei nino puee considerai que es mejoi dinero que papel” . . .

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

33 Ortiz Lopez (1999a, 1999b, 2001). 34 Pichardo (1849:iv–v).


both in Cuba and in other regions, so even Pichardo’s obvious scorn for bozalblacks and their speech did not impede him from including a reasonable lin-guistic facsimile.

An important if somewhat obscure literary text that attempts to portraynineteenth-century Cuban bozal Spanish is the “Exclamaciones de un negroen las fiestas efectuadas con motivo de la inauguracion del patrono de estepueblo San Marcos, el dıa 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 decimas (ten-lined poems meant to be sung) thatdescribed life on the hacienda San Marcos. Little is known about the life ofthis poet, most of whose verses have not been published, except that he was“un vate incorrecto, precario en concepciones y hasta poco original; pero deestro felicısimo y muy ingenioso, para poner en verso, a usanza de la epoca,el acaecimiento mas insigificante.”35 Manuel Cabrera apparently offered anaccurate description of the religious ceremonies which took place in Artemisaeach year, and given the large number of black slaves who worked on thenearby plantations, he had intimate knowledge of bozal speech. Although histext contains many comically grotesque modifications of standard Spanish, hiswriting is not the mindless parody of the negrito that so frequently appeared intexts produced by urban writers. The linguistic features of this text are consis-tent with other observations of bozal Spanish. There is considerable use of theinfinitive as invariant verb, alternating with the invariant third person singular.There is some use of the construction ta + Vinf, the most creoloid of all bozalfeatures and the one that links some Afro-Cuban texts to a wider Afro-Iberiancreole lineage. In Manuel Cabrera’s poem this construction alternates with theprogressive in -ndo, suggesting phonological erosion of the gerund rather thanthe infinitive as the source of the verbal stem combined with the particle ta.Other pan-bozal features include unstable non-adjective agreement, incorrectassignment of grammatical gender, pleonastic clitic lo, the invariant third per-son pronoun neye, omission of definite articles, redundant use of the subjectpronoun yo, use of invariant son as copula, and lack of any plural marking onnouns and adjectives.

A favorite butt of literary humor in nineteenth-century Cuba was the negrocatedratico, the presumptuous Afro-Cuban who wildly concocted erudite-sounding nonsense words, or used real Spanish words in grotesquely improb-able fashion. Catedraticos were not usually portrayed as bozales (althoughsome bozal characters used similar malapropisms), but were supposed to benative or near-native speakers of Spanish, whose flowery language resultedfrom a combination of insecurity and pomposity. That some such figures really

35 Guerra (1938:9).


existed is beyond doubt; in all language contact situations where a subordinategroup is struggling to attain social and economic legitimacy through educa-tion and self-realization, linguistic over-extension is a frequent concomitant.Among Afro-American societies in the Caribbean, the United States, and else-where, “fancy talking” is also a highly esteemed trait, and every community hasacknowledged experts, whose “performances” are marked by improvizationsbased on real or invented words used with the intent to verbally dazzle, ratherthan to communicate a specific message (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba#29, #47).

One of the most extensive – and most controversial – sources of nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban bozal language comes in the writings of Bartolome JoseCrespo y Borbon, who under the pseudonym Creto Ganga, wrote newspapercolumns and plays in a literary version of bozal language. Crespo y Borbonwas a Spaniard, who spent most of his adult life in Cuba and who fully assim-ilated Cuban culture and language. Jose Bartolome Crespo y Borbon was bornin Galicia in 1811. Twelve years later Crespo y Borbon moved with his fam-ily to Havana, where he was to spend the remainder of his life. By the endof the 1830s, he began writing satirical letters and poems in local newspa-pers. Although Crespo y Borbon was not yet using his self-assigned Africandesignation, there are several early attempts at using bozal language in thesepoems, which in comparison to his later writings, reveal him to have alreadylistened 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; inany case, his working-class life in Havana, as well as his tendency to associatewith progressive young writers and activists, virtually guaranteed that he wouldbe in contact with Cuban bozal language. As an outsider, whose own form ofSpanish was – and still is – the butt of jokes and bufo comedies in Cuba (in thestereotyped gallego figure), Crespo y Borbon would be naturally sensitive toquestions of language usage, and to the power inherent in accurate imitationsof particular social and cultural groups.

One of Crespo y Borbon’s pre-Creto Ganga writings, the Latigo del Anfibio,contains a dialogue between an aristocratic white woman and her black slave.The former speaks in meaningless vacuities, while the latter gives pithyresponses in bozal language (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #4). The samecollection contains the “Serenata del negro Pascual a Francisca,” set in a sugarmill, which is the first of many such “dialogues” which punctuate Creto Ganga’swritings (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #5). In 1846, after the famousescalera conspiracy in which hundreds of supposedly seditious blacks werekilled or deported, Crespo y Borbon published a series of decimas entitled“Laborintos y trifucas de Canava,” purporting to be “. . . veraero hitoria en vesode lo que pasa en la macara a yo Creto Ganga y nengrita mıo Frasica lucumı,


cuenta po yo memo”.36 This humorous writing was immediately picked up bythe newspaper La Prensa, and thus began a long-running series of newspaperpoems, articles, “reviews,” and commentaries by Creto Ganga. The literarybozal Ganga quickly acquired a newspaper rival, “Francisco Carabalı,” writ-ing in the Faro Industrial de la Habana. It appears that Crespo y Borbon wasalso the author behind Francisco Carabalı, although the two “Africans” at timesadopted somewhat different linguistic styles.

The newpspaer La Prensa, on April 11, 1849, stated that “El escritor que sefirma Creto Ganga es una verdadera especialidad en su genero, en ese dialectogracioso y oportuno para expresar cosas que de otro modo serıan duras de deciry mas duras aun de escucharse . . .”37 Calcagno, in his literary dictionary, notedthat “. . . bajo el seudonimo de Creto Ganga [Crespo y Borbon] comenzo unaserie de satiras en el lenguaje llamado bozal, y bien que el uso de esa gergasemibarbara le acarreo una cencerrada periodıstica, no puede negarse que pormedio de ella dijo verdades que solo con tal disfraz pudieron haber escapadoa la rıgida censura.”38 Although Crespo y Borbon showed no obvious hostilitytoward Cuban blacks, and in fact appears to have regarded them with consider-able feelings of sympathy and solidarity, there is no a priori guarantee that his useof bozal language is to be trusted. Alzola (1965:98) indicates that “representarel habla de los negros en Cuba no fue un tema festivo, sino un interes nacional.Tras el habla deformada de Creto Ganga se ocultaba el peninsular . . .” Cruz(1974:56) notes approvingly Ganga’s “supresion de preposiciones en determi-nados casos y los cambios morfologicos que recoge fielmente de la expresionbozal.” At another point (58) she states that “. . . Crespo, blanco, escogıa elhabla de la clase humillada del paıs, la ‘media lengua’ de los esclavos boza-les . . .” Is this assessment accurate? If so, it would place Crespo y Borbon ina relatively privileged position among Cuban writers – indeed among Spanishauthors in general – in providing a reasonable version of bozal Spanish free ofcontamination from ideological burdens or racist stereotypes.

The Havana newspapers of the 1840s contained other articles and commen-taries written in bozal language, at least some of which were probably also writ-ten by Crespo y Borbon, using other pseudonyms. In other instances, it appearsthat his Creto Ganga prompted other Cuban writers to also try their hand at bozallanguage and humor. One of the most accomplished characters was “CiriacoMandinga,” who in the pages of El Faro Industrial de la Habana sustained along literary dialogue with Creto Ganga. Although some observers feel thatCrespo y Borbon 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 Borbon

36 Cruz (1974:49). 37 Ibid. (192). 38 Ibid. (94).


with a much more sophisticated grasp of linguistic variation and Afro-Hispanicpeculiarities than is revealed in the remainder of his writings). These differencesare partly orthographic (biyete vs. villete, muge vs. muje), occasionally lexical(macho vs. baron), but mostly deal with subtle morphophonological differencesthat bespeak of true variation in Afro-Cuban bozal language. For example, forCreto’s ahuora Ciriaco has uhora. The first is clearly more reminiscent of Papi-amento awor (Lipski 1993, 1999b), while the second appears to be a simplevocalic transpostion of the Spanish word. The same holds for Creto’s ahuoy(similar to Papiamento awe) vs. Ciriaco’s uhoy. There are other apparentlylegitimate differences among bozal speakers (some of whom were evidentlyserving as linguistic models for Crespo y Borbon and for the author behindCiriaco Mandinga). This includes Creto’s iguariente, atrise, sintimao, dineru,and tıguere to Ciriaco’s goriente, tri, sitimao, ninero, and tıguire, respectively.Both writers use the portmanteau form nelle, but for Creto Ganga the term refersonly to simple pronouns (el, ella, la, los, las, etc.), while Ciriaco also extendsthe term to cover the equivalent of de el, de ella, de ellos, etc. Finally, whereCreto uses the preposition in/en (e.g. en el), Ciriaco uses ne < en el. In thiscase, Ciriaco’s choice fits more closely with Afro-Iberian creoles (especiallyPapiamento) than does Creto’s pure Spanish form. This type of variation isconsistent with other observations of bozal Spanish; nearly all the variants usedby Creto Ganga and Ciriaco Mandinga are well attested elsewhere in the Afro-Hispanic corpus. This fact in itself does not prove that the writers involved wereaccurately imitating the speech of Afro-Cuban bozales, but given both internalconsistency and systematic differences between the two writers, we are led toascribe a high level of credibility to the overall imitation. Crespo y Borbon’sliterary imitations come closest to being believable when he creates conversa-tions (or written exchanges) between two bozales. Despite the raucous parodiescontained in these dialogs, it is in conversations among pidgin speakers that thegreatest deviations from the target language are typically observed.

A relevant comment on Afro-Cuban Spanish comes from Antonio Bachillery Morales, a Cuban writer whose life spanned the greater part of the nineteenthcentury. In the late 1800s the German pioneer creolist, Hugo Schuchardt, beganto investigate several forms of hybrid contact languages based on Spanish andPortuguese, including what he called “Malayo-Spanish” (i.e. Philippine CreoleSpanish or Chabacano), “Negro-Portuguese” (Sao Tomense), and so forth. Inorder to gather information on what were at the time exotic linguistic phe-nomena, Schuchardt carried on an extensive correspondence with linguists andwriters around the world. Many of Schuchardt’s long-distance investigationswere subsequently published and form part of his extensive bibliography of cre-ole studies. Around 1880 Schuchardt became interested in the possibility that a“Negro-Spanish” – pidgin, creole, or contact language – might exist somewherein Latin America, and he focused on the area whose social history made the


likelihood of an Afro-Hispanic contact language greatest: Cuba. Schuchardtwas apparently unaware of Papiamento, which for later investigators wouldbe the quintessence of “Negro-Spanish.” At this point, he elicited the help ofBachiller y Morales, as regards the speech of blacks in late nineteenth-centuryCuba. Schuchardt never incorporated this correspondence into his writings, butBachiller y Morales (1883) included some of the results he had gleaned forSchuchardt in a much-cited article appearing in Cuba. In the course of the arti-cle, he affirmed that bozal Spanish could never be confused with the speech ofCuban-born blacks or criollos, nor with the (natively spoken) Afro-Cuban jivetalk of Havana, spoken by the negros curros. In his response to Schuchardt andin the subsequent article published in the Revista de Cuba, Bachiller y Moralescommented extensively on the linguistic and musical traditions of blacks inCuba. For example (98–99):

La mayor parte de los negros conservan los cantares de su tierra, con los aires y lenguasrespectivas: pero los congos por lo comun se unıan a los criollos y la letra de sus tangosen las fiestas de campo . . . era en el castellano que hablaban. Cuando los amos asistıana sus fiestas era un medio de hacerles suplicas y pedirles justicia. Si el mayoral eramalo, los cantores hacıan acompanar a los ecos de sus tambores palabras significativas:<<mayora come gente>> – <<mayora so malo>>, etc.

Bachiller y Morales continues (99):

Pero es singular que las modificaciones de la lengua, al aceptarla el negro, no fuesen lasmismas para el bozal o africano que para sus descendientes, y que estos introdujesenotras sobre las que la gente menos culta, especialmente de las provincias de fuera de Cubaya habıan generalizado. El negro bozal hablaba el castellano de un modo tan distinto alque sus hijos usaban, que no hay oıdo cubano que pudiesen confundirlos. No era solola expresion trastornada, sino aun la inflexion el dejo especial de cada interlocutor: aoscuras, con los ojos cerrados, de cualesquiera modo podrıa conocerse a ese negro y siera bozal ladino o criollo. Difıcilmente podrıa explicarse por que el bozal empleaba lao y la u supliendo otras vocales . . .

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


renderings of his contemporaries. He conceded that the imitations were rarelymotivated by the desire for linguistic accuracy: “Algunos escritores del paıs,no con objeto filologico sino en agradables burlas, imitaron su lenguaje cor-rompido en poesıas populares, como lo hicieron los espanoles en sus piezasdramaticas que reflejaban las costumbres, y los portugueses que antes llenaronde negros a Lisboa” (99) . . . “Varios escritores han empleado en sus horas debuen humor el lenguaje de los bozales ladinos y el de los criollos negros . . .”(100). Interestingly, Bachiller y Morales, examining both the Lope de Ruedaexamples and nineteenth-century Cuban bozal language, suggested that certaindeviations from Spanish usage could be attributed to Portuguese: “Si se hancopiado con fidelidad las escenas aludidas, se ve que los negros en Espana a lah la convertıan en f . . . y esto me parece que venıa de Portugal, pues fueronlos importadores portugueses, que hacen lo mismo y han dado origen a fetizoen vez de hechizo . . .” (99) . . . “Reparese que lo mismo ha sucedido para elafricano ladino en Cuba. Ha suprimido las eses finales; ha convertido a la h delos portugueses en f, como aquı la j de los andaluces; ha suprimido y maltratadola palabra despues: y la l de platos se vuelve r.” (100). He thus indirectly antici-pated 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 descriptionof the difference between bozal and ladino Afro-Cuban speech is therefore ofconsiderable importance:

No es posible confundir un lenguaje con el otro: la supresion de letras, la conversion deotras, no es peculiar de todo negro: la i final por la l, propiedad del criollo, es lo esencialque le toca; la o por la u en combinacion al principio de la palabra y el trastorno de lospronombres y los sexos en ellos, predominan en el africano. Por lo demas, tiene queconfesarse que una gran parte de sus alteraciones las inicia la generalidad de la gente delpueblo, con especialidad la del campo. Fueron andaluces los mas de los pobladores, ysigueronles los islenos, los catalanes, y otros malos hablistas, que dejaron huellas, que vandesapareciendo, aunque no tanto como debıa esperarse, en las clases mas desatendidas.(101)

Another key figure in the study of Afro-Cuban language and culture isFernando Ortiz (1881–1969), the Cuban anthropologist and ethnographer whostudied Afro-American groups in Cuba in the early decades of the twentiethcentury. Few actual examples of bozal language appear in Ortiz’s writings, buthis works are filled with examples of words and phrases used by the Afro-Cuban population, as well as extensive accounts of cultural and religious prac-tices. His principal Afro-Cuban works include Los negros brujos (1906), Losnegros esclavos (1916), Glosario de afronegrismos (1924), La africanıa de lamusica folklorica de Cuba (1950), Los instrumentos de la musica afrocubana(1952–55), and the posthumous Los negros curros. He was also co-founderof Estudios Afro-Cubanos, Archivos del Folklore Cubano and other seminal


journals. Ortiz was born in Havana in 1881, and a year later his family took himto Minorca, and later (1901) to Madrid. In the latter city he undertook universitystudies, while from 1902–05 he traveled back and forth between Europe andCuba. His first anthropological work, Los negros brujos (hampa afro-cubana)was first published in Madrid, and was intended as much as a work on crimi-nology as an ethnographic study. This is a surprisingly mature work (althoughbased on the racist premise that black Africans harbor innate criminal ten-dencies), and was but the first of many treatises, whose linguistic high pointcame in the masterful Glosario de afronegrismos, first published in 1924 andrevised subsequently. By the standards of today’s etymological and lexicologi-cal research, the work is flawed, since many items are uncritically attributed toAfrican etymologies. At the time, this dictionary was revolutionary, for, insteadof simply cataloging oddities and barbarismos, the author undertook a seriousvaloration of Afro-Cuban speech. In this respect, the Glosario is diametricallyopposed to Pichardo’s dictionary, which although generally based on soundlinguistic principles, reveals the author’s prejudices as regards Afro-Cuban lan-guage. In other works, Ortiz cataloged Afro-Cuban musical, religious, andcultural traditions, at times giving brief fragments of songs, dances, poems,verbal games, and religious ceremonies. These fragments, although short, arecrucial to the understanding of Afro-Cuban bozal language in that they areauthentic transcriptions by the author, and not literary inventions (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #7). These texts give some idea of the type of languageretained in songs and dances from the bozal era, but still in use in Cuba wellinto the twentieth century.

A brief fragment of nineteenth-century Cuban bozal language comes in thetravel narrative of Marıa de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, the Condesade Merlın. Marıa de las Mercedes was born in Cuba, the daughter of a wealthyaristocratic family that owned plantations and slaves. She spent her first twelveyears in Cuba, before her family took her to Madrid, where they maintainedcontacts with the best families of Spain and France. In 1809, she married aFrench general who had once been Joseph Bonaparte’s aide de camp; the newCondesa de Merlın then moved to Paris with her husband, and began a literaryand cultural career based on the French language. Her husband died in 1839, andin 1840 the condesa fulfilled a long-standing dream and returned to Cuba fora visit. Although her stay was a brief two months, she subsequently describedher trip in a book, which provides a dual perspective of a woman who wassimultaneously Cuban and foreign, familiar with and shocked by Cuban cultureand life. On two occasions, she gave brief descriptions of the speech of bozalslaves:

¿Su melce dara pa tabaco a nego viejo, mi ama?A mı no bebe aguariente, mi ama.


These two sentences are hardly significant in themselves as specimens of bozallanguage, but when inserted into the entire Cuban bozal corpus, they acquiresome importance. The Condesa de Merlın had originally been raised in a slave-owning society, and presumably shared the generally low opinion of black slaveswith other aristocratic Cubans of the time. However, her long stay in Europe hadrendered the slave society of the Spanish Caribbean exotic and foreign, and herdescription of other observations suggests a high degree of detached objectivity.There is nothing in her writing to suggest that she would deliberately distort thespeech attributed to Cuban blacks. The second sentence is also of importancesince it is one of the few instances in Latin American bozal Spanish of a mıbeing used as a subject pronoun, instead of the more usual yo.

Variants of bozal language appear in several nineteenth-century Cuban nov-els, most of which were written as anti-slavery documents. By far the mostfamous is Cecilia Valdes, by Cirilo Villaverde (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #9). Of the many Cuban anti-slavery novels, Cecilia Valdes has receivedthe highest literary acclaim, and takes its place among the foremost works ofCuban literature, irrespective of theme. Cirilo Villaverde was born in 1812in Pinar del Rıo province, western Cuba, moving to Havana in 1823. Afterseveral minor literary contributions, he produced a first – and very rough –version of Cecilia Valdes in 1839. In this early novel, all characters spokea uniformly homogeneous Spanish, from slaves to aristocrats. The definitiveversion of the novel was not to be finished until 1881, and the changes wereconsiderable. Most noteworthy is the author’s incorporation of different linguis-tic registers for the various groups of characters, including bozal and criolloslaves, peasants, Spaniards, etc. In the intervening years, Villaverde wrote andpublished prolifically, and was also active in Cuban politics. He conspired withNarciso Lopez (the filibustero whose plans included annexation of Cuba tothe United States), was jailed for his participation, escaped jail and fled to theUnited States where he worked as a journalist and Spanish teacher. He eventuallyreceived amnesty and returned to Cuba, only to establish residence in the UnitedStates 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 diedin 1894.

From a linguistic point of view, the representation of known entities (Cubanpeasants and aristocrats, immigrants from various parts of Spain) are accurate,although at times there are inconsistencies or overgeneralizations. RodrıguezHerrera (1982:157) notes that “se observa . . . que siempre las imitaciones nofueron del todo correctas o felices, sobre todo tratandose del lenguaje de losnegros bozales . . .” However, he concedes (158) that Villaverde “tenıa de modoigual buen oıdo para captar palabras y reproducirlas exactamente de acuerdocon la fonetica de las mismas, en lo cual no han acertado siempre todos los quehan tratado de imitar el extrano lenguaje de la gente inculta o extranjera, en


relacion con el habla comun de determinado paıs.” Comparing the bozal speechof Cecilia Valdes with Lope de Rueda’s plays, he (158) declares that “. . . lasnegras Eulalia y Guiomar trataban de hablar como los espanoles de su tiempo,pronunciando eses que jamas se han oıdo en boca de los negros cubanos. YVillaverde sabıa distinguir el entoavıa o entuavıa de un bozal del entodavıaultracorrecto uso por na Chepilla y Menesia, para luego escribir todavıa porpropia cuenta . . .” Some inconsistencies remain, however: “. . . a veces falla alponer en boca de algunos esclavos palabras como Cruz, dispues y otras, en vezde Cru y dispue o dimpue, como se advierte en algunos pasajes.” Villaverdewas 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 onindividuals whom he had known personally (Deschamps Chapeaux 1982; Luis1990:104–05). He was also sympathetic to the situation of Cuban blacks, anddid not seek to ridicule any of his characters through use of language. We maytherefore tentatively take the bozal imitations in Cecilia Valdes to have at leastsome basis in observed reality. Villaverde’s use of bozal language in CeciliaValdes can be compared with the less fictional Excursion 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 Valdes (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #10).

Another well-known Cuban abolitionist novel is Francisco, by AnselmoSuarez y Romero, originally published in 1839. Most of the characters are houseslaves, speaking unremarkable Spanish, and only a few instances of examplesof purported bozal language creep in (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #11).The protagonist, Francisco, is described as an African-born negro de nacion,but as Williams (1994:79–81) observes, “although Francisco’s stated identityas a ‘tribal black’ presupposes his being born into an African language, hisspeech bears no trace of his foreignness, despite repeated references through-out 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 (Suarezy Romero 1947:65) . . .the phonological and syntactical irregularities that mark the text are conven-tional strategies for signaling the alien status of blacks in Hispanic literature.The loss of final consonants and first syllables from certain words, the elisionof prepositions, and the improperly conjugated verbs are all linguistic mark-ers of foreignness, which were often invoked for comic effect . . . .” Franciscospeaks only standard Spanish, in contrast to the language used by certain slaves.Like Villaverde, Suarez y Romero was both sympathetic to the plight of Cubanslaves and in a position to observe their speech. The language of these frag-ments is nearly identical to the other nineteenth-century Cuban writers surveyedabove, and reinforces the notion that the basics of Cuban bozal Spanish werereasonably approximated at least by the core of abolitionist writers.


Martın Morua Delgado, another nineteenth-century Cuban abolitionistwriter, employed bozal language in his novels Sofıa (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #12) and La familia Unzuazu (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba#13). Sofıa is generally considered to be a rewriting of (the final version of)Cecilia Valdes, a novel that Morua Delgado found meritorious but stylisticallyflawed. Sofıa was written in the period 1888–90, i.e. well after the abolitionof slavery in Cuba, while the author was living abroad. It was published in1891. La familia Unazuazu was finished in 1896, and was published in 1901.These novels thus come at the end of the string of abolitionist novels. It wasalso written more than half a century after the African-born bozal had begunto become a less common figure in Cuba by an author whose own family hadexperienced slavery first-hand. Morua Delgado was born in Matanzas in 1857,of a Basque father and an African ganga mother. In theory, his mother was abozal, although little is known about her life or linguistic proficiency in Span-ish. From available information, it appears that Morua Delgado’s mother was ahouse servant for a well-to-do family, and within the family received a reason-able education. It is possible that his own mother’s speech retained some bozaltraits, and Morua Delgado’s work in Matanzas brought him into close contactwith African-born blacks. In his novels, he gives accurate linguistic imitationsof the speech of gallegos, andaluces, and working-class Cubans. Coupled withthe facts of his own background, this makes for a high degree of credibility forMorua Delgado’s brief but tantalizing bozal fragments.

There are several linguistic features of Morua’s use of bozal speech thatcoincide with the proposed reconstruction of nineteenth-century Afro-Cubanlanguage, 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 theuse of son as uninflected copula, another common trait in Afro-Cuban speech,and not found elsewhere in the Afro-Hispanic bozal corpus. There is alsothe use of yijo for hijo, a variant which may be related to Papiamento yiu,and which does not appear in Villaverde’s novel. Cecilia Valdes does containexamples of elle, and one example of son used incorrectly, but correspond-ing to the first person plural, rather than the more common third person sin-gular, which became nearly categorical in Cuban bozal language: “Mosotrono son casa por le iglese.” It is of course possible that Morua Delgadosimply copied such constructions from earlier writers such as Creto Ganga,whose prolific newspaper outpourings he must certainly have seen. The factremains that Morua’s two novels contain brief but credible bits of bozal lan-guage, and do not suggest that the linguistic examples are derived entirelyfrom imitation.

A few nineteenth-century Cuban novels contain only tiny fragments of bozallanguage. For example, Francisco Calcagno’s Romualdo: uno de tantos (first


published in 1881, and written some time before) contains only the word poriofor por Dios, and the phrases:

ese no son la jijo france, ese viene langenio chiquitico . . . no quiere la mayora. no quierecadena on maza.

Even this glance at Afro-Cuban language contains the undifferentiated copulason, as well as the frequent use of the feminine la as generic undifferentiatedarticle. Calcagno also spoke of bozal language in his lesser-known Los crımenesde Concha (1887), finished in 1863. In speaking of the protagonist, he states (7)“. . . la influencia pecuniaria del amo, con cuya logica por otra parte no puedeluchar el lenguaje bozal en que cuenta sus miserias.” Of another African-borncharacter, Calcagno says (21) “. . . a despecho de sus muchos anos pasadosen Cuba, no hablaba sino bozal: espanolizaremos su lenguaje para evitar allector ese enojoso trabajo de traduccion.” One of the characters states that“. . . dejo un piquinini en Africa . . . ,” using a Pidgin English word which madeits way to Cuba in the nineteenth century. Despite his intentions to spare readersextensive passages in bozal language, Calcagno offers one example (34), whenan African-born slave attempts to describe the location of a farm: “Ya no sabesino, mu lejo, rio taa allı, mata grande, tabaco mucho, la suelo corora, bujıoguano.” In chapter IX of the novel, the author describes nanigo and lucumıwords and ceremonies in detail, giving evidence of close observation.

Another abolitionist novel is Jose Antonio Ramos’ Caniquı (Chapter FiveAppendix 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 whereslavery was but a distant echo of the past. From a linguistic standpoint, the fewbozal fragments of the novel are much more “Spanish” than the examples culledfrom nineteenth-century novels. The author’s main deviations from popular(monolingual) Cuban Spanish is the use of third person singular as invariantverb (e.g. yo mata), occasional loss of articles (e.g. Yo mimo saque bridio ypone telarana), occasional loss of copula (e.g. nina asusta), and some incorrectnoun-article pairs (camina po lo suelo). The majority of the deviations fromstandard Spanish merely involve “eye-dialect” representations of uneducatedCuban Spanish. This provides indirect evidence that by the early decades ofthe twentieth century, bozal language was fading from the memory of mostCubans; although African-born blacks could still be found, nearly all wereelderly individuals who were not in constant linguistic contact with middle-class Cubans, as in earlier times when African-born slaves and workers workedcommonly in homes, stores, and on the streets of Cuban cities.

Similar conclusions hold for nearly all twentieth-century literary creationsthat attempt to imitate nineteenth-century bozal language, particularly thosewritten in the second half of the century. Thus for example, we have thenovel Quiquiribu Mandinga (se lo llevo el diablo), by Raul Acosta-Rubio, and


published in 1976 in the Miami Cuban exile community (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #15). This novel presents a rather stereotyped view of Cuban boza-les, together with abundant literary imitations of Afro-Cuban speech. Despitethe author’s apparent lack of personal familiarity with earlier bozal language,the imitations coincide in large measure with nineteenth-century examples. Thislanguage, which contains such “authentic” bozal phenomenon as uninflectedinfinitives as invariant verbs, invariant copular son, and many discrepanciesof noun-article and subject-verb agreement, bears a close resemblance to thewritings of Creto Ganga and some nineteenth-century authors of teatro bufo.These rudimentary pidgin forms alternate with correct Spanish conjugations(e.g. past subjunctive forms), as in Ganga, and given the late date of publica-tion of this novel, it is obvious that the author has based himself principally ifnot exclusively on earlier literary imitations of bozal speech. In the phoneticdimension, the imitations are a little closer to contemporary reality, especially asregards gemination of consonants following absorption of syllable-final liquids:pogque, sinvegguenza, etc.

Another twentieth-century novel containing even more questionable exam-ples of bozal language is Mas alla de la nada by Armanda Ruız Garcıa (ChapterFive Appendix Afro-Cuba #16). This author uses invariant infinitives and invari-ant copular son, together with phonetic modifications typical of vernacularCuban Spanish. Also used very frequently is the archetypal creoloid verb con-struction based on ta + Vinf. However, the text contains a chaotic mixture ofuninflected infinitives, verbs of the form ta + Vinf and correctly conjugatedverbs, a mixture scarcely likely to have been used by either bozal or criolloAfro-Cubans. If the author had intended to represent a true creole using prever-bal ta as particle, this usage would have been consistent (e.g. as in Papiamento,Palenquero, and Cape Verdean), whereas a true bozal speaking hastily acquiredSpanish would not combine two well-established verb systems (one based onparticles and one based on suffixal inflection) with the stop-gap measure ofthrowing in an uninflected verb. In addition to the questionably accurate lin-guistic traits, the novel also contains a plot line replete with facile stereotypesand romantic exaggerations, which renders the entire creation suspect as asource of information on earlier bozal language.

An even more sensationalistic twentieth-century Cuban novel to make use ofpurported bozal language is Yambao, by Julio Alba. This novel uses a formulaicset of transpositions, most prominent of which is the widespread use of ta + Vinf

verbal constructions: “mı ta sabe que tu no ta quere a la negra Yeye,” etc.(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #17). Unlike what occurs in legitimateAfro-Hispanic creoles, the bozal characters in Yambao even use ta as partof the hybrid copula ta se. The use of mı as subject pronoun coincides withearlier stereotypes of Afro-Hispanic pidgin of the “Tarzan-talk” variety, but isnot in accordance with known facts of nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban usage


(except in isolated instances, when contact with Papiamento, Jamaican Creole,or possibly Negerhollands occurred).

There are several shorter examples of bozal language scattered throughoutCuban literature written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mostcome in novels and short stories, but non-fictional descriptions also containbrief fragments. Marıa de Santa Cruz’s Historias campesinas provides severalinteresting 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 texta cluster of traits which appear to reflect contact with speakers of Papiamento:(1) verbal constructions based on ta + Vinf; (2) use of ague for hoy (Papiamentoawe); (3) use of bisa for decir “to tell, say”; (4) use of disjunctive mı as subjectand object pronoun; (5) possibly gueta.

Another source of examples of nineteenth-century Cuban bozal language isthe novel En el cafetal, by Domingo Malpica La Barca (1890) (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #19). Little is known of this author, but the bozal exam-ples are quite realistic. The use of third person singular for invariant verb stemis a well-attested trait of Afro-Hispanic pidgin, while the use of cosa as inter-rogative word corresponding to que is found throughout Iberian-based creoles,including Papiamento (kiko < que cosa/coisa) and Philippine Creole Spanish.

Of all the Latin American writers whose works have been taken as centralto the debate concerning the nature of Afro-Hispanic bozal language and itspossible creolization, Lydia Cabrera’s works form the centerpiece of virtuallyall arguments, both pro and con. For example, Granda (1971:483) offered theclaim that “. . . Cuba ha poseıdo y posee aun entre su poblacion negra rastrosy manifestaciones linguısticas ‘criollas’ . . . uniendose ası al ‘papiamento’, al‘palenquero’ . . . y a las manifestaciones puertorriquenas en la formacion deun ‘corpus’ dialectal ‘criollo’ de superestrato espanol . . .” To prove his case,Granda made ample use of El monte by Lydia Cabrera (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #38), originally published in 1954, an anthropological text contain-ing data on religious beliefs among Afro-Cubans, and which includes extensiveimitations of bozal Spanish. Granda unquestioningly accepts the accuracy ofCabrera’s imitations, given her high reputation in other linguistic and folkloricmatters, and suggests that such language, “caracterizadores de una estructura‘criolla’ de lengua, persistıan en el ‘registro’ hablado de negros cubanos . . .como continuacion de la modalidad linguıstica adoptada por generacionesanteriores de esclavos . . .” In this article, Granda did not explicitly link theputative Afro-Cuban creole to the monogenetic Portuguese pidgin hypothe-sis, but this claim was eventually made in Granda (1976). Lapesa (1980:560)believes that “las postreras supervivencias del criollo espanol parecen ser el

39 This is not the same Marıa de Santa Cruz as the Condesa de Merlın.


habla ‘bozal’ que se usaba entre negros de Puerto Rico en el siglo pasado ytodavıa entre los de Cuba a mediados del actual . . .”

Cabrera’s extensive writings, particularly El monte, have figured impor-tantly in most subsequent writings on a putative Afro-Cuban creole. Otheguy(1973) adds to the list of creoloid traits mentioned by Granda, and claims thatCabrera’s work demonstrates the prior existence of an Afro-Hispanic creole inthe Caribbean. Perl (1982:423–24) also refers to El monte, as well as to the briefbozal fragments from Miguel Barnet’s Autobiografıa de un cimarron (ChapterFive Appendix Afro-Cuba #68). Perl asserts that “. . . the Cuban ‘habla bozal’was no idiolectally determined jargon of the Blacks in the nineteenth centurybut a social variety of Spanish comparable with other varieties of Spanish- andPortuguese-based creoles.” With respect to a possible extra-territorial origin,Perl suggests that “. . . especially the morphosyntactic features of the ‘hablabozal’ are very suitable for demonstrating the relations to other Iberian-basedcreoles 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 accu-rate information regarding Cuban bozal language? The answers are as complexand varied as the elusive personality of this remarkable writer. Lydia Cabrerawas born in Havana in 1900, one of eight children in an upper-class intellec-tual family. In her earliest childhood years, she was attended by a black aya, asituation typical of upper-class children of the time. From this earliest contactwith Afro-Cuban society, Lydia probably derived some preliminary notions ofthe beliefs, attitudes, and cultural practices of black Cubans, and when she ulti-mately began to explore Afro-Cuban culture in earnest, she at least had somepoint of reference. Lydia Cabrera’s father was a writer and political activist, andthe Cabrera house was always filled with writers, philosophers, and literati of allsorts. Lydia, the youngest daughter, was reputedly her father’s favorite, and sheled a capricious childhood. In one area, however, Raimundo Cabrera y Boschwould not yield: Lydia was not allowed to attend high school or university. Byage fourteen, Lydia was already escaping from the house to attend art classes,but her frustration mounted, until in 1920 she threatened to commit suicide ifher father did not send her to France and let her study at the Sorbonne. LydiaCabrera 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 overthe years) until 1938.

During her years in Paris, Lydia Cabrera encountered the budding negritudemovement in Europe, which had repercussions for both art and literature. Expa-triate Latin Americans, typified by Miguel Angel Asturias, were “rediscover-ing” 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).


the powerful African presence in Cuba. Although she lived in Paris for manyyears, her several trips to Cuba were the time when she began to explore thehitherto distant Afro-Cuban culture, beginning in the Pogolotti neighborhoodof Marianao, in greater Havana. She sought the aid of a seamstress who hadpreviously worked for the family; the woman’s name was Teresa M., and herlucumı designation was Omı Tomı. Omı Tomı in turn introduced Lydia to CalixtaMorales, also known as Oddedei, and the two elderly Afro-Cuban women gaveLydia her first initiation into Afro-Cuban religious rituals.41 The three-monthsojourn in the company of these women gave Lydia enough material to enableher to begin writing on Afro-Cuban themes upon her return to Paris. Duringthis time period Alejo Carpentier was collecting materials for his first novel, theAfro-Cuban Ecue-Yamba-o; he later remarked that around 1927 “tropece conLydia Cabrera en un juramento nanigo celebrado en plena manigua, en las cer-canıas de Marianao.”42 If these recollections are accurate, it would indicate thatLydia Cabrera had begun her ethnographic explorations of Afro-Cuban cultureat a very early age, although the first fruits of these contacts were to appearin stylized fiction. Some thirty years later, Cabrera was to bring these contactswith secret Afro-Cuban brotherhoods into sharper focus, in the monographLa sociedad secreta abakua. In the 1920s, however, Lydia Cabrera was stillsomewhat of a dilettante, and the lighthearted way in which she dismissed heranthropological inclinations, both at the time and in later decades, has causedmany critics to assume that her entire corpus of writings is but the product ofa fertile imagination enriched by the Afro-Cuban environment, but devoid ofany value as legitimate ethnographic research. In fact, Lydia Cabrera’s writingsshow a steady progression toward an ever more accurate depiction of the mostintimate details of Afro-Cuban culture, but she never abandoned her sense ofliterary creation, her picaresque sense of humor, and her loving embrace ofAfro-Cuban life as the most magnificent form of magical realism to be foundin all of Latin America. It is this mixture of fact and fantasy, and her refusalto be classified as an anthropologist, which is the root of the great ambiva-lence with which Cabrera’s books have been treated by scholars in variousdisciplines.

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 merelyan attempt to draw upon materials that were familiar to the writer in her for-eign setting, and even which might be considered attractively “exotic” to aFrench-speaking readership which was fascinated by African and Native Amer-ican cultures, provided that they were safely grafted onto a familiar Europeancultural and literary trunk. Things were to change, however. In 1940, afterLydia Cabrera had returned to Havana to live, she was visited by Gabriela

41 Perera (1971:21–22). 42 Soto (1988:38).


Mistral, who expressed her disappointment at finding Cabrera to be very bour-geois.43 These criticisms stung Lydia, and perhaps as a result she began to writemore intensively. A flurry of books followed, and her literary and anthropo-logical writings continued throughout the rest of her life – half a century. Porque: cuentos negros de Cuba was published in 1948 (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #32). El monte, the massive treatise on folk medicine and folk prac-tices among various Afro-Cuban naciones, and which many researchers con-sider to be Cabrera’s premier Afro-Cuban study, appeared in 1954 (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #38). The humorous and whimsical Refranes de negrosviejos came out the next year (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #31). Anago,a glossary of lucumı [Yoruba] words used in Cuba was published in 1957. In1958 Cabrera published La sociedad secreta abakua, a stunning testimony tothe talent of this amateur anthropologist to penetrate a hermetic and secretiveall-male Afro-Cuban group (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #37). Twelveyears were to pass before Cabrera’s next book, Otan iyebiye: las piedras pre-ciosas, dealing with magical properties of rocks and minerals. Rapidly followingare Ayapa-cuentos de Jicotea (1971; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #36),Yemaya y Ochun (1974) – dealing with santerıa rituals (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #34), Anaforuana (1975) – another book dealing with Abakua rituals(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #67), Francisco y Francisca: chascarril-los de negros viejos (1976) – a book of humorous anecdotes (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #30), and the important Reglas de congo, palo monte,mayombe (1979) – a major treatise on cultural and religious practices of Bantu-speaking Afro-Cuban groups (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #64). Mostof the above-mentioned texts contain examples of Afro-Cuban bozal language,sometimes inserted with no preamble, and at other times explicitly attributed toparticular groups or speech communities. Several minor books also appearedduring this time period. In the last decade of her life, Cabrera published severalmore books, including La medicina popular en Cuba (1984), but there were nomore fragments of bozal language.

The bozal language in Cabrera’s apparently non-fictional works such as Elmonte and Reglas de congo has the same characteristics as the fragments appear-ing in avowedly fictional books such as Francisco y Francisca and Por que. Thisfact, combined with the high degree of detail in the anthropological works andCabrera’s positive valuation of Afro-Cuban culture, have led the majority ofresearchers who have examined her texts with an eye toward reconstructingearlier Afro-Cuban bozal language to conclude that her bozal language is tan-tamount to a first-hand transcription. The truth, it would seem, falls a bit shortof this assertion, although, from any viewpoint, Cabrera’s Afro-Cuban writ-ings constitute the single most important contribution to the documentation of

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


Caribbean bozal language. Lydia Cabrera had phenomenal powers of observa-tion, 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, Cabreraused notebooks and note cards to record her observations of bozal languageand culture. At best, then, her bozal fragments must be taken as approxima-tions written on the fly, or reconstructed long after the fact from the author’srecollections of the general speech patterns of her Afro-Cuban informants.

A more serious consideration in dealing with Lydia Cabrera’s bozal approxi-mations is the fact that even the most anthropological-like texts are in fact liter-ary approximations, while the stories and other fictional works represent evengreater 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 solopara 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 escribıa. Peronunca me he considerado escritora, ni antropologa . . . turista, si tu quieres. Lo que meha llamado la atencion de los negros es la poesıa de sus mitos. Y eso es lo que yo hetratado de captar.

This statement in itself does not invalidate the possible anthropological and lin-guistic significance of Cabrera’s writings; it only shows that accurate linguisticreporting was not foremost in her mind upon giving a literary rendition of Afro-Cuban culture and language.45 At other points in her career, however, Cabreraascribed a greater value to her anthropological observations, although caution-ing that she merely reported what she saw, rather than offering interpretations:46

Ha sido mi proposito ofrecer a los especialistas, con toda modestia y la mayor fidelidad,un material que no ha pasado por el filtro peligroso de la interpretacion, y enfrentarloscon los documentos vivos que he tenido la suerte de encontrar.

Elsewhere, Cabrera was even more revealing. To the question “Entonces, ¿ustedcontempla la posibilidad de que el habla bozal, en los cuentos, en las leyendasque la utilizan, este permeada de cultura hispanica?”, Cabrera replied:47

. . . En la misma religion se produjo un sincretismo . . . y desde luego, en los cuentostambien hay sincretismo. Cuando yo escribı los Cuentos negros hice lo que me dio lagana. Ası que no podemos decir que sean puramente folkloricos. Aunque otros, sı estantomados sin alteracion alguna. Y bozales, los habıa todavıa en Cuba cuando yo vinepara aca. Te ibas a Matanzas, a Pinar del Rıo, a Camaguey, y allı encontrabas al negrodel campo, sin contacto con La Habana, que era el negro bozal. Estaba viviendo comoen los tiempos de la colonia . . .

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

44 Zaldıvar (1986:7). 45 Valdes-Cruz (1978).46 Cabrera (1983:8). 47 Zaldıvar (1986:11).


than the recorder-like near-transcriptions that some researchers have assumed.This admission does not invalidate her entire corpus, since Lydia Cabrera hada good ear and a phenomenal memory, and much of what she wrote was indeedbased on an accurate recollection of Afro-Cuban speech. It does, nonetheless,introduce a critical element of caution, and invalidates attempts to perform, forexample, quantitative analyses or other detailed linguistic analyses on Cabrera’swritings as though they were true transcriptions. The end of the preceding quo-tation is also revealing, since Cabrera apparently extends the meaning of bozalfrom the more widely accepted ‘born in Africa, only partially acculturated toHispanic language and society’ to a more general meaning of rustic, unedu-cated, and isolated from urban society. The latter meaning, however, does notnecessarily imply that any pidgin or creole language remained, only a certaindistance from the mainstream of Cuban life. It is not clear that Cabrera used thesame broad interpretation of bozal in her earlier writings, and in her youngeryears she indeed had much contact with true African-born bozales.

Among Cuban scholars, the full impact of Lydia Cabrera’s Afro-Hispaniclanguage has seldom been recognized, possibly given the prevailing notionamong many non-specialist Cubans that Cuban blacks in general (i.e. thoseborn and raised in Cuba and speaking Spanish monolingually) speak a“special” form of Spanish. When pressed for details, most (older) Cubans sim-ply refer to phonetic traits which, while definitely more prevalent among thelower sociolects of Cuban Spanish, cannot be definitely ascribed to an Africansubstratum, are also used by white Cubans of comparable socioeconomic status,and are usually found in other Spanish dialects including those for which noAfrican connection can be postulated. Thus, for example, the literary scholarValdes-Cruz (1974:93) describes Cabrera’s use of “espanol deformado”:

Cuando incluye palabras en un espanol deformado que imita el habla de los negros, sevale de ciertos recursos, como la supresion de la “s” o de otras consonantes finales y aveces hasta de toda la sılaba final (ma por mas; seno por senor, to por todo). Otro recursoes el de la asimilacion y la perdida de consonantes interiores o el de la confusion de lossonidos “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 asNicolas Guillen, as well as by white Cuban writers who imitated the speech ofblacks, including Emilio Ballagas, Ramon Guirao, etc. Historically, it was evencommercially feasible to maintain this artificially exaggerated “black” Spanish.One case comes from a black Cuban radio comedian, Amador Domınguez, whoaspired to becoming an intellectual commentator and not simply a slapstickartist. Upon learning of Domınguez’s aspirations, his boss replied: “¡Bah! Eldıa que aprendas a hablar como blanco no te van a llamar para ningun programay te quedaras sin trabajo. ¡Tu negocio es seguir hablando como negro!”48 Long

48 Lopez (1981:393), also Lipski (1985b).


after African-born bozales had disappeared from Cuba, and when Afro-Cubanpidgin 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 newexamples of bozal speech. Indeed, such songs continue to appear sporadicallyeven today. Among the most famous practitioners of the neo-bozal musicaltradition are Celia Cruz, Miguelito Valdes, and, from earlier decades, Bola deNieve (Ignacio Villa, 1911–71). The latter was also a poet, composing severalpoems in bozal language in which creoloid elements figure prominently. Villa,born scarcely more than a decade after Lydia Cabrera, lived at a time in whichbozal language could still be heard, and there is every reason to consider hisimitations as authentic (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #8).

A brief fragment of purportedly authentic Afro-Hispanic language comes inthe Biografıa de un cimarron (1966) by Miguel Barnet (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #68). This book is essentially a transcription of the autobiography ofan elderly black Cuban who had been a cimarron (escaped slave) in his youth.Esteban Montejo was born in Las Villas around 1859. Miguel Barnet learned ofhim 104 years later, in 1963, when he was interviewed by a Cuban newspaper.Montejo was a Cuban-born criollo. His father was a Lucumı (Yoruba speaker)from Oyo, in Nigeria, while his mother was evidently born in Cuba “de origenfrances,”49 a term which Montejo applied to Haitians. At another point Montejoreferred to Haitians in Cuba singing tumba francesa songs in patua.50

Montejo escaped from slavery at a very young age, and never really knewhis parents. His godfather was named Gin Congo, suggesting that he was alsoAfrican-born, but Montejo never learned of his existence until the 1890s. Theyoung cimarron was apparently first raised by the owner of the sugar estate onwhich he was born, then by a succession of escaped slaves. By the time Barnetinterviewed the old man, he apparently spoke native vernacular Cuban Spanish,although Barnet alludes to “formas de lenguaje, giros, sintaxis, arcaısmos ymodismos de su habla.”51 This apparently refers to a disjointed narrative stylein highly vernacular language, rather than to any Africanized bozal speech.This is confirmed by the later remark (Barnet 1966:10): that “De haber copiadofielmente los giros de su lenguaje, el libro se habrıa hecho difıcil de comprendery en exceso reiterante. Sin embargo, fuimos cuidados en extremo al conservarla sintaxis cuando no se repetıa en cada pagina.” Although Esteban Montejowas a native speaker of Spanish, he did recall the speech of older bozales hehad known in his youth, and thus gave approximations to the Afro-Hispanicpidgin used by African-born blacks in early nineteenth-century Cuba:

Criollo camina alla adonde yo te diga, que yo te va a regala a ti una cosa . . . Uste, criollo,son bobo . . . mire, uste ve eso, con eso uste consigue to en cosa . . . (127)

49 Barnet (1966:16). 50 Ibid. (31). 51 Ibid. (9).


Mientras tu trabaja mayombe, tu son dueno e tierra (130).

Tu ve y haz este trabajo y cuando tu tiene problema resuelto, tu viene a mı y paga . . .Tu son bueno y callao, yo va a conta a ti una cosa . . . (154)

Uste, criollo, no sabe que son lifiante, ese que uste ve aquı en circo no son lifiante,lifiante mi tierra son mayore, come corazon de palma . . . (155)

The language of these fragments is unremarkable, in no way suggesting a stablecreole language with non-Hispanic syntax. Montejo himself declared (158):“Les decıan bozales por decirles algo, y por que hablaban de acuerdo con lalengua de su paıs. Hablaban distinto, eso era todo . . . Si queda alguno por ahıtiene que ser mas viejo que yo veinte veces.”

Several texts document the beginnings of Creole French-influenced Spanishas spoken in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba. In the story“Luna verde,” Carlos Carreras (1958:13–15) has some black characters, evi-dently Haitians emigrating to Cuba to cut sugar cane, speaking in “un francesroto,” but which in reality is neither French nor French creole, but more likelySpanish as spoken by French creole speakers:

Tu tene canma, Colın, las mujeres son ası . . .Yo tene canma, tu no apure . . .Tu, hijo bonito de blanco . . .Ella tener guanga . . .

Several key features of creole carryover are present in this example, includingunconjugated verbs without particle representing “have,” lack of reflexive verbs(tu no apure), and missing copula (tu hijo bonito de blanco).

Haitian Creole was an important linguistic and cultural element in Cuba. Inthe twentieth century, the Machado and Batista governments imported thou-sands of Haitian contract laborers to cut sugar cane,52 creating generations ofCuban-born Haitians, whose plight is typified in Alejo Carpentier’s novel EcueYamba-o. These Haitians often spoke a rudimentary Spanish which the unini-tiated observer might mistake for an Afro-Hispanic creole. Moreover, HaitianCreole influence in Cuban Spanish antedates these twentieth-century contacts.French Creole-speaking laborers were very common in nineteenth-centuryCuba, being especially prevalent around Santiago de Cuba. A few nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban texts hint at Haitian Creole influence; for example the useof pa mı “mine,” identical in structure to Haitian pa-m (< pa-mwe):

colazon pa mı ta brincando dentro la pecho como la cuebro. (Benıtez del Cristo 1930)

No seno, veguenza no e pa mı, e pa amo Toma. (Berenguer y Sed 1929)

52 Alvarez Estevez (1988).


(Creole) French-speaking blacks in Cuba organized into musical societiesknown as the tumba francesa; these societies still exist, and, although manyof the musicians are no longer completely fluent in Haitian creole, some of thesongs mix Spanish and Haitian.53 These texts cannot be confused with bozalSpanish, but rather constitute Spanish-Haitian code switching. In earlier periods,however, native speakers of Haitian who arrived in Cuba and learned Spanishas a second language spoke with many of the same creole-like features docu-mented for the Dominican Republic. The last generation of such speakers stillsurvives in eastern Cuba. Some Haitians, despite having lived as long as seventyyears in Cuba, still speak Spanish with second-language characteristics whichare similar if not identical to bozal Spanish attestations of earlier centuries:lack of subject-verb agreement, use of the third person singular or bare infini-tive as invariant verb form, misuse and elimination of prepositions, unstablenoun-adjective agreement, and incomplete targeting of Spanish words:54

Yo contrao [encuentro] un paisano mıa nosotro habla su lengua e nosotro poco catellanoel sabe yo sabe poco nosotro habla tambienYo trabaja, yo come. Yo trabaja lo canaveraleNosotro habla catellano, habla creol tambienYo crıa mucho animal, siembra mucho animal, se roba to, toro, toroYo no sabe mucho catellano, pero sabe poquitoEl valon son teniente [en] La HabanaYo tene do hijo . . . y varon yo tenıa se murio (Ortiz Lopez (1999a ))

Yo prende habla catellano con cubano . . . yo me guta habla catellano, pero poca cosano sabeYo tiene aquı, tengo 16 ano. Siempre una haciendo una trabajo yo come, yo va bien.Yo hacel mucho trabajal; coltal, coltal cana balato; recogel cafe a sei kiloDepue ute decansalUte lo habla, ute ta trabando con un dueno ma grande, quello decı ute hace (OrtizLopez (1999b ))

The Afro-Cuban corpus is at once the most extensive and the most ambigu-ous as regards the nature of pan-Caribbean Afro-Hispanic language, and theeventual fate of bozal Spanish. The search is far from over; archives in Cubacontain much unpublished material that can potentially shed further light on thesubject. Fieldwork in Cuba in search of vestiges of Afro-Hispanic language canstill turn up valuable results, as evidenced by Ortiz Lopez (1998). Afro-Cubanreligious rituals contain embedded bozal and post-bozal elements, and in someinstances practitioners who are “possessed” by ancestral spirits speak in whatis claimed to be bozal language.55 Regardless of the eventual deductions and

53 Franco (1959:76–77), Perl (1981), Martınez Gordo (1985a, 1989), Alen Rodrıguez (1986, 1991),Betancur Alvarez (1993:43–8), Perl and Grosse (1994, 1995).

54 Ortiz Lopez (1999a, 1999b, 2001). 55 Castellanos (1990).


conclusions, Afro-Cuban language will remain at the center of the reconstruc-tion of earlier Afro-Hispanic speech and its permanent contributions to regionalvarieties of Spanish.

The Afro-Dominican linguistic corpus

Although the Dominican Republic contains a high proportion of citizens ofAfrican descent, the tiny Afro-Dominican written corpus is entirely lacking inlegitimate bozal examples, in sharp contrast to neighboring Cuba and PuertoRico. By far the greatest number of “Afro”-Dominican linguistic texts in realitydepict the Spanish of Haitians, and thus represent the substratum influence ofan established creole language, rather than the speech of African-born bozales.Rodrıguez Demorizi (1975:16), speaking of the French and Haitian presencein western Santo Domingo, beginning at the turn of the nineteenth century,states that “ası se produjo en la isla el desplazamiento, transitorio e imperfecto,pero desplazamiento al fin, de la lengua espanola.” The French governmentestablished a French language publishing enterprise during the brief Frenchoccupation. Shortly after the Haitian occupation began, Haitian president Boyerordered the military conscription of all male Dominicans between the ages ofsixteen and twenty-five, an event which surely put them in contact with thelanguage of the Haitian troops – Creole, not European French. In 1824 Boyerdecreed the prohibition of the use of Spanish in official documents. All officialusage was in French, but once more Haitian Creole was much more likelythe language of the Haitian occupying forces, except for a small cultural elite.French became the language of many cultural events in the capital city, butit is unlikely that this had much of a linguistic effect on the majority of theSpanish-speaking population.56

Rodrıguez Demorizi (1975:18), in speaking of Samana, does not acknowl-edge the direct implantation of Haitian Creole during or after the Haitian occu-pation of Santo Domingo, preferring instead to attribute the minority status ofSpanish to a variety of sources: “Si en la villa de Samana y en sus regionesaledanas no predomina de manera absoluta el espanol, ello se debe a la inmi-gracion negra de los Estados Unidos . . . y a las anteriores incursiones de piratasingleses y franceses. Entonces nacio el patois usado en la Penınsula samanesa,confusa mezcla de espanol, frances e ingles.” In reality, the linguistic situ-ation in Samana is much more systematic:57 three well-delimited languagesare spoken: Spanish, English (in several varieties), and an archaic variety ofHaitian Creole (known locally as patois). There is none of the “confusa mez-cla” as stated above, although inevitably the languages have mutually affected

56 Rodrıguez Demorizi (1975:18).57 Benavides (1973) and Gonzalez and Benavides (1982).


one another. The ignorance of the situation in Samana on the part of otherwisewell-informed Dominican scholars (who evidently had little active knowledgeof either English or Haitian) has distorted the true situation of this region. Toa Spanish-speaking Dominican, the use of either Haitian or the extremely ver-nacular forms of English found in Samana, interlarded with borrowings fromSpanish, must surely have seemed like an unintelligible jargon, but the factremains that Haitian Creole, followed by English, are stable substrate influ-ences in Samana.

One of the very earliest parodies of the speech of Haitians resident in SantoDomingo comes in 1845, a year after the final Haitian withdrawal (ChapterFive Appendix Afro-Dominican #1). This article, appearing in a newspaperand poking fun at the endless political conversations taking place in cafes andon street corners, portrays Haitian expatriates as speaking French rather thanHaitian Creole, which is not unreasonable among the more elite Haitians whofrequented the improvised tertulias of Santo Domingo. This grotesque parodybears no resemblance to French- or Creole-influenced Spanish, but it does doc-ument Dominicans’ contempt for the languages of the former French colony.These early comic representations set the stage for later, more accurate, imita-tions of Haitianized Spanish.

Beginning in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, Dominican litera-ture and folklore is replete with legitimate examples of the use of Haitian in fluidcombinations with Spanish. For example, in a Dominican folktale a bewitchedbird speaks some lines in a mix of Haitian Creole and Spanish (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Dominican #2). In this fragment, mue is Haitian mwe ‘I, me.’Larrazabal Blanco does not identify langue, but it is possibly Haitian lague‘war,’ in which nasalization is common in the vernacular pronunciation.58 Ofmore interest than the individual words themselves is the smooth interweav-ing of Spanish and Haitian elements in this peasants’ folktale. Rather thanbilingual code-switching, this text suggests a gradual interpenetration of thetwo languages resulting in a creoloid form of Spanish which in the absenceof knowledge of the Haitian contact could be taken for a vestige of an earlierpurely Afro-Hispanic creole. Indeed, Larrazabal Blanco (1975:197) cautionsthat “la existencia de voces criollas haitianas en nuestros cuentos no debe serındice de su origen afro, como pudiera suponerse.”

In Villa Mella, considered one of the most “African” villages in the Domini-can 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 Cofradıa del

58 An alternative possibility is the vulgar Haitian epithet languet mama (u) ‘your mother’s clitoris,’corresponding to Caribbean Spanish el cono de tu madre. Given that Haitian coco is also a vulgarterm meaning ‘vagina,’ the latter hypothesis is quite plausible.

59 Rodrıguez Demorizi (1975:108).


Espıritu Santo, the words m’ale ‘I’m going’ are frequent),60 and the com-bination ti maguelo could combine Haitian ti “little” with Spanish aguelo,the vernacular pronunciation for ‘grandfather.’61 Reported for Monte Platais amodecı ‘por ejemplo,’ which the observer speculated came from a midecir.62 A much more likely etymology involves the archaic French creolepronoun mo (modern mwe in Haitian), still found for example in LouisianaCreole French and in the archaic Haitian Creole of the Samana Peninsula. Decımay be a hybrid of Haitian di and Spanish decir, or a combination involvingHaitian dezi ‘desire.’ Also reported for the same area is plesı (of uncertainmeaning), possibly from Haitian plezı ‘pleasure, pleased.’ In Santiago, sipon(< Haitian zipon < French jupon) ‘skirt, slip,’ fula ‘kerchief,’ and possibledolın (< Haitian dole ‘pain’) “anger” have been reported.63 Other Haitian formsappear throughout the Dominican Republic, at the vernacular level among rural,predominantly Afro-American populations; few have been recorded in glos-saries or other dialectological accounts. In Dajabon, near the Haitian border,a report made in 1922 (Rodrıguez Demorizi 1975:219) noted that at least 40percent of the population was Haitian, speaking patua. The author went on tostate “es muy rara la persona de nacionalidad dominicana que no sabe hablar el‘patua’ . . . sucede tambien que las familias acomodadas utilizan los serviciosde las haitianas como cocineras y de los haitianos como peones. De ahı la opor-tunidad que favorece la influencia del ‘patua’ siendo accesible a los escolares yhasta a los ninos de 4 anos de edad en adelante.” The reference to “la personade nacionalidad dominicana” clearly refers only to the western regions alongthe Haitian border, but it does give a feeling for the use of Haitian among abroad spectrum of Dominicans, in conjunction with rural vernacular varietiesof Spanish.

Many Dominican writers have incoporated imitations of the Spanish spokenby 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 isthe “Dialogo cantado entre un guajiro dominicano y un papa boco haitiano enun fandango en Dajabon” (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 formswhich have now evolved. For example, the earlier vu < Fr. vous is now u ‘you’ inHaitian; 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 “Dialogo.” More than an example of Haitianized Spanish, thispoem demonstrates code-switching, with entire sentences in Haitian intermixed

60 Hernandez Soto (1996:131). 61 Hernandez Soto (1996:133).62 Rodrıguez Demorizi (1975:98). 63 Ibid. (146–49).


with phrases in broken Spanish, of the bozal variety. A closer look at the latterelements reveals a number of combinations which, when occurring in Afro-Hispanic texts from other regions, have often been cited as evidence in favor ofan earlier pan-Latin American Afro-Hispanic creole.

Although Alix’s poems are the best known and most humorous imitations ofHaitians’ attempts at speaking Spanish, other examples are found in Domini-can literature and folklore, children’s games, etc. Dominicans once invented apseudo-Haitian oath, to be said while making the sign of the cross:64

por la pepor la panta cruquilifu quilifuMarıa quitifuumpa umju

The first line is legitimately pu la pe “for peace.” The second line, an obviousdeformation of Santa Cruz, is reminiscent of the mocking habla de negros ofSpanish Golden Age literature. Quilifu is quite probably derived from Haitianqui li fu ‘who he/she [is] crazy,’ while quitifu could be interpreted as ‘who [isa] little crazy.’

Among more realistic representations of Haitian-Spanish interlanguage arepassages from the novel Over, by Marrero Aristy (1939), which documentsthe situation of Haitian and West Indian laborers on Dominican sugar planta-tions or bateyes (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #4). In this novel,similar examples are also attributed to cocolos, speakers of West Indian CreoleEnglish (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #5). In the poem “Cocolosde Cocolandia – II” Antonio Frıas Galvez includes the following verses, whichimitate Spanish as spoken by West Indians, including creole French speakers:65

Ya Primo esta cansaYa Primo esta fatigue

Another novel representing the speech of Haitians is Canas y bueyes by Fran-cisco Moscoso Puello (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #6). Thisauthor also represents the speech of cocolos: mi no comprendi, Chencho! TheSpanish of cocolos is also imitated by Ferreras (1982), for example:

tu no voy a salir del escuelo si no tengo tu necesidad de hacerlo. (18)

. . . estoy coge el cana yo tenga pica pa aumenta el suya, si soy ası yo no voy seguı sercompanero suyo, conio. Tu soy muy sabio . . . (29)

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

64 Ibid. (305). 65 Mota Acosta (1977).


Although giving representations of Haitianized Spanish consistent with theearlier texts, Bosch evidently knew less about Haitian Creole than the Domini-can writers mentioned above. No Haitian cane-cutter would say, e.g. mon per,but rather papa-m, nor mon pitı but rather pitit-mwe. A few brief and not partic-ularly realistic imitations of Haitianized Spanish are found in the novel Jengibreby Pedro Andres Perez Cabral (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #8).These fragments also exhibit the stereotype pronunciation of turning all finalvowels to e, as well as confusing French forms (ils and on instead of yo). How-ever, the remaining combinations consistently reflect Haitians’ approximationsto Spanish.

Several twentieth-century Dominican poets have also imitated HaitianizedSpanish, with varying degrees of accuracy. One example comes from RubenSuro, in the poem “Rabiaca del haitiano que espanta mosquitos” (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Dominican #9). By the same author is the “Monologo del negrocon novia” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #10). These verses exhibitthe time-worn stereotype of replacing final vowels with e (or schwa), but alsodemonstrate the use of the third person singular (yo quema), and the infinitive(yo tene), found in both bozal language and as a transfer from the Haitianuninflected verb system. The use of eye for ella is superficially similar to thepronoun elle/nelle/ne found in many bozal texts from Cuba and Puerto Rico, andpossibly reflecting a Papiamento input to Afro-Hispanic language in the latterareas. In the Suro text, however, eye falls in line with the remaining instanceswhere final vowels are replaced by e, instead of representing an otherwiseunattested bozal pronoun in Afro-Dominican Spanish.

Chery Jimenez Rivera is another poet who has used “una jerga domınico-haitiana nacida por el choque cultural y linguıstico de dos pueblos que seencuentran en el panorama fronterizo y tratan allı de reducir sus diferencias.”66

The poem in question is “L’aitianita divariosa,” and most of the language is aneye-dialect representation of colloquial Cibao Spanish, in which the vocaliza-tion of syllable-final liquids is represented by e instead of i, as is more commonin Dominican literature (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #11). Theorigin of this phenomenon has yet to be satisfactorily determined.67

66 Caamano (1989:152).67 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 isvery rare in contemporary Canary Spanish. He observes that MacCurdy (1950) found traces ofvocalization in the speech of the Islenos of Louisiana, a vestigial Spanish-speaking communityderived in part from Canary Island immigrants who arrived towards the end of the eighteenthcentury. Most Isleno vocalization is of the sort paire < padre (although currently the formparde is more common [Lipski 1990c]), but this phenomenon is widespread in rural Spanishthroughout the world, being especially prevalent in Chile. Megenney (1990a:80–81) hints atan African origin for the same pronunciation. Few other areas of Latin America have evermanifested this phenomenon. Puerto Rican jıbaro speech of the nineteenth century apparentlyhad this trait, now absent in all Puerto Rican dialects (Giron n.d., Cadilla de Martınez 1938:


Occasional fragments in Haitian Creole (written in Spanish orthography) areinterspersed, but despite Caamano’s classification, this text cannot really beconsidered a specimen of Haitianized Spanish:

mue pa ue ane, ¿e u compe, u p’anco 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 ratherthan true penetration of Haitian Creole into Spanish. Despite acknowledgmentthat Haitian Creole or patois is one of the major languages used in the SamanaPeninsula (together with several varieties of English), Gonzalez and Benavides(1982) use data from nonstandard Samana Spanish to raise the issue of the priorcreolization of Spanish in this region. Closer examination of the Samana Spanishdata suggest instead the interlocking influence of Afro-American English andHaitian Creole, both impacting Spanish as acquired as a second language byolder residents of Samana.

Leaving aside the data from Samana, the only contemporary evidence of whatmight have been a legitimate bozal Spanish in the Dominican Republic comesin a few isolated words reported for some marginal dialects, whose phoneticdeformations are more typical of attested bozal language from other regionsthan the results of contact with French- or English-based creoles. Among theremaining attestations of what might be bozal leftovers in Santo Domingo, wefind some anonymous coplas (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Dominican #13),supposedly written by Dominican blacks in gratitude to Haitian president Boyerfor his abolition of slavery in Spanish Santo Domingo.68 The use of the thirdperson singular verb form va in combination with a first person subject is typicalof bozal language, but also characterizes Haitianized Spanish. The use of theFrench/Creole word liberte suggests a Haitian basis for this poem, rather thanan Afro-Hispanic bozal remnant. Caamano (1989:234) regards this text as anAfro-Hispanic creole leftover, noting that “el limitado testimonio documentalque representa el texto bajo estudio no permite otras observaciones sobre elantiguo afroespanol criollo de Santo Domingo.”

The Afro-Puerto Rican bozal corpus

Depicting the life and language of African slaves and free workers neverachieved the status in Puerto Rican literature that it enjoyed in neighboring

105–07; Alvarez Nazario 1990:80–81, for examples as early as 1814). Vocalization of liquidswas also prevalent among the negros curros of nineteenth-century Cuba, free blacks living inHavana 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 ofliquids was once more common in many Spanish-speaking regions, being now reduced to a fewsmall areas. Granda (1991) believes that liquid vocalization is due primarily to sociolinguisticmarginality, rather than to substrate influences.

68 Deive (1980:228), Rodrıguez Demorizi (1973:52–53).


Cuba, and though black characters and references abound in Puerto Ricannovels, stories, and poems, only the tiniest fraction of these works yields anyinsight into the speech of Afro-Puerto Ricans, and even fewer documents revealanything beyond brief accounts of foreigners’ blunders and malapropisms. Ahandful of texts represents the Afro-Hispanic speech of Puerto Rican bozales.The small number of Puerto Rican bozal texts stands in sharp contrast to theliterally scores of Afro-Cuban texts. This is a function of the history of bothislands. Cuba was swept up in the nineteenth-century sugar plantation boom,and received hundreds of thousands of new slaves within a few decades in thefirst half of that century. Puerto Rico participated only marginally in this enter-prise, and in particular there was no rush to suddenly import huge numbers ofslaves in the nineteenth century. Puerto Rico was also relatively unpopulatedin comparison with Cuba, had a much lower standard of living, fewer culturalopportunities, and a greatly reduced number of writers. By the nineteenth cen-tury, when most literary bozal imitations were produced in Latin America, thevast majority of black slaves in Puerto Rico were island-born and speakingSpanish with no second-language traits, although some ethnolinguistic mark-ers may have remained: “Es obvio suponer que en cuanto a los negros y lasnegras nacidos en la isla, su lengua se cimentarıa sobre las bases del lenguajepopular puertorriqueno, con sus variaciones. Los negros de tala o los traba-jadores de suelo adquirieron el espanol del campesino, mientras que los de lacasa grande tal vez desarrollaron una modalidad, mas refinada, de acuerdo conla manifestacion de los amos en el ambito domestico.”69

The Puerto Rican text which shows the greatest evidence of a systematicallyreconstructed Afro-Hispanic language is the skit La juega de gallos o el negrobozal (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #1) by Ramon Caballero, orig-inally published in Ponce in 1852, and first brought to the attention of linguistsby Alvarez Nazario (1974). Little is known about the author of this play, otherthan 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 African-born bozales, but the latter were certainly present in Puerto Rico during the timein which the play was written. La juega de gallos combines scattered structuresreminiscent of other Afro-Iberian creoles, set against a generally unremarkablebozal pidgin. The play contains such attested Afro-Hispanic elements as theuse of ta + Vinf, the invariant copula son, the use of the bare infinitive minusfinal /r/ as invariant verb, the West African Pidgin English form yari yari ‘cry,’and intrusive nasalization as in brangaman < valgame.71 These forms appearagainst the backdrop of imperfectly learned Spanish such as might be found inany foreign language classroom. On the basis of this text, Granda (1968:194,fn. 4) believes that “. . . es facil demostrar el caracter igualmente ‘criollo’

69 Ortiz Lugo (1995:14). 70 Giron (n.d.).71 Lipski (1986g, 1987b, 1992b, 1992c, 1999c, 2002c).


de la modalidad linguıstica puertorriquena . . .” From this point forward theclaim that an Afro-Hispanic creole was once spoken in Puerto Rico has neverbeen seriously challenged, despite the fact that the case rests on such a smallcorpus. In particular, since Ponce was the site of a large colony of Papiamento-speaking workers in the nineteenth century, the possibility that such creole-likeverbs as yo ta quere might be influenced by Papiamento (which has identicalconstructions) warrants further exploration. Among later studies of “Caribbeanbozal Spanish,” little attention has been paid to a possible Afro-Hispanic creolein Puerto Rico, with the latter region usually lumped together with the moreextensive Afro-Cuban corpus.

Another source of Afro-Puerto Rican language is another skit, Tio Fele byEleuterio Derkes (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #2), published in1883. There are several scenes in which bozal fragments occur; these do notsuggest a systematic creole, but rather the imperfect learning of Spanish. Theseextremely brief fragments do little in the way of reconstructing bozal languagein colonial Puerto Rico, but they do indicate some awareness of AfricanizedSpanish during the nineteenth century.

In 1883 Rafael Escalona published two humorous skits, inspired by the Cubanliterary stereotype of the negro catedratico. The title of Flor de una noche(Escalona 1883b) was intended to be a spoof of the Romantic Puerto Ricanpoem “Mi flor de un dıa” by Jose Gautier Benıtez, who in turn had derivedhis title from the play by the Catalan writer Francisco Camprodon Flor de undıa (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #10). Escalona’s play was firstperformed in 1881. Amor a la pompadour (Escalona 1883a) was first perfor-med in 1882. The second play contains dialect imitations of jıbaros and negroscatedraticos; the first, of catedraticos and bozales. The catedratico examplesrepresent vernacular Puerto Rican Spanish, with typical phonetic reductions andhypercorrections, together with the heavy dose of malapropisms that formed thebasis for this literary stereotype. In the same play, the character Diego is a negrocongo; his speech contains many typical bozal traits, including faulty noun-adjective agreement, improper use of definite articles, use of the third personsingular as invariant verb, all in variable opposition to correct Spanish usage.None of the traits points to anything more than second-language acquisitionof Spanish. The character Juan is described as a negro carabalı, that is, fromeastern Nigeria (speaking Ijo, Efik, or Ibibio), but his speech is that of a PuertoRican-born negro ladino. Amor a la pompadour also has catedratico speech,as well as jıbaro dialect.

In addition to the dramatic pieces, an odd and completely unexplained decimareferring to the Spanish-American war of 1898 was published in a folklore col-lection,72 containing what appears to be Afro-Hispanic language (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Puerto Rico #3). This poem contains a number of creoloid

72 Mason and Espinosa (1918:361).


elements, such as the use of the generic article lan/nan,73 but given the lack ofinformation regarding its composition, one can only speculate as to the authen-ticity of the language.

There are a few other short Puerto Rican poems purporting to represent bozallanguage. The “Decima de negros,” which according to Degetau (1925:44) was“una cancion de los negros bozales,” contains some non-agreeing conjugatedor infinitive verbs, as well as popular non-Africanized Puerto Rican Spanish(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #5).74 The poem “Yo so un negritoangolo” also contains a few suggestions of non-native bozal Spanish, but not ofa stable creole (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #6).75 A number ofsongs and bombas from Puerto Rico contain verses sung in what may be Africanlanguages.76 The second song, according to Cadilla de Martınez (1953), wasobserved and transcribed in Santurce. It is not clear whether the non-Spanishitems of these songs represent African items or are merely onomatopeic, pseudo-African jitanjaforas. Speaking of the first song and dance, performed in Santurceby natives of Loıza, Cadilla de Martınez (1953:26) comments:

Segun averigue y pude observar, esos bailes de negros se llevan a cabo los sabados porla noche y algunas veces durante el dıa. Los de dıa son muy raros y solo de cuando setrata de celebrar fiestas conmemorativas. Se reunen negros en un barrio formando uncırculo, en cuyo centro empiezan a cantar y a bailar uno de ellos . . . la cancion y el coroson de entonacion monotona y chillona. El baile se ha denominado en algunas AntillasCongo, sin duda por su procedencia africana. Algunos authores le han creıdo mezclado,o por lo menos derivado, del misterioso rito del Vodu.

In the poem “Buscando dinero,” Llanos Allende (1962:31–33) offers a dialogbetween a brujo and a congo although the latter, presumably an African-bornbozal, in reality uses vernacular Puerto Rican Spanish devoid of specific second-language traits (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #8).

A little-known but important literary representation of Afro-Puerto Ricanspeech comes in the story “Tate” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico#9) by Marıa Cadilla de Martınez (1945:49–60). The protagonist is an elderlyblack woman, a freed slave of the writer’s grandfather, who was apparently bornon a Puerto Rican plantation of an African father captured on the African coastand taken to the Caribbean by European slavers. The author gives no furtherinformation about this presumably real-life character (including the backgroundof the mother, who was supposed to have died when Tate was very young), nordoes she comment on the unusual speech, except to give glosses of words whichno Puerto Rican or Spanish speaker from another region would recognize today.This lack of metacommentary is itself suggestive that bozal or hybrid bozal-Caribbean creole speech was not unusual enough in Puerto Rico as late as the

73 Lipski (1987c). 74 Cadilla de Martınez (1953:111). 75 Ibid. (308).76 For example Cadilla de Martınez (1933:25–26) Rosa-Nieves (1957:62–63) (Chapter Five

Appendix Puerto Rico #7).


early part of the twentieth century as to require extensive explanation. Severalobservations arise from this text:(1) The form dona ‘give’ is essentially equivalent to Papiamento duna, and it

is difficult to derive this word from any Afro-Hispanic source which doesnot include at least some hybridization with creole languages.

(2) Reduction of syllable onset clusters (negro > nego) is typical of Afro-Iberian pidgin, rather than more nativized Afro-Hispanic language.

(3) The use of son as invariant copula (como son tu) coincides with other Afro-Hispanic examples, especially from nineteenth-century Cuba.77

(4) Parra and parra ‘say’ appear to be a cross between Spanish hablar andFrench/creole parler.

(5) Branca < blanca is a change found in Portuguese, but also in early Afro-Hispanic language. This word appears to have become part of a pan-Hispanic Africanized jargon, a sort of early “black Spanish” used perhapseven by descendants of Africans who learned Spanish natively in GoldenAge Spain and colonial Spanish America.

(6) Although Cadilla translates bella as ‘tengo,’ it is much more likely to be thephonetic reduction of verdad [bela], as in contemporary vernacular PuertoRican Spanish, or, if the ll is meant to represent [y], the verb vea withintrusive 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 Africanpronoun; enu is the (now archaic) second person plural pronoun in Afro-Colombian Palenquero, derived from Kikongo or similar Bantu languages.

(8) The form quere may be a rare example of voseo in Afro-Puerto Rican Span-ish (to date, voseo is only attested for Antillean dialects in some remote areasof Cuba, and marginally for the nineteenth-century Dominican Republic.Alternatively, it may represent use of the bare infinitive as invariant verb, acommon strategy of bozal Spanish throughout its history. Similarly, corre-sponde may represent an analogical preterite form (instead of correspondı)or a bare infinitive.

(9) Quia ser may not derive from que ha de ser, since in other cases when thiscombination has been reduced, the /d/ has remained. This form has sur-vived, for example, as the future/irrealis particle di in the Philippine CreoleSpanish (Chabacano) dialects of Cavite and Ternate. It was also used inthe now defunct Portuguese creoles of Goa and Bombay.78 In the Indiancreole Portuguese dialects (except for Korlai), had (< ha de) was used asa future/irrealis particle.79 Sao Tome creole occasionally uses te or di toexpress distant future (Valkhoff 1966:111). Cadilla de Martınez (1941:38)also observes that in vernacular Puerto Rican Spanish (i.e. of the early

77 Lipski (1999c, 2002c). 78 Dalgado (1900–01, 1902–03, 1917, 1922).79 Schuchardt (1883a, 1883b:6, 1883c, 1889b); Dalgado (1906:159–60, 19) for Norteiro.


twentieth century), ¿Me a conoces?,¿mea dices? replaces ¿Me conoces tu?,¿me dices? No explanation or clarification is given for this construction,which is not explicitly attributed to African influence. However, it bearsa striking resemblance to the particle a in the unusual Afro-Dominicandialect (or perhaps limited set of idiolects) studied by Green (1996,1997).

Perhaps the most important bozal text from Puerto Rico was never publishedat all, but rather appears in an unpublished first draft of an abolitionist play(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #11). In 1884, the poet/playwrightRamon Mendez Quinones (1847–89) wrote the play “¡Pobre Sinda!,” whichwas never published. This neo-Romantic drama is set in Puerto Rico, in the“epoca de la odiosa esclavitud – 1864.” Among the characters is a “esclavoviejo, congo,” who in the definitive version of the manuscript speaks in normal,even sublime, Spanish, as he delivers his impassioned denunciations of the cru-elties of slavery. In unpublished notes,80 Mendez Quinones gives his reasons fornot having this African-born slave use bozal language: “Hablando en su jerga,no convencerıa, y en los momentos mas pateticos no harıa sentir, produciendocon sus exclamaciones de dolor la hilaridad del publico.”81 To demonstrate hispoint, the author adds examples of several scenes that he had originally writtenin bozal Spanish, “y de las cuales prescindı por los conceptos antes expresa-dos.” These fragments show great similarity with bozal texts from elsewherein Latin America, and when combined with the author’s obvious concern forthe situation of blacks in Puerto Rico, converge on a positive evaluation of thelinguistic value of the unpublished notes. This text contains the independentlyverified guete for usted, the invariant copula son, and the invariant third per-son pronoun nelle, abundant in Afro-Cuban literature and still used among afew elderly Afro-Cubans.82 However the most important aspect of this text isthe fact of its expurgation from the final edition of the play, since its seemingauthenticity would be at cross-purposes with the author’s depiction of noblysuffering Africans.

In addition to purportedly bozal imitations, a few Puerto Rican texts doc-ument the former presence of creole French speakers, particularly from theLesser Antilles. For example in his novel La llamarada, Enrique Laguerre(1935:323–24) has black characters singing couplets with words in Frenchcreole (which, however, is not glossed in the text):

Agueda, dime lo que quieres;Dime lo que quieres, Agueda,Dime lo que quieres;Si es cunya dimelo.Si es lero dimelo.

80 Discovered by Giron (1991:399–411). 81 Ibid. (400). 82 Ortiz Lopez (1998).


Cunya is a fair realization of the Haitian (and lesser Antillean) French creoleword for ‘now’; lero seems to mean ‘later,’ containing creole French le ‘time,hour.’ This is more indirect evidence of the presence of creole French amongAfro-Puerto Rican communities. “Poema dedicado a la gran recitadora senoraDominga de la Cruz” by Victorio Llanos (1962:93) contains the chorus Ohdan-ze . . . mua . . . This line, in a poem about dancing, appears to contain thecreole French elements danse ‘dance’ and mua (more often mue) ‘I, me.’ Thesame poem also contains the lines: ¿Que importa que diga la gente que/yo bailabomba, ja, ja? There appears to be a lack of subject-verb agreement typical ofbozal speech as well as of speakers of other Caribbean creoles; later in thepoem the line is repeated, but with a subjunctive, which may mean that oneof the lines was misprinted, although the poem evidently intends to portray an“African” tone: ¡Que importa que diga la gente que/yo baile bomba! In thepoem “Cana,” Francisco Manrique Cabrera (1967:44) purports to represent thespeech of black cane cutters:

cana tumbapara hacendao;cana paratumba hacendao.

It is not clear whether tumba and para represent uninflected infinitives or adjec-tives (tumbada, parada), but in any case the lack of an article before hacendaosuggests second-language usage typical of bozal speech.

There are also some direct and indirect demonstrations of the Papiamentopresence in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. In the first acknoweledgment ofsuch an influence, Alvarez Nazario (1970, 1972, 1974) reproduces a poem writ-ten in what is clearly a partially Hispanized Papiamento, published in Ponce(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #4). The text in question comesfrom a pamphlet describing festive activities realized in the south of PuertoRico 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 pam-phlet is the following song, attributed to the “mulatos holandeses que residıan enel Sur.” The language of this song, while clearly written in a type of “jerga” (theterm used by Pasarell), is not Papiamento, although bearing a number of resem-blances to the latter language. However, the attribution of this text to natives ofCuracao, and the references to Curacao and its history in the song itself, suggestthat some form of Papiamento was once to be found among the “mulatos holan-deses” residing in Puerto Rico.83 The most significant aspect of this discovery,

83 A more contemporary example, from a poem published in 1947 (Rodrıguez de Nolla (1947:63)is:

Ano nuevo dande, ano tabinı.


amply recognized by Alvarez Nazario, is the fact that the language of these gentidi Corso was familiar enough to observers in early nineteenth-century PuertoRico as to require no special introduction or translation. Manuel Alonso, inthe classic nineteenth-century work El jıbaro, also referred to the presence of“criollos de Curazao” in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, evidently an unre-markable phenomenon in his day. Giron (n.d.) also describes the presence ofPapiamento-speaking natives in Puerto Rico.84

Following the negrista trends in other Latin American countries, some con-temporary Puerto Rico writers have employed popular phonetics to convey thespeech of bozal or ladino blacks in Puerto Rico, much as Pales Matos haddone for a pan-Latin American “Africanized” Spanish (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Puerto Rico #12). In the story “Guasima” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #13), a son (probably born in Puerto Rico) of black slaves in centralPuerto Rico describes memories of a nineteenth-century hurricane, using popu-lar jıbaro Spanish. Finally, in the story “La ironıa que pasa,” written at the begin-ning of the twentieth century, Juan Braschi attributes to an Anglo-American alanguage 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 whichthe American speaks using only unconjugated verbs, the dialog breaks into ajumbled mixture of conjugated and unconjugated verbs and misplaced con-cordance which recalls stereotypical bozal imitations (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Puerto Rico #14), and which suggests that such stereotypes persist in thecollective memory of Puerto Rican writers and readers.

The Afro-Ecuadoran corpus

Despite the significant black population in Ecuador, from the earliest colonialperiod to the present day, there is very little documentation of Afro-Ecuadoranlanguage. Prior to the early decades of the twentieth century, Ecuadoran writersdid not describe the language of the nation’s black population, and there are noknown documents purporting to represent the speech of African-born bozales ortheir immediate descendants. Twentieth-century Ecuadoran writers – mostly ofAfrican origin themselves – have offered literary examples of “black” Spanish ofnorthwestern Ecuador, but the traits in question simply represent the vernacularspeech 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 (Domınguez1989:12):

ano novo ta benıano novo ta baytelele, telela . . .

84 Alonso (1975:57). Also Vicente Rosalıa (1992).


non-native bozal language. Nor has any written documentation of the earlyspeech of the highland Afro-Ecuadoran population of the Chota Valley cometo light.

In the colonial period, African slaves in Ecuador formed maroon commu-nities as elsewhere in Latin America, and some survived until the nineteenthcentury. One such village is Palenque in Los Rıos province to the northeast ofGuayaquil, where a considerable group of descendants of escaped slaves hadsettled, and where in the nineteenth century an apparently creolized Spanishappears to have existed. The historian Chavez Franco (1930:524–29) citedfrom memory examples from his own childhood days, but was unable toprovide an exact translation for the highly deformed elements (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Ecuador #1). The village of Palenque still exists, but noneof its residents speaks in this fashion, nor is there any collective memory ofa creolized speech being used in past generations, which leads to the sup-position that the examples recalled by Chavez Franco, if in fact they rep-resent a creolized Spanish (and not, for example, an actual African songor a series of onomatopoeic forms), were the last remnants of an earlierspeech mode.

A few travelers’ accounts also suggest that as late as the end of the nineteenthcentury a distinctly Africanized Spanish may have been spoken in the ChotaValley. Hassaurek (1868:194) who traveled through Ecuador in 1861, noted,upon witnessing a celebration among chotenos that “I was unable to make outany of the verses, but my companions told me the songs were composed by theNegroes themselves, and in their own dialect. Like the Negroes of the UnitedStates, the Negroes of Spanish America have a dialect and pronunciation oftheir own. The same guttural voices and almost unintelligible pronunciation, thesame queer gesticulation and shaking of the body, the same shrewd simplicityand good humor . . .” It is evident that, regardless of his qualifications as anexplorer and an anthropologist, Hassaurek was a questionable linguist, whowas strongly influenced by stereotypes and generalizations that even in thenineteenth century were invalid for Hispanic American dialectology. The factthat the chotenos” songs were incomprehensible to the visitor (who apparentlywas not entirely fluent in Spanish) says nothing essential about the local Spanishdialect, but rather exemplifies a natural phenomenon, the phonetic deformationof sung language and the stylistic discrepancies between daily speech patternsand the lyrics of popular songs. Boyd-Bowman (1953:233) claimed that theChota dialect “pertenece linguısticamente a la provincia negra de Esmeraldas,”an opinion echoed by Weil et al. (1973:83), where we also find the declarationthat on the Ecuadoran coast, a “black” subdialect exists alongside other varieties.

In the coplas and decimas of Esmeraldas,85 sung most frequently duringthe annual Carnival, there are slight hints of an earlier period of Africanized

85 Garcıa (1980), Rahier (1985).


Spanish, mostly in the form of occasional lapses of agreement (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Ecuador #2). There are also examples of the popular inter-change of [f] and [hw] (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Ecuador #3), a phoneticdevelopment found in several areas of Latin America characterized by lan-guage contact.86 Examples of supposedly “Afro-Ecuadoran” pronunciation arefound in literary works written by Ecuadorans of African descent, among whichAdalberto Ortiz is one of the first. In much of Esmeraldas province, Afro-Ecuadorans are in contact with indigenous groups, particularly the Cayapas.The pidginized Spanish of the Cayapas is juxtaposed with the popular Esmer-aldeno Spanish in the novel Juyungo by Adalberto Ortiz (1976). There is evenan instance of a native Spanish speaker’s imitation of Cayapa Spanish (38):

Mira, compadre; tu dando poquito polvo amarillo, yo regalando collar bonito. Si tu noqueriendo collar ni tela bonita, yo dando bastante teyo . . .

There are also examples of the speech of the Colorados (and imitations thereofby native Spanish speakers), using the same strategy of the gerund as invariantverb (93):

nosotros viniendo a visitarlos, compadre Segundo. Hoy dıa de fiesta, tomando un poco.Eso estando bueno, entren en mi casa, yo llamando otra gente . . . Toma, compadreSegundo, leche de tigre. Estando bueno . . .

In contrast, the “Afro-Esmeraldeno” speech is represented simply by the lossof final /r/ in infinitives, by the occasional loss of final /s/ and of intervocalic/d/:

Yo que voy a sabe . . . Puede se. Pero lo que yo digo tambien es la verda . . . (83)

Estan enganaos y veran como el ingeniero se los va atranca . . . (110)

Todavıa venı a cae a deshoras este condenao aguacero. (112)

Decı tu verda, no ma. (176)

Similar examples are found in Nelson Estupinan Bass Cuando los guayacanesflorecıan (1974):

. . . no sabemo nada. (44)

¡Cuanto no hicimo! . . . Una vez pa ve si ası 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 areashas been associated only with early bozal Spanish and never for native Spanishspeakers of African descent. This is the closest approximation to what may

86 Lipski (1995c). 87 Ramırez de Moron (1975).


have been earlier bozal language in contemporary Afro-Ecuadoran literature(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Ecuador #4). A few other scattered examples arefound in Afro-Ecuadoran literature (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Ecuador #5).

Little in the Afro-Ecuadoran corpus gives evidence of anything other thanvernacular coastal pronunciation and popular morphological traits. In north-western Ecuador, there are many references to Colombian blacks who arrivedafter independence, while the few references to the Chota Valley make onlyoccasional reference to loss of word-final /s/.88 The example “Todavıa venıa cae a deshoras este condenao aguacero”89 may contain an example of anunconjugated verb, while the few instances of branco < blanco are not typ-ical of regional Spanish, but do coincide both with the Portuguese word andwith earlier Afro-Hispanic language. By the nineteenth century, when literaryimitations of Afro-Hispanic language flourished in Latin American narrativefiction, there were almost no bozales in Ecuador; most of the black populationhad been in the country since colonial times, or were native Spanish speakersmore recently arriving from neighboring Colombia.

The Afro-Colombian corpus

Although Cartagena de Indias was the principal slaving port for the northern halfof Spanish South America, and the maroon village Palenque de San Basilio, withits attendant creole language, arose close to Cartagena, the Afro-Colombianlinguistic cupboard is nearly bare as regards legitimate bozal examples. In theseventeenth century, a number of musical texts, typically the negrillos sung inchurches and cathedrals, were composed or performed in Colombia (ChapterFive Appendix Afro-Colombia #1-7). Albeit possibly conceived on Colombiansoil, the documents in question are identical to those produced in Spain duringthe same time period, and, like the companion texts from Mexico, Peru, andBolivia of the same time period, were either written by expatriate Spaniards orwriters educated in Spain, or were simply imitations of the Peninsular Spanishhabla de negros. It may be that the first African slaves taken to Colombiaactually spoke with these traits, but the near identity with the Peninsular texts,as compared with later Afro-Hispanic texts indisputably produced in LatinAmerica, casts the authenticity of the seventeenth-century Afro-Colombiantexts into doubt. Found is the usual cluster of phonetic patterns, includingshift of intervocalic /d/ to [r], the shift /r/ > [l] in intervocalic and onset clusterpositions, 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 FiveAppendix Colombia #12).

88 Not a common trait in this highland dialect; Lipski (1986e, 1987a).89 Ortiz (1976:112).


In 1693, legal documents from Cartagena give some of the earliest examplesof bozal Spanish from colonial Colombia which bear no noticeable relation toearlier Golden Age patterns:

Ya blanco ya quere caria negro (Arrazola 1970:151)

Seno tene razon decı vien (Ibid. 153)

blanco habla [i] (Ibid. 131)

Immediately obvious in these brief fragments is the use of the bare uninflectedinfinitive (lacking the final /r/), a typical Spanish pidgin strategy, found in earlybozal language of many regions, as well as in more contemporary approxima-tions to Spanish.90

Another early example of Afro-Colombian language comes from the Pacificport of Tumaco, an area that even today has a population of predominantlyAfrican origin. The Franciscan priest Juan de Santa Gertrudis visited the area in1759, and registered the following humorous but plausible interchange betweena bozal slave and a landowner:91

Mi amo, toca oro.Negro, ¿donde hallaste este oro?Mi amo, peda grande.¿Donde es Peda grande?Quote peda gande.Manana me ensenaras Peda Gande.. . . era simplemente “bajo aquella piedra grande.”

This interchange shows the bare uninflected infinitive, as well as onset clusterreduction (peda < piedra), both traits common in Afro-Iberian pidgins.

Following these early examples, the Afro-Colombian corpus is vacuous asregards purported bozal language. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth cen-tury, several Colombian authors employed literary eye-dialect to represent thesupposed speech of Afro-Colombians. In most instances, the traits involvedare those of popular Caribbean Spanish, together with features of the mostmarginalized sociolects. Some novels also attempt to depict earlier times, whenAfrican-born bozales were still present in Colombia, although none explicitlyattribute nonstandard Spanish forms to bozal African speakers.92 One exceptionis the comment in Palacios (1954:50):

Conversaciones como esta habıa en cada grupo, aunque en lenguaje barbaro, porqueningun negro hablaba bien el castellano; todos ellos eran africanos o hijos o nietos deafricanos. Suprimıan siempre la r y la s finales, y aun la r en medio de la diccion,

90 Lipski (2001a, 2002d). 91 Jurado Noboa (1990b:305), Santa Gertrudis (1970:205).92 Chapter Five Appendix Colombia B-8-11; Lipski (1999d).


y se detenıan mucho en la vocal final acentuada; a esto se agregaba un dejo en lapronunciacion, peculiar a todos ellos.

The traits mentioned in this passage reflect popular Spanish of coastal Colom-bia, stemming in turn from the Andalusian/Canary heritage of the Caribbeandialects. According to the testimony of individuals who actually heard bozalSpanish many years ago, Africans’ Spanish did indeed contain unique intona-tional patterns as well as phonetic truncations. For example the Palenquero lan-guage of Palenque de San Basilio has an intonation which is markedly differentthan neighboring coastal Colombian dialects of Spanish, and Palenquero’s ver-nacular Spanish usually contains the same patterns, thus making Palenquerosinstantly identifiable when they go to Cartagena. The definitive traits weregrammatical, however, consisting of unstable subject-verb and noun-adjectiveagreement, as well as syntactic anomalies such as juxtaposition of words insteadof using prepositions and relative clauses. None of these features appears in pur-portedly “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 whichwhat are claimed to be bozal Spanish carryovers are liberally mixed with ver-bal improvisation and stereotyping.93 The very existence of the congo speechand rituals, along with other Afro-Panamanian songs which contain examples ofnon-native Spanish usage, point to the prior existence of a possibly widespread“African” Spanish in Panama, which all but disappeared before the relativelyrecent Panamanian literary tradition developed. Indeed, no known Panamanianwritten text claims to depict bozal Spanish, and the rich oral tradition yieldsambiguous if tantalizing nuggets. Among the few documents in which any formof “Africanized” Spanish occurs, a mid-nineteenth-century poem imitates thespeech of Panamanian-born blacks; the traits are similar to those of the negroscurros of Cuba, reflecting popular phonetics such as loss of final /s/ and neutral-ization of /l/ and /r/ (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Panama #1). In a collection ofpoems, the Afro-Panamanian writer Vıctor Franceschi (1956) casts several ofthe Afro-Caribbean tinged poems in popular Caribbean pronunciation, such asaspiration or loss of final /s/, loss of final /r/, etc. (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Panama #2). The grammar and vocabulary of these poems in no way deviatesfrom standard Spanish. In one poem, however, Franceschi unexpectedly intro-duces bozal characteristics, including use of the third person singular form as aninvariant verb root, and constructions using ta + Vinf (Chapter Five Appendix

93 Lipski (1989), Joly (1981).


Afro-Panama #3). The poem begins with unremarkable language, containingonly occasional popular phonetic modifications; suddenly the language changesto include lines such as:

Yo asegura que en canarla traidora ta enroca . . .cuando tu ta tlabajayo te puee asegura . . .

The construction tu ta tlabaja ‘you work’ is is the only known literary exam-ple of the construction ta + Vinf outside of Cuba and Puerto Rico; ta enrocais simply esta enroscada ‘she is curled up,’ and does not exhibit the sameprocess.94

In another poem, Franceschi (1956:33) employs one ambiguous case of whatmay be the invariant copula son, common in nineteenth-century Afro-Cubantexts and occurring occasionally in other Afro-Hispanic documents:

. . . ponle la yuca blanca,yuca que niega el blanco:yuca son pa lo negro . . .!

These examples, although unique outside of the Afro-Cuban corpus, are worthpursuing. 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 cen-turies. Imitation of Afro-Cuban literary models cannot be excluded, especiallysince there are no comparable examples in the works of other Panamanianauthors.95 However, the language of the negros congos gives every indicationof being a locally Panamanian phenomenon, and the Franceschi poems mayprovide evidence that some constructions thought to be primarily Afro-Cubanor Papiamento-influenced could once have existed elsewhere in the Caribbeanregion.

In contemporary Panamanian Spanish, there are some words of African ori-gin, particularly among the Afro-colonial population. Most of the elements arefound elsewhere in the Caribbean region, and do not shed light directly onthe African origins of slaves in colonial Panama (Jamieson 1992). Panamanianliterature does contain several references to Afro-Antilleans, Creole English-speaking blacks descended from Panama Canal workers, and whose “African”speech traits when learning Spanish are twice-removed from both Africa andfrom slavery. Tejeira (1964:17) imitates the speech of Afro-Panamanians inColon, who pronounce intervocalic /d/ as [r]:

94 Outside of these two countries, and the Panamanian example just cited, Moodie cites an ambigu-ous example from the vestigial Spanish of Trinidad, while Tompkins (1981:311) mentions anolder Afro-Peruvian informant in Canete, who recalled a line from an old song: “Lima ta hablary Canete ta ponde.” Given the highly eroded vestigial Spanish of Trinidad, the sole Trinidadexample is questionable, while the Peruvian case remains unverified.

95 Wilson (1982).


– Si ron romingo gana, yo mejoro.– ¿Y como va usted a mejorar – le pregunto alguien – si usted es su adversario?– No mejoro de mejorar . . .

A satirical song mocking Afro-Antillean Panamanians contains phoneticdeformations suggestive of Afro-Hispanic stereotypes (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Panama #4). Many Panamanian novels and stories also illustrate the code-switching of Creole English- and French-speaking Panamanians.96 A few ves-tiges of earlier bozal Spanish also survive in the lyrics of Panamanian folkdances, particularly the Zaracunde.97 This dance, also known as El Cuenecueor Danza de los negros bozales, is currently performed in the town of LosSantos (with a very small population of African origin), but was once per-formed during Carnival season in other parts of Panama. One of the charactersof this ritual dance is the Negro boza, a pronunciation reflecting the truncationof final consonants in Afro-Hispanic speech; final /r/ is frequently deleted invernacular Panamanian Spanish, but final /l/ almost never falls in contempo-rary speech. Other characters’ names also reflect bozal confusion of Spanishmorphological endings: Pajarite (pajarito ‘little bird’), Fransisque (Francisco).The Negro boza chants phrases which include Afro-Hispanic bozal language,including yo tene (yo tengo ‘I have’), la huerte (la huerta ‘the garden’), yuque(yuca ‘yucca’), tamarinde (tamarindo ‘tamarind’), papaye ‘papaya’. The songeven contains a non-inverted question, frequent in the Spanish Antilles but notcommon in contemporary Panamanian Spanish:98 ¿Cuantos hijos tu teneis?‘How many children do you have?’99 The frequent replacement of Spanishfinal -o and -a by -e is similar to phenomena attributed in literature to HaitianL2 speakers of Spanish in the Dominican Republic, and actually verified byOrtiz Lopez.100

The Afro-Venezuelan corpus

Although the presence of African-born slaves persisted in Venezuela well intothe second half of the nineteenth century, there are few if any legitimate sur-viving bozal texts from Venezuela, although oral folklore is rich in suggestivefragments 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 Simelo cribana primero ‘if you write it for me first’. Also found in much Afro-Venezuelan folklore are snatches of songs and popular poems which reflect thepresence of Papiamento elements, brought by slaves who escaped the nearby

96 E.g. Cubena (1981, 1990). 97 Rhodes (1998).98 Except among Creole English-speaking Afro-Antilleans, probably through the influence of

English creole; Bishop (1976:62).99 Arosemena Moreno (1984). 100 Ortiz Lopez (1999a, 1999b, 2001).

101 Ovalles (1935:70).


Dutch slaving depots of Curacao and Aruba and established themselves inremote areas of the Venezuelan coast. The coastal province of Coro received aconstant stream of escaped slaves from Curacao, who also introduced the Afro-Iberian creole language Papiamento into the Afro-Venezuelan linguistic mix.102

Many of the slaves brought to colonial Venezuela were loangos from thecoastal Congo region, and some of their rituals survive to this day.103 The mostvernacular speech of this (natively Spanish-speaking) group is characterizedby 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.), realiza-tion of intervocalic /r/ and /rr/ as [d] (badato < barato, vadia < varias, etc.),and reduction of onset clusters (nego < negro, ladone < ladrones, etc.). Thereare also some syntactic constructions which depart drastically from other formsof vernacular Venezuelan and Caribbean Spanish, for example:

yo no voy a se apueta con utada polque depue ello se pueden demaye y decı . . .(Mosonyi et al. 1983:165)

yo no quien me mando a venime pa ete condenao pueblo. (Ibid.)

El me dice: “a se tengo.” (Hernandez 1981:110)

A number of the loangos had escaped from nearby Curacao beginning in theeighteenth century, and are the principal source for the various Papiamentosong fragments that survived in this region well into the second half of thetwentieth century. The above-mentioned traits are, however, not symptomaticof Papiamento presence, but rather are presumed carryovers from the Spanishacquired by African slaves. The phrase a se tengo is reminiscent of the Palen-quero combination (i) a se tene ‘I have,’ of uncertain etymology. One loangoverse containing Papiamento elements is:104

ano novo ta benıano novo ta baytelele, telela . . .

This verse would be correct in modern Papiamento, except that the word for“year” in the latter language is ana. In Coro, New Year’s Eve is celebrated withthe same verse in Spanish (Domınguez 1989:37):

el ano nuevo se vieney el ano viejo se va . . .nosotros nos marcharemospara no volver jamas . . .

102 Acosta Saignes (1967:196).103 Domınguez (1989), Mosonyi et al. (1983). 104 Domınguez (1989:12).


The Puerto Rican poet Olga Rodrıguez de Nolla (1947:63) published in 1947a poem in Spanish which contains the verse: “Ano nuevo dande, ano tabinı.”Despite the obvious similarity with the Papiamento verses found in Coro (thePuerto Rican poet gives no source for her language, which is entirely Spanishthroughout the collection of poems except for the above verse), there is no readyexplanation for dande (some derivation of andar is suspected, possibly using aconstruction derived from Spanish/Portuguese ha de + inf in it ive ).

The best-known Papiamento text from Venezuela was collected in Falconstate (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Venezuela #1). Aretz de Ramon and Ramony Rivera (1955:72), who did not recognize the language of the nearby Nether-lands Antilles, classified the language as “el argot tıpico de los negros . . . sonsumamente interesantes por su lenguaje pintoresco, que es muy difıcil cap-tar ası, y el cual probablemente pertenece al grupo de dialectos antillanos opatois.” Granda (1973a) subsequently identified the majority of the elements asPapiamento, although there has been much transformation and distortion. Chap-ter Five Appendix Afro-Venezuela #2-4 contains other Papiamento exam-ples collected in Venezuela. The same Coro Afro-Venezuelan folklore recallsCuracao in songs in Spanish (Domınguez 1989:15):

en busca de una negritame voy para Curazao . . .

A few surviving song fragments and poems from contemporary Afro-Venezuelan communities give hints of earlier Africanized speech, although thelatter has completely disappeared from Venezuela.105 Sojo (1986:104) cites asong 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 paesPeo pao va esando.

This text contains popular Caribbean pronunciation, and is otherwise unremark-able as a testimony of contemporary vernacular Spanish, except for the gerundesando, which may hark back to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Afro-Hispanic copula sa(r), with occasional gerund esando. Another song fragmentmentions the Popo (Ewe-Fon) group:106

Bailando guachicangocon los neguitos del Popo,que me dieron a bebeaguardiente con coliflo[o]

105 Megenney (1999). 106 Sojo (1986:105).


In this song, the only possibly “African” vestige is the reduction of the onsetcluster negritos > neguitos. Another example of onset cluster reduction comesin a song transcribed early in the twentieth century in Curiepe:107

. . . malabı, como dice el negode la Sierra Sabaco . . .un neguito de la Guineame dijo un dıa–Aja?Que si los dos querıamos teneuna mima muje . . .–Verda? . . .

In a collective memory of the abolitionist movement in postcolonial Venezuela,black laborers were reputed to have shouted ¡Ya toro semo uno!108 evidencingthe common Afro-Hispanic pronunciation of intervocalic /d/ as [r]. The samephenomenon is also found in a song fragment from Barlovento:

Ario me respiroque cosa can crique . . .

Madriz Galindo (1969:9) explains: “Tal dialecto no es de extranar, porque ennuestros antiguos negros existieron los llamados ‘luangos,’ que no pronuncia-ban con claridad el castellano.” The song “El sambarambule” contains similarexamples, together with an uninflected plural:109

¿Por onde le rento?¿Por onde le roy?Que me dan los temblor . . .

Another song was transcribed in the village of Caraballeda:110

Dicen que mi Chango es monoMa Chango no es mono naMa Chango lo que tieneque no lo saben baila.

This song may contain an example of double negation,111 although if the ref-erence to Chango is taken to suggest a Yoruba origin for the verses, doublenegation would not be an expected result. A similar use of na (da) as doublenegator is found in a song transcribed in Chichiriviche:112

Yo soy el Pajaro Negrocuando la gana me da;cuando no me da la ganano soy pajaro na!

107 Ibid. (201). 108 Ibid. (219). 109 INCIBA (1970:16–17).110 Sojo (1986:106). 111 Lipski (2000d). 112 Sojo (1986:258).


The Afro-Venezuelan villages on the southern shore of Lake Maracaibo haveretained several songs which make oblique reference to earlier Afro-Hispaniclanguage. For example:113

No soy negro por la ley . . .yo sigo la ley de Cristo.¡Mira, a mı nunca me han vistorobando cafe en el muey!

The realization of muelle as muey may represent an earlier Afro-Hispanic trun-cation. A song fragment dated 1783 contains use of the third person singular asinvariant verb:114

. . . Ah malhaya mi gargantacuando yo viene a grita . . .

Another uninflected verb may be present in a song from Ocumare del Tuy:115

La jincatumba el bucareMartina FarucheEl CachicamoTapa la cucharaTonada corrida.

A “Jurumunga” song from the village of Quıbor, near Barquisimeto, containsthe lines:116

Jurumunga minaah ese tamboreronegro para bueno . . .

The verb mina may be related to Palenquero minı “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 inother varieties of Spanish, occur from time to time, for example in this songtranscribed in Tachira state:117

Son un neglitochacantelitoy no hay otro mejo que yo:barro la casalavo los tastes,limpo lo ninoy hago el arro.

113 Martınez Suarez (1986a:14). 114 Ramon y Rivera (1965:111).115 Ramon y Rivera (1971:33). 116 Pollak-Eltz (1972:57).117 Ramon y Rivera (1992:336).


In the “Sarambule” or “baile para matar la culebra,” found in the Barloventoregion, 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 . . .¡Pico culebra! ¡Pico culebra a Francisco!

Venezuelan literature has abundantly portrayed black characters,119 butwhen an ethnolinguistically distinct speech mode has been ascribed to Afro-Venezuelans, the results have uniformly been popular phonetic modificationscommon throughout the Caribbean.120 These include loss of syllable-final /s/,neutralization of preconsonantal /l/ and /r/ and loss of these consonants word-finally, loss of intervocalic /d/, as well as popular analogical formations (ChapterFive Appendix Afro-Venezuela #5). As in other Caribbean nations, Venezuela’spopulation of African origin is disproportionately poor and undereducated, withthe result that the vernacular traits in question are indeed found among marginal-ized Afro-Venezuelan speech communities. These characteristics are, however,not African in their origin, and the absence of imitations of foreign-born boza-les in Venezuelan literature reflects the fact that few slaves were taken directlyfrom Africa during the final century of slavery.

118 Ibid. (340–41). 119 E.g. Beane (1980).120 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 textsshow the neat template-like superposition of Romance and African languagepatterns found among creole languages, perhaps not surprising in view of thefact that bozal language was re-created spontaneously each time a diverse groupof Africans was thrust into a situation where learning Spanish or Portuguesewas instantly necessary. Despite the lack of systematic one-to-one correspon-dences between grammatical structures peculiar to individual African languagesand bozal Spanish or Portuguese, there are some recurring traits among majorAfrican languages whose traces among Afro-Iberian speech can potentially beseparated from the spontaneous effects of imperfect second language acquisi-tion. Among later bozal texts, particularly those from the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries, there is a higher overall degree of linguistic accuracy, andeven some attempts at anthropological accounts of Afro-Hispanic languageand culture. Available documentation on the demographics of the African pop-ulation in nineteenth-century Latin America is also more complete, and thereare occasional glimpses of substratum influence on bozal Spanish syntax. Anassessment of several prominent cross-sections of African grammatical struc-tures is therefore not without merit, even in the absence of stable creoles. Thefollowing survey is not intended to be complete, but rather to underscore thetype of considerations that might be brought to bear on individual bozal textsin order to fathom the possible effects of African grammatical patterns.

Much of what makes African languages seem “different” from the perspectiveof Romance languages has to do with the internal morphological complexityof many African language families, involving noun classes and elaborate con-cordance systems. Most notorious are the Bantu languages, each with a dozenor more morphologically arbitrary nominal categories, with varying forms forsingular and plural. Among some members of the Atlantic group, subject-verbconcordance is marked in fashions diverging widely from Romance verb suf-fixation. To superimpose such structures on a partially acquired Romance lan-guage would entail considerable grammatical complication, and the ex nihilo

197


construction of previously nonexistent morphological structures. As a conse-quence, Afro-Hispanic language shows no traces of African morphologicalcomplexity. It is rather in those domains where African syntactic patterns coin-cide with more efficient learners’ strategies, e.g. in allowing for a morpho-logically transparent analytic construction formed by juxtaposing uninflectedbuilding blocks from the target language, that the feasibility of an African sub-stratum influence on bozal language increases. When the African patterns areareal characteristics occurring broadly among the language families implicatedin 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 termi-nology used to describe African languages, as well as in the actual classificationschemes and the genealogical relationships among languages they presuppose.At the same time, many of the ethnic groups qua speech communities whichinteracted with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking populations were known atdifferent times by a variety of names, and in some cases none of the histori-cal names coincides with currently accepted terms. Terms such as Mina, Nago,Arara, Carabalı, Angola, etc. were once common in designating African groups,their languages, and cultural practices, but none of these terms is currently usedby linguists or ethnographers.

According to contemporary classifications, the main African language fami-lies are Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Niger-Congo.1 Although it is the lattergroup which had the greatest impact on Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts, theremaining groups were at times implicated indirectly, through borrowings intoNiger-Congo languages, or via the languages spoken by individuals engagedin trans-Saharan trade caravans.

Afro-As iat ic . This includes the Semitic languages of North Africa, includ-ing Arabic and Berber. In addition to the use of Arabic items in the earlyMediterranean Lingua Franca, Arabic elements entered many African lan-guages with the spread of Islam.

Nilo-Saharan . This family was formerly known as “Eastern Sudanic,” andincludes Amharic, Somali, and other languages of northeastern Africa.

Niger-Congo . This group has also been known as Niger-Kordofanian.Under the latter classification, Niger-Kordofanian is subdivided intoKordofanian (exemplified by small groups of languages spoken in Sudan)and Niger-Congo. In some classifications, Mande is seen as a third divisionof Niger-Kordofanian. In the classification scheme of Williamson (1989a),

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

Survey of major African language families 199

Niger-Congo is divided into the three-way split of Mande, Atlantic-Congo,and Kordofanian.

Mande . The principal languages of this group are Mende, Kpelle, Susu,and Vai (spoken in Sierra Leone) and the Mandinkan languages (includ-ing Mandinka and Bambara), spoken in a wide area stretching across theSenegambia.

Atlantic . This includes Wolof (the major coastal Lingua Franca of Senegal),Serer (also spoken in Senegal), Fula (a major inland language familycovering a wide area in northwestern Africa), Diola (a cluster of lan-guages straddling the border between Senegal and Guinea-Bissau, andTemne (spoken in Sierra Leone). The Atlantic languages were the first tocome into direct contact with Portuguese, and made a lasting impact onAtlantic creoles, as well as being mentioned by name in many early bozaltexts.

I jo id . Ijo, spoken in eastern coastal Nigeria around Port Harcourt, is themain language of this family. Ijo directly influenced the formation of theBerbice Dutch creole. It was probably also present in the Nineteenth-century Hispanic Caribbean, particularly in Cuba, where large numbers ofAfricans arrived from the Nigerian coast.

Kru . This is a family of languages spoken throughout Liberia and the IvoryCoast. Major Kru languages include Klao, Bassa, and Grebo, but none ofthe speech communities is large in comparison with other major Africanlanguages. The Kru people have traditionally taken to the sea, and Kru menwere renowned as sailors from the sixteenth century onward. Relativelyfew Kru were taken as slaves, but many Kru served on slaving ships and incoastal settlements along the West African coast that participated in tradewith Europeans.

Gur. Also known as Voltaic languages, this group of small languages is spokenin the Sahel region across the northern portions of Ivory Coast, Ghana,Togo, and Benin, as well as representing most of the languages of BurkinaFaso (the former Upper Volta). None of these languages is spoken near thecoast, and as a result there is no evidence that Gur languages participatedin significant numbers in Afro-Hispanic contacts.

Dogon . This language, sometimes grouped with Gur languages, is spoken innortheastern Mali, and is not known to have intersected with Spanish orPortuguese during the Atlantic slave trade.

Adamwa-Ubangui . This is a small group of languages spoken in CentralAfrica, in southern Chad and neighboring areas. None of these lan-guages apparently made an impact on Afro-Hispanic language, although acreolized member of this family, Sango, has become the major LinguaFranca of the Central African Republic, and may have come into contactwith European languages during the slave trade.


Kwa . Using the current designation, Kwa languages comprise only a subset(“Western Kwa”) of the formerly much broader designation. Major lan-guages include the Akan group (Twi, Fante, Asante, Bran/Brong), Ga,the Ewe/Fon group (also known as Gbe languages). This was among themost important African language groups to intersect with Spanish and Por-tuguese, as well as with other European languages, and was instrumentalboth in shaping bozal language in many regions and in permanently influ-encing the formation of several creoles.

Congo-Benue . 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 groupare Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, the Edo cluster, the Idoma group. Together withthe (new) Kwa group, this was the most important non-Bantu family ofAfrican languages to interact with Spanish and Portuguese. Congo-Benuelanguages have been directly implicated in the formation of Atlantic cre-oles, and definitely influenced Afro-Hispanic bozal languages, particularlyin the nineteenth-century Caribbean.

Bantu . This is a vast family of languages (estimates of the total number ofBantu languages range from more than 400 to some 670), stretching acrossmost of the southern half of Africa and well into the northeastern quad-rant. Although some non-Bantu languages are spoken in South Africa,the majority of African languages spoken below the equator belong to theBantu 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 impor-tant. 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 inmuch of Angola), Umbundu (spoken in and around the southern Angolanport of Benguela, which was an important slave exporting point). Angolanslave traders also brought speakers of inland Bantu languages such asNgombe, and eventually from as far away as Mozambique, slaves speakinglanguages such as Chinyanja, Ronga, Sena, Shona, etc. However, for thepurposes of reconstructing early bozal language, the Congo Basin Bantulanguages are by far the most important.3 More so than any other largeAfrican language division, the Bantu languages share remarkable resem-blances in formal structure (and among neighboring languages, often a

2 A complete genealogy of Bantu languages is an ongoing enterprise, with the most ambitiousand far-reaching classification scheme to date that of Guthrie (1948, 1953, 1967–71, 1971).Hinnebusch (1989) offers some more recent opinions on Bantu classification.

3 It is also possible that some Africans who arrived in the American colonies spoke regional BantuLingua Francas such as Lingala (which currently prevails in Kinshasa, Zaire) or creolized Bantulanguages such as Kituba (derived from Kikongo).


Table 6.1

Family Representative languages

Atlantic Wolof, Fula, Diola, Temne, SererMande Mende, Mandinka/Bambara, Kpelle, Susu, VaiIjoid IjoKru Klao, Bassa, GreboGur many small groupsDogon DogonAdanwa-Ubangui SangoKwa Akan (Twi, Fante, Asante, Bran/Brong), Ga, Ewe/FonCongo-Benue Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Edo, Idoma, NupeBantu Kikongo, Kimbundu, Umbundu, Bubi, Fang, Ndowe/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 whichtypological similarities noticed only by linguists are far overshadowed bysignificant differences and virtually no mutual intelligibility. The compar-ative homogeneity of Bantu languages is a factor to be reckoned with intracing the Atlantic slave trade across time, since during the time periodsand in colonial regions where slaves were taken from the Bantu-speakingparts of Africa, it is possible to postulate a higher degree of coherence inthe substratum, and to open the search for possible areal features creepinginto bozal language.

Consequences of the diversity of African languages inAfro-Iberian contact situations

Traditional classifications of African ethnic groups and languages also reflectlinguistic diversity and similarity, albeit not always in complete accord withcontemporary typological schemes. Thornton (1992:ch. 7) bases his discus-sion on a three-way division that formed the broad outline for the Atlanticslave trade: Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea, and Angola. Upper Guinea stretchedapproximately from the Senegal River to Cape Mount in Liberia. Lower Guineastretched from the western Ivory Coast to Cameroon. In between Upper Guineaand Lower Guinea was a stretch of coastline (included in modern Liberia andIvory Coast) sometimes known as the Kwakwa Coast, where little slave trad-ing or other commerce with Europeans took place. Lower Guinea was sepa-rated from the historically designated area of Angola by most of contemporaryCameroon and Gabon, from which few slaves were taken.


The greatest linguistic heterogeneity existed in Upper Guinea, which con-tained numerous members of the West Atlantic and Mande families. WestAtlantic languages (of which Wolof was a prime exemplar) were quite dif-ferent from one another, while members of the Mande group (overwhelminglyrepresented by Mandinka) were relatively similar. In areas where several mutu-ally unintelligible languages were spoken in close proximity (e.g. the “Riversof Guinea” in modern Guinea-Bissau), most inhabitants were multilingual, andregional lingua francas developed.4

Lower Guinea is the homeland of the traditional Kwa languages, todaydivided into the former Eastern Kwa languages of the Akan/Fon/Bran groupand the Western Kwa languages such as Yoruba, Efik, Edo, and Igbo. Lin-guistically, there is considerable homogeneity within the Akan group, whilethe remaining Kwa languages share numerous structures, but are in generalnot mutually intelligible except for the closest relatives. Yoruba emerged asan important lingua franca in the eastern portion of Lower Guinea, as didEwe/Fon; the Akan languages held sway in the western portion. It is from themorphosyntactic similarities of the Lower Guinea/Kwa languages that many ofthe prototypical features of Afro-Atlantic creoles emerged, including the pre-verbal tense/mood/aspect particle system, predicate clefting, and some formsof articles, possessives, and plural markers.

The area designated as Angola, stretching from contemporary central Zaireto southern Angola, spoke a variety of closely related Bantu languages, withKikongo and Kimbundu having emerged as the most important regional lan-guages. The degree of homogeneity of the Angolan languages was the greatestof the three traditional geographical groupings, and politically the powerfulKongo and Ndongo/Ngola empires had produced a greater sense of identityand unity among Africans drawn from this region.

This linguistic profile calls into question the notion that slave traders or plan-tation owners were able to secure sufficiently heterogeneous slave populationsas to prevent communication in a common language. This reduced heterogene-ity in many cases also calls into question the pressure to creolize Portugueseor Spanish, in West African slave depots and in New World plantation envi-ronments. First, linguistic diversity aboard slaving vessels was almost entirelya function of the slave collection which had been amassed by an African slavetrader at a single port, since typical slaving vessels made only a single stop at anAfrican 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 Fulaspeakers 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 lan-guages in northwestern Africa prior to the arrival of the Europeans. The Mande languages (includ-ing Mandinka, Bambara, and Mende) had been spread through the conquests of the Mali Empire,and were spoken by necessity far from their native region.


Atlantic slaving period, when ships stopped in Cacheu and other Upper Guineanports, the chances of obtaining a linguistically heterogeneous population werethe greatest, and it is probably not coincidental that a creolized Portuguesequickly developed in slave depots on the Cape Verde Islands and later on themainland. 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 speakersof Akan languages, while the increasingly important slave coast (Allada, Arda,and Whyda) yielded speakers of the Ewe/Fon group. Cargos of slaves fromAngola were linguistically even more homogeneous. Moreover, large groupsof slaves sold at a single time were frequently obtained by African middlemenas the result of wars between tribes, and thus may have come from a singlegeographical and ethnic area and may even have known each other: “An entireship might be filled, not just with people possessing the same culture, but withpeople who grew up together.”5

Once in the American colonies, African slaves were subject to varying pres-sures, in the slave markets and on plantations, which sometimes resulted in eth-nically and linguistically heterogeneous groupings. Particularly in the BritishCaribbean islands, many slave owners deliberately sought slaves from variousethnic groupings in order to minimize the possibilities of rebellion. On the otherhand, many French planters preferred to draw their slaves from a single groupand to encourage intermarriage, believing that stability of their labor forcewould be thus facilitated. As slave dealers and buyers became more sophis-ticated, certain traits were associated with particularly African ethnic groups;some were renowned as heavy laborers, others as rice cultivators, cooks, arti-sans, or overseers. Thus, depending upon the needs of a particular owner, slavesmight be deliberately chosen from the same linguistic group. Finally, once Por-tuguese and then Dutch slave trading concentrated on the Angola region, thelinguistic homogeneity of slave populations was virtually guaranteed. Selectionof African slaves based on perceived traits associated with ethnic groups waswell 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 languagesduring a time period stretching across nearly four centuries, under widely vary-ing demographic conditions and sociohistorical circumstances. Many dialectsof Spanish were involved, ranging from sixteenth-century Andalusian Spanish,in which the phonological traits that today make this dialect so distinctive werejust emerging, to distinctive Caribbean, Andean, and Pacific South Americandialects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, already far evolved from thePeninsular antecedents. Thus the result of Africans’ pronunciation of Spanishvaried as the Spanish dialects themselves evolved: for example, the productof an Angolan Bantu language and early sixteenth-century Peninsular Spanishwere qualitatively different from the product of the same Bantu language andnineteenth-century Cuban or coastal Peruvian Spanish. Even more diverse wasthe panoply of African languages that ran headlong into Spanish and Portuguese,first in Europe and coastal Africa, then in the Americas. All African languagefamilies were implicated; through sheer force of numbers, Bantu languages(stretching from the Gulf of Guinea through southern Africa and around tomuch of eastern Africa) eventually came to represent the largest single cross-section of African languages, with Kwa languages in second place, and theremainder divided among Kru, Mende, Atlantic, and other smaller groups.Each dyadic contact between a particular African language and a specific spa-tial/temporal variety of Spanish gave rise to a unique pattern of phonologi-cal adaptation, in principle making the totality of Afro-Hispanic phonologyas vast as the union of African languages and Spanish dialects over severalhundred years. To compound the problem, little accurate information existsin representation of the first centuries of Afro-Hispanic pronunciation. Few ifany Spanish writers had even the slightest knowledge of African languages,and even fewer took the trouble to accurately transcribe the phonetic diffi-culties experienced by Africans who attempted to learn European languages.Much easier was the facile stereotype, the repetition of hackneyed transpo-sitions 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 “African-ized” Spanish were picked up via imitation by writers who had no directcontact with African speakers of Spanish, and passed from text to text likea sinister party line game, becoming more distorted and less realistic witheach copy.

Common denominators among African languages:tone and stress

There is as much difference among the various major African language fam-ilies as between any one of these families and Ibero-Romance languages.Indeed, pan-African typological variation is generally greater than found amongthe Indo-European languages. Even taking into consideration the fewer thantwenty African languages that had the greatest known impact on Spanish andPortuguese, the typological diversity is considerable. In the midst of this mul-tiplicity of phonological configurations, there are a few common denominatorsworth taking into consideration in assessing the formation of Afro-Hispanicspeech patterns. In addition to specific points of potential linguistic transfer,few and far between, general strategies of second-language phonology becomeoperative when considering the totality of the Afro-Hispanic interface.

The one phonological trait most commonly found among an extremelybroad cross-section of African languages, and which opposes nearly all sub-Saharan African languages to Ibero-Romance, is the presence of phonemiclexical tones among African languages. The Cushitic languages (spoken innortheastern Africa) are exceptional in that few have distinctive tones;1 how-ever, this language family was sparsely represented during Afro-Hispanicencounters. Of the African languages known to have interacted with Ibero-Romance, only West African languages from the Senegambia region – prin-cipally Wolof, Fula, and Serere – lack phonemic tones. Of the major EastAfrican languages, Swahili, does not exhibit lexical tones. However, Swahilihad little demonstrable impact on Spanish, since few Africans from Swahili-speaking regions were ever taken to Spanish America. Correspondingly, veryfew sub-Saharan African languages have a distinctive stress accent. This isstrikingly different from all Indo-European languages, which typically have awell-defined stress accent of some sort (whether predictable by general algo-rithm or phonemically arbitrary), at times in conjunction with a pitch accent(e.g. Serbo-Croatian, Lithuanian, Swedish).2 Little empirical evidence exists

1 Welmers (1973:78).2 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 accretioncharacteristic of underprivileged languages . . . the usual treatment is to ignore it, in hope that


which documents the behavior of suprasegmental systems during the acqui-sition of non-tonal European languages by speakers of sub-Saharan Africanlanguages. The most that is usually offered is a vague reference to “tone lan-guages” to explain away the “strange” (e.g. with respect to native Europeanusage) intonational patterns often observed in Africans’ and some Asians’ pro-nunciation of non-tonal European languages. Given the magnitude of the typo-logical dissimilarity, and the fact that phonemic tones are found in most if not allsub-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. Super-ficial complex tones (e.g. rising, falling, circumflex) result from “dumping” ofautosegmental tones onto a single vowel, normally at the right edge of a word.Among the Bantu languages, the usual tonal distinction is between High andLow tones. Three-tone systems (High, Mid, Low) are found in several WestAfrican languages, with Yoruba providing a representative example. The lim-ited psycholinguistic research which has been done on the acquisition of tonelanguages points to the tones as the first component of the phonology to belearned accurately by young children, usually well before the consonant andvowel 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 tonallanguages, it is usual for the tonic syllable to be interpreted as a lexical Hightone, or a circumflex rising+falling combination. This is a natural consequenceof the usual correlation between stress accent and rising intonation in suchIndo-European languages as English and Spanish. At times, one or more ofthe originally posttonic syllables may also receive a high tone, depending uponthe Africans’ perception of the tonal patterns in the European language. Theoriginally stressed vowel may also be lengthened in African languages whichhave distinctive vowel length or like-vowel sequences. Alleyne (1980:71) notesthe regular correspondence between Saramaccan high pitch and main stress inSranan Tongo, and in the lexifier languages of Saramaccan (English and Por-tuguese). Sierra Leone Krio also replaces English main stress with phonemichigh tone.3 According to Alleyne (1980:73), pitch accent in borrowed wordscan eventually become phonemic when a language, for example a develop-ing creole, begins to borrow words from African languages in which lexical

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 vitalimportance of correct tonal usage.

3 Berry (1970).


tone is already present. If these tones are retained during borrowing, the lex-ification of tones in words derived from the original lexifier language will beenhanced.4

In Cuba, the Yoruba language – known locally as lucumı – became an impor-tant concomitant of Afro-Cuban santerıa rituals, and in addition to being spokennatively by a vestigial bozal population, contributed many words to the vocab-ulary of Cuban santeros, most of whom speak no Yoruba. Many of these termshave penetrated into popular Cuban culture, being found in music and poetrycreated by monolingual Spanish speakers. Yoruba words taken into Spanish lostthe majority of their tonal patterns. However, Yoruba High tone, particularly inword-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 nowritten accent for mid tone) ile (Yor. ıle) ‘house,’ Chango, orisha, meyi (Yor.mejı) ‘two, twins, pair,’ etc.5

A study of Portuguese borrowings into African languages provides similarillustrations.6 For example, Portu(gal) > Puto in Kikongo, Kimbundu and otherAngolan languages. Portugues was passed on to Kintandu as mputulukeesu;Mputu means ‘Europe’. In Kitandu, Dom Afonso > Ndo Fuunsu, DonaMaria > Ndoona Madiya. In some Zairean languages, prata > mpalata. In otherborrowings into Kikongo, coroa > kolowa/kooloa, Satanas > satana, Andre >

4 A selection of English loanwords into Yoruba neatly illustrates many processes of tonal adaptation(Ojo 1977, Salami 1982):

ENGLISH YORUBApound pouncopper kobohalfpenny eepınısix(pence) sısıshop soobudirt(y) ıdotıchurch soosıdoctor dokıtacollar kolaBible bıbelıgrammar gramaminister mınıstatable tabılıparadise paradaısıdriver derebaopener opunaoven ofunucorporal koburucoat kootu

5 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.

6 Atkins (1953), Bal (1968, 1974, 1991), Bradshaw (1965), Kiraithe and Baden (1976), Likangama(1990), Martins (1958a, 1958b), Prata (1983).


Nderi, bolo > mboola/mboolo, escada > sikaada, sapato > nsampatu, arroz >

looso, mula > muula, escola > sikoola, hora > woola, lapis > kilapı, fosforo> fofolo, etc. English borrowings into Ijo exhibit similar patterns: flag > filagi,pan > pani, flower > filawa, etc.7

Atkins (1953) is among the few attempts to systematically trace theassignment of lexical tones to Portuguese borrowings, taking examples fromKimbundu. His brief but illustrative demonstration shows that Kimbundu didnot simply interpret Portuguese tonic stress as High tone (in fact, this substi-tution did not always occur), but attempted to fit Portuguese words into thetonal templates of already existing Kimbundu noun classes. Thus from arrozKimbundu has the root -loso (e.g. ma-loso ‘heaps of rice’). Livro gave the pluralma-divulu, bengala gave m-bangala, etc. These examples show that in manycases there is little correspondence between Portuguese tonic stress and Kim-bundu High tone; rather, the Portuguese words are fitted into already existingKimbundu tonal configurations. Among personal names borrowed are Sara >

Sala, Joana > Nzwana, Fabiao > Fabyaa, Eduardo > Duwaludu, Alexandre >

Xandele, etc. Once more, although the correspondence between Portuguesetonic stress and High tone is somewhat closer, there are cases of KimbunduHigh tone corresponding to Portuguese atonic vowels. Polysyllabic Portuguesewords taken into Kimbundu come closer to the correspondence atonic vowel =Low tone/tonic vowel = High tone: bicicleta > bisileleta, bacalhao >

mbakanyaa, etc. The same also holds for the small group of Portuguese func-tional words adapted to Kimbundu: ate > kate, nunca > nuca, entao > antaa,etc. These examples need to be supplemented by more recent and more wide-ranging data, but even these early observations suffice to show that Africans’adaptation of Spanish and Portuguese words to African tonal patterns can-not be reduced to a simple formula. Perception of grammatical function,and attempts to assign nouns (the majority of the borrowings) to an estab-lished nominal category, were also important factors, at least among the Bantulanguages.

Possible impact of tonal languages on Spanish and Portuguese

The full story of the pronunciation of Spanish and Portuguese words by speakersof tonal African languages cannot be deduced only by studying borrowings intoAfrican languages. In the latter case, foreign words are adapted completely tothe structure of the host language, and are inserted into discourse realizedentirely in an African language. The borrowing process in effect removes the“strangeness” of the originally foreign word, by altering its phonetic structureuntil it is indistinguishable from the native lexical stock. The learning of Spanish

7 Jenewari (1989).


or Portuguese by an African speaker, especially outside of Africa, presentsa completely different scenario. Spanish words are not being fitted into analready existing African phonotactic system. Rather, the African speaker istrying to master new patterns, in which tones appear to chaotically vary acrosswords, in that successive pronunciations of the same word can emerge withdifferent “tones” on each syllable, as perceived by the tone-sensitive Africanspeaker. There is no stable background of words based on lexical tones againstwhich new Spanish words can be fitted. Rather, the entire language which isbeing learned is typologically so different, as regards the fundamental use oftones, that the African learner cannot possibly analyze each attempted Spanishword as a tonally stable configuration as would be found in the native Africanlanguage. European words borrowed into an African language normally enteredone at a time. Africans slowly became used to individual words such as Cristo,Portugal, Dios, etc., and the African speech community ultimately settled ona stabilized adaptation to the local language. An African learner of Spanish orPortuguese is faced with the overwhelming task of analyzing and reproducingthousands of words, and fluent speech gives no time for trial and error, orgradual approximations. As a consequence, it is unreasonable to suppose thatAfrican bozales systematically pronounced a sentence in Spanish with the sametonal consistency as though each word had been individually borrowed into anAfrican language in an African setting.

Although each polysyllabic Spanish or Portuguese word in isolation hasa stress accent, many of these accents disappear or are partially shifted dur-ing connected speech. African bozales clearly did not learn Spanish and Por-tuguese through imitation of isolated citation forms, but rather tried to grasp thephonological significance of fluent discourse. The end results are often strik-ingly different from the neat correlations observed in assimilated Europeanborrowings into African languages. One common strategy, observed amongcontemporary Africans who speak Spanish and to a certain extent Portugueseis 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 atonicsyllables = Low tone.8 These tones rarely become lexicalized, so that a givenpolysyllabic word as pronounced by a single speaker may emerge with dif-ferent tonal melodies on each occasion. What results is a more or less undu-lating melody of high and low tones, at times punctuated by mid tones andrising/falling contour tones. Such a pronunciation is radically different fromthe more usual intonational patterns in native varieties of Spanish, where thepitch register varies smoothly and gradually across large expanses of sylla-bles, and where a syllable-by-syllable tonal change rarely or never occurs. Tothe European ear, a syllable-based tonal alternation as produced by an African

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


learner of Spanish causes a sing-song cadence, and may blur the intonationaldifferences between statements and questions. In the absence of a perceptiblestress accent, syllable-level tonal shifts may obliterate such minimal pairs astrabajo/trabajo.

Many African tone languages also exhibit syntactically motivated tonal polar-ity phenomena, in which High and Low tones are switched at certain syntac-tic boundaries. This has been carried over at least partially to some creolelanguages, with the most noteworthy case being Papiamento.9 Early studiesof Papiamento10 noticed the use of High and Low tones, but it is only morerecently that Papiamento specialists have recognized that these tones have lexi-cal and grammatical functions. Even more recent is the realization that lexicallyprespecified tones can be modified in connected speech through polarity phe-nomena.

There are more subtle phenonema which occur during the collision of anAfrican language with lexical tones and a European language in which into-nation takes a larger domain. Many tonal African languages exhibit dynamicprocesses of gradual tonal shift such as downstep, downdrift, and tone terracing,any or all of which could, under the right circumstances, be confused with con-textually determined intonational patterns in European languages. Morever, insome African languages, the initial tone of a sentence has an effect on the intona-tion of the remainder of the sentence. Essentially, the sentence- or phrase-initialtone 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 pitchwhich is higher than sentences beginning with an initial low tone, irrespec-tive of downstep and downdrift, and regardless of intervening configurations ofhigh and low tones. The possible implications of such a system for the interfacewith European languages has been explored by Setse (1965), in a study of theinterference of Ewe on the acquisition of English, and vice versa, in easternGhana. In Ewe, the initial lexical tone of a sentence determines the overall into-national contour of the remainder of the sentence. Setse (1965:57–58) observesthat Ewe speakers learning English tend to carry over the same practice, inter-preting English stressed initial syllables as high toned, and vice versa, therebyproducing unrealistic and often confusing intonational patterns in English. Forexample, a declarative sentence such as Togo mountains are high, which beginswith a high tone (whether pronounced in Ewe, or as rendered in English withan 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 Yawohas also gone out will be produced with a characteristically low intonationalcurve.

9 Romer (1977, 1980, 1983); also Bendix (1983). 10 E.g. Harris (1951).


A sample case: the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea

A possible example of syllable-by-syllable tonal anchoring in Afro-Hispanicpronunciation, which may once have characterized bozal speech, comesfrom contemporary Spanish as spoken fluently but non-natively in EquatorialGuinea.11 With the exception of the island of Annobon, where a Portuguese-based creole (with heavy Angolan Bantu influence) is spoken, and the fre-quent use of Pidgin English throughout the island of Bioko (Fernando Poo),the native languages of Equatorial Guinea are Bantu languages which normallyexhibit high and low tones, together with superficial contour tones. These lan-guages include Bubi (the indigenous language of Fernando Poo), Fang (themain language of the mainland enclave of Rıo Muni), and the playero or coastallanguages, including Combe/Ndowe, Bujeba, etc. There exists no establishedframework for describing spoken Spanish in terms of syllable-based lexicaltones, but the following examples are displayed orthographically in terms of athree-tone system similar to that found in Yoruba, in which acute accents indi-cate High tone, grave accents Low tone, circumflex accents rise+fall, and nodiacritic indicates Mid tone. Not all Guineans produce such musically undulat-ing speech, but the examples below are quite representative of the AfricanizedSpanish found throughout the country, and cutting across various ethnic groups.

Fang woman in Malabo:

el que tiene dınero no habla . . .yo pensaba qu’esta arrıba . . .vıno el amıgo de su marıdo . . .

Young Bubi man from Barrio B, near Malabo:

Hay algunos que, cuando estan en casa, como son bubi, hablaran el bubisolamente.

Cuando uno ya esta en la ensananza media coge la ıdioma que quiere.Me falta un solo publo que no he ido.

Young Bubi man from Baney:

Puede durar sus sesenta anos.El arbol no tiene manera de desarrollarse.

Combe man from Bata:

Playero somos todos nosotros.Si hay dos fang que entienden combe se puede hablar el combe, ¿no?

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


Bujeba woman in Bata:

Para vender i para consumo propio.Nosotros pagamos menos.

These examples do not show a totally consistent tone-to-syllable association,but a noteworthy non-Spanish intonational pattern is evident from these tran-scriptions. Many declarative sentences end on a mid or high tone, and occa-sionally even on a rising tone, in contrast to native non-African varieties ofSpanish. In the case of Spanish as phonologically restructured by speakers ofBantu languages in Equatorial Guinea (all of which use a basic two-tone sys-tem), it appears that many instances of lexical stress accent in Spanish havebeen reinterpreted as lexically preattached High tone. The remaining syllablesreceive Low tone by default, but tone terracing results in superficial Mid tonesoccurring 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 litera-ture, but the ease with which Golden Age black theatrical figures slip effortlesslybetween speech and song suggests that Europeans perceived Africanized Span-ish as already “musical.” This was carried over into the chants of black itinerantstreet venders or pregoneros, who were a commoplace in many Latin Americancities for several centuries, and who were also found in Spain and especiallyPortugal, well into the nineteenth century. Especially in Latin America, thesestreet vendors were often bozales who still spoke Spanish with some African-ized 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 thetranscriptions reveals that few if any of these chants represent “musical” phrasesin the Western sense.12 Mesquita (1903:543), writing at the end of the nine-teenth century, described black street vendors in Lisbon throughout the ages,and declared “ainda nao ha muito que andavam nos bairros orientaes e alfam-istas, e no bairro Alto, as pretinhas do mexilhao, netas d’aquellas outras, e cujopregao metalico, monotono e sinistro, era provavelmente reproducao do tradi-cional pregao das antigas marisqueiras.” This impressionistic description alsosuggests an intrusion of syllable-based tonal fluctuation, which would soundforeign and even menacing to Portuguese speakers accustomed to more gradualintonational curves. The Afro-Hispanic pregones are qualitatively more similar

12 Rossi y Rubı (1791), Pereda Valdes (1929), Portal (1932), Ayarza de Morales (1939), Carambula(1952a, 1952b, 1968), De Marıa (1976), Cuche (1981), Estenssoro Fuchs (1988).


to Africans’ tonalized approximations to Spanish words as described for Equa-torial Guinea, and it is not unlikely that an African tonal contribution is foundin the pregones.

African tonal patterns have at times been implicated more directly in describ-ing contemporary Afro-Hispanic speech communities, but the results have yetto be put on a firm empirical foundation. For example, Megenney (1982:193)refers to the putatively anomalous tonal patterns in the speech of some Afro-Dominican enclaves such as Villa Mella. He also gives examples from Colom-bian Palenquero which show a similar departure from what is claimed tobe “normal” (i.e. non Afro-Hispanic) Spanish intonation. He is careful notto make the direct claim of African tonal influence, leaving the matter forfuture investigation. An examination of the taped material (kindly furnished byMegenney) reveals an intonational pattern similar to that found in EquatorialGuinea, but now nativized in a population which has spoken Spanish nativelyand monolingually for at least a century or more (in the past, both United Statesblack English and Haitian Creole were spoken in Villa Mella, but Spanish hasbeen the principal native language of the village for several centuries). Otherresearchers who have studied Afro-American dialects and creole languageshave also commented on tonal differences with respect to the original lexi-fier languages, although tracing definite influences of African tones is left tospeculation. Herskovits (1941:312) observes that “that the peculiarly ‘musical’quality of Negro English as spoken in the United States and the same trait foundin the speech of white Southerners represent a non-functioning survival of thischaracteristic of African languages is entirely possible, especially since thissame ‘musical’ quality is prominent in Negro-English and Negro-French every-where.” Turner (1969:249) makes a similarly cautious speculation as regardsthe intonational patterns of Gullah. Megenney (1982:195) claims that the into-nation of negative sentences in Papiamento (an Afro-Iberian creole noted for itsunique tonal structures) exactly parallels that of Fante, and notes tonal survivalsin 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 Spanishdialectologists alike, not all sub-Saharan African languages (1) have only opensyllables, (2) do not distinguish /l/ and /r/, (3) have nasal vowels, (4) haveprenasalized consonants, or (5) do not have onset clusters. However, each ofthe above-mentioned traits does recur in a wide range of prominent Africanlanguages families, and both in terms of demographic proportions and in view


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 con-sonants altogether.13 Among the remaining languages, only nasal consonantscommonly occur in the coda, and then only word-finally. Among the languagegroups which exhibit word-final nasals are Akan, Kpelle, Efik, Wolof, many ofthe Mandinkan languages, some Edoid languages, and many Bantu languages.Typically only a single nasal phoneme is found word-finally, although in a fewlanguages more than one nasal phoneme appears word-finally. The numberof African languages allowing obstruents in the coda is very small, althoughsome of the relevant languages cannot be discounted as having enjoyed someprominence in Afro-Hispanic encounters. Efik is relatively rare in its toler-ance for obstruents, including stops, in word-final position. In contradiction towidely accepted models of sonority, Efik tolerates word-final stops, but exhibitsno instances of final liquids or /s/, the most common word-final consonants inSpanish. Although word-final obstruents are tolerated in Efik, open syllables arequantitatively much more common.14 Several of the Atlantic languages, amongwhich Wolof figures prominently,15 also contain word-final consonants. Oncemore, 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 majorAfrican language families which intersected with Spanish and Portuguese dofinal consonants figure prominently, and in those instances where the Africanlanguages absorbed and nativized Ibero-Romance words, final consonants weretypically either deleted (especially if the preceding vowel was unstressed) orfollowed by a paragogic vowel, thereby ensuring a sequence of open syllables.The exception to the lack of word-final consonants in African languages isthe frequent presence of word-final nasal consonants, at times alternating withnasalized vowels.

Onset clusters

By far the majority of African languages, from all major families, tolerate onlysingle consonants in the syllable onset. Although many languages exhibit pre-nasalized 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).


and gb, and which act as phonologically single consonants. As in so many othercases, Efik is exceptional among African languages in tolerating obstruent+/r/onset clusters, ostensibly similar to combinations found in Spanish and Por-tuguese.16 In the same language, intervocalic /t/ and /d/ are often pronouncedas simple [r], a phenomenon also documented in many early Afro-Hispanictexts.17 The epenthetic vowel observed in native Efik words corresponds to thefrequent insertion of an epenthetic vowel to break up onset clusters in Europeanwords borrowed into African languages. For example, Kikongo has Cristo >

kidisitu, cruz > kulunsi, ingles > ngelesi, franco > fwalanka, trombeta >

tulumbeeta, etc.; Kimbundu has claro > calalo, Claudio > Culaudio; Swahilihas brea > bereu, flotilha > furutile, praca > baraza, franga > faranga,fronha > foronya, lacre > lakiri, etc., but also assimilated Cristo > Kristo,padre > padre/padiri, etc. Among Mozambican languages, we have sacra-mento > Chope sakramentu, brinco > Macua ebrinko, blusa > Macua bulusa,broca > Macua eporoka, cobre > Macua kobiri, blasfemia > Chinianja blas-femya, but bruto > Chinianja bulutu.

On the other hand, some West African languages have easily incorpo-rated obstruent+l iquid combinations in borrowed words, even thoughsuch clusters are absent in the native vocabulary. Thus for example we findcobrar > Temne kopra, but cobre > Limba kobiri, Mandinka koporo, Susukobiri; frasco > Limba, Temne frasko; prata > Mandinka prata; vidro > Temnea-bithra, Limba hu-bitira, etc. Yoruba has grama < grammar (an obviouslytechnical term), but bredı/buredı < bread, eropuleenı < aeroplane, buluu >

blue, fırıı < free, bırıkı < brick and even gulukoosı < glucose.Observation of the first attempts of contemporary Africans from a variety

of languages to articulate Spanish and Portuguese does not support the option ofthe 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 alter-native is the elimination of the liquid consonant. Although no quantitative dataare available, this reduction appears to be more prevalent word-internally thanword-initially, a suggestion born out by the vestigial remains of reduced con-sonant clusters found among contemporary Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Braziliancommunities. The term ombe < hombre is common in the vernacular speechof much of the Caribbean and is a frequent interjection in popular music suchas the Colombian vallenato and the Dominican merengue, while nego < negrois used colloquially by Brazilians of all backgrounds, especially when used asa term of endearment. In marginalized Brazilian dialects in which the African

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

17 (Ward 1933:2, 14).


contribution is strong, reduction of onset clusters through elimination of theliquid 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 – rarelyif ever depict Africans as reducing onset clusters through loss of the liquid, whilethe use of epenthetic vowels does occur from time to time.18 This is typified bythe change negro > nego.19 This change also occurs frequently in vernacularBrazilian Portuguese, where an African component can be postulated. In the Rıode la Plata area, the corpus of Afro-Argentine and Afro-Uruguayan languagedoes not normally give evidence of this change. However, occasional glimpsesemerge, which may be writers’ inventions or stereotypes.20 This pronunciationwas apparently also found among street vendors or pregoneros:21

yo soy nenguito ninoque siempre passo po acavendiendo escoba y pumeroy nadie me quiere compa.¿Sera poque soy tan nego?que passo de regulay toa la gente s’asutay no me quiee compa.

In vestigial Afro-Peruvian language, the same reduction is found, for example inmarginal areas such as the Chincha community described by Galvez Ronceros(1975). Among the possibly African-influenced pronunciation features of thiscommunity is the reduction of syllable-initial consonant clusters (e.g. trabajo >

tabajo, hombre > hombe). The same pronunciation is found in the novel Mata-lache, by Enrique Lopez Albujar (1966):

Vaya, mi hija, porque no hay na que se haga en la frabica sin consulta a ese nego chalade mis pecaos . . . Nega Casilda no moleta, amita. Ella ayudao mata cabrita Jose Manue,y pa nego congo na . . . Neguito no rira ni cantara ma, manque muera e pena. Perdon pasu neguito . . .

In the satirical text El gran doctor Copaiba (Carrera Vergara 1943) we find:

Ay, amito, a refresca la mollera. Sacara pallantanfuera remonio der gato que quiere aranaer neguito cuidara a Francica.

18 Lipski (1994a, 1994b, 1995a, 2001c, 2002b).19 E. g. Jeroslow (1974:45–46), Mendonca (1935:114), Raimundo (1933:70–71).20 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 pinta la cara a la donseya. ¡Dice que no me quiere po se nego! Pues la pinto de nego, ynega es eya” (Matamoro 1976:68).

21 Becco (n. d.:45).


The well-attested existence of Spanish and Portuguese borrowings intoAfrican languages is proof enough that at least some Africans in contactwith Ibero-Romance inserted epenthetic vowels, if not continuously, thenfrom time to time. Epenthetic vowels were seldom used to break up onsetclusters, as opposed to the frequent use of final paragogic vowels, and theoccasional epenthetic vowel following syllable-final consonants. This con-trasts with the more frequent use of epenthetic vowels after coda consonants.Afro-Hispanic language beginning in the sixteenth century dealt with Spanishobstruent+l iquid onset clusters largely through neutralization of theliquid consonant in second position. Neutralization in favor of [l] was the mostcommon event; neutralization to [r] also occurred, particularly in cases of con-tact with some variety of Portuguese.

Liquid consonants among African languages

Among African languages, the distribution and behavior of liquid consonantsvaries widely, and true common denominators are almost nonexistent. Lade-foged (1968) surveyed sixty-one West African languages covering all majorlanguage families from the Senegambia to the Bight of Biafra; his survey revealsthat most distinguish /r/ and /l/.22 There is apparent free variation or comple-mentary distribution between /l/ and /r/ in Ewe and Tiv. Fewer languages do notexhibit the phoneme /l/, although some prominent West African languages areincluded in this group (essentially the entire Akan family): Fante, Twi, Igbira,Efik, Kutep, and some varieties of Tiv. In Tiv and Akan, [l] may sometimesoccur 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 ofthe major languages. Mandinga, Vai, Temne, Mende, Wolof, and Kru routinelydistinguish the two liquids, and have maintained them separately in borrowingsfrom Portuguese and English.23 Yoruba distinguishes both /r/ and /l/, in onsetposition (Yoruba has no syllable-final consonants).

Neutralization of prevocalic liquid consonants inAfro-Iberian language

In the earliest Afro-Hispanic texts there is none of the systematic neutralizationof liquids that would come to characterize later Afro-Iberian texts. These texts

22 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/: theseinclude Kissi, Mende, Bambara, Dagbani, Nzima, Effuta, Kyeropong, Ga, Fon, Avatime, Bafut,Kom.

23 E.g. Bradshaw (1965).


are consistent with the notion that the major African language groups repre-sented in sixteenth-century Portugal and Spain, at least during the first half ofthe century, came from northwest and west Africa, in which /l/ and /r/ weredistinguished in the majority of the languages. For example Diego Sanchezde Badajoz, in plays written between 1533 and 1548, begins to make use ofliquid neutralization, but in favor of [r] rather than [l], a change suggesting theintersection of such West African language families as Akan and Efik (ChapterThree Appendix #2-5). In the bozal imitations of Lope de Rueda (Chapter ThreeApendix #6-8) there is virtually no neutralization of liquids, with the exceptionof the shift /l/ > [r] in onset clusters, a phenomenon which was common inpopular Spanish dialects of the period (particularly in Extremadura and Leon –whence the sayagues stage dialect, but also in Andalusia). In some cases, Lopede Rueda may have been suggesting that Africans in sixteenth-century Spainhad first passed through Portugal, learning some rudiments of Portuguese:diabro < diablo, muntripricar < multiplicar, etc.

The major Bantu languages which came into contact with Spanish andPortuguese during the centuries of direct Afro-Iberian linguistic contact donot systematically distinguish /l/ and /r/. Kikongo, Kimbundu, Umbundu,etc., have only /l/, although as shown above, the contemporary Portugueseas spoken by native Angolans does not overwhelmingly exhibit neutraliza-tion of liquids in favor of [l].24 In the Spanish Golden Age, however, thingswere evidently quite different, since the literary record from both the IberianPeninsula and Spanish America shows an increasing tendency to neutral-ize /l/ and /r/ (usually in favor of [l]) beginning in the seventeenth century.With such works as the “Entremes de los negros” of Simon Aguado (ChapterThree Appendix #14), literary Afro-Hispanic language begins to systemat-ically depict the interchange of /l/ and /r/, usually in favor of the formersound. In Lope de Vega, the shift /r/ > [l] is used quite sparingly, and usu-ally in key stereotyped elements such as neglo, plimo, and siolo (ChapterThree Appendix #19-27). A few years later, the play “El valiente negro enFlandes” by Andres de Claramonte (Chapter Three Appendix #28), broughtadditional examples of this change, but involving the same set of words.Gongora’s humorous Afro-Hispanic sonnets, also written around the firstdecade of the seventeenth century, make more frequent use of the shift /l/ > [r](Chapter Three Appendix #15-18). By the middle of the seventeenth centurythe shift /r/ > [l] was characteristic of literary habla de negros, and was muchmore frequent than the opposite change. By this time, Africans from Bantu-speaking 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 Gomez Gomez (1996:31–34), there are several Bantulanguages which do distinguish /r/ and /l/; others prefer /r/.


a distinction between /l/ and /r/ in these languages begins to seep into literaryauthors’ representations of bozal speech. Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, in poemswritten in the 1670s and 1680s, frequently used the shift of /r/ > [l], although notto the same extent found in Peninsular Spanish texts (Chapter Three Appendix#46). By the time of her writings, the Portuguese slave trade from Angola andSao Tome had reached a high point, and it is likely that she heard large numbersof Bantu-speaking Africans, who may well have had difficulty with Spanish /r/.

In Portugal, lateralization of /r/ in literary lıngua de preto follows a simi-lar pattern. The first group of Afro-Portuguese texts to make use of phoneticdeformations are the plays of Gil Vicente, written in the first half of the six-teenth century (Chapter Two Appendix #5-7). These texts show no instancesof 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 forChiado’s plays and for most of the remaining texts. Only in a few anonymouspoems and songs from the mid-seventeenth century onward does the change/r/ > [l] become common in Afro-Portuguese literature. In view of contem-porary varieties of Spanish and Portuguese as learned by speakers of Bantulanguages which do not distinguish /l/ and /r/,25 it is unlikely that most bozalesever replaced all instances of /r/ by [l] except perhaps during the first encoun-ters between Europeans and Africans. In attempting to reconstruct the speech ofthe first Afro-American communities (largely those which developed English-based creoles), Alleyne (1980:61) claims that “it is clear that no phonemicdistinction existed between [l] and [r] in the earliest form of Afro-Americandialects. [l] is the preferred sound in all dialects.” This statement may be true,for example for Saramaccan, and rings true for Palenquero. Srnan Tongo, how-ever, shows [r] as the most prevalent liquid, while the remaining English-basedAtlantic creoles are completely ambiguous. There is no doubt from the data thatconfusion of liquids was a factor in some Afro-American speech communities,but no evidence offered to date suggests that a single form of neutralizationprevailed in a “proto-Afro-American” speech community, even if attention islimited only to English-based creoles. A hypothetical reconstruction of a proto-Ibero-Romance creole is equally problematical, despite the frequent and well-articulated claims to the effect that a single Afro-Lusitanian pidgin underlies allAfro-Iberian and other Ibero-Romance based creoles, and possibly some cre-oles based on other languages, including English and Dutch. Afro-Lusitaniancontacts in the Congo/Angola region, as reflected in Sao Tomense, Annobonese,and Colombian Palenquero, indeed seem to have systematically replaced Span-ish and Portuguese /r/ by [l] in nearly all contexts. However, this never seemsto 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.


African languages normally maintain the /l/–/r/ distinction, nor is there evidenceof systematic neutralization of liquids in Asian Portuguese creoles, nor in Philip-pine Creole Spanish

One of the most frequent phonetic modifications found in Golden AgeSpanish and Latin American bozal texts (from Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, andMexico) is neutralization of word-initial and intervocalic liquids, usually involv-ing lateralization of /r/ to [l].26 This shift, although occasionally affecting a fewwords in marginal dialects of Andalusia, the Canary Islands, and Latin America,is not typical of any speech community in the Spanish-speaking world, and wasdropped by Africans who learned Spanish natively, regardless of the varietyacquired. Many bozal texts extend this neutralization to interchange of intervo-calic /d/ and /l/, a shift which is frequent in Portuguese borrowings into Kikongo,Kimbundu and other Bantu languages, and which reflects the frequent phono-logical alternation beween /d/ and /l/ in many Bantu languages.27Among surviv-ing Afro-Iberian linguistic groups, this change is found in Panamanian congolanguage,28 vestigial Afro-Venezuelan speech,29 Palenquero,30 Sao 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 obstruent+l iquid clusters. Interchange of /l/ and /r/ in the syllabic onset occurred spo-radically in Ibero-Romance, although the shift of /l/ to [r] was much more fre-quent.34 In contemporary Andalusian Spanish, the same process occasionallyoccurs,35 but never with the frequency found in bozal texts. Some stereotypingwas involved (as suggested by the high frequency of selected items, such asFrancisco > Flancico and primo > plimo). However, bozal texts should beinterpreted not as indicating only the shift of /r/ > [l] among Africans, but thefact that the opposite change, /l/ > [r], was unremarkable in rustic non-AfricanSpanish, 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 precon-sonantally and in phrase-final position. In modern Spain, this change is increas-ingly rare, although once more common in rural communities of Murcia andeastern Andalusia. Lateralization of /r/ is somewhat more common in the CanaryIslands, but nowhere approaching rates found, for example, in vernacular speech

26 Alleyne (1980:61–62) gives examples for other African-based creoles.27 Raimundo (1933:69–70), Atkins (1953), Martins (1958a, 1958b), Bal (1968), Dunzo (1974),

also Granda (1989) for Colombian Palenquero.28 Lipski (1989). 29 Mosonyi et al. (1983), Megenney (1985c, 1989a, 1990c, 1999).30 Friedemann and Patino Rosselli (1983). 31 Ferraz (1979).32 Vila (1891), Barrena (1957), Ferraz (1984).33 Numerous examples are found in Lipski (1994b, 1995a, 2001c).34 E.g. Torreblanca (1989a). 35 Salvador (1978).


of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and parts of Cuba and Venezuela. Aswith loss of /r/ and reduction of /s/, dating of the lateralization of /r/ in non-African dialects is hampered by the lack of credible documentation. In mostareas of Spain and Latin America the first unequivocal written examples do notcome until the nineteenth century, although it seems certain that the processhad begun earlier in most areas.

In contrast to the general scarcity of early attestations of the lateralization ofsyllable-final /r/ in Spanish, Afro-Hispanic texts from the Golden Age onwardfrequently exhibit the shift /r/ > [l], at first only in word-internal preconsonan-tal position but eventually encompassing word-/phrase-final positions as well.Lateralization of preconsonantal /r/ appears at approximately the same time asloss of word-final /r/, i.e. in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Lat-eralization of syllable-final /r/ is found in Latin American bozal texts from allregions, even in areas such as Mexico, highland Colombia, Peru, and the Rıo dela Plata region where this change never became permanently implanted in thelocal dialects. According to Fontanella de Weinberg (1987a), lateralization of/r/ was at one point relatively common in Buenos Aires, peaking in the middleof the eighteenth century and dwindling precipitously thereafter. It is perhapsnot coincidental that at the same time period, the African and Afro-Americanpopulation of Buenos Aires rose to its highest proportion (roughly 30 percent),and also dropped drastically in the following decades, being eventually over-whelmed by European immigration. In Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, lateralized/r/ in Afro-Hispanic language is confined to the earliest texts, from the seven-teenth and early eighteenth centuries. Later Afro-Peruvian texts show loss of/r/, particularly in verbal infinitives, a pronunciation still found in coastal areasof predominantly African descent. Lateralization of syllable-final /r/ has neverbeen a common trait of any regional dialect of Spain, and it might be thought thatwhen representing Africanized Spanish, Golden Age writers simply exchangedsyllable-final /l/ and /r/ following Quevedo’s formula. That this facile assump-tion is inadequate is shown by the fact that replacement of syllable-final liquidsdoes not appear in bozal texts until well into the seventeenth century, fully acentury after bozal Spanish is attested, and by the fact that while lateralizationof /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 andLatin American dialects, and also shows a variety of manifestations in Afro-Hispanic language across time and space. In contemporary Andalusia, phrase-final /r/ is most commonly lost; preconsonantally a greater number of variantsexists, but retention of some sound is the usual result. In the Canary Islands, thesituation is more varied, with retention of phrase-final /r/ in some form (often [l])


more common than in Andalusia. In Latin American dialects where /r/-reductionis common, principally in the Caribbean, phrase-final realizations usually varybetween [l] and elision of /r/, while preconsonantally the manifestations includeloss, lateralization, gemination of the following consonant, glottalization, andvocalization. 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 GoldenAge examples are limited to the final /-r/ in verbal infinitives. This morphologi-cal correlate of /r/-loss is also well attested in Andalusia, the Canary Islands, andLatin America. In Latin America, loss of final /-r/ in infinitives is found in bozaltexts from eighteenth-century Mexico and Colombia, from Peru (beginning ofthe nineteenth century) and from the Rıo de la Plata (late eighteenth/earlynineteenth century). In these same texts, loss of word-final /r/ also occurredin other words, such as senor, and loss of preconsonantal word-internal /r/,while rare, is attested. Of these areas, only coastal Peru and Colombia, and afew marginal areas of Guerrero and Oaxaca in Mexico routinely elide verb-final /r/; the areas exhibiting this elision are characterized by a high percent-age of African descendency. Areas such as Mexico and the Rıo de la Plata,whose pronunciation eventually became dominated by other patterns and whoseAfro-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 six-teenth century to the nineteenth, is the conversion of intervocalic /d/ to [r], asin todo > toro. Judging by the pronunciation of intervocalic /d/ in contempo-rary Afro-Hispanic dialects, it is likely that the sound that emerged was notalways a flap but, sometimes an occlusive intervocalic [d], which Spanish writ-ers accustomed to the usual fricative variant transcribed as /r/.36 Bozal textsfrom Latin America, from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, fol-low identical patterns. Currently, the pronunciation of intervocalic /d/ as anocclusive or flap is common in bilingual areas of Latin America where theindigenous language has no fricative realization of /d/, and is found in Afro-Hispanic speech of Equatorial Guinea, in parts of the Dominican Republic,Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia, as well as typifying the speech ofWest Africans who learn Spanish.37 This feature never came to characterize anymajor regional variety of Spanish, but was typical of bozal Spanish of all levels offluency.

36 Alleyne (1980:62) for examples from African-influenced creoles in the Americas.37 Granda (1977), Nunez Cedeno (1982, 1987), Lipski (1985a, 1986b,c, 1988a, 1992d), Megenney

(1990a, 1990c, 1999), Schwegler (1991a), Quilis and Casado-Fresnillo (1992, 1995).


Reduction of syllable-final /s/ in Afro-Hispanic speech

Although documentation of /s/-weakening in pre-nineteenth-century Spanishis scarce, literary habla de negros exhibits loss of final /s/ beginning earlyin the sixteenth century. Many objections have been raised against acceptingbozal 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 Ruedaand Gongora, suggests that if loss of final /s/ had already been widespread inAndalusia beginning in the sixteenth century, these authors would not haveattributed the phenomenon only to African slaves. Alvarez Nazario (1974:84)categorically rejects any connection between Golden Age bozal texts and thedevelopment of regional Spanish dialects. Pereda Valdes (1965:179–80) is ofthe opinion that “habıa mas inventiva humorıstica que autenticidad en aquellenguaje literario deformativo y onomatopeyico.” The opposite point of view issustained, e.g. by Dunzo (1974:121): “In an effort to transport local color to thestage, the Spanish playwrights portrayed in a remarkably accurate fashion thespeech common to the Blacks of the era.” Loss of /s/ in Golden Age bozal textsdemonstrates both internal consistency and compatibility with independentlydocumented Afro-Hispanic language, thus giving to the bozal documents morecredibility than suggested by the previous comments.

Loss of final /s/ first appears in bozal Spanish texts in the first decades of thesixteenth century, beginning with Sanchez de Badajoz and Lope de Rueda. Theonly 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 rastrearla dificultad de los negros para pronunciar la -s final, rasgo completamenteconvencional, ya que Lope de Rueda hace hablar continuamente a sus negrasarticulando 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 GoldenAge bozal Spanish to vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, where /s/ frequentlyfalls in similar circumstances, without passing through a process of phoneticreduction. It is worth noting that in bozal Portuguese texts from the early six-teenth century, the final /s/ of the desinence -mos is also lost (e.g. the playsO clerigo da beira, Nao d’amores and Fragoa d’amor of Gil Vicente, fromthe 1520s), although there is no evidence of general weakening of final /s/ insixteenth-century Portuguese.

By the time of Velez de Guevara’s El negro del seraphın (ca. 1643; ChapterThree Appendix #30), the final /s/ of second person verb forms is also variablyelided. These same texts show very limited instances of /s/-reduction whereno morphological conditioning is involved, e.g. in word-internal preconsonan-tal position, or final lexical /s/. The frequent loss of /s/ in Jesus is probably


attributable to Portuguese, or to clipping based on Jesucristo. Sanchez deBadajoz’s Farsa teologal (Chapter Three Appendix #2) shows a few examplesof loss of preconsonantal /s/, as in crito [Cristo], trequilado [trasquilado] andetar [estar] (the unreduced form estar occurs more frequently). These may bescribal errors or idiosyncrasies, but their scarcity, in comparison with numerouscases of retained preconsonantal and word-final /s/, renders it unlikely that earlybozal Spanish was eliminating syllable-final /s/ in a wholesale fashion. Elim-ination of preconsonantal /s/ appears occasionally in a few of Lope de Vega’splays: in El santo negro Rosambuco (Chapter Three Appendix #27) we findvito [visto], riponde [responde], and Franchico [Francisco] (the latter name andthe pronunciation without /s/ became a stereotype in bozal literary texts). Theform paqua [Pascua] is found in a late-sixteenth-century romancerillo (ChapterThree Appendix #13), alongside numerous instances of retained preconsonan-tal /s/. In the late-seventeenth-century bozal texts of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruzloss of preconsonantal /s/ is still very sporadic, with only a handful of cases inher entire Afro-Hispanic corpus: Flasica [Francisca], fieta [fiesta] (alongsidefiesa and fiesta), naquete [en aqueste], etc. (Chapter Three Appendix #46).

In Sor Juana, we find some of the first consistent cases of another exampleof morphological conditioning of /s/-reduction: loss of plural /s/ in nouns whenpreceded by a plural article in which /s/ is generally retained: las leina [lasreinas], las melcede [las mercedes], lus nenglu [los negros], las paja [las pajas],etc. This configuration, where plural /s/ appears only on the first availableposition of a noun phrase, is typical of vernacular Brazilian Portuguese, and isfound in many basilectal varieties of Latin American Spanish, particularly thosewith a strong African connection, in the Dominican Republic, Colombia (Chocoregion), Ecuador, and in the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea. In Brazil, highlandEcuador and Equatorial Guinea, syllable-final /s/ is generally not weakened to[h], while in the other dialects morphologically conditioned retention of /s/ iscombined 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 tipleessa tura junta? Another song, dated 1699 (Chapter Three Appendix #49), con-tains lines like Reye zamo del Oriente. An anonymous villancico dated 1661(Chapter Three Appendix #50) provides Hagamole placa a lo Reye Mago turo loneglo, e turo lo branco; another dated 1676 (Chapter Three Appendix #51) offersTlaemo mucho cantare and still another dated 1694 (Chapter Three Appendix#52) contains lines like turu lo Neglico la noche de Nasimienta ha de andalcomo pimienta. These examples indirectly suggest that reduction of final /s/in southern Spain and the Caribbean was still not conditioned by purely pho-netic factors as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Golden


Age texts show a striking imbalance in apparent cases of /s/-reduction. Thecorpus 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. Thiscompares to a handful of other cases of /s/-loss, none of which occur untilwell into the seventeenth century. Among the latter, most involve plural /-s/.Although the exact proportions are irrelevant, it is clear that bozal pronunciationof the verbal ending -mos extended an already weakened pronunciation foundin local Spanish dialects. Much the same occurred in early-twentieth-centuryBuenos Aires and Montevideo, when speakers of cocoliche, the Spanish inter-language of Italian immigrants, categorically eliminated final /s/ in the ending-mos (normally aspirated to [h] in porteno Spanish), while at the same timereinforcing other instances of (already weakened) preconsonantal /s/ to [s].38

Of the Spanish bozal texts being considered, none shows reduction of pre-consonantal /s/ without reduction in the verbal suffix -mos, while the oppositeconfiguration is quite common, characterizing nearly the entire Golden Agecorpus. The consistency of the textual data suggests a reasonably accurate tran-scription of bozal speech, from which it may be concluded that by the end of theseventeenth century, Afro-Hispanic speech was just beginning to effect whole-sale elimination of preconsonantal /s/ and lexical word-final /s/. Andalusianand Caribbean Spanish were obviously not providing a model for eliminationof all syllable-final /s/, since the imperfect language acquisition representedby bozal speech invariably reduced syllable structure, and never enhanced it.However, this does not necessarily mean that Andalusian Spanish showed noreduction of /s/ until at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, only thatweakened variants were still perceivable by Africans. Amongst Golden Agebozal texts, apparent loss of preconsonantal /s/ is proportionately more com-mon toward the end of this period. Moreover, all instances of /s/-loss discussedso far have been in perceptually weak positions, preconsonantally or word-finally following an unstressed vowel. If Andalusian Spanish were alreadyweakening (but not eliminating) /s/ in these positions, for example to an aspira-tion, Africans, most of whose languages do not contain the distinction betweenstrongly and weakly stressed syllables, might easily fail to perceive any soundat all.

Paragogic vowels and the validation of Afro-Hispanic texts

When borrowing Spanish or Portuguese words containing syllable-final conso-nants into African languages, a frequent strategy was the addition of a paragogicvowel. 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).


more common. For example, Kikongo and Kimbundu began to borrow wordsfrom Portuguese beginning in the fifteenth century:39

Kikongo : dotolo < doutor; katekisimu < catesismo; kidisitu < Cristo;kulunsi < cruz; loosu < arroz; mptulukeesu < portugues; nanasa/nanasi< ananas; ngelesi < ingles; nsaalu < sal; poosita < posto.

Kimbundu : calalo < claro; Culaudio < Claudio; lapassi < rapaz; Rodolofu< Rodolfo.

Portuguese preconsonantal /s/ was not always salvaged by addition of a para-gogic vowel, but was sometimes lost, as in Kikongo fofolo < fosforo; kipeelo <

espelho; lupitaalu < hospitalMetathesis was another occasional option:

Kikongo : sikoba < escoba; sikoola < escola; siponza < esponja; sitadu <

estado.Kimbundu : sicora < escola; sikarera < escalera; supada < espada;

supoleta < espoleta.

The final paragogic vowel (whose timbre was normally dictated by processesof vowel harmony), was almost invariably added after a stressed syllable; whenthe final syllable was unstressed, the Portuguese final consonant was mostfrequently lost, as in Kikongo kilapi < lapis; vokolo/ukolo < oculos; woolo <

ouros; zikopu < copas. Similar developments are found in Afro-Lusitanian cre-oles, particularly those of the Gulf of Guinea. To cite only a few examples, fromSao 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 > STdesu; doutor > ST dotolo; flor > Ann. foli; garfo > ST galufu; mais > ST, P, A mashi;oculos > ST oklo; paz > ST pazi; Pedro > Ann. Pedulu; sabedor > Ann. sabedolo;senhor > Ann. sholo; sol > Ann. solo; tres > ST tleshi; voz > ST vozu.

A number of instances of paragogic vowels are also found in Afro-Brazilian Por-tuguese, where the Kikongo and Kimbundu input was very strong. Some of themodified forms have become fixed in nonstandard rural varieties, especially inplace names and nicknames.41 A sample includes: baranco < branco; baravo <

bravo; buruto < bruto; faraco < fraco; Firimino < Firmino; Fulugenco >

Fulgencio; Puludenco < Prudencio; purugunta < pergunta; Quelemente <

Clemente; suporeta < espoleta.42

39 Mendonca (1935:116–18), Martins (1958a, 1958b), Bal (1968). Leite de Vasconcellos(1901:158) and Schuchardt (1888d) noted that Kimbundu speakers in Angola still added theparagogic vowels in question as late as the end of the nineteenth century.

40 (Barrena 1957).41 Raimundo (1933:69–70), Ramos (1935:248), Machado Filho (1964:71, 84, 109–10).42 Alleyne (1980:45–48) documents the extensive use of paragogic vowels in other African-

influenced creoles.


The presence of paragogic and epenthetic vowels in bozal Spanish texts canbe applied as a diagnostic of regional Spanish pronunciation. In so doing, itmust be conceded that the precarious situation in which adult slaves learned apidgin Spanish was far different from extended language contact that resulted,for example, in Portuguese borrowings into Kikongo. In the latter case, a speechcommunity gradually and voluntarily adopted foreign words into a native lan-guage that was not threatened in future generations, as were African languagesin the diaspora. Bozal learners might be expected to perform more drastic reduc-tion of words than West African communities who learned European words frommissionaries and traders, but a comparison with Afro-Lusitanian creoles andAfro-Brazilian Portuguese suggests a consistent adaptation of final consonants:paragogic vowels were added when the preceding vowel was stressed, and theconsonant was usually lost following an unstressed vowel. The same generaltrends hold for word-internal syllable-final consonants. Extrapolating to cog-nate structures in bozal Spanish, we would expect to find paragogic vowels in thesame configurations, if the final consonants were still pronounced in the regionaldialects of Spanish during the time periods in question. These expectations arerealized in many instances, with the paragogic vowels distributed according tothe prediction. Typical examples from Golden Age Spain include:43 amolo[amor], bicicochos [bizcochos], cansiona [cancion], casicabele [cascabel],guruganta [garganta], pavillono [pabellon], turumento [tormenta], and dozensof others. These data point to the conclusion that Andalusian final /s/, at leastfollowing a stressed vowel, was articulated strongly enough to be analyzed byAfricans as requiring a paragogic vowel, through the end of the seventeenthcentury and perhaps later.

Afro-Hispanic language and the canonical CV syllable

Consonantal reduction in Afro-Iberian language, including contemporarySpanish dialects where an African component is prominent, has often beenattributed to reduction of syllabic complexity, the striving for a canonical CVsyllable by speakers of African languages whose syllable prototypes containedno closed syllables. The supposed inexorability of such a drive has been usedto dismiss early loss of consonants in Afro-Hispanic speech,44 despite thewell-documented trend toward open syllables in vernacular Spanish worldwidebeginning prior to the fifteenth century. According to such “African-only” theo-ries, Africans simply ignored Spanish final consonants, straining local Spanishvarieties in which these consonants were intact through a CV-dominated fil-ter that ruthlessly stripped off even the most strongly articulated final conso-nants. A comparative study of bozal language over a period of several centurieschallenges this simplistic assumption, as do data from several Afro-Lusitanian

43 Lipski (1995a, 2002b). 44 E.g. Chasca (1946), Alvarez Nazario (1974), Salvador (1981).


pidgins and creoles. Treatment of both Spanish and Portuguese words by realspeakers of African languages normally follows more complex paths than meretruncation of “offending” consonants.45 A major conditioning factor is the treat-ment of stressed vs. unstressed syllables by speakers of languages lacking astress accent. Simple truncation of syllable-final consonants has never beenthe prevailing strategy among African languages when borrowing words fromEuropean languages. Particularly when stressed syllables are at stake, paragogicvowels are more common, and strongly articulated consonants (e.g. sibilants)in unstressed syllables are more often than not retained through the addition ofa vowel.

Also overlooked in treatments of Afro-Hispanic language that ignore cor-relations with local varieties of Spanish is the fact that the prototypical WestAfrican syllabic template not only contains no syllable-final consonants, butalso contains no syllable-initial consonant clusters. Putative exceptions involvecoarticulated consonants such as [gb], or prenasalized obstruents which behavephonologically as single consonants. When these languages borrow words fromEuropean languages, epenthetic vowels are also typically used to break upsyllable-initial clusters, typified by the evolution flor > fulo. This presupposesan intense enough contact for adaptation of Romance onset clusters to occur.Under more urgent and transitory linguistic contact such as might occur duringa slave raid, on a slaving ship, or in a plantation environment, onset reductionwould be favored, much as happens in child language.

A study of the fashions in which the Spanish syllable template was treatedby bozal speakers as represented in literature reveals that bozal language isconsiderably more advanced than the sort of desperate survival response whichwould truncate any and all consonants which stood in the way of a canoni-cal CV syllable. Afro-Hispanic literary texts reveal syllable types not found ina cross-section of West African languages, as do most independently verifiedAfro-Hispanic contact languages. In order to observe the type of drastic syllabicreduction predicted by an inexorably CV model, one has to turn to Afro-Iberiancreoles which were (a) formed very early (sixteenth or early seventeenth cen-turies), (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 Annobon and Sao Tome,as well as Palenquero and Saramaccan.46

45 Bradshaw (1965), Bal (1974), Cabral (1975), Kiraithe and Baden (1976), Prata (1983).46 Vila (1891), Herskovits (1931), Barrena (1957), Friedemann and Patino (1983), Ferraz (1979).

Reduction of syllable-initial clusters is also found in some isolated vernacular dialects of Brazil-ian Portuguese in which a heavy African presence can be documented (e.g. Mendonca 1935:114;Raimundo 1939:70–71; Jeroslow 1974:45–46). In these dialects, isolation and drift are probablyat the root of the severe syllabic reduction, rather than a basis in a radical Afro-Lusitanian pidginor creole.


Literary habla de negros contains very few examples of the breaking ofsyllable-initial consonant clusters, either through loss of one consonant orthrough addition of an epenthetic vowel; one of these two processes wouldbe expected if Africans were indeed filtering received Spanish through a maxi-mally simple CV template. Among the only verifiable cases from Golden AgeSpain are bolocado [brocado], ezturumento [instrumento], falauta [flauta], andsalamandera [salamandra]. A handful of cases are found in Argentina/Uruguayat 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 Rıo de la Plata region peaked in the late eighteenth cen-tury, a large proportion of the Africans were transshipped from Brazil, where atleast some had learned the rudiments of Portuguese. Other features of bozal lan-guage from Buenos Aires and Montevideo support this hypothesis, particularlythe frequent raising of final unstressed /o/ to [u].

In Afro-Hispanic language of various time periods, syllable-initial clusterswere at times created, due to the use of metathesis as one means of resolv-ing an unacceptable syllabic coda. Metathesis was frequent both in Africanlanguages’ assimilation of Spanish and Portuguese words, and within ver-nacular Spanish and Portuguese, at times with convergent results. The use ofmetathesis to displace a syllable-final consonant to syllable-initial position hasalready been noted, for example sicoba/shicoba < escoba. In Ibero-Romance,liquids are common in syllable-final position, and in it ial obstruent+l iquid clusters are also frequent. Metatheses of syllable-final liquids to pro-duce obstruent+l iquid onset clusters has been a common process. Afro-Iberian bozal speakers evidently made use of the same process, judging by thegreatly increased number of metatheses in Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguesetexts. There is no indication that Africans spontaneously invented metathe-ses in the absence of models in received Spanish. Metathesis was already aviable strategy in the vernacular Spanish which provided the input for bozallanguage, and Africans adopted and extended metathesis to words not metathe-sized by other speakers. The common drumı(r) < dormir is found in Afro-Hispanic language both past and present, in Papiamento, and in Afro-BrazilianPortuguese; similar forms abound in Afro-Hispanic language from many areasand time periods. Some examples of metathesis in Afro-Hispanic texts areprobably continuations of metathesis patterns found in isolated and rural Span-ish worldwide. In other instances, rather than creating open syllables, closedsyllables were formed during methathesis, but such examples, common invernacular 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 Filho1964:109), incronta < incontra (Jeroslow 1974:53), pruque < porque (Ramos


1935:52), troca < tocar (ibid.), vredade < verdade (Raimundo 1933:71).Syllable-final consonants were usually avoided in bozal language, but therewas not such a strong avoidance of obstruent+l iquid clusters in the syl-labic onset. It is possible that first generation bozal speakers did insert a fleetingepenthetic vowel in such combinations, which was ignored by Spanish writersunless 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 betweenadaptation of European words into African languages, and likely interferenceexperienced by African speakers when attempting to learn the pronunciationof European languages. Spanish and Portuguese words borrowed into Africanlanguages were gradually modified until their phonotactic shape was in no waydifferent from the native lexicon. In the majority of cases, given the demograph-ics of the African side of the Afro-Iberian linguistic interface, the African lan-guages contained no word-final consonants, nor word-internal coda consonants,and Spanish and Portuguese syllables were modified either through truncation ofthe coda consonants or through addition of paragogic vowels. On the other hand,the observation of contemporary situations in which Africans from a varietyof linguistic backgrounds attempt to learn Spanish and Portuguese for the firsttime reveals minimal difficulty with the articulation of word-final consonants.In the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea, which derives from consonant-strongPeninsular dialects of Castile and Valencia, word-final consonants are rou-tinely maintained. They occasional drop in the speech of less fluent Guineans,but the loss is never widespread nor consistent, this despite the fact that sim-ilar configurations are all but unknown in native Guinean languages. Thesesame African languages do not permit word-internal coda consonants, and yetSpanish coda consonants largely survive, without suffering either effacementor paragogic vowel insertion. The same is true for Portuguese, even as spo-ken at the most rudimentary level, in Angola, Mozambique, Sao Tome, andGuinea-Bissau, and for Spanish as learned occasionally by speakers from otherWest and Central African countries.47 This observation extends not only toprivileged intellectuals and expatriates, but also to those who pick up smatter-ings of Spanish and Portuguese through trade, travel, or exile. Contemporaryobservations simply do not give evidence of the massive syllabic deformationsof received Spanish and Portuguese phonotactic patterns such as appear inearlier literary representation of “Africanized” Spanish and Portuguese. In fact,the latter imitations bear similarity not to modern Africans’ spoken Spanish

47 Lipski (1986c).


and Portuguese, but rather to the fully nativized borrowings of European lex-ical items into African languages. One might be tempted to completely writeoff early literary imitations as mere parodies, devoid of linguistic reality, exceptfor the obvious existence of Afro-Iberian creoles in which just syllabic defor-mation took place: Palenquero, Sao Tomense and Principense, Annobonese,and to a certain extent Papiamento. This real-life set of languages in whichprecisely the sort of massive syllabic replacement found in early Afro-Hispanicliterary imitations actually took place requires greater attention than can bemustered in the present work. In essence, the prime differentiating factorseems to be intimately related to the sociolinguistic conditions which are nor-mally required for full creolization to take place. These include at least thefollowing:

(1) Lack of a viable common language among the second language learn-ers, forcing them to communicate with one another in whatever version ofthe target language they can muster. Although multi-ethnic communication inSpanish or Portuguese does take place in areas of Africa characterized by theofficial use of these languages, such instances are quite rare. Africans in theirhomelands normally communicate with one another in local and regional lan-guages, at times supplemented by long-standing lingua francas such as PidginEnglish, Lingala, Swahili, Kituba, etc. Their use of European languages is moreor less circumscribed by official domains, including school, church, some gov-ernment activities, and of course when communicating with most Europeans.This reduces the number of opportunities for adapting the European words toa more African pattern, and maintains a constant awareness that Spanish is a“foreign” language.

(2) Limited availability of native speaker models. In situations where creolelanguages developed, the original creole speakers had relatively little access toadequate native speaker models. On slave plantations, for example, Africansoften had contact only with overseers, teamsters and cooks, who themselvesspoke Spanish or Portuguese only imperfectly. Slaves working in domestichouseholds or in urban areas where they were in contact with a large native-speaking population did not develop a creole language, but rapidly acquired areasonable approximation to the received language; in this environment, theiroffspring would learn Spanish natively. In the contemporary African setting,where Spanish or Portuguese are the official languages, African speakers arenever too far removed either from quasi-native speakers, or from the officialreminders of usage (radio broadcasts, official announcements, public speeches,and the like). Even if the latter are produced by other Africans, these are thespeakers who have acquired the “best” Spanish or Portuguese.

(3) Closely related to the previous point is the demographic proportionof potential creole speakers to native speakers of the target language. In


environments where Afro-Iberian creoles have developed, Africans outnum-bered Europeans at ratios ranging from 10–15 to 1 to more than 100 to 1. Whileit might seem that even greater proportions might obtain in modern Africa, whenone considers the proportion of the population that effectively speaks Spanishor Portuguese, the numbers are much smaller. A native Spanish speaker, sayfrom Spain, in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, finds that most of the surroundingAfricans also speak Spanish, although they may not be doing so at any givenmoment (e.g. when mutual use of an African language or Pidgin English is themost viable option). The Equatorial Guinean in the same setting will also findit feasible to use Spanish in almost any circumstances. To a lesser extent, thiscondition holds true in Luanda, Bissau, and Maputo, where, however, there isa greater proportion of non-Portuguese speakers from the hinterlands.

(4) In the contemporary African setting, children normally learn Spanishand Portuguese first in school, although they may certainly have heard thelanguage used, for example on the radio, among certain adults, perhaps even bytheir parents. The school system, albeit often staffed by less than totally fluentteachers, especially in rural areas, provides a cross-generational consistencyin linguistic usage, which ensures that successive generations of children willacquire essentially the same language. This is different from the typical proto-creole scenario, where the children’s main linguistic input is the deficient targetlanguage 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 primarilyofficial models in official settings to effect the transfer.

In the first Afro-Hispanic contacts, unflatteringly but perhaps not unreal-istically depicted in literary texts from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries,African bozales are depicted as speaking a wide range of second-languagevariants of Spanish and Portuguese, from highly deformed and barely recog-nizable attempts to virtually perfect imitations. The best literary effects werederived from the former styles, and the temptation to slip from a legitimateAfro-Hispanic pidgin into a stage parody was too great for some authors toresist. At the same time, too great a density of deformed variants would renderthe speech entirely unintelligible to European audiences, thus depriving thecrudely humorous lines of their comic effect. Judging by the texts, the major-ity of authors leaned in the direction of the hapless African captive, recentlythrust into the Romance-speaking world, whose attempts at speaking Spanishor Portuguese show little attempt at accommodating Romance phonotactics.Significantly, a large number of the most “Africanized” texts presents Africansspeaking to one another in a European or American setting; to the extent thatsome authors actually observed such conversations rather than simply inventinghumorous scenarios out of whole cloth, we get some hints of what an incipientAfro-Hispanic pidgin might have looked like.


Spontaneous and intrusive nasalization inAfro-Hispanic language

Among the other recurring changes in written attestations of Afro-Hispanicspeech, one of the most intriguing developments is spontaneous intrusive nasal-ization, which resulted both in the slight modification of existent words and inthe creation of new words, combining the function of articles, demonstratives,and pronouns. This spontaneous shift is typified by the evolution of negroto nengre/ningre/nengue/nenglo, etc., which became a literary stereotype forAfro-Hispanic speech. The full range of cases is illustrated in the Appendix tochapter 7.

Non-etymological nasalization in Spanish is not limited to Afro-Hispaniclanguage, since vernacular Spanish of many regions exhibits items such asdende < 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 appearedin word-final position or word-internal syllable-final position. These words arefound in representations of Afro-Hispanic language from the sixteenth centuryto the late nineteenth century, one of the few phonetic traits not traceable tovernacular non-Africanized Spanish that spans the entire time period for whichsome type of pidginized Afro-Hispanic speech is attested. Together with spon-taneous nasalization came denasalization; in the same corpus, apparent lossof word-final /n/ is attested, with both phenomena often appearing in a singledocument. In view of these opposing tendencies, it is inaccurate to character-ize Afro-Hispanic speech as generally “more nasal” or “less nasal” than otherdialects of Spanish.

It is often stated, though seldom substantiated, that “African” influenceon Spanish included an increase of nasalization. Alvarez Nazario (1974:116)notes that in early Afro-Hispanic texts from Spain one finds “introduccionde un elemento consonantico de resonancia nasal, a veces en sustitucion deotro sonido.” At another point, the author refers to “la tendencia del negroa la nasalidad” (175). Ruben del Rosario (1956:6) refers to Afro-Hispanicbozal speech in Puerto Rico as “habla muy grave, oscura y nasalizada,” stat-ing also (8) that “los negros esclavos, base de la poblacion negra y mestiza,tenıan una clara propension a la nasalidad . . . el negro trajo o desarrollo suhabito de nasalizar.” Romero (1987:102) speaks of the “numero abundantede nasalizaciones vocalicas, que parece provinieran de influencias afronegras.”Chasca (1946:336) notes that “the tendency toward nasality of the [seventeenth-century 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. Canfield1960 for El Salvador, Wright and Robe 1939 for Mexico), it is not necessary to postulate anyextraterritorial roots.


influence.” Pichardo (1976:11), describing nineteenth-century bozal Spanishin Cuba, observes the frequent change of /y/ to [n], a change also observed byHenrıquez Urena (1940:168) for Dominican Spanish, although not necessarilyattributed to African influence. Lenz (1928:82) comments on increased usedof nasal consonants in Papiamento, attributing this at least partially to Africaninfluence, quoting Schuchardt’s (1882) attribution to Afro-Hispanic speakers atendency to nasalize vowels. Wagner (1949:153) also comments on increasednasality of Cuban bozal Spanish, Papiamento, and other Caribbean creoles.

Although it remains to be convincingly demonstrated that Afro-Hispanicspeech in general was any more “nasalized” than other ethnic or regional vari-eties, several recurring types of addition or shift of nasal elements in Afro-Hispanic speech may be identified. The prominence of what was probably arelatively small subset of such elements, noteworthy for their differences withrespect to other Spanish dialects, was responsible for the notion that Afro-Hispanic speech was characteristically nasal.

In many dialects of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as Afro-Romance cre-oles, the presence of a word-internal nasal consonant may cause nasalization ofother elements in the word, both vowels and consonants. The most common pro-cess 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 some-times looks to be leftward spreading (with occasional rightward nasalization),e.g. multiplicar > muntipricar,49 Mingue < Miguel.50 Some common casesinclude brangaman < valgame [Dios], simpanole < espanoles, ringalame <

regalarme, sintaliano < italiano, dimpensa < dispensa, prantano < platano,sintimao < estimado, satinfasione < satisfaccion, tamberna < taberna, etc.

Nearly all the cases of polysyllabic words not originally containing a nasalin which an intrusive nasal element is found in bozal texts exhibit the addednasal element on the first vowel, with alternate variants at times demonstratingrightward spreading, rarely if ever affecting the final vowel. Typical examplesinclude lango < largo, (n)anquı < aquı, limbre < libre, dimparate < disparate,rimpito < repito, pincueso < pescuezo, dimpacha < despachar, dingrasiao <

desgraciados, rimpica < repicar, sincritore < escritores, ingresia < iglesia,sintrella < estrella, pintola < pistola, dimbarato < desbarato, unte < usted,51

Jesuncristo< Jesucristo, Punto Rico<Puerto Rico, ringo< rigor,52 Nantega<

Ortega,53 nontron < otros. In a very few words, spontaneous nasality appearsto have spread rightward from the initial syllable: brangaman < valgame, andsumprica/sumpringa < suplica. There are few counterexamples to the attach-ment of a nasal element to the initial vowel, and most can be accounted for

49 Chasca (1946:326). 50 Alvarez Nazario (1974:150).51 Alzola (1965:363). 52 Alvarez Nazario (1974:150). 53 Ibid. (147).


by independent constraints or developments. Thus satinfasione < satisfaccionmay reflect the previous existence of a nasal in the root word. Arintocrasia <

aristocracia can be explained through phonotactic constraints, since if the firstvowel were nasalized and then developed an excrescent syllable-final [n], theoriginally intervocalic /r/ would now find itself in postconsonantal onset-initialposition, and according to Spanish phonotactics the /r/ would have to be realizedas a trill, representing a non structure-preserving transformation. Prohimbido <

prohibido actually contains a diphthong in the initial syllable (the letter h is silentand the unstressed /i/ is realized as a semivowel), to which the nasal elementwas added. Another apparent counterexample, pecandora < pecadora as usedby Gongora can be explained through the obvious analogy with the gerundpecando, whereas intrusive nasalization of the first vowel could conceivablyresult in potential confusion with penca ‘cowhide used for whipping,’ therebydetracting from Gongora’s attempted humor. Finally, the nasal element in Jesun-cristo/Sesunclito, etc., most likely was attached originally to Jesus, constitutinga type of word-final nasalization to be covered below.

The last type of spontaneous nasalization in Afro-Hispanic speech to be stud-ied here involves word-final position: callan < callad,54 daremon < daremos,bucan < busca, etc. A particularly intriguing set of forms exhibiting non-etymological word-final nasals are monosyllabic catchall morphemes such aslan, lon, and nan, as well as other monosyllabic function words derived fromclitics, copulas, prepositions and the like.

Previous analyses of word-final nasalization

The only Afro-Hispanic words exhibiting word-final nasalization that have beenpreviously analyzed are the pair lan/nan. Given the phonetic similarity of theseitems with pronouns or articles in Afro-Hispanic creoles such as Palenquero,Papiamento, Sao Tomense and Annobonese, some investigators have suggestedthat these words were actually derived from a proto-Hispanic creole, or per-haps 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 Ricostems from a common extraterritorial source, then the existence of both formsin Puerto Rico and the predominance of the former in Cuba would suggest anevolution lan > nan, initiated and only partially completed in Puerto Rico. The

54 Chasca (1946).55 Lipski (1987c). Cotton and Sharp (1988:208) refer to lan in Afro-Caribbean speech as “an undif-

ferentiated 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) postulatesthat the original form was nan, and that the change nan > lan took place through the influenceof the definite article la.


opposite development would be suggested only if it could be demonstrated thatlan/nan was attested in Cuba significantly before appearing in Puerto Rico,having undergone the putative evolution nan > lan before the latter form wastransferred to Cuba, via an as yet unattested route of linguistic transplantation.However, the data collected for the present study show that lan occurs from theearly seventeenth century on, both in Spain and in Spanish America, includingPuerto Rico; lon makes its first written appearance shortly thereafter.56 Thealmost total restriction of nan to nineteenth-century Puerto Rican texts thussuggests a route of evolution opposite to that suggested by Alvarez Nazario,namely lan > nan, if in fact the two items are related etymologically. AlvarezNazario 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 thenineteenth century. He also proposes that the semantic replacement of a prepo-sition plus article is related to the plural particle ma of Colombian Palenquero,e.g. ma ngombe ‘the cattle,’ where he interprets ma as a fusion of na and theSpanish possessive mi. However, the Palenquero form is in reality a Bantu plu-ral marker, only fortuitously similar to fusions of Romance items. Given thelack of other significant parallels with West African or Caribbean creoles, andthe fact that lan/nan does not occur in Palenquero (the one Afro-Hispanic lan-guage demonstrably influenced by Bantu morphology), there is no compellingreason to identify lan/nan as direct transfers from African languages or creoles.The claimed similarity with Palenquero stems from a misunderstanding of thefunction of ma in the latter language. Nan is phonetically identical to the thirdperson plural pronoun/plural marker in Papiamento, but in the latter languagepluralizing nan is invariably placed after the noun: e kasnan ‘the houses.’ Nouse of Papiamento nan parallels Afro-Hispanic usage. Since no bozal texts shownan used as a plural subject pronoun or postposed plural marker, it seems thatthe similarity with Papiamento is fortuitous. The change lan > nan may simplyresult from regressive nasalization (a nearly identical change has occurred inHaitian 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 undif-ferentiated third person pronoun nelle/neye/ne. For example, Brau (1894:138)observes that in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, what he called “cimarronesbozales” used expressions such as na-cosina, ne-pueblo, na-casa, etc., foren la cocina ‘in the kitchen,’ en el pueblo ‘in the town,’ en la casa ‘in thehouse,’ again suggesting a simple phonetic shift, or conceivably na as derivedfrom a Portuguese pidgin, rather than a transfer of African morphologicalstructures. It is not inconceivable that West African or creole morphologicalstructures influenced the development of lan. However, since the latter elementfits in among a series of monosyllabic function words all showing the same

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


spontaneous nasalization but otherwise exhibiting no basic similarities, the casefor an African/creole origin is not compelling. There is indeed a reason for notseparating out lan/nan, namely the fact that Afro-Hispanic materials reveal alarge and potentially open-ended set of words in which a final nasal elementwas added.

Evidence of prenasalization in Afro-Hispanic language

Close scrutiny of the Afro-Hispanic data suggests that what was eventuallytranscribed as a word-final /n/ in elements such as lan, lon, den, etc., reflectsthe presence of a prenasal ized obstruent in the following word, atransformation of an originally oral consonant resulting from a unique com-bination of West African areal characteristics and a particular interpretationof Spanish and Afro-Hispanic phonotactic patterns by Africans and Spanishspeakers alike. Prenasalized obstruents are a common feature of many WestAfrican language families, among them several known to have been carried toSpain and Latin America. Such sounds have traditionally caused difficultiesof interpretation and pronunciation for speakers of European languages, andwhen found phrase-initially they are often perceived and transcribed as pre-ceded by a prothetic vowel, or as a nasal+obstruent cluster separatedby an epenthetic vowel. Although most Afro-Hispanic texts reflect no particularlinguistic sophistication as regards transcription of non-Spanish sounds, thereare a few fragments that appear to directly reflect the presence of prenasalizedobstruents.57 There is also evidence that African words containing prenasal-ized consonants were absorbed into Afro-Hispanic language. For example, inCaribbean bozal Spanish, Africanisms (usually from the Bantu group) con-taining prenasalized consonants frequently lost the nasalization, but an alter-native 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 pre-nasalized obstruents were at times resyllabified as a syllable-final nasal fol-lowed by a syllable-initial obstruent, when adapted into Spanish: e.g. Kikongosiri + mpompa > cirimbomba ‘drunken orgy’.59 Prenasalization of Europeanwords originally beginning in oral obstruents was a frequent concomitant ofmany Afro-European linguistic contacts, including the formative periods ofIbero-Romance-based creole languages of the Americas. In addition to thedocumented presence of prenasalized consonants (e.g. in Gullah and Njuka),Palenquero, the most distinctively Africanized Spanish-based creole, has not

57 Several relevant examples are included in the Appendix to Chapter 7, Part K, but some of theremaining 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.

58 Garcıa Gonzalez and Valdes Acosta (1978:21). 59 Megenney (1979:119).


only retained African items containing prenasalized consonants (e.g. ngombe‘cattle’), but has also prenasalized Spanish word-initial obstruents, most par-ticularly /d/ and /g/:60 dejar > ndeja, gritar > ngrita, ganar > ngana, dolor >

ndolo, doce > ndosi, duro > ndulo, (a)garrar > ngala, etc.In the adaptation of Portuguese loans in Kikongo and Kimbundu, initial

oral consonants were frequently, but not uniformly, rendered by prenasalizedobstruents when borrowed into African languages. A small sample of the hun-dreds of Portuguese borrowings in Kikongo which illustrate this shift are:catequista > nkatikista, Joao > Nzuau, Pedro > Mpetelo, Paulo > Mpaolo,Garcia > Ngalasia/Ngala, sal > nsalu, acucar > nsucadi/nsucali, pano >

mpaanu, fardo > mfwadu/mfwalu, saco > nsaaku, tinta > ntinta. The listof obstruent-initial Portuguese words that did not undergo prenasalization isalso lengthy, which indicates that the process was variable at best. Also inter-esting is the fact that Portuguese words beginning with an initial nasalized(or occasionally even oral) vowel were at times reinterpreted as a prenasal-ized obstruent in Kikongo: Abel > Mbele, Ambrosio > Mbolozi, Agostinho >

Ngositinu, etc. Occasionally, word-internal nasalization or nasal spreadingoccurred 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 throughprenasalization:61 Joao > Nzwazitu, Joana > Nzwana, etc. Similar borrowingprocedures occurred in other West African languages, which provides a plau-sible basis for such developments in Afro-Hispanic language. In many Bantulanguages, the initial nasal element acts as a nominal class marker, and it ispossible that borrowed items were assigned to nominal classes based on theirperceived similarity with native nouns. This would be similar to the assignmentof gender to loanwords in Spanish not originally conforming to the canonicalSpanish patterns in which gender is predictable.

Nearly all attestations of spontaneous “word-final” n in Afro-Hispanic wordsin reality occur preconsonantally, where a Spanish speaker would likely mis-interpret, e.g. la ngallina as lan gallina. Word-initial voiced stops form themajority of the examples, which is consistent with the distribution of prenasal-ized obstruents in West African languages, as well as with the Palenquerodata. Prenasalized consonants are most prevalent in languages characterized byopen syllables, which also correlates with bozal Spanish, in which nearly allSpanish syllable-final consonants were eliminated.62 It is interesting to note thatPortuguese word-final nasal vowels were uniformly denasalized in Kikongo,corresponding to the pattern frequently noted in bozal Spanish texts (AppendixPart L), in which a word-final /n/ or nasal vowel was lost: Sebastiao > Sibatiau,

60 Friedemann and Patino Rosselli (1983:99–100). 61 Atkins (1953). 62 Herbert (1986).


limao > limao/nlimau/limanu, mamao > mamau/mamo, serrao > selau, prisao> pelezo, kapitao > kapitau, etc. Modern Palenquero effectively denasalizessuch words as tambie < tambien ‘also,’ although at times a residual nasal res-onance is detectable. It is unclear whether such examples represent completedenasalization of the final vowel, or whether, given the presence of final nasalvowels in a large subset of African languages represented among speakers ofAfro-Hispanic pidgin, Spanish-speaking writers simply missed the compen-satory nasalization of the preceding vowel.

Speakers of African languages, like most other second-language learnersof Spanish, routinely pronounced all instances of /b/, /d/, and /g/ as occlu-sives, as opposed to the more frequently fricative articulations found in nativevarieties of Spanish. The retention of occlusion, while in its origins a reflec-tion of African phonotactic patterns which did not contain the stop-fricativealternation, created a series of sounds not normally occurring intervocalicallyin Spanish, including in word-initial postvocalic position. An occlusive pro-nunciation of the voiced obstruent in a combination like la gallina would, ifinterpreted within a Spanish phonotactic model, suggest the latent existenceof a preceding consonant, most probably a nasal. Although nothing in thephonetic realization would give substance to such an analysis, the Spanishdistributional possibilities, in combination with already existent prenasalizedstops in the pool of African languages found in the bozal populations, wouldfacilitate reinterpretation of word-initial voiced stops as containing two rootnodes. Addition of a prenasalized segment fits smoothly within this pattern.In the case of prenasalized obstruents in bozal Spanish, there is nothing tosuggest that the original word-initial consonants were analyzed as clusters.Once the inclusion of prenasalized stops in bozal speech had begun to affectword-initial /b/, /d/, and /g/, this pattern could be extended to initial voice-less stops, providing that the pool of African languages serving as a substratetrigger also contained prenasalized segments whose second element was voice-less. Both types of prenasalized obstruents are found among West Africanlanguages, but prenasalized voiced obstruents are more common.63 Analogywith the voiced series, rather than a differential analysis of Spanish voicelessstops (which do not alternate with fricatives), would be at work here. In Afro-Hispanic speech voiceless stops were sometimes voiced following nasals; rem-nants such as Palenquero planda < platano, Palenquero/Papiamentu hende <

gente, and Papiamentu punda < punta may signal an earlier time period whenpostnasal voicing of obstruents was more frequent. The majority of bozal attes-tations of function words apparently ending in [n] are found before voicedstops.

63 Ibid., Welmers (1973).


Summary reconstruction of early Afro-Iberian phonology

The reconstruction of Afro-Hispanic phonology is circumscribed by both tem-poral constraints and geographical settings. The first large category spans thelargest stretch of both time and space, and may be roughly identified with therepresentation of Africanized Spanish in Golden Age literature, plus the firstmanifestations of colonial Spanish American writing. In Spain, the time periodinvolved begins in the late fifteenth century, and – in literature at least – extendsthrough the first half of the eighteenth century. Bozal Spanish of the sort repre-sented in the literary texts of the epoch probably ceased to be a viable linguisticcommodity by the second half of the seventeenth century. In Latin America, thetime period in question being towards the end of the sixteenth century, althoughthe first written attestations do not come until the second half of the seventeenthcentury, ending somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century. All majorcolonial centers were involved, although the written attestations cluster aroundmajor mining areas and the largest administrative centers: Potosı in Alto Peruand Cuzco in Peru, Mexico City, Puebla, Bogota, and the like.

The extant documentation covers two very distinct dialect areas of Spain:Castilian and Andalusian (together with some transitional zones). In earlycolonial Spanish America, documented seventeenth/eighteenth century Afro-Hispanic language contacts center on highland zones characterized by strongconsonantal articulation in syllable-final position, and on a relatively uniformpronunciation of stressed and unstressed vowels. Despite these wide dialectaladstrata, Africanized Spanish in this first category exhibits more similaritiesthan differences. These include:(1) occlusive pronunciation of /b/, /d/, and /g/ in all positions, sometimes pro-

ducing the impression of a preceding nasal consonant. In a few instances,true prenasalized stops may have emerged, but these never prevailed, exceptin splinter groups, often formed by runaway slaves, whose language wascut off from further contact with Spanish: this includes Palenquero, as wellas the Afro-American creole Gullah and some of the creoles of Surinam.Rapidly pronounced intervocalic /d/ was often perceived by native Spanishspeakers as [r].

(2) weak but tenacious pronunciation of syllable-final consonants. By no meansdid Africans simply strain all Spanish in their environment through a rigidCV filter; rather, they accentuated already present tendencies towards con-sonantal weakening in those regions where such processes existed. InCastile and highland Spanish America, final consonants were as oftenretained as weakened or lost, while in Andalusia (and presumably the devel-oping Caribbean and other coastal dialects of Latin America), Africansovergeneralized the ever-expanding move to eliminate syllable- andword-final consonants.


(3) special mention must be made of final /s/ in the first person plural verbaldesinence -mos, for evidence suggests consistent pronuciation without thefinal /s/ by Africans in all the regions and time periods under consideration.Also found with high frequency was the dropping of plural /s/ in multiple-word noun phrases, remaining only on the first word of the phrase (typicallya definite article). The evidence suggests a recurring tendency to see plural/s/ and the /s/ in /-mos/ as largely redundant, as opposed to instances ofsyllable- and word-final /s/ which were devoid of morphological value. Thelatter instances of /s/ were lost only when the regional variety of Spanishalready weakened /s/, for example in Andalusia, at least by the end of theseventeenth century.

(4) paragogic vowels occurred variably, especially following polysyllabicwords ending in a stressed vowel plus consonant (e.g. senor, Dios), forwhich there was no ready model in the majority of African languageswhich intersected with Spanish. Word-internally, paragogic vowels werecommon in early borrowings into African languages, which were charac-terized by a brief contact with native speakers of Portuguese or Spanish,followed by oral transmission from one non-native speaker to the next, all ofwhich facilitated rapid divergence from the original source. In AfricanizedSpanish spoken in closer contact with native speakers of Spanish, word-internal paragogic vowels were rare and transitory, with the frequency ofsuch vowels varying according to the native African languages involved, aswell as with degree of assimilation of Spanish. When paragogic vowels didappear, vowel harmony with a preceding vowel, usually the vowel receivingthe main stress, was a common strategy.

(5) interchange of /l/ and /r/ was by no means the norm for all or even most Afro-Hispanic language. Only after the large influx of Bantu-speaking Africans(towards the end of the seventeenth century) did the change of /r/ to /l/ andinterchange of /d/ and /l/ become in the least common. Observations ofcontemporary Bantu speakers who have learned Spanish or Portuguese as asecond language (e.g. in Equatorial Guinea and Angola) reveal a fairly lowrate of neutralization of /l/ and /r/, even among the least proficient speakers.However, the presence of even a few cases of liquid neutralization sufficeto create the stereotype of massive replacement of /r/ by /l/.

(6) failure to maintain the /r/–/rr/ distinction is characteristic of AfricanizedSpanish of all times and places. Although the single flap [r] is the most usualmanifestation, observation of Spanish spoken non-natively in EquatorialGuinea shows that hypercorrect use of the trill [rr] is also a frequent event.

(7) the majority of Africans acquiring Spanish spoke language with lexicaltones, and attempted to reinterpret the Spanish intensity stress accent intonal terms. For all Africans speaking tone languages, replacement of tonicstress by a high tone without concomitant higher intensity was the rule, but


more proficient speakers suppressed the tendency to assign a discrete toneto each syllable, gravitating instead in favor of a roughly (low) monotonepronunciation of most atonic vowels.

The final stages: nineteenth-century SpanishAmerican bozal Spanish

Qualitatively, Afro-Hispanic language in Latin America began to change duringthe eighteenth century, but the majority of the documentation of this secondphase begins at the turn of the nineteenth century. The areas in question areprimarily Buenos Aires and Montevideo, coastal Peru, and to a lesser extentthe Caribbean coast of South America, especially Venezuela. In the Rıo de laPlata, African laborers arrived in relatively large numbers, but most remainedin urban areas. Contact with Spanish was extensive, and slavery ended a fewdecades later, so that blacks, even African-born bozales, drifted into a varietyof menial occupations, most of which brought them into constant contact withnative speakers of Spanish. In coastal Peru, the majority of Africans remainedin the greater Lima area, where the situation was similar to that of the Rıo dela 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 theirlanguage will have to be based entirely on extrapolation.

By the nineteenth century, the Rıo de la Plata and coastal South Americandialects had already developed significant weakening of syllable-final conso-nants, especially /s/ and, in the case of Peru, also /r/ and /l/. Afro-Hispaniclanguage built on these tendencies, which meant virtually no paragogic vowels,and an abundance of open syllables. Given the preponderance of Bantu-speakingslaves taken to the Rıo de la Plata during this time, almost all of whom camefrom the Portuguese Congo and Angola, Bantu phonetic tendencies could pre-dominate. In coastal Peru, the late-arriving Africans in the nineteenth centurywere of more varied origin, roughly duplicating (in diversity, but not in quan-tity) the Africans arriving in nineteenth-century Cuba. This means a roughlyeven mix between speakers of Bantu languages and speakers of Kwa languages.As a consequence, fewer characteristics of specific African language familiesare found. Afro-Hispanic language in nineteenth-century South America pre-sented, in addition to the omnipresent neutralization of /r/ and /rr/, occlusivepronunciation of /b/ and /g/, and reinterpretation of Spanish stress accent interms 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-finalcontexts, word-internal and word-final.


(3) in the Rıo de la Plata area, replacement of /r/ by /l/ was relatively com-mon among African bozales, and may have influenced the speech of non-Africans during the period when blacks (African- and American-born)made up 30 to 40 percent of the Buenos Aires and Montevideo popula-tions.64 The relative scarcity of this phenomenon in Afro-Peruvian speechlends credence to the notion that the highly concentrated Bantu presencein Argentina and Uruguay was directly responsible for this change.

(4) Africans reinterpreted the weak and variably deleted intervocalic /d/ ofcoastal South American Spanish as zero, although the occlusive pronunci-ation of /d/ in other contexts is probable.

In the nineteenth century, the plantation slavery of Cuba created the con-ditions for heavier and more long-lasting African phonetic influences, whichat times transcended the speech of foreign-born bozales to encompass Afro-American Spanish. Diachronic reconstruction suggests that by the turn of thenineteenth century, Cuban Spanish had the same phonetic characteristics as ithas today, although among the large Spanish-born population (at times reaching50 percent of the white population), retention of final consonants was frequent,and even among some upper-class Cubans there was some reluctance to reducefinal consonants to the extent found in popular speech. It was the latter varietythat interacted with Afro-Hispanic speech, so that massive loss of syllable-finalconsonants, 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 chanceto interact with native Spanish speakers than in the countries described above;therefore, the opportunities were greater for phonological restructuring of thesort found in more radical creoles. The only reason why such a restructuringnever took place is the short period of time (roughly fifty years) in which asignificant African-born population acquired Spanish non-natively in Cuba inthe difficult plantation situation. As a consequence, Afro-Cuban bozal Spanishwas in most ways similar to Africanized Spanish in coastal South America,with the tendencies toward loss of final consonants more exaggerated. Amongthe few distinguishing features of this transitory Afro-Hispanic variety are thefollowing:(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 andplaces where Spanish and African languages came together, but this processappears to have evolved the furthest in Cuba.

In few areas did Afro-Hispanic speech reflect the phonological impact ofa single African language or areal grouping. The majority of features used by

64 Fontanella (1987b).


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

8 Grammatical features of Afro-Hispanic language

Introduction

This chapter will focus on particular grammatical structures among Africanlanguages and possible substratum influences in Afro-Iberian speech. The listof possible transfers is nearly endless, and yet among creole languages world-wide only a relatively small handful of syntactic patterns are typically implicatedin substratum transfer. Overall configurations such as word order, together withspecific constructions involving negation, interrogation, topicalization, defi-niteness marking, pluralization, and copular predicates are among the leadingvenues 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 Africanlanguages that interacted with Spanish and Portuguese are head-initial SVO(subject-verb-object) languages, meaning that objects follow prepositions andverbs, and complementizers such as that/que come at the beginning of theclauses they introduce. A proportionately smaller number of languages exhibitSOV (subject-object-verb) order, with some being head-final/postpositional.Some languages appear to be in transition from one word order pattern toanother. Few African languages depart drastically from one of these two canon-ical patterns, although alternative word orders are common in constructionsinvolving focus and topicalization, relativization, interrogation, etc. Accordingto Heine (1976:23–24), who surveyed some 300 African languages, 95 percenthave S-V order in intransitive sentences; in transitive sentences, the propor-tions are 71 percent SVO, 24 percent SOV, and 5 percent VSO. If the subjectis pronominal, 94 percent of the languages place the pronoun preverbally. Henotes: “Given any unknown African language one can therefore predict with acertain degree of probability that in this language the subject precedes the verb,that nominal qualifiers like adjectives, numerals or demonstratives follow thenoun, and so on” (24). Most Benue-Congo languages have a “type A” clusterof properties, including SVO order, prepositions, noun+genit ive order,

245


noun+adject ive order, preverbal tense/mood/aspect markers, object pro-nouns in postverbal position, and the general order subject pronoun+tense /mood/aspect markers+negative part icle+verb+object pronoun . Most West Atlantic and Eastern Kwa languages also fallinto this pattern, leaving Mande and Western Kwa languages as the only majorAfrican language families that intersected with colonial Spanish that deviatefrom this basic pattern. Western Kwa languages and Mande languages normallyexhibit “Type B” characteristics: they have postpositions rather than preposi-tions, exhibit the order genit ive+noun , do not distinguish nouns by gen-der, and have little or no nominal morphology of any type. Phonologically, TypeB languages usually have open syllables only, and contrast oral and nasal vowels.Type B languages share with the A group predominant SVO and noun+adject ive word order. These two groups account for nearly all Africanlanguages known to have come into contact with colonial Spanish and Por-tuguese, and therefore provide a set of common denominators around which thesearch for African structural influence on Afro-Iberian language can be based.

When pronominal clitics are drawn into the picture, the list of available word-order patterns grows even longer. Africanists are divided in their reconstructionof proto Niger-Congo, as to whether it was originally SVO or SOV.1 In somecases, word-order patterns appear to have shifted partially during the time spanrepresented by Afro-Hispanic linguistic encounters.

Among the African language groups exhibiting SOV word order are theMande 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 familyhas been suggested as a major contributor to the formation of some Afro-American 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 pre-

dominantly SOV word order.3 Under the name Carabalı (Calabars in English),Ijo speakers were present in Cuba, but the possible extent of their linguistic con-tributions has yet to be assessed. Ijo speakers formed a coherent speech commu-nity in the Berbice region of Guyana, and Ijo was a key factor in the formation ofBerbice Dutch creole.4 Despite the SOV structure of Ijo, Berbice Dutch creoleis a SVO language, which some investigators have taken as a demonstration ofthe 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 Williamson (1989a).2 E.g. G. Hall (1992) for Louisiana Creole French. 3 Jenewari (1989).4 Robertson (1979), Smith, Robertson and Williamson (1987), Kouwenberg and Robertson (1988).5 Bickerton (1981).

Grammatical features of Afro-Hispanic language 247

have postpositions, clearly derived from the substratum and virtually impossi-ble to derive from any form of Dutch unaffected by a postpositional substratumlanguage. Smith et al. (1987) propose that Berbice Dutch was formed throughintense contact and combination of only two languages – Eastern Ijo (Kalabari)and some form of Dutch, possibly already creolized. If this hypothesis is cor-rect, it opens the possibility for creolization to occur during bilateral linguisticcontacts, and not only when the superstrate language is in contact with a numberof mutually unintelligible substrate languages.6

Kru languages, representing the old Windward and Grain Coasts, typicallyhave a SVO order in simple sentences, but when auxiliary or negative elementsoccur, the preferred order is S AUX IO DO V.7 Members of the Kru group werewidely represented during the Atlantic slave trade as Kru men, renowned fortheir seafaring abilities, shipped out as sailors and crewmembers for variousenterprises all along the west coast of Africa. Kru seamen have been implicatedin the spread of varieties of West African Pidgin English (especially SierraLeone Krio) to Fernando Poo, eastern Nigeria, and Cameroon. On FernandoPoo, the Kru formed a coherent community, often clinging to pidgin Englisheven when official usage switched to Spanish. Proportionately few Kru languagespeakers were documented among slave populations taken to Latin America,possibly because slave traders found the Kru to be more valuable as sailors andintermediaries.

African language families with predominantly SVO word order are morenumerous, and represented a much greater proportion of the African side ofAfro-Hispanic linguistic encounters. The Atlantic family typically uses SVOorder,8 and many Atlantic languages were documented in the slave trade tothe Iberian Peninsula and Latin America, including Wolof, Fula, Diola, Serer,Temne, and Biafada. Kwa languages9 were among the most important languagesto interact with Spanish and Portuguese. Prominent Kwa languages includethe Akan group (Twi, Asante, Fante), Ewe, Fon, Bran, and Ga. Among theeven 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 deviationsoccurring during focus and topicalization. By far the largest subgroup of theBenue-Congo classification is the vast Bantu family, including such languagesas Kikongo, Kimbundu, UmBundu, and many languages from the interior of theCongo Basin, Angola, and later Mozambique and East Africa. Bantu languagesnormally follow a basic SVO pattern.

In the balance, most African languages participating in bozal Spanish andPortuguese encounters prefer SVO order, and no modification of Romance

6 E.g. as proposed by Whinnom (1965). 7 Marchese (1989). 8 (Wilson (1989).9 In the revised classification, e.g. of Stewart (1989). 10 (Williamson 1989b)


word order would be expected. African slaves who spoke SOV languages fellfrom prominence in Afro-Iberian communities after the early seventeenth cen-tury, although they were proportionately more important in French and Britishcolonies. Many speakers of African SOV languages also spoke another regionallanguage or lingua franca characterized by SVO order; for Mande languagespeakers, knowledge of Fula or Wolof was common, while Ijo speakers usuallywere familiar with neighboring Benue-Congo languages, and, later, with PidginEnglish.

Possible influence of SOV languages on Afro-Iberian speech

Spanish and Portuguese were in contact with a proportionately high number ofMande speakers, using SOV word order, only during the first century of Euro-pean penetration of West Africa, and occasional fragments from the sparsesixteenth-century bozal corpus may reveal a gravitation away from SVO pat-terns. For example, from the Coplas of Rodrigo de Reinosa (Chapter ThreeAppendix #1), we find:

. . . si querer, conmigo facer choque, choque,y con un bezul dos veces arreoen vostro becer alla se me troque . . .

The Afro-Portuguese fragment by Henrique da Mota (Chapter TwoAppendix #2), from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, contains afew 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 wordorder to an African substratum, since medieval Spanish and Portuguese stillused O-V constructions as an alternative to the more prevalent V-O pattern. IfSVO is indeed a universal trait of pidgins and creoles, to be overcome only in thepresence of extremely concentrated substratum or adstratum pressure (e.g. asoccurred in the formation of Philippine Creole Spanish, whose predominantlyVSO pattern follows the structure of all contributing Philippine languages), thenone should not look for any deviation from SVO syntax in bozal Spanish orPortuguese, unless an exceptionally homogeneous contact with an SOV Africanlanguage was at stake. The case of Guinea-Bissau Kriyol is of some relevance tothe study of Afro-Hispanic word order, since Kriyol is in contact both with SVOAtlantic languages (especially Bijago and Manjaku, and, in the Casamance,with Diola) and with the SOV Mande language Mandinka. Kriyol word order


is SVO, except for topicalized sentences, but there are several instances wherePortuguese (or pidgin Portuguese) word order has taken precedence over anyof the African substrate patterns.11

Subjects and subject pronouns

In many African languages, the issue of subject pronouns is closely boundup with subject-verb agreement. A question as apparently straightforward aswhether or not “null subjects” are permitted in African languages becomesentangled with syntactic characterization of “subject” position vs. agreementor inflectional marker. To further complicate matters, many African languagefamilies have dual series of “subject pronouns” – a free-standing stressableset which closely correspond in meaning and usage to Ibero-Romance subjectpronouns, and preverbal clitics, which find Romance counterparts only in someFrench and northern Italian dialects.12 At the same time, proponents of a uni-versally unmarked syntax during the creolization process frequently point toovert 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 withdifferent verbal tenses, with conjunctions, and in certain other constructions.There is also a series of emphatic (disjunctive) subject pronouns. Use of thesubject clitic is obligatory, and when an optional emphatic pronoun is used, itmust be followed by the subject clitic: ngia ngi tewe ‘I (emph.) cut,’ where ngiais 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 argumentposition.

Mandinka has a similar distribution of emphatic subject pronouns and subjectclitics.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 witha low tone. Rowlands (1959:56) observes that since the tonal distinctions areoften lost on Europeans, “Mandinkas tend to use Emphatic forms in speaking toEuropeans in many situations where they would use Unemphatic forms amongthemselves. This corresponds to putting stress on a Pronoun in English to ensureclarity.” This suggests that the use of emphatic pronouns to reinforce subjectposition (e.g. Ibero-Romance use of (a)mi instead of yo/eu) could work in theopposite direction, with Africans deliberately choosing emphatic disjunctivepronouns in their dealings with Europeans, who then overgeneralized theirnotions about pronouns in African languages.

11 Kihm (1994:142). 12 Brandi and Cordin (1989), Rizzi (1986), Safir (1985).13 Migeod (1908). 14 Rowlands (1959:ch. 6).


Subject pronouns in Atlantic languages often generally exhibit the samedisjunctive pronoun/clitic split found among the Mande group. Among Kwaand Benue-Congo languages, it is more usual to find a distinction betweenemphatic subject pronouns and subject clitics; when emphatic pronouns areused, the clitic is normally absent.15

Among the Bantu languages, optional free-standing (and emphatic) pronounsare combined with obligatory preverbal subject clitics. Although the full sub-ject pronouns vary widely among African languages, the subject clitics aretypologically quite similar. All are monosyllabic, and many consist of a singlevowel or consonant prefixed to the verb. The greatest cross-linguistic similarityconcerns the first person singular subject clitic, which takes the form of a nasalprefix m- or a homorganic nasal, alternating with the CV combination mi- (withalternative form mo-) in a surprising variety of languages, from the Senegambiato southern Africa. In a later section we will explore the contribution to earlypidgin Spanish and Portuguese of the (synchronically) coincidental preferencefor m-/mi- as first person singular subject clitic. To observers unfamiliar withthe languages in question, preverbal subject clitics may be confused with theverb itself.

No major African language allows for free elimination of all subject marking,except at times for imperative constructions. Subject clitics – almost always pre-fixes – take the place of verbal suffixes, which mark subject-verb agreement inRomance. To most African speakers, leaving off a subject clitic renders the sen-tence as “incomplete” as would a Spanish verb stem from which the inflectionalsuffix had been truncated. On the other hand, no major African language groupmarks subject-verb agreement enclitically (post-verbally), although Bantu lan-guages 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 toboth subject clitics and disjunctive subject pronouns in African languages. Themonosyllabic pronouns yo/eu, tu/tu, nos (Portuguese), vos, and el (Spanish) havethe same phonotactic shape as many African subject clitics, all the more so ifweakening 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 See Pulleyblank (1986) for a representative analysis of Yoruba subject clitics. These languagesalso exhibit some allomorphs of the subject clitic, for example in negative forms. In transplantedvarieties of some of these languages (for example Yoruba in Cuba, Trinidad, and Brazil), use ofthe disjoint subject pronouns prevails, hinting at a possible semi-creolization as these languageswere learned by other Africans in the New World setting, and/or passed along imperfectly tothe last generation of speakers.

16 Schwegler (2002).


usted pronounced as ute (the quintessential Andalusian/Caribbean realization).Polysyllabic pronouns such as nosotros, vosotros, and ustedes are conspicuouslyunclitic-like, but, for example, when the first syllable of nosotros is lost, a moreacceptable candidate for subject clitic results (as in Palenquero suto < nosotros,rural Haitian and Lesser Antillean zot < nous/vous autres ‘we/you all’). Evencontemporary Palenquero utere < ustedes, truncated to ’tere, could pass for asubject clitic.

If Spanish and Portuguese subject pronouns could sound like subject cliticsto the bozal attempting to learn the European language, there is no ready sourceof other Ibero-Romance elements which could pass for disjunctive or emphaticsubject pronouns. Only full nouns could potentially fill that role, and the frequentuse of proper names instead of first and second person pronouns in bozal textsmay reflect Africans’ compensation for the absence of an identifiable subjectclitic (since received Spanish would contain proportionally few tokens of thenormally redundant pronouns yo, tu, 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 vosance me ordenamo, Anton hacemo;¿Por que en Juan matar queremo a Antoniyo?Pues ¿quien damo comira a Anton?Y a Anton, ¿que damo?Tambien, pobre Anton, morimo.

Use of one’s proper name instead of the first person singular pronoun is a com-mon staple of rudimentary pidgins worldwide, and is also stereotyped in “babytalk” 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 ofsubject pronouns in early bozal texts, but the possible compensation for the lackof a pronoun/clitic duality in Ibero-Romance remains as a possible contributingfactor.

No Afro-Hispanic bozal texts examined to date contain transparent casesof Ibero-Romance pronouns being used as subject clitics; we do not find, forexample, constructions such as *Juan el sabe (i.e. without a topicalized sub-ject set off by an intonational pause), as might occur in some northern Italiandialects and in some vernacular varieties of contemporary French. However,later bozal language, particularly the large Afro-Cuban corpus, does providesome curious instances of the invariant clitic lo, in some cases appearing tobe a “clitic doubled” direct object, such as is found in Andean Spanish inter-language, and in other instances in combination with intransitive verbs, whereno obvious argument can be assigned to lo. Representative cases are found inChapter Eight Appendix #1. There are even a few examples of non-argument lo


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 inmany other instances provided imitations of bozal language consistent withAfro-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, Spanishlo, by virtue of its usual preverbal position, its invariant nature, and its cliticstatus, is reinterpreted as a transitivity or tense marker found in the nativelanguage.17 In Quecha-influenced Andean Spanish, for example, invariant loaccompanies all transitive verbs, regardless of the direct object. In Nahuatl-influenced Spanish, invariant lo not only doubles direct objects, but also appearswith some intransitive verbs.18 Clitic doubling with lo was once common inindigenous interlanguages in parts of Central America, including Pipil andLenca in El Salvador and Honduras.

Overt subject pronouns and subject-verb agreement inAfro-Iberian language

In Afro-Hispanic texts, particularly from the Caribbean, the apparent overuse ofovert subject pronouns has been taken as a diagnostic for creole or post-creolestatus.19 However, even in non-creole Spanish dialects categorical use of sub-ject pronouns may arise when, for example, natural processes of consonantalreduction (e. g. /s/ > [h] > Ø; /n/ > nasal ized vowel > Ø) partiallyobliterate verbal endings; this has occurred in some parts of Andalusia and inCaribbean Spanish.20 An examination of the bozal corpus reveals considerablevariation in the use of overt subject pronouns, even when subject-verb concor-dance 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 offinal consonants in popular speech, vernacular Caribbean Spanish was makingextensive use of overt subject pronouns. Among Golden Age bozal texts, overtsubject pronouns are in general no more frequent than in non-Africanized Span-ish of the same time period, this despite the fact that verbal agreement is ofteneffectively suspended in bozal language. The morphological result of stuntedverb conjugation took different forms: the uninflected infinitive, third personsingular, 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 thecombination of null subjects with faulty subject-verb agreement is to adopt theperspective that the first stages of Afro-Hispanic pidgin (as represented bythe texts of Resende’s Cancioneiro Geral, Reinosa’s Coplas, Lope de Rueda’s

17 Lipski (1994e:82–89). 18 Hill (1987).19 E.g. Otheguy (1973), Perl (1982). 20 Mondejar (1970), Poplack (1980).


characters, etc.) are characterized by a reduced syntax in which there are nofunctional 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 man-ifested itself in many different fashions, most prominently the third personsingular, the uninflected infinitive, and the first person plural. The latter form, ifit was every truly used in Afro-Hispanic speech rather than being just a literaryinvention, disappears from the corpus by the end of the seventeenth century.Afro-Hispanic language from Latin America most frequently uses the thirdperson singular as the invariant verb root; the bare infinitive was also occa-sionally used. For example, the Afro-Cuban corpus contains many instances ofthe uninflected infinitive as invariant verb root (Chapter Eight Appendix #4).From the eighteenth to nineteenth century Afro-Peruvian corpus comes a sin-gle example: Yo no falta a sumese puque solo pregona tama, tamale (ChapterFive Appendix Afro-Peru #10). This compares with earlier bozal usage of theinfinitive (Chapter Eight Appendix #5). Examples of the third person singu-lar used as default verb in the Afro-Cuban bozal corpus are found in ChapterEight Appendix #6. The Afro-Peruvian bozal corpus contains examples like: Yoquiele se diputa (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #12). Most of these exam-ples also contain overt subject pronouns, making it untenable to claim that allforms of bozal Spanish lacked a true subject position. However, the fifteenth-and early sixteenth-century texts come closest to the vision of an Afro-Hispanicpidgin lacking most functional projections. This was the period in which fewAfricans had come into contact with European languages, and the black Africancommunity in the Iberian Peninsula was so small that no Afro-Hispanic speechgroup could form.

Direct objects in African languages

All African languages have some sort of direct object pronouns, but the man-ifestations vary widely, even more so than with subject pronouns. Since thecanonical word order for all major African languages is subject-first, subjectpronouns are normally the first major constituent in a sentence; the relativeposition of the direct object with respect to other constituents is more variable.Spanish and Portuguese, typifying Romance developments, have object cliticsin addition to (or instead of) direct object pronouns.

In Mande languages, which have SOV order, DO pronouns are prever-bal clitics, similar to Ibero-Romance patterns. In Mende, for example,22 DO

21 For example Aldridge (1988), Lebeaux (1988), Radford (1988, 1990), Pierce (1992), Deprezand Pierce (1993), Hyams and Wexler (1993).

22 Migeod (1908:200).


pronouns differ only slightly from their counterparts in subject position (thefirst subject pronoun is used with aorist and past tenses, while the second isused with present and future tenses). When the DO is a third person objectunderstood from the context, it can be eliminated. Atlantic languages preferSVO order; DO pronouns follow the verb, often as enclitics. The phonologicalform 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 pronounsthat are usually phonological clitics, regardless of their syntactic status. InSVO languages (the majority in this group), DO pronouns appear in immediatepostverbal position. In SOV languages (e.g. Ijo), proclitic DO pronouns arefound. There is usually at least some phonological similarity between subjectclitics and DO clitics, and, especially in the first person singular, they are oftenidentical. In Yoruba, for example, the subject clitic is mo (with variant mi innegative sentences), while the DO clitic is mi.

The behavior of DO pronouns in Bantu languages is more complex, giventhe greater complexity of the Bantu verb and the incorporation of both subjectand object clitics as part of the verb. Most Bantu languages allow for free-standing DO pronouns in the normal postverbal argument position. Kikongois relatively rare in allowing for some emphatic and negative constructions inwhich a disjunctive pronominal DO occurs preverbally; however, in these casesa subject pronoun is used.23 Obligatorily in Bantu languages, when there is noovert DO, and optionally when a DO is present, a DO prefix is attached to theverb stem. In the usual case, the order of morphemes in the verbal complex issubject cl it ic+tense marker+DO clit ic+verb stem , makingthe DO clitic seem more like an infix than a prefix. Free-standing personal DOpronouns are usually reserved for emphatic or contrastive status. In pidginizedvarieties of Bantu languages, disjunctive object pronouns are often used insteadof DO proclitics. This is true despite the high level of cognates among BantuDO clitics.24

The majority of SVO African languages place DO pronouns in the sameposition as DO nouns, i.e. after the verb. Even in Bantu languages, which havean option somewhat similar to Spanish preverbal DO clitics, a SVO order withfree-standing DO pronouns is a possible alternative. In some languages theDO pronouns are clitics, while in others they behave as independent pronomi-nals, and there is usually a phonological similarity with respect to full subject

23 Bentley (1887:577).24 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 inthe 1st Class.” Pidgin Swahili is spoken in eastern Zaire (former Shaba/Katanga; Fabian 1986,1990; Polome 1968), and may well have figured in the mix of African languages which came intocontact with Portuguese, particularly when the Portuguese slave trade reached eastern Africa(Mozambique).


pronouns (although not always to subject clitics). Although the Bantu groupemploys preverbal DO clitics, these are separated from the subject by tensemarkers, which makes the entire verbal complex different from the typicalSpanish pattern. It is possible that some more advanced Bantu-speaking learn-ers of Spanish attempted to analyze the occasional Spanish preverbal adverb(as in Yo ya lo conocı) as a tense morpheme appearing in the same position asin Bantu structures. However, given the relative morphological opacity of theSpanish cl it ic+verb complex, the simpler SVO option with disjunctivepronouns (which, because they frequently occurred in isolation or in emphaticor contrastive contexts, were more prominent in received discourse) was fre-quently taken.

Direct object pronouns in Afro-Iberian language

Given the high degree of commonality among African languages as regards DOpronoun usage, a unified strategy of bozal language would be to maintain SVOorder even when DO pronouns were at stake, and to use disjunctive pronounswherever possible. This procedure cannot be attributed to a specific Africanlanguage or family, but is rather a logical consequence of recurring patternsamong most African language families. Bozal texts from all time periods giveevidence of this tendency. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese has regularized theuse of disjunctive (subject) pronouns instead of clitics, a striking departurefrom European Portuguese usage which many observers attribute to an earliersemicreole stage in Brazil: vejo ele “I see him/it” vs. European Portuguesevejo-o. As seen by this example, Brazilian Portuguese also allows for thirdperson disjunctive pronouns to be used with inanimate objects, whereas inEuropean Portuguese, ele, ela, etc. as subject and DO can only refer tohuman/animate beings. Examples from the bozal corpus are found in ChapterEight Appendix #8.

Negation in African languages

Patterns of negation among African languages are quite diverse, and members ofthe 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 languagescontain some sort of negative particle corresponding to Spanish no/Portuguesenao. In only a few instances is it likely that African negation patterns had anyeffect on bozal languages.

In Mende, taken as a representative of the Mande family, negation is fre-quently expressed by simply lengthening the final vowel of the subject clitic.There are also intensifying words which are used to reinforce some negative


constructions).25 Mandinka usually employs a special preverbal negative aux-iliary. Vai places a negative morpheme between the subject clitic and the verb.Atlantic languages, typified by Diola-Fogny, Temne and Wolof, suffix mor-phemes to the verb to indicate negation.26 This negative element comes imme-diately after the verb, not phrase- or clause-finally as occurs in Palenquero, andoccasionally in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese. Fula combines vowel length-ening with negative items. Among Kwa languages, and non-Bantu languages ofthe 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 neg-ative particle ko between the subject clitic and the verb. In rapid speech the/k/ disappears and the vowel may merge with the preceding vowel, with theresult that negation is frequently realized as a low-tone extension of the pre-ceding vowel. In such languages as Nupe and Igbo, negation is expressed by asentence-final particle. Ewe combines a sentence-final particle o with a particleme placed between the subject clitic and the verb. Ijo places a negative particlebetween the verb and the following aspect marker. Ga combines a prefix anda suffix on the verb stem.27 In Sango, negation involves a postposed markerpεpε, occurring at or near the end of the negated clause.28

Kikongo, together with some minor Bantu languages, shows “doublenegation,” similar to French ne . . . pas constructions. Kikongo typically useske . . . ko:29

Ke be- sumba koNEG Cl. Buy NEG = ‘They do not buy.’

Some related Congo languages employ different strategies, typically combininga different set of subject clitics with changes to the verb endings.30 Others usepostposed ko in conjunction with a preverbal negative particle such as si, insertedbetween the subject clitic and the verb.31 In Kimbundu, there is a differencebetween the speech of Luanda and the speech of the sertao or hinterlands.32

In the latter dialects, negation is accomplished by simply prefixing ki- to theaffirmative verb. Through vowel fusion with subject clitics and class markers,the variants ka- and ku- also occur. In the Luanda dialect, however, preverbalki- is optional, while following the verb a disjunctive pronoun, the same used

25 Migeod (1908:92–95). Migeod (1908:92) cautions that “the addition of a single word the equiv-alent of not to a positive statement, for the purpose of rendering it negative, does not occur.”

26 Migeod (1911, vol. 1:109–10), Rowlands (1959:87–88), Sauvageot (1965:115–16), Welmers(1976:84–85), Church (1981:238–39).

27 Zimmermann (1858:105–06), Warburton et al. (1968:32–33), Fiaga (1976:52–53).28 Samarin (1967:148). 29 Bentley (1887:607).30 E.g. Cambier (1891:69–70). 31 E.g. Ussel (1888:48–49).32 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.


in possessive constructions, occurs.33 In Umbundu, another important Angolanlanguage spoken in Benguela and widely represented in the Atlantic slave trade,negation is done entirely by means of prefixes, usually ka- or ha-, immediatelybefore the subject clitic, together with some changes in the subject clitic. InXhosa 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.) betweenthe subject clitic and the verb. A similar process is used in Combe/Ndowe,another important language of Equatorial Guinea, spoken along the coast ofRıo Muni. Bujeba, another coastal language of Rıo Muni, employs a form ofdouble negation, inserting the particle aa between the subject clitic and the verb,and affixing -le to the verb. Fang, the most widely spoken language of EquatorialGuinea, combines a particle a inserted after the subject clitic and a particle ke orki (sometimes omitted) following the verb. Despite the prominence of Fang inEquatorial Guinea, being the language of the ruling class and widely spoken asa second language by most of the population, there is no evidence of double orpostposed negation in the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea, regardless of the levelof fluency or the presence of other interference from native languages. Negativeprefixes are also typical of Bantu languages spoken in Mozambique.34 OtherBantu languages use only suffixes. For example, Lingala postposes tε to theend of the entire predicate. Swahili uses a variety of suffixes, all placed afterthe verb.35

Negative structures among African languages exhibit so much diversity thatthere is little hope for the discovery of a unified “African” negation pattern inbozal Spanish and Portuguese. The only circumstances that might allow for anAfrican-influenced negation pattern in bozal language would be an unusuallyhomogeneous African linguistic community learning Spanish or Portuguese inthe same setting. In the history of Afro-Iberian contacts, this scenario has usuallybeen reserved for African colonial languages (e.g. Angolan and MozambicanPortuguese), or for isolated creoles originally arising from a highly homoge-neous slave population, such as Palenquero. Vernacular Brazilian Portuguese,notorious for double and postposed negation, might also fit this category, given

33 This construction has been in existence for a long time; it is registered, for example, in the earlygrammar of Dias (1697:21–23).

34 For example, Chinyanja prefixes the negative particle si (which sometimes appears as sa- or s-) tothe verb (Henry 1891:132–33; Missionarios da Companhia de Jesus 1964:95–96). In Sena, thereare a separate set of subject clitics for negative forms (Anderson 1897:27). Xilenge preposes amonosyllable, usually a-, to the subject clitic (Smith and Matthews 1902:23–24). Ronga alsotypically preposes a- (or nga) to the subject clitic, as well as changing the final vowel of theverb (Junod 1896:138–39; Quintao 1951:109–10).

35 Juanola (1890:56), McLaren (1906:100-01), Gonzalez Echegaray (1916:142–43), Abad(1928:67), Fernandez (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 Boleka (1991:132–34).


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

Double negation in Afro-Iberian language

At several points in the bozal corpus, double negation appears. Double negationis also found in the overwhelmingly Afro-Hispanic Choco region of Colombiaand in the vernacular speech of the Dominican Republic.36 Postposed negation(using nu) is found in Palenquero, a creole whose Bantu sources (particu-larly Kikongo and Kimbundu) are well established. In the Dominican Republicand in the Choco, Schwegler (1996a) and Megenney (1990a) postulate that anAfrican contribution may be at work. Schwegler and Megenney trace this pat-tern to Bantu languages, particularly Kimbundu and Kikongo. In the Choco, anAfrican basis for double negation is quite plausible, particularly given the prox-imity of the Palenque de San Basilio and the earlier existence of other escapedslave communities, in which creolized language similar to Palenquero appearsto have developed. Slaves who escaped from Cartagena or the mining camps inAntioquia often followed the course of rivers and ended up in the Choco, and,given the strong Bantu influence in Palenquero, it is reasonable to suppose that atleast some Afro-Colombians acquired double negation due to a Bantu substrate.The same could be said for Brazil, where the Portuguese-dominated slave tradecarried thousands of Africans from the Portuguese zones of Angola and theCongo directly to Brazil. Unlike in other Latin American regions where slavescame from a wide variety of African regions, Brazil received a much heavierconcentration of Kimbundu and Kikongo speakers prior to the nineteenth cen-tury (when importation of Yoruba- and Ewe-speaking slaves became the majortrend). In the Brazilian case, it is even conceivable that some slaves had acquireda Portuguese-based creole such as Sao Tomense, in which double negation isused. However, comparative data on Afro-Hispanic language from elsewhere inLatin America cast doubt on the notion that double or postposed negation wasonce the norm for a wider cross-section of Afro-Hispanic speech. Among theextensive documentation of Afro-Hispanic bozal speech in nineteenth-centuryPeru, Argentina, and Uruguay, there is not a single attestation of double orpostposed negation, despite the fact that the Bantu substrate was particularlystrong in the Rıo de la Plata area. The only other Latin American region where

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


double negation was attested in Afro-Hispanic language is nineteenth-centuryCuba, where a few bozal texts representing the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies appear to present such patterns (Chapter Eight Appendix #9). TheCuban examples require a different approach, since by the time of the out-pouring of nineteenth-century bozal examples, the predominant groups weredivided between Kikongo/Bantu speakers and speakers of Kwa languages, par-ticularly Yoruba. The latter group, however, provided most of the linguisticinput to Cuban bozal Spanish; Kikongo contributions were confined to certainAfro-Cuban religious ceremonies. Cabrera (1983) amply documents the lin-guistic structures produced by Yoruba interference in bozal Spanish, but noneof the examples of Spanish as produced by Bantu speakers (e.g. the examples inCabrera 1979) show other traces of Bantu syntactic influence. The Cuban data,when combined with the frequent use of double negation in rural regions of theDominican Republic, suggest that a Haitian influence may be at least partiallyresponsible. Within the Dominican Republic, double negation is particularly fre-quent in the Samana Peninsula, and also in western regions where the Haitianpresence is especially prevalent. Haitian is noted for use of a sort of doublenegation, combining the usual preverbal pa with cliticized phrase-final -non.Ending affirmative sentences with cliticized -wi is an even more commonstrategy; the same sort of double affirmation occurs in vernacular Domini-can Spanish.37 Since Spanish no is cognate with Haitian non, while Spanishno occupies the same syntactic position as Haitian pa and is easily acquiredby speakers of the latter language, the pathway to the formation of doublenegation in Haitian-Spanish contact situations is straightforward. Speakers ofHaitian were certainly in the right places at the right time to have caused the for-mation of double negatives in Cuban bozal Spanish, although there is no directevidence of a Haitian contribution. This hypothesis does not invalidate claimsof a Bantu influence in Cuban and even Dominican double negation, but it doesreduce the necessity of such a postulate, by suggesting another contributingsource.

Double negation is also found in the local Spanish dialect of the GuiriaPeninsula of Venezuela, where Spanish is in contact with the French creole ofTrinidad, which also employs double negation.38 This construction is not foundelsewhere in Venezuela, even in areas of heavy African cultural and linguistictraditions.39 All of the above examples point to the conclusion that doublenegation in Latin American Spanish dialects is the result of language contact,

37 See Alen Olavo (1986:57) for examples of Haitian tumba francesa songs in Cuba.38 Llorente (1994, 1995).39 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 Bedıa1994:360–61), which has been traced to the use of a combination of preposed and postposednegative markers in Quechua.


but not necessarily from a single source.40 Contact with creole languages inwhich double negation prevails appears to be the most likely source of doublenegation in Guiria, the Dominican Republic, and eastern Cuba, while Quechuais the source in northwestern Argentina. In the Colombian Choco, matters areless clear; contact with Kikongo or another African language employing doublenegation remains possible, as does the intermediate formation of a restructuredSpanish 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 ele-ments most commonly occurring as clausal subjects across African languagesare “what” and “who.”41 Such concepts as “why,” “when,” “which,” “where,”etc. may occur as adverbial complements, as in Spanish and Portuguese, but inmany African languages the same concepts result from paraphrases, rather thanbeing represented by individual interrogative words. Among suggested uni-versal tendencies for pidgins and creoles is the development of bimorphemicinterrogative 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 Africanlanguages make use of similar strategies, so that a choice between substratumand universal tendencies is not always possible.42 For example among Bantulanguages, and in some other African languages, the word for “what” is fre-quently based on the word for “thing.”43 The combination ¿que cosa? occurredwidely in Afro-Hispanic language, and became fixed in Papiamento kiko < quecosa/que coisa. Some examples of the use of (que) cosa from the Afro-Cubancorpus are found in Chapter Eight Appendix #11. The Golden Age bozal corpuscontains few examples:

Que cosa estar vos hablando? (Gil Vicente, Floresta de enganos; Chapter ThreeAppendix #55)

Cosa vimo que creeya pantara . . . (Gongora, “A lo mismo” [al nacimiento de Cristonuestro senor]; Chapter Three Appendix #16)

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

40 This is the approach pursued in Lipski (1994a, 1996a, 1999a, 2000d).41 E.g.Welmers (1973:417). 42 Muysken and Smith (1990).43 Torrend (1891:209), Welmers (1973:431).


position.44 The effects of this interrogative formation can be observed inAngolan musseque Portuguese, where in situ interrogatives frequently occur(Chapter Eight Appendix #12). The Kimbundu use of in situ interrogative wordsis found in some other Bantu languages, with numerous alternative variants andoptions.45 Other key Bantu languages prepose interrogative words: Kikongonormally preposes interrogative words,46 in the same positions as in Spanishand Portuguese. The same usually holds for Fang, Bubi, Combe/Ndowe, andFiote.47

Among non-Bantu languages of Africa, the tendency toward preposed inter-rogative words is noteworthy. Representative languages and groups usingpreposed interrogative words include Mende, Yoruba, Temne, Igbo, and Ga.Fante prefers preposed interrogatives, although in situ placement is a possibleoption.48 A comparatively small number of West African languages regularlyemploys 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 Diola-Fogny and Sango.49 In some languages (Yoruba is a good example), use ofa sentence-initial interrogative word is combined with a resumptive pronounand/or a dummy copula, creating constructions of the sort “Who is it that goes?”The corresponding resumptive pronouns are preverbal clitics, and the result isin effect a complex interrogative expression, similar to Spanish que es lo que . . .The latter construction is possible in all Spanish dialects, but appears particu-larly often in Caribbean Spanish, where it also creates the effect of preservingdeclarative sentence order.50 It is unlikely that this construction represents adirect African contribution, but especially in nineteenth-century Cuba, when ahigh proportion of Yoruba speakers arrived simultaneously and formed coher-ent Afro-Hispanic speech communities, the existence of cognate constructionsin native African languages may have favored what is ordinarily a less commonstylistic option in Spanish.

In the balance, a large and representative cross-section of African languagesthat came into contact with Spanish and Portuguese during the initial century or

44 Chatelain (1888–89:30–31), Johnson (1930:40–41), Schadeberg (1990:18).45 Henry (1891:120–24), Junod (1896:108–10), Anderson (1897:24), Smith and Matthews

(1902:20), McLaren (1906:130 and passim.), Quintao (1951:91–92), Guthrie (1951:59–62),Gonzalez Echegaray (1960:109).

46 Bentley (1887:584–85).47 Ussel (1888:83), Juanola (1890:46–47), Abad (1928:50–51), Fernandez (1951:55–56, 144–47),

Ndongo Esono (1956:51–52), Nze Abuy (1975:73–74).48 Zimmermann (1858:115), Migeod (1908:73–74), Ward (1936:122–23), Welmers (1945:58),

Wilson (1961:33).49 Rowlands (1959:67–68), Sapir (1965:48), Williamson (1965:77–8), Samarin (1967:217–18),

Welmers (1976:118–20).50 Suner (1986).


two of bozal language gravitates toward sentence-initial placement of interroga-tive elements. Such a configuration would cause no difficulty in acquiring Span-ish and Portuguese interrogative placement. Only in exceptional circumstances,where speakers of closely related African languages all of which prefer in situinterrogatives acquired Spanish or Portuguese as a pidgin, could deviationsfrom sentence-initial interrogatives be contemplated. Nearly all African lan-guages require a preverbal subject clitic, usually even when a non-pronominalsubject is also present, and except for focused or topicalized constructions,subjects normally occur preverbally. A very likely common denominator forbroad cross-sections of African bozales learning Spanish or Portuguese wouldtherefore be non-inverted questions, a tendency expected to be exceptionallystrong when dealing with a monosyllabic prononimal subject such as tu or el.The Golden Age bozal corpus contains few examples of interrogative sentenceswith overt subject; most questions are short subjectless asides of the form ¿quehacemo? There are a few cases of subject-verb inversion:

Agora sı me contenta; mas ¿sabe que querer yo, sinor Pollos? (Lope de Rueda, Comediade Eufemia; Chapter Three Appendix #8)

Gentel homber; ¿que querer vox, voxa merxa? (Feliciano de Silva, Segunda Celestina;Chapter Three Appendix #10)

The early bozal Portuguese corpus contains some examples of non-invertedquestions. 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 ques-tions (Chapter Eight Appendix #16). The corpus shows greater variation thanwould be predicted by a simple consideration of prevailing African syntacticpatterns. Bozal language is not just the sum total of all the African languageswhich interacted with Spanish or Portuguese. Contact with native speakers ofthe European languages, degree of fluency, circumstances of language use,stability of African speech communities, and relative homogeneity of the sub-stratum languages, are all factors which influenced the extent to which bozallanguage showed the traces of individual African languages.

Subject preposing in WH-questions has at times been attributed to an earlierAfro-Hispanic creole, if not directly to an African substrate.51 However, theCanary Island and Galician contribution cannot be ignored, since non-invertedWH questions are common in both dialect zones, which provided large groupsof settlers to the colonial Spanish Caribbean. More to the point, Afro-Iberiancreoles typically employ declarative word order in WH-questions, simply plac-ing the interrogative word at the beginning of the sentence. This includes Cape

51 Alvarez Nazario (1974).


Verdean/Guinea-Bissau creole Portuguese, Sao Tomense, Papiamento, Palen-quero. Invariant declarative word order in WH-questions has also been sug-gested as a possible universal in creole formation, so in sorting out interrogativeusage in bozal Spanish and Portuguese, one must thread a path among substra-tum influences, Ibero-Romance dialectal variants, possibly earlier creolization,and universally unmarked creoloid structures.

In Latin America, non-inverted questions are only found in the Caribbeanarea, and only selectively. Such questions are common in Cuba, Puerto Rico,and the Dominican Republic, but vanishingly rare in Panama, Venezuela, andcoastal Colombia, with some important exceptions. In the Antilles, contact withcreole languages was once frequent among the Afro-Hispanic population (Papi-amento, Haitian and Jamaican creoles in Cuba; Papiamento and some Frenchand English creoles in Puerto Rico; Haitian and more recently English creolesin the Dominican Republic. In Venezuela, non-inverted questions are frequentonly in the eastern coastal region, particularly in the Guiria Peninsula,52 whereSpanish is in contact with Trinidadian French creole, which employs non-inverted questions. In Panama, non-inverted questions are typical only in theCaribbean port of Colon, among West Indians who speak Creole English, inwhich non-inverted questions predominate.53 Finally, some bilingual speakersin Palenque de San Basilio, Colombia, employ non-inverted questions whenspeaking Spanish, reflecting Palenquero usage but differing from prevailingpatterns in coastal Colombian Spanish. The correlation between non-invertedquestions and the adstratal presence of another language employing such con-structions is difficult to exclude in the cases just mentioned, although this byno means implies that contact with creoles or other languages is responsible forthe 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 differencebetween African languages as a group and Ibero-Romance is the lack, among theformer languages, of subject inversion in yes-no interrogative structures. Bozallanguage typically made no use of inversion or other syntactic modificationsin yes-no questions. As in the case of questions involving interrogative words,a determination of possible syntactic inversion is complicated by the generallack of overt subjects in many bozal texts (Chapter Eight Appendix #17). Thereare only a few instances of inversion (Chapter Eight Appendix #18). Fewexamples of inverted yes-no questions are found in Cuban bozal Spanish

52 Llorente (1994, 1995). 53 Bishop (1976:62).


(Chapter Eight Appendix #19). The Peruvian bozal and criollo corpus alsocontains some examples of yes-no questions (Chapter Eight Appendix #20).

Congo-Benue languages often have an interrogative particle for yes-noquestions; for example Yoruba uses sentence-initial se or nje. In Igbo, when thesubject is a noun, a resumptive pronoun is used to make a declarative sentenceinto a question. When the subject is a pronoun, it is given a uniformly lowtone. In some instances, the entire tone sequence of the sentence is raised inyes-no questions.54 Sentence-final particles are also used (optionally or obliga-torily) in Songhay, Hausa, Kanura, Mandinka, Mende, Twi, Ga. Ewe employs aclause-final particle as well as intonation to distinguish yes-no questions. Into-nation alone can be used to distinguish yes-no questions from the correspondingdeclarative sentences in Fula, Bambara, Mandinka, Vai, Wolof, Ga, and Efik.55

In Fanti, yes-no questions end with the particle a; at times, a conjunction naor ana also occurs sentence-initially. Diola-Fogny permits use of a graduallyrising intonation to signal yes-no questions. For more emphasis, a hypotheticalmarker 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 anda higher overall pitch level. Sango uses rising intonational patterns to signalyes-no questions.56

Among Bantu languages, there are several strategies for forming yes-no ques-tions. In Bubi, yes-no questions begin with the particle ana; when the subjectis pronominal, the pronoun is also repeated. Chinyanja postposes the particlekodi at the end of declarative sentences to turn them into questions. Xilengepostposes xana; in Ronga, xana may be either sentence-initial or sentence-final. 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 whenan affirmative answer is expected, a sentence-final particle -e may be appended.Sena is reputed to use an interrogative intonation. Lingala and Fiote also typ-ically use intonational curves to distinguish yes-no questions from declarativesentences.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 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 aphrase-final particle -aa.

55 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.), Fiaga(1976:80), Welmers (1976:36).

56 Welmers (1945:57–58), Wilson 1961:42), Sapir (1965:48), Samarin (1967:216–17).57 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), Quintao (1951:182).


in which subject inversion had occurred, but only that the writers had not chosenquestion formation as part of the repertoire of linguistic stereotypes. Speakersof languages which do not employ subject-verb inversion in questions typicallyhave difficulty in acquiring this feature of Spanish (e.g. English speakers incontemporary foreign language classes), and it is reasonable to suppose thatbozal speakers were no more adept at learning this new syntactic strategy. Thetreatment of subject pronouns as subject clitics, situated in invariant preverbalposition, would reinforce the resistance to subject-verb inversion. In contempo-rary areas of Latin American in which traces of Afro-Hispanic language havebeen postulated, it is common to hear non-inverted questions of the sort ¿Tusabes . . .?, ¿Ute sabe . . .?, etc. Since such questions are also found in dialectsof Spanish for which no African contribution can be postulated, non-invertedyes-no questions have not been regarded as potential evidence in the search forAfro-Hispanic linguistic roots (unlike non-inversion in questions with interrog-ative 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 haveadopted plural markers that deviate significantly from their European coun-terparts. Usually, these innovative plural markers can be traced directly to thesubstratum, either to a specific language, or to areal characteristics that con-verged during creole formation. Haitian creole -yo (the third person plural sub-ject pronoun) placed at the end of the entire NP is also found in Ewe/Fon, thelanguage family which apparently played the most significant role in the forma-tive 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 surroundingcontext is not adequate to determine number. English-based Caribbean creolesuse postposed dem in a similar fashion. In all cases, recurring patterns amongcertain African languages have been implicated. Palenquero signals nominalplural by the preposed marker ma, evidently of Bantu origin. Among Bantulanguages, there are numerous prefixes for singular and plural, depending onthe noun class. Even considering Kimbundu and Kikongo, the two languageswhose traces are most clearly observable in Palenquero, there are many dif-ferent nominal prefixes in the plural. However, ma is frequent enough to beimmediately recognized as a plural prefix by speakers of Angola/Congo Bantulanguages.

In bozal Spanish and Portuguese, on the other hand, there are no specialsyntactic or morphological devices for signaling nominal plural. What is foundin the texts is great instability in plural marking, with a decided preference

58 Fiaga (1976:11–12).


for singular forms, especially when a plural reference can be obtained from thesurrounding context. Nominal and adjectival plural in Spanish and Portuguese ismarked by final /s/, a sound which especially in Spanish was subject to erosionand elision during much of the bozal period. It is therefore not possible toaccurately determine whether an apparently singular form with plural meaningin 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, con-sisting of separate sets of singular and plural prefixes for all nouns, dependingon noun class. Since the number of noun classes is often a dozen or more inany given language, the net effect is a rather arbitrary set of singular-plural cor-respondences 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-Americancreoles like Palenquero and Gullah. The Palenquero use of ma as pluraliz-ing particle is highly exceptional, and evidently reflects the extraordinarilyhomogeneous substratum of closely related Bantu languages underlying thiscreole.

Among non-Bantu African languages, strategies for pluralizing nouns aremuch more diverse, although clustering around the use of prenominal andpostnominal particles. In most of these languages, plural is only explicitlymarked when plural reference cannot be surmised from the surrounding con-text.59 Thus with numbers and plural quantifiers signifying ‘many,’ ‘a few,’‘some,’ etc., many African languages add no plural marker to the accompa-nying noun. A minority of non-Bantu African languages employs extensivestem modifications. In most cases pluralization is a morphologically transpar-ent analytical operation. Suffix particles are used, for example, in Songhay,Mandinka, Bambara, Susu, Vai, Mende, Fanti, Ijo, Ewe, and Ga. Prefixes areused in Yoruba, Wolof, Twi, Efik. Igbo and Temne use no special plural markeron nouns, although Temne employs a plural article.60 Diola-Fogny uses a seriesof singular and plural prefixes that are somewhat similar to Bantu patterns.Fula uses a set of complex modifications, including prefixes, suffixes, and stemmodifications. Hausa, an Afro-Asiatic language distantly related to Arabic andother Semitic languages, employs a number of strategies for plural forma-tion, including template-based singular and plural forms typical of the Semiticgroup.

The Afro-Iberian bozal corpus gives no examples of alternative pluralizationstrategies using particles, not even combinations using plural pronouns. Thereare, however, numerous examples of obviously plural nouns lacking the plural

59 Manessy 1964/1985).60 Rowlands (1959:38), Manessy (1964, 1985), Sauvageot (1965:72–73).


ending. Particularly in sixteenth-century Spanish texts, and in texts comingfrom 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, Comediade Tymbria; Chapter Three Appendix #7)

y alla 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 plu-rality only once per NP, usually on the first element. This process never becamefixed in any variety of Afro-Hispanic language, possibly because in the dialectzones where Afro-Hispanic speech patterns persisted for the longest time, con-sistent consonant reduction caused all instances of /s/ to perish, including asa plural marker in NPs. In vernacular Brazilian Portuguese it is frequent forplural 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 ofdefinite articles. Most Portuguese-based creoles either have no definite articlesor have adapted Portuguese articles. Prıncipe creole uses postposed -se.61 Afro-Iberian bozal language is characterized by variable and unstable use of definitearticles, with omission of articles predominating over hypercorrect usage.

Among non-Bantu African languages, some place definite articles before theNP, others after the NP, and some have no definite articles. A few languageshave special definite and indefinite form of nouns. Typical cases include:

Defin ite art icle placed before NP: TemneDefin ite art icle placed after NP: Songhai, Wolof, Ga, IjoPostposed demonstrat ives “a certain”: Yoruba, IjoNo def in ite art icles : Yoruba, Ijo, Vai, Mandinka, Bambara, Hausa, Twi, Igbo,

EfikSeparate def in ite and indef in ite forms : Fula, Mende

Most Bantu languages have preverbal particles which function as definite arti-cles. In Kikongo, Kimbundu, and related Congo Basin languages, the “definitearticles” are single vowels, typically i, u, o, or e.62 This makes them similar oridentical in form to the Portuguese definite articles o and a. In function, how-ever, there are major differences, since Bantu articles are separated from thenominal stem at least by the singular/plural prefix. Moreover, definite articlesare used more as Classical Latin demonstratives than as Ibero-Romance arti-cles, 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).


no articles are used, creating article-less combinations similar to those foundin African languages lacking definite articles.

All other things being equal, one would anticipate that Bantu languagesin contact with Spanish and Portuguese would exhibit a more convergentpattern, eliminating definite articles in circumstances where Kikongo orKimbundu, for example, would not use an article, but also containing examplesof specific nouns signaled by definite articles. Contemporary Angolan mussequePortuguese, formed in contact with Kimbundu, partially bears out this hypoth-esis, echoing patterns also found in vernacular Brazilian Portuguese. Examplesfrom the Angolan musseque corpus are in Chapter Eight Appendix #21). In theearly Afro-Hispanic bozal corpus, examples of loss of definite articles are lessfrequent:

Yo me ir a porta de ferro . . . Yo me ir a porta de villa . . . (Reinosa, Coplas; ChapterThree Appendix #1)

In the nineteenth-century Cuban bozal corpus, which is by all appearances amuch more realistic approximation to Afro-Hispanic pidgin of the time period,there are more examples of omission of the definite article (Chapter EightAppendix #22). The Afro-Peruvian bozal corpus yields only:

neguito congo aprendıo canto . . . Neguito no rira ni cantara ma . . . (Lopez Albujar,Matalache; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #14)

Francica, bota frifro (Nicomedes Santa Cruz [1982], “Pelona”)

Even bozal speakers who did use Spanish articles more or less correctly, oftenfailed to make the articles agree in gender and number with the accompanyingNP. Although Romance-based creoles in general have taken masculine singularforms from the lexifier languages and made them into invariant creole forms,bozal language, including late-nineteenth-century examples evidently based onaccurate observations, was not consistent in this regard. There is however adecided preference for la before masculine nouns, more than use of el beforefeminine NPs. Since la represents a canonical open CV syllable, the basiccommon denominator across almost all African languages, the phonetic shapeof this article must be considered (Chapter Eight Appendix #23). Confusionof definite articles, nearly always favoring la, is amply documented in thenineteenth-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 Beren (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Peru #8)


Copulative verbs in African languages

Many African languages omit the copula with predicate adjectives, havinginstead a series of “adjectival verbs” or “verbalized adjectives.” Yet otherAfrican languages omit the copula with predicate nominatives. Some languageshave copulative verbs corresponding in large measure to the Ibero-Romancecounterparts; a few languages even have two copulas which pattern like ser–estar. In some cases (e.g. Yoruba), there is confusion between copulative verbsand topicalizing particles. The lack of any clear common denominators in theexpression of copulas among African language families suggests that little directsubstratum influence would be found in bozal Portuguese and Spanish, exceptwhen a highly coherent substratum is at work.63

Genitive constructions among African andAfro-Iberian languages

Among African languages, there are several well-defined patterns for genitiveconstructions involving two nouns (e.g. “John’s house”). Some African lan-guages have special genitive case markers or particles. Another frequent patternis the noun + noun combination; in some languages the possessor comes infirst position (e.g. of the type “John book”), while in others the possessor comeslast (e.g. “ball John”). In some languages there is a noun+part icle+noun combination in which the possessor is the first noun. Among mostBantu languages and several prominent non-Bantu languages there are approx-imate counterparts to the casa de Juan type construction of Ibero-Romance.In the Bantu group in particular, the connective element involved cannot beanalyzed as a preposition or particle, but is more properly part of the nominalconcord system in that it depends on nominal class and number.64

Possessor+possessed (e.g. “John house”): Mandinka (only withsome kinship terms and inalienable possession), Songhai, Bambara,Vai, Twi, Ga, Ijo, and other Akan languages

Possessed+possessor (e.g. “house John”): Yoruba, Fula, EfikPossessor+part icle /prepos it ion/possess ive (e.g.

“his”/“her”)+possessed : Mandinka, Vai (sometimes), Mende(sometimes)

Possessed+part icle /prepos it ion (e.g. “of”)+posses -sor : Hausa, Wolof, Temne, Nupe, Igbo, Bubi, Ngombe, Swahili,Kele, Soko, Ngala, Kikongo, Kimbundu

63 Lipski (1999c, 2002c). 64 Welmers (1973:275–76).


From this list of possibilities it can be seen that, as a group, Bantu languagespresent genitive constructions superficially showing the same order as in Ibero-Romance. Combinations involving true prepositions are also found in severalprominent African languages that came into contact with Spanish and Por-tuguese. In the bozal corpus, we do not find many deviations from canonicalRomance genitive patterns, perhaps for this reason. Afro-Iberian creoles as agroup also maintain the Romance genitive pattern: this includes Cape Verdeanand Guinea-Bissau creoles, Sao Tomense, Annobonense, Palenquero, and Papi-amento. Only in the Afro-Cuban bozal corpus are there consistent examples ofgenitive constructions in which juxtaposition of possessed+possessortakes the place of constructions based on prepositions. This is the predomi-nant genitive pattern in Yoruba and related Kwa languages that were promi-nently represented in nineteenth-century Cuban bozal speech, and this unusu-ally coherent substratum may have influenced Afro-Cuban syntactic patterns(Chapter Eight Appendix #25). In these examples, the similarity with Yorubaand related Congo-Benue languages is probably not mere coincidence; this typeof construction is virtually absent in earlier stages of bozal language, when theAfrican substratum languages were more varied in their treatment of genitiveconstructions.

Verb systems among African languages

African languages of the Kwa-Benue group use preverbal subject clitics tomark verb phrases for person and number, rather than the suffixes found inIndo-European languages. Indeed, all modifications of the verbal stem are usu-ally preposed, either as bound morphemes or as independent particles thatmay be used as adverbs. In general, African languages tend to mark aspectrather than tense in establishing “past” vs. “present” distinctions, and irrealisrather than future to express notions of futurity, conditionality, and construc-tions which would be rendered by the subjunctive in Romance languages. Theuse of preverbal particles to the complete exclusion of postverbal inflections isa key feature of all Afro-European creoles, and many scholars have looked toan African substratum. Substratum influence seems quite likely in the case ofcreoles formed with an apparently homogeneous substratum, such as Haitian,which in a very striking fashion replicates the verbal structure of the Ewe/Foncluster. Similarly, Guinea-Bissau Kriyol shows much the same verbal structureas surrounding African languages.65

Mandinka, an important member of the Mande family, mostly uses preverbaloperators to indicate tense, mood, and aspect. There is, however, an intransitivesuffix attached to the end of the verb stem. Mende makes greater use of suffix

65 Kihm (1994).


particles placed after the verb stem, in addition to preverbal markers. The suf-fixes are used to indicate, for example, perfective and pluperfect constructions,infinitives, continuous aspect, etc.66 In Temne, as in some other Atlantic lan-guages, most verbal markers are pre-stem particles. Diola-Fogny, on the otherhand, has many post-stem aspect markers. Fanti and other Akan languages useonly pre-stem particles or prefixes. Ijo typically uses post-stem particles to indi-cate tense and mood. Preverbal particles are also found in such languages asEwe, Twi, Ibo, Efik, and Vai. Bambara and Wolof have both prefix and suf-fix markers modifying the verbal stem. Bantu languages use both prefixes andsuffixes, including numerous suppletive forms, to indicate tense, mood, andaspect.67

Some African languages make use of independent particles, which can alsobe used, for example as adverbs or separate verbs, to signal verbal tense, mood,and aspect. In other languages, verbal affixes are bound morphemes, ofteninvolving significant vocalic and consonantal modifications. There may also beconcomitant modification of the verbal stem itself, and of the subject clitics (e.g.in Mande). There are not enough common denominators to suggest a coherentsystem of verbal particles in general bozal language, coming into contact witha variety of African language families. In some circumstances, however, therewas evidently enough coherence in the African substratum to facilitate theconversion of Spanish or Portuguese independent words to preverbal tense-mood-aspect (TMA) particles. Thus Papiamento uses ta (arguably derived fromSpanish/Portuguese esta 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 ornoun.68 Papiamento also has the hybrid element tabata, combining the Ibero-Romance imperfective of estar with what appears to be another derivative ofestar, to indicate past imperfective. The form ta also appears in Cape Verdeanand Guinea-Bissau creoles and in Palenquero, as well as in some Spanish- andPortuguese-based creoles in Asia. Among Afro-Iberian creoles, none make useof verb-derived forms for future, while the past/perfective is arguably derivedfrom an adverbial ya/ja. Among Afro-French creoles, however, the future isusually formed from va or a similar verb, while present/progressive comesfrom apres “after.”

Prior to the nineteenth century, there is no evidence in the bozal corpus thatany Spanish or Portuguese elements were consistently functioning as preverbalparticles, replacing verbal inflection, to signal tense, mood, and aspect. Thus for

66 Migeod (1908:ch. 6), Rowlands (1959:ch. 8).67 Wilson (1961:22–23), Sapir (1965:30–31), Welmers (1973:55–56). Williamson (1965:ch. 3),

Church (1981).68 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.


example, no form of estar is combined with another verbal root, except in trans-parently progressive constructions, in which the -ndo ending is still present. Inthe Golden Age bozal corpus, there are only a few cases where ya is combinedwith present tense or uninflected verbs in what might be a calque of Africanpart icle+verb stem combinations, and in which a reading of “now” or“shortly” is not likely (Chapter Eight Appendix #26). No one of these casesprovides clear evidence that ya/ja is functioning as a preverbal aspectual par-ticle (indeed, it is not clear whether sixteenth-to-seventeenth-century Spanishwriters 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 markerrather than the usual adverbial adjunct.

There are almost no cases of particles that could indicate future/irrealis inthe bozal corpus. It has sometimes been suggested that va had this function, butmost instances of va in bozal Spanish can be analyzed as simple instances of theperiphrastic future (Chapter Eight Appendix #28). In the pre-nineteenth-centurybozal corpus, there are no examples of ta or esta(r) used with an invariable verbstem in a fashion suggestive of its use as a preverbal particle. However, thenineteenth-century Cuban bozal corpus provides a different panorama, withwide 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 Span-ish shares with Palenquero and Papiamento (and with Cape Verdean) an earlierAfro-Lusitanian heritage. Ziegler (1981) has even suggested that Afro-Cubanbozal speech used va and ya as preverbal particles, in addition to or insteadof their normal functions as auxiliary verb and adverbial adjunct, respectively(Chapter Eight Appendix #27). The claims that ya and va are acting as parti-cles are impossible to fully evaluate based only on these fragmentary textualcitations. Spanish ya has a wide range of meanings, which span the range frompast/perfective (e.g. ya se fue) to future/irrealis (ya veremos), as well as sig-naling simple present, roughly meaning ‘now.’ Only in cases where ya appearswith an unconjugated infinitive or a verb which appears to be an invariantpresent-tense form is there any likelihood that ya in Afro-Cuban bozal texts isbehaving like a particle. Thus examples like Ya mi llega la bujı, ya pede, yayo cucha, Tu ya son muje tene siete ano, and ya lleva mi lengua jafuera mayconceivably represent a partially restructured verb system in which an invari-ant stem is combined with preposed aspectual particles. In order to subjectthis hypothesis to a definitive test, it would be necessary to have an extensiveverified corpus from a single individual or speech community, to determinewhether these examples show simple faulty concordance or a Yoruba-like verbsystem.

Matters are similarly complicated with respect to va before verbal stems.Since in the Spanish periphrastic future va a+ inf in it ive , va a is pronouncedas va, there is no a priori way of determining whether a combination such as yo va


morı in bozal texts represent a restructured verb system, or merely an invariantbut otherwise unremarkable Spanish verb. A concentration of examples withclear lack of concordance hints at possible restructuring, but the matter remainsopen: ¿quiene va paga la pato?, ¿y nelle lo muchachito va pende su Pana denute?, yo va esta de garrafon, yo va friımi cuepo toro, yo va dı, yo va camina,nelle va llora, Yo va crebı, Yo me va cupla 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 areincorporated into the Afro-Hispanic pidgin. In these extreme circumstances, itmay be that some Cuban bozales used available Spanish monosyllabic itemssuch as ta, ya, and va as though they were Yoruba preverbal particles. Yorubahas invariant verb stems, to which are prefixed particles such as n for progres-sive, ti for past/perfective, yıı for future, maa for habitual, etc. The obligatoryconstituent order is subject cl it ic+TMA part icle+verb stem , e.g.mo n lo. ‘I am going,’ mo ti lo. ‘I went,’ etc. Virtually identical combinations arefound in neighboring languages with which many Afro-Cuban bozales wouldhave spoken either natively or through previous contacts in Nigeria. It is notunreasonable to expect that Yoruba-speaking Africans who were attemptingto learn Spanish in Cuban slave quarters would instinctively construct verbphrases in an already familiar pattern. Since Spanish already provided a seriesof monosyllabic verbal adjuncts or auxiliaries which could occur in positionsidentical to those of Kwa preverbal particles, it was but a small step to therestructuring of such words as ta, ya, va, etc. to take on new functions. In manycases, Spanish speakers would not notice that a familiar item was being usedin a modified fashion, and thus it may be that Cuban bozal language actuallycontained a more radically restructured verb system than is suggested by theselection of texts surveyed above.

The Cuban bozal corpus is unique among Afro-Hispanic linguistic materi-als, in that the possibility for syntactic transfer from African languages wasenhanced by the homogeneity of the bozal community. In the remaining bozaltexts, from the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, and rep-resenting varieties of both Spanish and Portuguese, there is no evidence of anysubstratum influence on the verb system. The observed gravitation toward asingle invariant verb stem is a general concomitant of second-language learn-ing under duress, and while the widespread existence of invariant verb stemsamong African languages may have furthered the erosion of Ibero-Romanceverbs in bozal speech, African language interference is not at the root of thereduced verbal paradigms found in bozal texts.

Conspicuously absent from the bozal corpus – although found in manyAtlantic creoles – are such combinations as serial verbs (of the “I take knifecut” 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


that the authors of the texts (invariably white Spanish or Portuguese speakerswith no detailed knowledge of African languages, and with varying degreesof familiarity with bozal language as used in their own communities) tendedto include only those grammatical pecularities which represented only smalldeviations from standard Spanish or Portuguese, or which were already familiarto the general public as the result of other language contact environment. Inthe verbal system, for example, unstable conjugation and errors of agreementcould be observed in the speech of any second-language learner of Spanish orPortuguese; bare infinitives have also been used in hastily assembled Romancecontact vernaculars, from the medieval Lingua Franca to contemporary “GringoSpanish” (e.g. of the ¿cuanto costar esto? variety). Literary stereotypes of themoro or Moor already exploited this tendency. Slight modifications in the useof auxiliaries or adjuncts such as ya and va would not be noticed by most writ-ers, whose literary characters would continue to use these items as in standardSpanish.

Prepositions and postpositions in African languages

In general, African languages follow the widespread typological patterns bywhich SVO languages tend toward prepositions, while SOV languages pre-fer postpositions. However, in many African languages, what are translated asprepositions are in fact nouns (e.g. ‘head,’ ‘foot,’ etc.) or serial verbs. There arealso a number of different possibilities for genitive constructions that in Ibero-Romance languages are expressed by the preposition de, as well as a variety oflocative constructions. For those African languages (numerically in the major-ity) that do use prenominal relational items that occupy the same position – ifnot necessarily having the same syntactic function – as Ibero-Romance prepo-sitions, there is no conceptual difficulty in acquiring Spanish and Portugueseprepositions. To be expected is the confusion of particular prepositions, as wellas the elimination of prepositions, particularly in constructions where a preposi-tion might be absent in the African substratum languages (e.g. genitive construc-tions). In the entire Afro-Iberian bozal corpus, there are no examples of post-positions 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 barepreposition, in a fashion similar to its usage in Papiamento (Chapter 9). Thisrepresents a significant deviation from monolingual Spanish usage, and maysignal a Yoruba influence (Yoruba uses ni + ori = lori ‘at (the) head’ as thepreposition corresponding to ‘above,’ and ‘over’ (Chapter Eight Appendix #29).These examples also give evidence of the frequent elimination of commonprepositions such as de and a (Chapter Eight Appendix #30).


General grammatical characteristics of pre-nineteenth centuryAfro-Iberian speech

Prior to the nineteenth century, Afro-Iberian language had crystallized intostable creoles in Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and Casamance, Sao Tome,Prıncipe and Annobon, Curacao, San Basilio de Palenque, and in variousAsian ports. In addition to these established creole-speaking communities,bozal Spanish and Portuguese continued to be reinvented by successivegenerations of Africans taken to the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America.Although in the nineteenth century Spanish may have briefly creolized insome isolated Caribbean pockets, and almost certainly Portuguese was restruc-tured in Afro-Brazilian communities, most bozales acquired an unstable pid-gin, which was replaced by local varieties of Spanish and Portuguese. Asa continually reappearing series of interlanguages this speech was inher-ently variable and non-systematic, and literary imitations probably ascribeda greater degree of consistency to Afro-Iberian language than ever existed.Among at least some of the bozales there were recurring grammatical pat-terns, resulting as much from imperfect second-language acquisition as fromthe influence of particular African languages. Among the more salient traitswere:(1) Imperfectly conjugated verbs, with a gravitation toward the third person

singular, and to a lesser extent the uninflected infinitive (usually lacking thefinal [r]). Use of the first person plural in -mos as invariant verb may haveexisted as an occasional option, but was probably overstated by GoldenAge parodies.

(2) Early Afro-Iberian language often used (a)mı as subject pronoun, but thisusage evidently disappeared by the end of the sixteenth century.

(3) Disjunctive object pronouns were sometimes used instead of object clitics,especially postposed mı instead of proclitic or enclitic me.

(4) In the early stages of acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese, nearly allAfricans omitted definite and indefinite articles; this tendency prevailedacross all substratum families and time periods.

(5) Gender and number concord between nouns and adjectives was sporadic atbest, although there was no massive use of a single inflexion. When nominalplural was signaled, it was through use of /s/, at least on the first elementof an NP; there is no textual evidence of alternative, substratum-influencedplural constructions in the bozal corpus.

(6) In the first century and a half of Afro-Iberian language, the invariant copulasa/sa (as well as invariant samos) alternated with correctly and incorrectlyconjugated forms of ser and estar. The latter copulas were normally used ina fashion identical with prescribed Spanish and Portuguese usage, exceptfor the very first Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts.


General traits of nineteenth-century Afro-Caribbean Spanish

Afro-Caribbean Spanish of this period was qualitatively different from bozallanguages of other periods and regions. Surviving elderly Afro-Cubans stillrecall the speech of the final generations of Caribbean bozales, and can attest tothe essential veracity of literary and anthropological imitations. The followingfeatures were found in most if not all Afro-Hispanic speakers in nineteenth-century 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 mı,

instead of object clitics.(5) Frequent use of the third person singular (and possibly plural) undifferen-

tiated pronoun elle/nelle, with occasional variant ne.In addition to these indisputably Afro-Caribbean traits, some speakers used

constructions pointing more dramatically to the possible creolization of Span-ish. Such speakers appear to have represented a minority – possibly a large one –of all bozales in Cuba. The possible reasons for such qualitative discrepanciesamong Afro-Cuban bozales will be explored in the following chapter. Amongthe creoloid traits observed in a subset of Afro-Cuban speakers are:(1) Occasional use of mı as subject pronoun.(2) Occasional use of guete 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 reassessthe question of whether Spanish ever creolized, and if so, where, under whatcircumstances, with what antecedents, and with what long-term effects on thesurrounding Spanish dialects. First it is necessary to revisit the question ofwhy so few (if any) Spanish-derived creoles are found throughout the world, incomparison with the large and diverse collection of Portuguese-, French-, andEnglish-based creoles scattered across five continents. Attempts – sometimesonly implicitly stated – at answering this question for Spanish have taken at leastthe following forms: (1) the demographic proportions of Europeans to Africansin the Caribbean were not favorable to the formation of creoles; (2) Spanish col-onization 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 slavedepots; (4) Spanish did once creolize in the Americas, and certain vernacularvarieties of Caribbean Spanish are the post-creole remnants of what was oncea more extensive creole language; as yet undiscovered enclaves of vestigialSpanish creole language may still be uncovered, as the creole nature of Afro-Colombian Palenquero was revealed only a few decades ago. The bulk of thischapter will consider the last viewpoint, which is of direct relevance to theevaluation of the Afro-Hispanic materials discussed in the preceding chapters.First, however, we turn to the other proposals on the apparent failure of Spanishto creolize under conditions that would seem to duplicate those of communitieswhere Portuguese-, French-, and English-based creoles arose.

Demographics as a reason for the non-creolization ofCaribbean Spanish

A number of scholars have compared the demographic proportions of African-born slaves to creole slaves and Europeans in Spanish Caribbean coloniesand in French and British Caribbean colonies, in order to address the lack

277


of creolization of Caribbean Spanish and the vigorous and long-standing exis-tence of French- and English-based creoles. Mintz (1971) postulates three setsof conditions that affected the development and spread of creole languagesin the Caribbean: (1) relative proportions of Africans, Europeans, and othergroups; (2) codes of social relationship and status among the various groups;(3) specific community settings. Mintz asserts – not without caution – that in theSpanish Caribbean Africans never dominated the population, and “movementfrom the social category of ‘slaves’ to that of ‘freemen’ was almost alwaysrelatively rapid and relatively continuous.”1 This is partially tied to the lack ofa plantation-based society in the Spanish Caribbean, except in Cuba and mini-mally in Puerto Rico towards the end of the eighteenth century, by which timeCaribbean creole languages had already solidified on other islands. Mintz alsohints that Spaniards born in Cuba and Puerto Rico tended to think of themselvesas Cuban and Puerto Rican “creoles” rather than as expatriate Spaniards, unlikethe situation in English and French colonies; according to Mintz this may havehastened the tolerance for linguistic and racial miscegenation on the Spanishislands, thus precluding the discontinuities implicit in creolization. Laurence(1974) accepts the essence of Mintz’s proposal but urges caution in the interpre-tation of details, lest one fall into the myth of a “kinder gentler” Spanish slaverythat has uncritically been proffered as the basis for the non-creolization ofcolonial Spanish. Choosing Cuba as a test case, Laurence describes the systemof coartacion that existed before the establishment of sugar plantations, andthrough which Spanish slaves could buy their freedom. This practice was oppor-tunistic and pragmatic rather than bespeaking an overwhelming social liberal-ism, but it did speed the entry of blacks into free society, with the concomitantlinguistic contacts. Once the sugar plantation hit Cuba in the late 1700s socialconditions for African slaves changed drastically and rapidly for the worse, andhad such a society lasted for more than a single generation, it is quite possiblethat a Spanish-based creole might have arisen on Cuban plantations. Laurencedoes allow for the transitory existence of Spanish creoles in maroon commu-nities in the Caribbean, much as once occurred in Palenque de San Basilio,Colombia.

Clearly demographic proportions alone are not enough to account for theformation or non-formation of Caribbean creole languages, but the relativeproportions of Africans and white settlers in the Spanish colonies were forseveral centuries different enough from those found in French and Englishcolonies as to provide a key piece to the Spanish dialect puzzle. Racial and classboundaries were somewhat more permeable in the Spanish Caribbean, if onlydue to the practicalities of coexistence in economically stagnant colonies, and

1 Mintz (1971:481); emphasis in original.

The Spanish-Creole debate 279

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 ide-ological nature of Spanish colonization resulted in the effective Hispanizationof colonial populations to such an extent that even rapid demographic imbal-ances such as occurred with the huge importation of African slaves into thenineteenth-century Spanish Caribbean was unable to dislodge the Spanish lan-guage and permit the formation of a creole. At first glance, such a notion seemsimpossible to accept, for example in the face of the fact that the Spanish languagenever took root in the Philippines, despite more than four centuries of Spanishcolonization, or the tenuous foothold of Spanish in Paraguay and the Andeanhighlands, where Spanish missionaries and colonizers often preferred the useof indigenous languages over Spanish. In the Spanish Caribbean, however, theindigenous population rapidly disappeared, decimated by disease, forced labor,and rebellion, while the African-born population remained relatively small untilthe end of the eighteenth century, when the sugar plantation boom occasioned bythe collapse of the French colony of Saint-Domingue – which became the rebel-lious and unstable free nation of Haiti – induced Spanish colonists in Cuba and,to a lesser extent, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela to dra-matically increase the importation of African slaves. Chaudenson (2001:131)surmises – consistently with all available documentation – that “. . . at thistime [end of the eighteenth century], Spanish (in its Cubanized form, of course)was the language of the whole population of the Island, Whites and Blacksalike. Not until 1790–1820 did Cuba take on its current appearance of a sugarisland with a primarily Black population” (emphasis in original). Chaudensoninaccurately asserts that “in 1862, Blacks made up more than 80 percent ofthe population of the Island, with slaves representing about half this figure”(131); in fact the black and mulatto population was perhaps around 50 per-cent, although in sugar-producing areas – where the conditions for creolizationof Spanish were the most promising – the black to white ratios were evenhigher than the figures cited by Chaudenson.2 Clinching his analysis of thefailure of Cuban Spanish to creole under the massive immigration of African-born slaves, Chaudenson (2001:131–32) states: “At the time of widespreadAfrican immigration in Cuba at the end of the eighteenth century, CubanizedSpanish was also characterized by . . . systemic stabilization and generalizedusage by the whole local population (particularly the social groups responsible

2 Humboldt (1827, 1956), Aimes (1907), Knight (1970), Moreno Fraginals (1978), Perez de laRiva (1979), Castellanos and Castellanos (1988).


for assimilating immigrants). This regional variety of Spanish served as the tar-get 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 creolizationdid not occur here.” In the Dominican Republic, the proportion of blacks towhites never reached the levels found in Cuba, since Dominican planters werenot about to recreate the configurations that had resulted in slave revolts andthe expulsion of white owners in the French half of the island. For Chaudenson,the “homestead society” (societe d’habitation) which existed prior to the estab-lishment of large sugar plantations in the late eighteenth century, and in whichblacks and whites worked and interacted linguistically in close proximity, pro-vided a ready model for the acquisition of Spanish by subsequently arrivingAfricans, although one may take exception to the claim that, for examplein Santo Domingo, “slavery was indeed present, but, because of the well-established nature of White-Black relationships, it was less ‘ferocious’ thanin 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 vari-ety . . . and to generalized use of this language throughout colonial society.From that point on, later immigration did not have a significant impact on thelanguage . . . and it did not lead to a creolization of Spanish, since immigrantswere ‘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 theFrench islands the homestead society was replaced by a plantation society witha much higher proportion of African-born slaves at a much earlier period thanoccurred in Cuba and Santo Domingo, with the result – again according to Chau-denson – that later arriving African slaves did not have access to fully nativeforms of French, but only to “a form of language that itself already consistedof approximations of French . . . the core phenomenon was thus a shift to theexponent of approximations of French, a square approximation which seemsto me to be the true moment and place of creolization: the autonomization ofthis approximative system in relation to French.”4 This is presumably becausethe white settlers – many of whom were poor and worked alongside their blackslaves and laborers – themselves spoke non-prestige varieties of French, andfreely absorbed linguistic features from the Africans, eventually providing theseeds from which the creole language would spring. Although this approachhas much to recommend it, the historical facts do not fully support such adifferential implantation of French versus Spanish in the homestead societies.

3 P. 134, based on an interpretation of Dipp and Maggiolo (1982).4 Chaudenson (2001:127); emphasis in original.


It is difficult to accept that French would creolize but Spanish would remainunaffected 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 heldsway in West Africa has been advanced by McWhorter (1995, 2000) who inessence has postulated that creoles derived from European languages did notform in plantation societies but rather in West African slaving stations andentrepots. Although not rejecting out of hand Chaudenson’s arguments thatthe formation of a Spanish-based creole in Cuba and Santo Domingo wasimpeded by the persistence of the societe d’habitation until the end of theeighteenth century, McWhorter asserts that in some mainland South Americancolonies, particularly in the Choco and Popayan areas of Colombia, and in partsof Ecuador, the homestead society model never obtained. The use of Africanlabor on plantations and in placer mining created demographic and sociolin-guistic situations similar to those found in traditional plantation societies, andtherefore – according to McWhorter’s reasoning – Spanish-based creoles shouldhave emerged if the plantation creole model is essentially correct. To the extentthat his affirmation that no true Spanish-based creoles exist, the remainder ofMcWhorter’s claims grow in credibility. One test case is the Colombian Choco,where Africans outnumbered Europeans for several centuries in this isolatedregion. This would seem an ideal candidate for creole formation, but contem-porary Choco Spanish shows only the signs of geographical and sociolinguis-tic marginality, but is grammatically identical to other varieties of Spanish.5

However, McWhorter’s bleak description of the inaccessibility of Spanish toAfrican slaves in the Choco leaves open the question of how any native vari-ety of Spanish penetrated this region. The fact that even the most uneducatedand 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,Choco residents spoke some kind of Spanish-derived creole. The Chota Valleyof highland Ecuador contains another speech community in which Africansonce significantly outnumbered Europeans, but whose modern Spanish dialectshows only the mildest traces of an earlier restructured variety.6 However, theChota Valley is not geographically isolated (today the Pan American Highway

5 Although Schwegler (1996a) claims that the prevalent double negation stems from a previousSpanish-based creole, Ruız Garcıa (2000) has found some vestigial deviations from monolingualSpanish grammar which may be the fossil remains of a long-disappeared Choco creole or semi-creole.

6 Lipski (1986e, 1987a), Schwegler (1994, 1999).


passes through the region), and, at least since the middle of the nineteenthcentury, its inhabitants have always been able to freely travel to the remainder ofSpanish-speaking Ecuador, surely ample time for any earlier creole to have beencompletely erased. Moving to demolish arguments that Spanish-based creolesdo 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 slav-ing stations on the West African coast. However, the debate on the origins ofthe two existing creoles is far from resolved. In particular, scholars are almostevenly divided as to the Spanish vs. Portuguese origins of Papiamento, while theobvious affinities between Palenquero and the Portuguese creoles of the Gulfof Guinea are matched by the equally strong affinities with Spanish, whicheven according to the Portuguese-origin hypothesis (e.g. Schwegler 1996b) arenot due to subsequent decreolization or relexification. Even Philippine CreoleSpanish (Chabacano), dismissed by McWhorter (following Whinnom 1956) asrelexified from Portuguese and – amazingly – as “having emerged via marriagesbetween Iberian men and Philippine women” (14), is not unequivocally derivedfrom Portuguese, and most probably had origins far more complex than thosesuggested by McWhorter.7 As to the unlikelihood that any vestiges of nowextinct Spanish-based creoles in Latin America will turn up, one may cite thecompelling evidence unearthed by Ortiz Lopez (1998), who interviewed elderlyAfro-Cubans in that nation’s most remote regions and discovered not only accu-rate imitations of the last generation of bozales (including family members ofsome of the oldest informants), but also post-creole traits in their own speech,phenomena which Cuban linguists have long declared as extinct in their owncountry. Similarly, Green describes the speech of some Afro-Dominicans whoevidence creoloid features in their speech.8 Similarly, the ritualized bozal imita-tions 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 sys-tematically restructured than, for example, Haitian Creole or Palenquero, butdo fall in line with some Caribbean English creoles and Indian Ocean Frenchcreoles.

McWhorter (2000:203) argues that “plantations themselves did not pidginizeinput to slaves” and therefore that “. . . on Spanish plantations, there werenot two targets – the local standard and the creole – but just one, thelocal standard. Therefore, Spanish slaves simply acquired a second-language

7 Lipski (1992a).8 Green (1997, 1999, 2001); Lipski (2001a) suggests that at least some of these traits may originate

in language disorders.9 Lipski (1989). 10 Castellanos (1990).


Spanish, and passed this on to subsequent generations.” It is known, however,that Africans’ documented approximations to Spanish in the Americas oftencontained all the traits normally ascribed to pidgins. If by lack of pidginiza-tion McWhorter means that fluent Spanish speakers never deliberately modifiedtheir language when speaking to African bozales, this may also not be accurate,given well-documented imitations of Afro-Hispanic pidgin throughout LatinAmerica, including documents written by Africans or their immediate descen-dents in a demonstrably stable pidgin, such as the “Proclama que en un cabildode negros congos de la ciudad de La Habana pronuncio su presidente, ReyMonfundi Siliman” (ca. 1808; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #2). ForAlvarez Nazario (1974:137), this document is the oldest specimen of Afro-Antillean Spanish, but the format of this pamphlet, giving a pidginized Spanishversion “en dialecto natural y propio de ellos” in one column and an en facetranslation into Spanish in a parallel column, casts some doubt on the authentic-ity of the examples, or at the very least of the authorship, since the text appearsto have been written by a (white) native speaker of Spanish, rather than by atrue Congo, whether bozal or Cuban-born.

At the core of McWhorter’s hypothesis is an ideological claim: “the preva-lence of creole competence was due to the creole becoming established as thelinguistic expression of black identity, as blacks came to interact more exclu-sively with one another than with whites.” The idea itself is neither objectionablenor implausible (McWhorter rightly points to vernacular African AmericanEnglish as a contemporary example), but leaves unanswered the question ofwhy creoles did not develop in areas such as the Choco, the Chota Valley, andother areas of Spanish America in which blacks remained an isolated majoritypopulation for long periods of time. McWhorter attempts to answer the ques-tion by affirming that only pidgins imported from Africa developed into creolesin the Americas, and that plantations were not conducive to pidginization ofSpanish or other European languages. The reasoning is circular, however, sincethe only “evidence” is the fact that creoles did not develop in Spanish Americanplantations (if indeed they did not). There is nothing inherent in the plantationor post-plantation environment which is qualitatively different than the tradingpost and castle slave venues described by McWhorter, and no a priori rea-son why blacks on a plantation should not adopt a second-language variety ofSpanish as an ethnolinguistic solidarity marker (assuming that one can defen-sibly differentiate pidgins and rudimentary second-language approximations).

McWhorter assumes that in Spanish colonial plantations, for example inCuba, black overseers – who were typically native speakers of Spanish (perhapswith some ethnolinguistic identifying traits in their Spanish) – were instrumentalin transmitting a more or less complete version of Spanish to bozal slaves, ratherthan allowing the latter to continue using a pidgin:


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

These affirmations are at odds with many known facts of Spanish colonialplantation 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) pre-cisely because of their presumed unconditional loyalty to the white masters.In 1797 the Spanish priest residing in Cuba Nicolas Duque de Estrada wrote amanual instructing fellow priests on how to teach Christian doctrine to bozalslaves.11 Duque felt the need to compare Jesus Christ to plantation overseers, inorder to ensure obedience by the slaves; as noted by Castellanos and Castellanos(1988:101) “Jesucristo . . . es un mayoral bueno . . . la obligacion del siervo, siquiere salvarse, es trabajar intensamente para el amo, pues tal era la voluntad deDios . . .” The Cuban writer Bachiller y Morales (1883:99), describing Cubanbozal talking drums and work songs to the German creolist Hugo Schuchardt,notes that “si el mayoral era malo, los cantores hacıan acompanar a los ecos desus tambores palabras significativas: ‘mayora come gente’ – ‘mayora so malo,’etc.” The autobiography of the former Cuban slave Juan Francisco Manzano,whose period of slavery covered the early nineteenth century, describes numer-ous instances of brutal treatment on his masters’ plantations, at the hands ofblack overseers. Cuban literary texts portray the vicious treatment frequentlydispensed by black overseers to their equally black slave charges; for exam-ple in the novel En el cafetal, by Domingo Malpica La Barca (Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #19), a bozal slave admits: “Yo cuando gente entra dormir,yo queda fuera, contramayoral tranca por dentro, mayoral echa llave, yo duermey entra por la manana y toma cafe.” Although some black overseers undoubtedlyexperienced feelings of solidarity towards enslaved blacks, more frequently theoverseers had been co-opted by the white masters, and as happens all too fre-quently among oppressed groups, could be even more cruel to members of theirown race and ethnic groups than any white colonist.

McWhorter (2000:200) surmises: “The Spanish that even isolated black His-panophones speak today shows that slaves, especially children, had access to alexifier in plantation settings.” This does not necessarily follow from the his-torical facts, because these “isolated” groups have in fact been linguisticallyintegrated into their respective regional and national speech communities for at

11 Alpızar Castillo (1987), Fernandez Marrero (1987), Lavina (1989).


least the past century, sufficient time for earlier and highly stigmatized pidgin-like traits to disappear; vestigial remnants from the Chota Valley, the ColombianChoco, the Barlovento coast of Venezuela, some Afro-Dominican villages, andisolated Afro-Cubans suggest that constructions that deviate substantially fromnatively spoken Spanish may have faded from view comparatively recently inthese regions. As to how (non-Spanish) pidgins born in West Africa could turninto 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 pidginas a mere step on the path to the local standard, would retain it as a vernacular registerencoding in-group identity . . . when colonies passed from the societe d’habitation phaseto the plantation phase, the creole would have gradually prevailed over the local standardin the slave speech community . . . the prevalence of creole competence was due to thecreole becoming established as the linguistic expression of black identity, as blacks cameto 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 Sao Tome, andwhich has been deliberately maintained in a diglossic relation with Spanishat least since the eighteenth century. It is also consistent with the triumph ofmaroon culture and, by extension, language which resulted in Haitian inde-pendence. However, this viewpoint does little to explain the origin of Papia-mento, which, apart from some general similarities to Cape Verdean Creole,is not clearly related to any West African creole. To conclude his accountof 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 occurredonly where a pidgin had been imported in the first place. Early Spanish slaves in theChoco, the Chota Valley, Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru imported no such pidgin. Thuson 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 Spanish, and passed this on to subsequent generations. There was no ‘pidgin’pole to express black identity through, and thus no movement among slaves towardssuch a pole as the black community grew and coalesced . . . black identity was thusexpressed via a vernacular dialect of the local Spanish, with ‘blackness’ encoded viaslight phonological variations and above all, African lexical borrowings.

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

12 Lipski (1985b, 1999d).


blacks deliberately adopted marked registers in order to distinguish themselvesfrom their non-black counterparts; this ranged from the hyperbolic speechof the negros curros in nineteenth-century Havana13 to the combination ofcontrived and vestigial bozal speech among the negros congos of Panama.14 Inthe balance, McWhorter’s thought-provoking comments offer much food forthought, but fall short of a complete explanation for the relative scarcity ofSpanish-based creoles. In particular, this theory gives no reason why a devel-oping Spanish-, French-, English- or Portuguese-based pidgin formed in anAmerican plantation environment could not serve as a marker of black identity,and be deliberately retained by black slaves as they simultaneously acquired amore complete version of the masters’ language; there is no compelling reasonwhy only a pidgin previously used in West Africa might possess this regener-ative power. There is no doubt that black and white linguistic attitudes wereinstrumental in the formation or non-formation of creole languages, and bothChaudenson and McWhorter have contributed significantly to the understand-ing of creole genesis. Like those of virtually every other creole researcher,their models are put to a stringent test when confronting the data from Spanishcolonial speech communities, and the combination of strengths and shortcom-ings surveyed above justify a more detailed exploration into the possibility thatAfro-Hispanic language may once have creolized, in the Americas and perhapselsewhere.

The scarcity of current Afro-Hispanic creoles

With the exception of Palenquero and, arguably, Papiamento, no Spanish-basedcreole exists in Latin America today; even the aforementioned creoles may owemore of their origins to Portuguese than to Spanish. Even after creole languageswere 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 leastpartially a Spanish-based creole. In commenting on Pichardo’s (1849) obser-vations on Cuban bozal language, Van Name noted: “This description accordsnearly enough with the Creole Spanish of Curacoa [sic] to show that we havehere the beginning of proper Creole, but for the reasons given above, it hasfailed of development.” Pichardo adds that “the Creole Negroes, i.e., thoseborn on the island, all speak the Spanish.” Subsequent comments centered onthe possibility that blacks in Cuba had developed or adapted a creolized Span-ish. Thus Reinecke (1937:269) in the first comprehensive survey of creoles,speculated that “conditions, one would assume, were eminently favorable forthe 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).


Holm (1989:305) would speak cautiously of a “restructured” Spanish in theCaribbean: “The Caribbean seems more likely than Spain to have had a sta-ble Spanish-based pidgin during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . .”Referring specifically to Cuba, Holm states that “there is fairly clear evidencethat a pidgin developed on Cuba during the nineteenth century, although it isless clear that it ever became a true creole” (307).15

The question of Spanish-based creoles remained confined to Papiamento andthe more debatable Afro-Cuban Spanish until the realization that the “lengua”spoken in the Afro-Colombian village of Palenque de San Basilio was in facta creole, grammatically much different from Spanish.16 Most scholars inves-tigating Palenquero converge on the opinion that Palenquero is in essence apartially relexified version of an early Afro-Portuguese pidgin first formed inWest Africa. In turn, Palenquero is related to Papiamento, with its unmistakablePortuguese elements, with Cape Verdean Portuguese Creole, with Sao TomensePortuguese Creole, with Afro-Portuguese texts from the Renaissance, and withvestigial Afro-Hispanic language from several places in Latin America. Thegeneral feeling, then, inclines toward the view that most or all of Palenqueromay have been originally formed prior to contact with Spanish, and that par-tial relexification in the direction of Spanish has not affected the fundamentalgrammatical structures of this language.

Claims of a bozal-derived Afro-Hispanic creole

A number of Hispanists and creole researchers have supported the notionthat Afro-Hispanic bozal speech creolized in the Caribbean and perhapselsewhere.17 These researchers have attempted to link Afro-Hispanic bozal

15 Other opponents of this view include Alpızar Castillo (1989:75–76) and Lopez Morales(1980:108–09). Perl (1984:53, n. 30) recalls the differences between urban slavery and theisolated slave barracks, where true Spanish-based pidgins and creoles had a more viable oppor-tunity to have developed, a caution also echoed by Perez de la Riva (1978:33–34).

16 Bickerton and Escalante (1970). In reality, Palenquero had been described extensively byEscalante (1954), but not from the perspective of being essentially anything other than a par-ticularly nonstandard variety of Spanish. Even earlier, Ochoa Franco (1945) had reproducedfragments of Palenquero speech, however without commenting on its possible creole basis.Montes Giraldo (1959, 1962) and Florez (1960) had also visited the village as part of the workon 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 pickup on the fact that a separate language was spoken there. By the 1970s, Palenquero was theobject of serious study by dialectologists and creolists, and with increasing frequency, the pos-sible Afro-Portuguese basis of the language was the subject of attention. Granda has studied theproblem from a number of perspectives, and Megenney (1986) and Schwegler (1989, 1991b,1993, 1996b) have also made important contributions in this respect.

17 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), andSchwegler (1999).


language with earlier Afro-Lusitanian pidgins and creoles, all stemming ulti-mately from a Portuguese-based maritime pidgin or “reconnaissance lan-guage.”18 Another significant body of research opposes some or all of theseviews, and points to the conclusion that bozal Spanish in the Caribbean neverrepresented more than a transitory phenomenon that did not survive trans-generationally, but rather evolved smoothly into regional Caribbean varietiesof Spanish.19

Nearly all the “black” Spanish found in eighteenth- to nineteenth-centuryLatin American texts represents the speech of African-born bozales, although inthe Rıo de la Plata region, the literature suggests that American-born blacks mayhave continued bozal linguistic patterns for a generation or more (Lipski 2001c).To the extent that the written documents attest the spontaneously producedinterlanguage of foreign-born language learners, these bozal texts have littlesignificance for Latin American dialectology. On the other hand, if it can bedemonstrated that consistent traits came to define Afro-Hispanic language inthe New World, such as once occurred in Spain, the possibilities for a moreprofound linguistic contact are enhanced. If Afro-Hispanic speech ever reachedthe stage of creolization, or even attained the status of “restructured Spanish,”then a later process of decreolization might have resulted in a continuum oflinguistic variation spanning the range between the earliest bozal language andthe contemporary regional standards of Latin American Spanish. These areindeed important issues, and in addition to studying the development of Afro-Hispanic language in particular countries, we are led to consider the generalpatterns of language usage among Afro-Hispanics in Latin America.

One of the earliest investigators to link Caribbean bozal Spanish to an earlierAfro-Lusitanian pidgin was Wagner (1949:101). Wagner’s comments lay fallowuntil the development of more ambitious theories of creolization and monogen-esis. The first attempt to document the presence of an Afro-Lusitanian pidginamong bozales in Latin America was Granda’s (1970) analysis of the observa-tions of Alonso de Sandoval (1956:94). The latter, a (Spanish-born) Peruvianpriest resident in Cartagena de Indias, remarked in 1627 that African slavesfrom Sao Tome spoke “con la comunicacion que con tan barbaras naciones hantenido el tiempo que han residido en San Thome, las entienden casi todas conun genero de lenguaje muy corrupto y revesado de la portuguesa que llamanlengua de San Thome . . .” The reference to some sort of Portuguese-basedpidgin or creole is clear, but the implication that slaves from other regions alsoacquired an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin is not, since Sandoval’s quote continues:

18 Whinnom (1956, 1965), Thompson (1961), Naro (1978).19 Opposing views are represented by Bachiller y Morales (1883), Reinecke (1937), Alvarez

Nazario (1974), Laurence (1974), Valdes Bernal (1978, 1987), Lopez Morales (1980, 1998:ch.5), Martınez Gordo (1982), Alpızar Castillo (1987, 1989), and Lipski (1986a, 1986f, 1993,1996a, 1998a, 1998c, 1999a, 2000a, 2001b, 2002a).


“. . . al modo que ahora nosotros entendemos y hablamos con todo genero denegros y naciones con nuestra lengua espanola corrupta, como comunmente lahablan todos los negros.” Although Granda interprets Sandoval’s observationsto mean that an Afro-Lusitanian pidgin formed a substrate for all Afro-Hispaniclanguage in Cartagena (and by extrapolation, elsewhere in the Spanish Amer-ican colonies), the final sentence seems to indicate the opposite, namely thateven Africans speaking the “lengua de San Thome” eventually acquired bozalSpanish. In any event, by the end of the eighteenth century, when the crit-ical Caribbean bozal texts appear, Spain was acquiring few slaves from thePortuguese depot on Sao Tome.

Granda (1971:483) unequivocally states: “. . . Cuba ha poseıdo y posee aunentre su poblacion negra rastros y manifestaciones linguısticas ‘criollas’ . . .uniendose ası al ‘papiamento,’ al ‘palenquero’ . . . y a las manifestacionespuertorriquenas en la formacion de un ‘corpus’ dialectal ‘criollo’ de superestratoespanol . . .” Granda (1972a:11) postulates that “no era impensable que el hablaque sirvio de vehıculo de comunicacion normal entre los moradores de losbarracones de esclavos importados de Africa hubiera pervivido, de generacionen generacion, por un proceso de continuidad ininterrumpida, renovado en cadanuevo caso de incorporacion de negros ‘bozales’ . . .” In turn, Perl (1984:53)believes that speakers of “espanol relexificado y pidginizado” included notonly African-born plantation slaves, but also “esclavos de plantacion nacidosen Cuba, esclavos domesticos y personas libres de color que no tenıan unaposicion social o que vivıan en lugares aislados.” Lapesa (1980:560) insists that“las postreras supervivencias del criollo espanol parecen ser el habla ‘bozal’que se usaba entre negros de Puerto Rico en el siglo pasado y todavıa entre losde Cuba a mediados del actual.”

Valdes Bernal (1978:86–87) poses the question

¿Serıa el bozal un habla criolla como las hasta hoy conocidas variantes ‘criollo’-inglesade Jamaica, Trinidad-Tobago, Honduras Britanicas . . . la ‘criollo’-francesa de Haitı,Luisiana, Guadalupe . . . la ‘criollo’-holandesa ya en decadencia de las Islas Vırgenes,y la ‘criollo’-portuguesa de Curacao, Aruba y Bonaire? . . . en los primeros siglos deimportacion de negros esclavos en Cuba (XVI–XVII) se daban las condiciones para queexistiese un habla criolla, pues las diversas lenguas africanas habladas por los nucleosde esclavos no fueron sustituidas inmediatamente por el espanol, por lo que debio existirun perıodo intermedio de ‘criollizacion’ de la ‘lingua franca’, el espanol, seguido deotro de ‘descriollizacion’, dentro del marco de la poblacion de procedencia africana.

He even suggests that during the first decades of the sixteenth century, Spanish-born blacks taken to the Caribbean colonies “muy bien pudieron ser el focoque originara el bozal, lo que significarıa la introduccion en Cuba del habla delnegro nacido en Espana.” While echoing the observation of Pichardo (1849)that “los negros criollos hablan como los blancos del paıs de su nacimiento ovecindad,” Valdes Bernal (1978:88–89) concludes that


el habla ‘criolla’ o bozal ya a finales del siglo XIX iba desapareciendo, pues solo erautilizada por ‘negros de reciente introduccion’ . . . otro testimonio de que el bozal yaestaba en vıas de desaparicion de la Cuba del siglo XIX se deduce del hecho de queen la literatura costumbrista cubana generalmente aparece esta modalidad ‘criolla’ delespanol en boca de negros oriundos del Africa o en negros – acaso nacidos en Cuba, osea criollos – de muy avanzada edad, mientras que a los negros (y mulatos) jovenes –tambien criollos – no se les caracteriza en los dialogos con el bozal . . .

Putative evidence of bozal Spanish turned creole in Cubaand Puerto Rico

Among the pro-bozal creole studies, the existence of a prior stable Afro-Hispanic creole in Puerto Rico is based on a handful of texts analyzed byAlvarez Nazario (1974), principally the skit “La juega de gallos o el negro bozal”(Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #1). Alvarez Nazario demonstratedmany parallels between the Puerto Rican texts and Afro-Iberian language fromother regions and time periods, although his characterization of Puerto Ricanbozal language as a “criollo afroespanol” may refer to a non-native pidgin,rather than to a nativized creole. That the latter might indeed have existed inPuerto Rico was first claimed by German de Granda, who notes:20 “. . . es facildemostrar el caracter igualmente ‘criollo’ de la modalidad linguıstica puerto-rriquena . . .” From this point forward the claim that an Afro-Hispanic creolewas once spoken in Puerto Rico has never been seriously challenged, despite thefact 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 Afro-Hispanic creole in Puerto Rico, with the latter region usually lumped togetherwith the more extensive Afro-Cuban corpus.

The existence of a former Afro-Hispanic creole in Cuba has been forcefullyasserted by a number of investigators. Wagner’s (1949:158) case was based onthe poem “Yo bota lan garafo” (Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #26) andthe “Dialogo” between a negro criollo and a bozal (Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #27). In a later and more comprehensive analysis, Granda (1971)made ample use of El monte by Lydia Cabrera, originally published in 1954, ananthropological text containing data on religious beliefs among Afro-Cubans,and which includes extensive imitations of bozal Spanish. Granda unquestion-ingly accepts the accuracy of Cabrera’s imitations, given her high reputation inother linguistic and folkloric matters. Otheguy (1973) adds to the list of cre-oloid traits mentioned by Granda, and claims that Cabrera’s work demonstratesthe 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 MiguelBarnet’s Autobiografıa de un cimarron. Perl (1982:424) asserts that “. . . the

20 Granda (1968:194, fn. 4). 21 Lipski( 2001b).


Cuban ‘habla bozal’ was no idiolectally determined jargon of the Blacks inthe nineteenth century but a social variety of Spanish comparable with othervarieties of Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles.” With respect to a possibleextra-territorial origin, Perl (1982:423) suggests that “. . . especially the mor-phosyntactic features of the ‘habla bozal’ are very suitable for demonstrating therelations 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 con-stituted a definable creole, and attempted to write a grammar of this putativecreole. Ziegler believes that Cuban bozal creole resulted from fifteenth-centuryPortuguese, with later accretions from several West African languages, fromnonstandard Spanish dialects, and from Jamaican creole English, carried byJamaicans arriving in Havana in the eighteenth century. It is known, for exam-ple, that during the British occupation of Havana in 1763, tens of thousands ofslaves were quickly imported into Cuba by the British.22 The minimal traces ofPortuguese in surviving bozal texts is, according to Ziegler, due to sustained con-tact with non-creole Cuban Spanish. Megenney (1984a, 1985a) adopts Ziegler’sevidence, and groups “Afro-Cuban creole” together with Palenquero and Papi-amento in a comparative analysis of Portuguese-influenced Latin Americancreoles. Valkhoff (1966:116) states, without further discussion, that the onlysurviving 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 nineteenth-century Cuba, it is not clear that a true creole developed. Speaking of thepossibility for creolization of Spanish in Cuba, Reinecke (1937:269) noted that“conditions, one would assume, were eminently favorable for the formation ofa 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 par-ticipation in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave trade to Cuba, togetherwith similarities between the putative Cuban bozal creole and the acknowl-edged creoles Papiamento and Palenquero, for which Afro-Portuguese rootsmay be more uncontroversially established. For Puerto Rico, the case is evenmore precarious, for only two literary texts (for which a possible imitation ofCuban models cannot be entirely excluded) establish claims of a stable Afro-Hispanic creole, and the parallels with Papiamento and Palenquero are thereforeeven more limited. In view of these considerations, not all investigators haveaccepted the notion that any stable Afro-Hispanic creole was ever spoken in theCaribbean.

22 Knight (1970:7).


Presumed creole features of bozal Spanish

Bozal Spanish is not currently spoken, and its existence is documented onlyindirectly, in literary imitations, travelers’ accounts and anthropological studies.Although scholars who support the bozal qua creole hypothesis are not in totalagreement as to the features in Afro-Caribbean Spanish texts which bespeakearlier creolization, the following traits – found in written texts – are mostfrequently mentioned:23

(1) Preverbal aspectual particles combined with an invariant verbal stem. Themost suggestive element is ta, acting variously as imperfective, progressive,or habitual particle:24

¿Po que tu no ta quere a mı? (Ramon Caballero, “La juega de gallos o el negrobozal”; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Puerto Rico #1)

Horita ta benı pa ca (Ignacio Villa, “Drumi, Mobila”; Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #8)

Rıo seco ta corre mamba (Fernando Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en elfolklore de Cuba; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #7)

Como que yo ta cucha la gente que habla tanto . . . yo ta mira gente mucho(Manuel Cabrera Paz, “Exclamaciones de un negro”; Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #3)

Primero ta llora na ma. (Marıa de Santa Cruz, Historias campesinas; Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #18)

Ta juı, ta puja mı, sino (Anselmo Suarez y Romero, Francisco; Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #11)

In a few cases it might be possible to argue that spontaneous developmentstook place, e.g. when ta is clearly derived from esta(r) where erosion ofgerund is involved:

Que to mi cuepo me eta tembla (Lydia Cabrera, Reglas de congo; Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #64)

pavo real ta bucan palo (Lydia Cabrera, El monte; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #38)

yo esta corta un canas (Ismael Consuegra Guzman, “Yo esta corta un canas”; Feijoo1979:102).

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

23 For an analysis of the development of the particle ta, see Lipski (1986g, 1987b, 1991b, 1992c).24 Lipski (1986g, 1987b, 1991b, 1992c).


This residue is among the few sure indicators of an infusion of creoleelements 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 seenin chapters 5 and 8. It is difficult to unequivocally assign particle status tothese elements, since va is frequently used in the Spanish periphrastic future(although exhibiting full subject-verb agreement), while ya is a commonlyused sentential adverb. In most instances, bozal ya occurs before subjectpronouns (like Papiamento future/irrealis lo) rather than preverbally, as isthe case with the particle ya/ja in other Ibero-Romance based creoles, aswell as representing the most usual configuration in Spanish. When thesubject is a full NP, ya appears after the subject. In some instances, theplacement of these elements in immediately preverbal position, togetherwith the lack of subject-verb agreement in the case of va and the presenceof accompanying adverbs with ya may signal grammaticalization of theseelements as preverbal particles.

(2) Double negation. This combination, also found in vernacular Spanish ofthe predominantly Afro-American communities in the Colombian Chocoand in vernacular Dominican Spanish, is found in a handful of nineteenth-century Afro-Cuban texts:25

yo no so pobre, no (Benıtez del Cristo, Los novios catedraticos; Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #29)

Yo no so planeta, no (Benıtez del Cristo, Los novios catedraticos; Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #29).

No moja no (Lydia Cabrera, Francisco y Francisca; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #30)

No e mıo, no (Lydia Cabrera, Francisco y Francisca; Chapter Five Appendix Afro-Cuba #30)

no seno, yo no soy cuchara, no (Lydia Cabrera, El monte; Chapter Five AppendixAfro-Cuba #38)

El amo no quiere matar Eugenio, no (Malpica la Barca, En el cafetal; Chapter FiveAppendix Afro-Cuba #19)

Yo no bebe guariente, no (Francisco Fernandez, Los negros catedraticos; ChapterFive Appendix Afro-Cuba #47).

. . . yo pensa que mama suyo que lo parı nelle no lo va a cunuse, no (Jose Crespo yBorbon “Creto Ganga”; 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 Jimenez Sabater (1975:170), Benavides (1985), Megenney (1990a:121–28), Schwegler (1996a).


Recent field work among elderly Afro-Cubans by Ortiz Lopez (1998) hasrevealed only the most exceptional retentions of this combination in Cuba;there are no known attestations of double negation in Puerto Rico or otherCaribbean Spanish dialects (with the exception of one isolated Venezue-lan case). Double negation occurs in the Afro-Lusitanian creoles of theGulf of Guinea, in the vernacular Portuguese spoken in the working-classneighborhoods or musseques of Luanda, Angola, and in vernacular Brazil-ian Portuguese, with a strong African basis. Schwegler and Megenney tracethis pattern to Bantu languages, particularly Kimbundu and Kikongo, wherea combination of an (invariable) preposed negative element and an oftenvariable postverbal negative element are used. Schwegler (1996a) has pro-posed that the vestigial remains of double negation in contemporary Afro-Hispanic dialects are evidence that an earlier pan-Caribbean Spanish creolewith Afro-Portuguese roots once employed double negation. There are noknown Spanish dialectal antecedents for such a construction.

(3) Use of the invariant subject pronoun elle/nelle for masculine and femi-nine, singular and, sometimes, plural referents (Chapter 10 Appendix # 1).This pronoun is still remembered and occasionally used by elderly Afro-Cubans living in isolated rural communities.26 Other Ibero-Romance basedcreoles use the Portuguese-derived pronoun ele (with several variants) formasculine and feminine referents. Alvarez Nazario (1974:185–97) feelsthat semantic replacement of a preposition plus an article (as in na) hasoccurred. 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 ele nor similar forms in Papiamento, Palenquero, SaoTomense, etc., provide a source for the [y]. Schwegler (1996b) has attemptedto phonologically derive Afro-Caribbean elle from Afro-Portuguese ele,but it is more likely that the common denominators represented by theSpanish pronouns ella, ellos, ellas, ello provided the phonotactic template.However, neither a gender-invariant third person pronoun nor a subjectpronoun ending in -e is attested in non-Africanized Spanish dialects. Thepronoun ele for el is occasionally heard in the Colombian Choco and inthe Afro-Ecuadorian communities of the Chota Valley. Schwegler (1996b)has proposed that these are carryovers of an originally Portuguese-basedcreole; however, it is not possible to rule out paragogic vowels, and not nec-essarily due to African phonotactic influences. For example, the traditionalSpanish of northern New Mexico frequently exhibits phrase-final para-gogic vowels, especially after verbal infinitives, but hearing ele for el is notimpossible.27

26 Ortiz (1998).27 See Hills (1906), Espinosa (1909:138), McSpadden (1934), Rael (1937), Hernandez-Chavez

and Perez (1991).


(4) Traits found in many Afro-Caribbean bozal texts but no longer heard in anyvariety of Caribbean Spanish include omission of definite articles, loss ofcommon prepositions, especially de and a, frequent loss of noun-adjectiveand subject-verb agreement, and elimination of the complementizer que.All bespeak the partial acquisition of Spanish as a second language, but donot necessarily presuppose creolization of bozal Spanish.

(5) Traits still common to vernacular Caribbean Spanish which have at timesbeen attributed to a previous creole or semi-creole stage include non-inverted questions of the sort ¿Que tu quieres?; preposed subjects of infini-tives, of the sort para tu hacer eso; and categorical use of normally redun-dant overt subject pronouns.

In addition to these common denominators, other linguistic features ofAfro-Iberian language have at times been used as the basis for monogeneticPortuguese-pidgin theories and claims that Afro-Hispanic language once cre-olized. These include:(1) Use of the second person singular pronoun bo(s) < vos, instead of tu.

This pronoun is found in Palenquero and Papiamento, but is very rarein Cuban bozal Spanish,28 and is not found in Puerto Rican texts; vosis also found in most Portuguese-based creoles in Africa and Asia, andin Philippine Creole Spanish. At the same time, use of vos is common inmany Spanish American regions, including parts of coastal Venezuela, andvos was used vestigially in Cuba (but not in Puerto Rico) until well into thetwentieth century, precisely in the region whence come the few examplesof vos in bozal Spanish.29 Among other Afro-Hispanic manifestations inLatin America, use of second person forms of address generally followsregional Spanish usage; thus tu is found in texts from Mexico, Venezuela,most of Colombia, Peru,30 northwestern Ecuador and even in such areasof widespread voseo as Argentina and Uruguay. The Panamanian negroscongos use tu exclusively both in the congo dialect and in the local Spanishdialect, despite the fact that other areas of Panama are characterized bythe voseo.31 Among contemporary (non-creole) Afro-Hispanic dialects,only the Chota Valley dialect of Ecuador regularly employs vos,32 and thisfollows regional Spanish usage.

(2) Neutralization of pronominal case, usually in favor of disjunctive pro-nouns. In addition to the use of vos, Palenquero and Papiamento employvariants of the disjunctive pronoun mi for subjects and objects, but use ofmi as subject is vanishingly rare in nineteenth-century Caribbean bozaltexts, except in imitation of Haitian creole speakers’ pidgin Spanish in theDominican Republic,33 or where Papiamento speakers are implicated.

28 E.g. Ballagas (1946:92). 29 Pichardo (1849:12), Lopez Morales (1971:136–42).30 In alternation with vos (Lopez Albujar 1966:72).31 Lipski (1989), Robe 1960). 32 Lipski (1986e, 1987a).33 Juan Antonio Alix, in Rodrıguez Demorizi (1973:267–90).


(3) Use of subject pronouns as possessives. Papiamento and Palenquero, aswell as Afro-Lusitanian and French creoles regularly use some variant ofthe subject pronouns as possessive markers, sometimes postposed to therespective nouns. Such usage is conspicuously absent in Latin Americanbozal Spanish, even in the Caribbean, and is also absent in bozal Spanishtexts of previous centuries.

(4) Use of the third person plural subject pronoun (usually postposed) asa nominal plural marker. This combination is usual in Papiamento (e.g.buki ‘book,’ bukinan ‘books’), as well as in most French creoles, and mayhave occurred in nineteenth-century Caribbean bozal speech in the formof the pronoun nan (variant lan) of possible Papiamento origin: comolan 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 pluralmarker (always preposed, unlike in Papiamento), was never used as a truesubject pronoun in bozal Spanish.36 Palenquero does not use the thirdperson plural pronoun to signal nominal plurality, but rather employsthe (preposed) marker ma: ma ngaina utere e ten pete ‘your chickensstink.’37

(5) Use of invariant third person subject pronouns, of the form ele/e/a forthe singular, and eles (Papiamento nan, Palenquero ane) for the plural.38

The scarcity of nan among bozal Spanish dialects has already been dis-cussed, but use of a single third person variant39 instead of the normal mas-culine/feminine dyad is found variably in nineteenth-century Caribbeanbozal speech: si yo lo tene uno nino como nelle, yo va murı de cunten-tamienta.40 In other attestations of bozal Spanish, there is occasional con-fusion of el and ella and of ellos and ellas, but systematic neutralizationin 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 Cuba; Cruz (1974:118).35 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 maycome from Spanish estan or Portuguese estam [sic]. See Lipski (1987c) for a further analysis ofthis word.

36 It is also possible that the final /n/ of lan/nan results from the nasalization of the final /s/ ofthe definite articles los/las, since this process is also attested for bozal Spanish: Bachiller yMorales (1883:100–01), Benıtez del Cristo (1930:132), Cruz (1974:37), Valdes Bernal (1978),Perl (1981), Lipski (1992b).

37 Friedemann and Patino Rosselli (1983:148).38 Granda (1968, 1978), Otheguy (1973), Alleyne (1980:11–13).39 Usually elle/nelle; Alvarez Nazario (1974:190), Cruz (1974:168).40 Cuba; Cruz (1974:117–18).41 Schwegler (1996b) has uncovered occasional use of ele in the Afro-Ecuadoran Chota Valley

community, and Ruız Garcıa (2000) has found what may be a few examples of this undifferen-tiated pronoun in the Colombian Choco dialect.


(6) Loss of the copula.42 All principal Afro-Hispanic creoles, including Papi-amento and Palenquero, offer an alternative to the zero option; Papiamentohas ta, presumably derived from the verb estar, while Palenquero has bothta and e, with occasional jue and senda.43 In nineteenth-century Caribbeanbozal Spanish several examples of loss of the copula are found, in alterna-tion with correct and incorrect use of the copulative verbs ser and estar;substantially the same holds for other Afro-Hispanic dialects in LatinAmerica, although use of some form of the copula is the general rule.In Golden Age bozal Spanish and Portuguese, the copula was frequentlypresent, 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 theearliest attestations of Africanized Spanish and Portuguese, gender andnumber have been unstable and variable, usually resulting in incorrectassignment of gender, partial lapses in adjectival-nominal agreement, useof incorrect articles, use of singular forms for plural referents and viceversa. However, with the exception of established creoles such as Papia-mento, Chabacano and Palenquero, such neutralization was never carriedto completion.

(8) Loss of definite and indefinite articles. Despite the fact that this featurehas 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, some-what idiosyncratic, and subject to modification during the first stages ofdecreolization, as well as in the beginning stages of language erosion.

(9) Loss of prepositions.47 Many specimens of bozal Spanish contain highrates of loss of de and a, but this is not sufficient to postulate a com-mon origin for Afro-Hispanic creoles, since the same traits are found invernacular and vestigial Spanish worldwide.

(10) Use of tener instead of haber as the existential verb. Among bozal Spanishtexts, use of tener with existential force is quite rare; one example is:48

en botica tien de to. Much more frequent is the use of haber, albeit withhighly nonstandard forms and syntactic patterns: yo lo ve craramiente quelo habe en la mundo quiene me lo tene infision y guena golunta.49

(11) Categorical use of normally redundant subject pronouns.50 Even in non-creole Spanish dialects categorical use of subject pronouns may arise

42 Alvarez Nazario (1959:46, 1974:115–20), Ziegler (1981), Perl (1982).43 Friedemann and Patino Rosselli (1983:130), Lipski (1999c, 2002c).44 (Alvarez Nazario (1974:121), Naro (1978:342), Lipski (1999c, 2002c).45 E.g. by Alvarez Nazario (1959:46), Granda (1968), Perl (1982). 46 Janson (1984).47 Alvarez Nazario (1959, 1974), Granda (1968, 1972a, 1978), Otheguy (1973), Ziegler (1981),

Perl (1982, 1985, 1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c).48 Cabrera (1969). 49 Cruz (1974:230). 50 E.g. Otheguy (1973), Perl (1982).


when, for example, natural processes of consonantal reduction (e. g. /s/> [h] > Ø; /n/ > [v] > Ø) partially obliterate verbal endings; this hasoccurred in some parts of Andalusia and in Caribbean Spanish.51

(12) Constructions based on a prepos it ion (frequently para) + subjectpronoun + inf in it ive instead of a subordinate clause involving theconjunction que and a subjunctive verb form: pa tu tener = para que tutengas ‘in order for you to have.’52 This combination is frequent in popularSpanish of southern Spain and the Canary Islands, and is attested in manyareas of Latin America;53 it is likely to have arisen spontaneously in morethan one area, since it results from the reduction of a marked conjugatedform to the maximally unmarked infinitive, as occurs in Spanish childlanguage.54

(13) The frequent Caribbean preposing of mas in negative expressions (masnada ‘no more,’ mas nunca ‘never again’) instead of the more usualphrase-final position has been claimed as the result of earlier Portuguese-based creole language.55 The Portuguese connection is quite likely, but thepresence of this construction in Caribbean Spanish is more likely due tothe heavy Galician and Canary Island influence, in which such construc-tions (apparently due to earlier Galician-Portuguese maritime contacts)are common.56

(14) Postposed demonstratives, of the form piera ese ‘that rock’.57 Within bozalSpanish texts, postposed demonstratives are used very infrequently; theabove example stands nearly alone, set against preposed demonstrativesand lack of demonstratives.

(15) The portmanteau preposition na (found in many African and Asian Por-tuguese creoles, in Philippine Creole Spanish, Papiamento, and Palen-quero, 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 simplicityas a maximally unmarked CV element and the nature of creoles, pidgins,and bozal speech as approximative varieties.

(16) Perhaps the most frequently cited structural parallel among Afro-Iberiancreoles is the use of verbal aspectual particles in combination with

51 Mondejar (1970), Poplack (1980). 52 Alvarez Nazario (1959:46).53 Florez (1946:377), Padron (1949:164), Kany (1951:159).54 Gili Gaya (1960:29, 1972). 55 Megenney (1985a).56 Perez Vidal (1944), Kany (1951:363–4), D’Albuquerque (1953), Alvarez Nazario (1972b:95),

Lorenzo Ramos (1976), Torres Stinga (1981).57 Taylor (1971), Otheguy (1973), Ziegler (1981), Cabrera (1983:108).58 For example in Venezuela; Aretz de Ramon y Rivera and Ramon de Rivera (1955:72): tres

corona na mi mano “three crowns in my hand.”59 E.g. by Whinnom (1956, 1965), Taylor (1971), Megenney (1984a, 1985a); for an assessment of

na in Philippine Creole Spanish also Lipski (1988b).


unconjugated verb stems; the particle ta is used for present/imperfectiveand durative aspect, with ya/ja and sometimes ba a frequent concomitant inthe past/imperfective.60 Among bozal Spanish dialects, however, the com-bination ta + Vinf is found only in nineteenth-century Cuban and PuertoRican texts, where this construction alternates with the archetypical bozalpattern of partially or incorrectly conjugated verb forms.61 Such expres-sions were unknown in Golden Age Spanish and Portuguese texts, despitethe fact that such Afro-Iberian dialects as those of Annobon, Sao Tome,Palenquero, Saramaccan and Papiamento were apparently formed duringthis time period; among Latin American bozal texts, no trace of aspectualparticles is found in any region other than Cuba and Puerto Rico,62 andin the latter countries only following the turn of the nineteenth century.While the existence of aspectual particles in Palenquero and Papiamentoare likely results of common or shared Afro-Iberian antecedents, the pres-ence of such particles in nineteenth-century Cuban and Puerto Rican bozalspeech are more likely the consequence of the importation of Papiamento-and other creole-speaking slaves into these nations around the beginningof the nineteenth century.63

Similarities and differences in bozal Spanish

The preceding overview has demonstrated considerable disparities among bozalSpanish manifestations, in which the three special Latin American cases (Papia-mento, 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 cen-turies, exhibit more diversity. The very earliest attempts at representing bozalSpanish, in sixteenth-century Spain, are merely imitations of contemporaryPortuguese literary patterns, while also reflecting the speech of slaves recently

60 A partial list of investigators who have used the existence of particles like ta as evidence of acommon origin for Afro-Iberian creoles and for the existence of an Afro-Lusitanian basis forCaribbean 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).

61 Lipski (1986g, 1987b, 1991b, 1992c, 1993, 1996a, 1998a, 1998c, 1999a, 2000a).62 Some examples come from the Dominican Republic, in a poem by Alix purporting to repre-

sent a Haitian creole speaker’s rudimentary attempts at speaking Spanish (Rodrıguez Demorizi1973:270): manque tu ta dı que no ‘although you say no.’ The existence of aspectual particlesin this context is not surprising, given their usage in Haitian Creole (Lipski 1994a). Tompkins(1981:311) cites an older Afro-Peruvian informant in Canete, who recalled a line from an oldsong: Lima ta hablar y Canete ta ponde. This suggests that at least some creoloid verb formsmay have occasionally surfaced in Afro-Peruvian speech, although apparently never coalescinginto a consistent pattern.

63 Alvarez Nazario (1959, 1974:65, 218–9), Granda (1973a).


arrived from Portugal. From the middle of the sixteenth century until thebeginning of the twentieth bozal Spanish existed in its own right in variousregions, 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 uninflectedinfinitives.

(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 assubject (mı saber) and at other times in the use of subject pronouns asverbal or prepositional objects (para yo).

(6) Frequent phonetic and phonological deformation, at times reflecting regu-lar processes (loss of syllable-final /s/, /l/, and /r/; neutralization and inter-change of syllable-final /l/ and /r/; neutralization of /r/ and /rr/ and of /r/, /l/,and /d/), and equally as often representing more idiosyncratic deformationsand misidentifications.

Of the above features common to Peninsular and Latin American bozalSpanish, all are frequently found in vestigial Spanish worldwide in which noAfrican connection can be demonstrated. They are also found in the non-creoleSpanish of Equatorial Guinea and in cases of marginal bilingualism with non-African languages in such areas as Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador,Venezuela, etc.64 Moreover, features (1), (4) and (6) are frequently found in pop-ular rural Spanish of many regions, and features (2) and (5) are not unknownin nonstandard Spanish dialects. All of these characteristics are natural con-sequences of imperfect learning, of the possible interference of a variety ofnon-Romance languages, of the lack of a wide pool of adequate native speakermodels, and the absence of individual and societal monitoring and feedbackmechanisms that would partially counteract reductive tendencies. The fact thatthe same features are found in established Romance- and English-based creolesis less indicative of potentially common origins than of quasi-universal tenden-cies of drift, reduction, and structural simplification. In particular, none of thefeatures points convincingly to an Afro-Iberian base for general bozal Spanish.Although Africanized Spanish was widely represented in Latin America over aperiod of nearly 300 years, a high degree of homogeneity never existed from oneregion to another, except for those features resulting naturally from imperfectlearning, and any early Afro-Lusitanian basis either disappeared among later

64 Riley (1952), Gifford (1973), Melia (1974, 1980), Siade (1974), Cerron-Palomino (1976), Usherde Herreros (1976), Granda (1979), Welti (1979), Quant and Irigoyen (1980), Muysken (1981b).


shipments of slaves or was subsequently neutralized once the recently arrivedbozales 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, suggeststhat contacts between Spanish and already established creole languages in theCaribbean setting account for many of the linguistic pecularities which havebeen used to bolster claims of earlier creolization. The events in question are notof early colonial origin, but rather occurred principally during the demographicand economic upheavals of the nineteenth-century Caribbean, in some instancescarrying over well into the twentieth century. For this reason, the linguistic tracesof these creoles are still observable in vestigial and isolated communities inCuba and the Dominican Republic, all of which are Afro-American. The Afro-European creoles in question all share significant structural similarities with oneanother, and in the absence of demographic and linguistic documentation, thetraces of Caribbean creoles in vestigial Afro-Caribbean Spanish are potentiallyindistinguishable from structures to be expected if the Spanish dialect itself hadpassed through a creole stage.

The historical circumstances giving rise to Spanish-creole contacts in theCaribbean varied from one region to another, and also varied according to thetime period. In the Dominican Republic, contact with Caribbean creoles resultedin part from the shared history of the island of Espanola and the highly perme-able Spanish-Haitian Creole interface. To this natural coexistence is added agradually increasing labor force from other Caribbean islands, beginning earlyin the twentieth century. The presence of Caribbean creoles in Puerto Rico waseven more limited, due to the minimal importance of large plantation agricul-ture. Most speakers of creole languages found in Puerto Rico are occasionalarrivals from neighboring islands, whose impact on the island’s linguistic pro-file is negligible. It is in Cuba that the greatest demographic upheavals occurred,beginning early in the nineteenth century and continuing through the first halfof the twentieth century. The voracious labor demands, coupled with Cuba’sgeographical location and already linguistically diverse population, resulted ina 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 andearly twentieth centuries. In addition to the well-studied dichotomy betweennatively spoken Spanish vs. Africanized bozal language, the labor demands ofthe second half of the nineteenth century brought in speakers of many struc-turally (and possibly genetically) related creole languages. In some instances


the historical record provides direct testimony as to the manner in which suchindividuals learned and used Spanish, while in other cases the possible linguisticconsequences must be extrapolated from available demographic information. Itis unlikely that any single creole language significantly altered Afro-CaribbeanSpanish during the contact period; a more likely scenario entails the mutualreinforcement of certain creoloid patterns which may or may not have beenpresent in bozal Spanish, but which would be familiar to speakers of struc-turally cognate Afro-Caribbean creoles, and would be extended beyond normalexpectations. Matters are not helped by the fact that writers of the time hadlittle interest in Afro-American ethnography; any black individual who pro-duced grammatically “deviant” or simply nonstandard Spanish was dismissedas a bozal, even during the latter decades of the nineteenth century when blacklaborers born on other Caribbean islands far outnumbered African-born bozales.

The heavy African cultural and ethnic presence in the Spanish Caribbean hasoften been taken uncritically as proof that any unusual feature of CaribbeanSpanish is due to African influence. When to the mix is added a corpus ofcreole-like language formerly attributed to blacks in Cuba and Puerto Rico, theequation seems complete: Spanish once creolized in Latin America, at leastamong the population of African origin, and this creole gradually percolated upto encompass all local varieties of Spanish. This would make Caribbean Spanishmuch 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 favoringthe formation of a stable creole never existed in the Spanish Caribbean. A muchmore reasonable route for creole-like characteristics of earlier Afro-CaribbeanSpanish, as well as contemporary vernacular varieties, is the impact of estab-lished creole languages, which in one guise or another formed the linguisticbackbone of the nineteenth-century Caribbean. Regardless of the European lan-guage which provided their lexicon, these creoles already shared considerablesimilarity with one another, due both to universal aspects of creolization, andto commonly recurring patterns in key groups of West African and Europeanlanguages. In the linguistic proving ground of nineteenth-century Caribbeanplantations, simply throwing Spanish together with any of the Caribbean cre-oles, or better yet with several, would yield strikingly similar results, whichmight be superficially indistinguishable from the effects of spontaneous cre-olization of Spanish.

Among some of the creoloid features found in some Caribbean bozal Spanishtexts attributable to possible contact with the creole languages mentioned aboveare:(1) Double negation in colloquial Dominican Spanish and in some nineteenth-

century Afro-Cuban bozal texts. Probable source: Haitian Creole. Recently,


double negation has also been reported for the Spanish of the Guiria Penin-sula of Venezuela,65 where Spanish was in contact with Trinidadian Frenchcreole, which uses both double negation (with postposed no(n)) and doubleaffirmation. Ortiz Lopez (1999a) discovered cases of double negation inthe pidginized Spanish spoken by elderly Haitians in Cuba.

(2) Realization of intervocalic /d/ as a stop [d] or flap [r] in Villa Mella, Samana,and Afro-Dominican pororo dialects. Probable source: American BlackEnglish and Haitian Creole.

(3) Use of preverbal ta + inf in it ive , found in some nineteenth-centuryAfro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican texts. Probable source: Papiamento,with slight possibility for Macao creole Portuguese reinforcement inChinese-Cuban laborer groups.

(4) Use of (a)mı as subject pronoun in some nineteenth-century Afro-Cubantexts. 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 usagenever took hold in the Spanish Caribbean, probably because it was highlystigmatized from the outset (this substitution is very common in early childlanguage, and also was found in the first Afro-Iberian language from Spainand Portugal in the sixteenth century).

(5) Errors of subject-verb and noun-adjective agreement in Samana, DominicanRepublic.66 Probable source: American Black English and Haitian Creole(i.e. Spanish not spoken natively in this area).

(6) Categorical use of normally redundant subject pronouns in Afro-CaribbeanSpanish. Caribbean Spanish is noted for its high use of overt subject pro-nouns, partially in compensation for the extensive loss of final consonants(especially /s/) in verbal endings. However, all of the pidgin and creolelanguages that came into contact with nineteenth-century bozal Spanishin the Caribbean require overt subject pronouns, since there is no ver-bal inflection. Thus, any speaker of an Afro-European pidgin or creolewould further extend the already existent Caribbean tendency towards overtsubject 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 invalidatethe serious scholarship which has taken place on all facets of the controversy.By seeing the nineteenth-century Caribbean as a rich tapestry of interactinglanguages, many of which shared structural similarities, the task of deciding

65 Llorente (1994, 1995). 66 Gonzalez and Benavides (1982).


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

References

Abad, Isidoro. 1928. Elementos de la gramatica bubi. Madrid: Editorial del Corazon deMarıa.

Acosta-Rubio, Raul. 1976. Quiquiribu Mandinga (se lo llevo el diablo). Miami:Ediciones Universal.

Acosta Saignes, Miguel. 1967. Vida de los esclavos negros en Venezuela. Caracas:Hesperides.

Acuna de Figueroa, Francisco. 1944. Nuevo mosaico poetico. Montevideo: ClaudioGarcıa y Cıa.

Aguirre, Carlos. 1993. Agentes de su propia libertad: los esclavos de Lima y ladesintegracion de la esclavitud 1821–1854. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Catolicadel Peru.

2000. La poblacion de origen africano en el Peru: de la esclavitud a la libertad. InFondo Editorial del Congreso del Peru (2000:63–75).

Aguirre Beltran, Gonzalo. 1958. Cuijla: esbozo etnografico de un pueblo negro. Mexico:Fondo de Cultura Economica.

1972. La poblacion negra de Mexico. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2nd edn.Aimes, Hubert H. S. 1907. A History of Slavery in Cuba 1511 to 1868. New York: G. P.

Putnam’s Sons.Alba, Julio. 1958. Yambao. Mexico: Editorial Novaro.Albuquerque, Luıs de. 1991. Dialogo luso-italiano nos seculos XV e XVI. Mare Liberum

2.97–105.Aldridge, Michelle. 1988. The acquisition of INFL. Ph.D. dissertation, University

College of North Wales. Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1989.Alen Rodrıguez, Olavo. 1986. La musica de las sociedades de tumba francesa en Cuba.

Havana: Ministerio de Cultura.1991. The tumba francesa societies and their music. Essays on Cuban music:

North American and Cuban perspectives, ed. Peter Manuel, 77–85. Lanham, md:University Press of America.

Aliaga, Francisco, Elisabeth Aliaga, Jean-Pierre Blaise. 1991. Rhythmes noir du Perou.Paris: Lierre et Coudrier Editeur/Wamani.

Alleyne, Mervyn. 1980. Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Alonso, Amado. 1953. Estudios linguısticos: temas hispanoamericanos. Madrid:

Gredos.Alonso, Manuel. 1975. El jıbaro. Barcelona: Editorial Vosgos.Alpızar Castillo, Rodolfo. 1987. Un curioso documento linguıstico del siglo XVIII

cubano. Anuario L/L 18.3–17.

305

306 References

1989. Apuntes para la historia de la linguıstica en Cuba. Havana: Editorial deCiencias Sociales.

Althoff, Daniel. 1994. Afro-mestizo speech from Costa Chica, Guerrero: from Cuaji toCuijla. Language Problems and Language Planning 18.242–56.

Alvarez, Alexandra. 1987. Malabı Maticulambı, estudios afrocaribenos. Montevideo:Monte Sexto.

Alvarez, Carolina. 1989. La “fonetica negra”: estereotipo socio-linguıstico en la lit-eratura venezolana. M.A. thesis, University of Georgia.

Alvarez Estevez, Rolando. 1988. Azucar e inmigracion 1900–1940. Havana: Editorialde Ciencias Sociales.

Alvarez Nazario, Manuel. 1959. Notas sobre el habla del negro en Puerto Rico duranteel siglo XIX. Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena 2.43–8.

1970. Un texto literario del papiamento documentado en Puerto Rico en 1830. Revistadel Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena 47.9–20.

1972a. El papiamento: ojeado a su pasado historico y vision de su problematica delpresente. Atenea (Mayaguez) 9.9–20.

1972b. La herencia linguıstica de Canarias en Puerto Rico. San Juan: Instituto deCultura Puertorriquena.

1990. El habla campesina de paıs. Rıo Pedras: Editorial de la Universidad de PuertoRico.

1974. El elemento afronegroide en el espanol de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Instituto deCultura Puertorriquena, 2nd edn.

Alzola, Concepcion Teresa. 1965. Hablar popular cubana. Revista de Dialectologıa yTradiciones Populares 23.358–69.

Amaro, Ama Maria. 1980. Um jogo africano de Macau: a chonca. Macau: Sep-arata do No 1 da Revista da Facultade de Ciencias Sociais e Humanas daUNL.

Anda Aguirre, Alonso. 1993. Indios y negros bajo el dominio espanol en Loja. Quito:Ediciones Abya-Yala.

Anderson, W. G. 1897. An Introductory Grammar of the Sena Language Spoken on theLower Zambesi. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Andrews, George Reid. 1980. The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900.Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Angola Maconde, Juan. 2000. Raıces de un pueblo: cultura afroboliviana. La Paz:Producciones CIMA, Embajada de Espana, Cooperacion.

Anonymous. n. d. Entremes segundo del negro. MS. 16936, Biblioteca Nacional deEspana.

Anonymous. 1723. La negra lectora. Arcadia de entremeses escritos por los ingeniosmas clasicos de Espana. Madrid: Angel Pascual Rubio.

Anonymous. 1963. Auto de Vicente Anes Joeira, edition of Cleonice Berardinelli. Lisbon:Instituto Nacional do Livro.

Aparicio Prudente, Francisca, Marıa Cristina Dıaz Perez, Adela Garcıa Casarrubias.1993. Choco, chirundo y chando: vocabulario afromestizo. Omotepec: “El Gara-bato,” Unidad Regional Guerrero de Culturas Populares.

Aranda de los Rıos, Ramon. 1990. Sublevacion de campesinos negros en Chincha, 1879.Lima: Herrera Editores.

References 307

Aretz de Ramon, Isabel and Luis Felipe Ramon y Rivera. 1955. Resumen de un estudiosobre las expresiones negras en el folklore musical y coreografico de Venezuela.Archivos Venezolanos de Folklore 3:4.65–73.

Arienzo, Luisa d’. 1991. L’influenza culturale italiana alla corte portoghese nell’etadelle scoperte. Mare Liberum 2.107–120.

Arona, Juan de [pseudonym of Pedro Paz Soldan y Unanue]. 1883. Diccionario deperuanismos. Lima: Imprenta de J. F. Solis.

Arosemena Moreno, Julio. 1984. Danzas folkloricas de la villa de Los Santos. Panama:Banco Nacional de Panama.

Arrazola, Roberto. 1970. Palenque, primer pueblo libre de America. Cartagena:Ediciones Hernandez.

Arroyo, Eduardo. 1981. La hacienda costena en el Peru: Mala-Canete 1532–1968.Lima: Centro de Proyeccion Cristiana.

Ascasubi, Hilario. 1960. Paulino Lucero, Aniceto el Gallo, Santos Vega, seleccion.Argentina: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.

Atkins, Guy. 1953. The tonal structure of Portuguese loan words in Kimbundu. Boletimde Filologia 14.340–342.

Austen, Ralph. 1979. The trans-Saharan slave trade: a tentative census. The UncommonMarket: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, eds. HenryGemery and Jan Hogendorn, 23–76.

Avellaneda, Francisco de. 1622. Entremes de los negros. MS. 15143, Biblioteca Nacionalde Espana. Also in Revista de Archivos, Museos y Bibliotecas 3a. epoca v. 5 (1901),912–19.

Ayarza de Morales, Rosa Mercedes. 1939. Antiguos pregones de Lima. Lima: CasaEditora ‘La Cronica’ y ‘Variedades.’

1967. El folklore musical uruguayo. Montevideo: Arca Editorial.Ayestaran, Lauro. 1990. El tamboril y la comparsa. Montevideo: Editorial Arca.Azevedo, Rafael Avila de. 1984. A influencia da cultura portuguesa em Macau. Lisbon:

Instituto de Cultura e Lıngua Portuguesa, Ministerio da Educacao.Bacardı Moreau, Emilio. 1914. Vıa crucis. Havana: Imp. El Cubano Libre/Barcelona:

Imp. Vda. de Tasso.1916–17. Dona Guiomar. Havana: Imp. El Siglo XX de A. Miranda.1972. Filigrana. Madrid: Obras completas de E. B. M. reeditadas por Amalia Bacardı

Cape.Bachiller y Morales, Antonio. 1883. Desfiguracion a que esta expuesto el idioma

castellano al contacto y mezcla de razas. Revista de Cuba 14.97–104.Baird, Keith. 1975. Anticipations of Papiamento in the Afro-Portuguese of Gil Vicente.

Atlanta University, Center for African and African-American Studies, CCASLinguistics Paper No. 6.

Bal, Willy. 1968. O destino de palavras de origem portuguesa num dialecto quicongo.Revista Portuguesa de Filologia 15.49–101.

1974. Portuguese loan-words in Africa. Aufsatze zur portugiesischen Kulturgeschichte13.280–300.

1991. Mputu. La Revue Generale 8–9. 57–68.Balandier, Georges. 1968. Daily Life in the Kingdom of the Kongo: from the Sixteenth

to the Eighteenth Century. Tr. by Helen Weaver. New York: Pantheon Books.

308 References

Balbi, Giovanna. 1966. La schiavitu a Genova tra i secoli XII e XIII. Melanges offertesa Rene Crozet, eds. Pierre Gallais and Yves-Jean Riou, tome II, 1025–29. Poitiers:Societe d’Etudes Medievales.

Ballagas, Emilio. 1946. Mapa de la poesıa negra americana. Tucuman: Pleamar.Balmaseda, Francisco Javier. 1869. Los confinados a Fernando Poo e impresiones de un

viage a Guinea. Nueva York: Imp. de la Revolucion.Barnet, Miguel. 1966. Biografıa de un cimarron. Cuba: Instituto de Etnologıa y Folklore.Barrantes, D. V., ed. 1882. Recopilacion en metro del bachiller Diego Sanchez de Bada-

joz, tomo I. Madrid: Librerıa de los Bibliofilos.1886. Recopilacion en metro del bachiller Diego Sanchez de Badajoz, tomo II. Madrid:

Librerıa de los Bibliofilos.Barrena, Natalio. 1957. Gramatica annobonesa. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Africanos.Barrick, Mac, ed. 1973. Tercera parte de la tragicomedia de Celestina, Gaspar Gomez

de Toledo. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Barry, Boubacar. 1988. La Senegambie du XVe au XIXe Siecle. Paris: Editions

L’Harmattan.Bartens, Angela. 1995. Die iberoromanische-basierten Kreolsprachen. Frankfurt am

Main: Peter Lang.Batalha, Graciete Nogueira. 1974. Lıngua de Macau. Macau: Imprensa Nacional.Batalha, Ladislau. 1891. A lıngua de Angola. Lisbon: Companhia Nacional Editora.Baxter, Alan. 1988. A Grammar of Kristang (Malacca Creole Portuguese). Canberra:

Department of Linguistics, the Australian National University (Pacific LinguisticsSeries B, No. 95).

Beane, Carol. 1980. The characterization of blacks and mulattoes in selected novelsfrom Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru. Ph.D. dissertation, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley.

Becco, Horacio Jorge. n. d. Negros y morenos en el cancionero rioplatense. BuenosAires: Sociedad Argentina de Americanistas.

1946. El tema del negro en cantos, bailes y villancicos de los siglos XVI y XVII. Lima:Ollantay.

Benavides, Celso. 1973. Orıgenes historicos del habla de Samana (aproximacion socio-linguıstica). Espanol Actual 25.14–18.

1985. El dialecto espanol de Samana. Anuario de la Academia de Ciencias de laRepublica Dominicana 9.297–342.

Bendix, Edward. 1983. Sandhi phenomena in Papiamentu, other creoles and AfricanLanguages: can they be used to reconstruct history? Studies in Caribbean Language,ed. Lawrence Carrington, 112–23. St. Augustine, Trinidad: Society for CaribbeanLinguistics, University of the West Indies.

Benıtez del Cristo, Ignacio. 1930. Los novios catedraticos. Archivos del Folklore Cubano5(2).119–46.

Bentley, W. Holman. 1887. Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language, as Spokenat San Salvador, the Ancient Capital of the Old Kongo Empire, West Africa. London:Trubner and Co.

Berenguer y Sed, Antonio. 1929. Tradiciones villaclarenas, tomo I. Havana: Imprentay Papalerıa de Rambla, Bouza y Ca.

Bergman, Hannah. 1965. Luis Quinones de Benavente y sus entremeses. Madrid: Edi-torial Castalia.

References 309

Bermejo y Carballo, Jose. 1882. Glorias religiosas de Sevilla o noticia historica-descriptiva de todas las cofradıas de penitencia, sangre y luz, fundadas en estaciudad. Seville: Imprenta y Librerıa del Salvador.

Bernardes, Octavio N. Canhao. 1970. A lıngua portuguesa e Angola. A Bem da LınguaPortuguesa 21.93–104.

Berry, Jack. 1970. A note on the prosodic structure of Krio. International Journal ofAmerican Linguistics 36.266–67.

Betancur Alvarez, Fabio. 1993. Sin clave y bongo no hay son: musica afrocubana yconfluencias musicales de Colombia y Cuba. Medellın: Editorial Universidad deAntioquia.

Biblioteca de Cultura Peruana, primera serie numero 9. 1938. Costumbristas y satıricos.Paris: Desclee de Brouwer.

Bickerton, Derek. 1981. Roots of Language. Ann Arbor: Karoma.Bickerton, Derek and Aquiles Escalante. 1970. Palenquero: a Spanish-based creole of

northern Colombia. Lingua 32.254–67.Birmingham, David. 1966. Trade and Conflict in Angola: the Mbundu and their

Neighbours under the Influence of the Portuguese 1483–1790. Oxford: ClarendonPress.

Bishop, Hezekiah Adolfo. 1976. Bidialectal traits of West Indians in the Panama CanalZone. Ed. D. dissertation, Columbia University Teachers College.

Blanchard, Peter. 1992. Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru. Wilmington,DE: SR Books.

Bolekia Boleka, Justo. 1991. Curso de lengua bubi. Malabo: Centro Cultural Hispano-Guineano.

Bonafoux, Luis. 1988. Ultramarinos. Edicion anotada de Socorro Giron. Ponce: Edicionde la autora [first published 1882].

1990. Esbozos novelescos. Ponce: Edicion de la autora [first published 1894].Bono, Salvatore. 1993. Corsari del Mediterraneo. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori

Editore.Bosch, Gerardus-Balthasar. 1836. Reizen in West Indie, vol 2. Utrecht: N. van der Monde.Bosch, Juan. 1978. Luis Pie. Cuentos escritos en el exilio, 53–63. Santo Domingo:

Amigo del Hogar, 7th edn.Bovill, E. W. 1968. The Golden Trade of the Moors. London and New York: Oxford

University Press. 2nd edn.Bowser, Frederick. 1974. The African Slave in Colonial Peru 1524–1650. Stanford:

Stanford University Press.Boxer, Charles R. 1968. Fidalgos in the Far East 1550–1770. Hong Kong: Oxford

University Press.1969. Four Centuries of Portuguese Expansion, 1415–1825. Berkeley and Los

Angeles: University of California Press and Johannesburg: Witwatersrand Uni-versity Press.

1985. Portuguese Conquest and Commerce in Southern Asia, 1500–1750. London:Variorum Reprints.

Boyd-Bowman, Peter. 1953. Sobre la pronunciacion del espanol en el Ecuador. NuevaRevista de Filologıa Hispanica 7.221–33.

Brading, D. A. 1971. Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico 1763–1810. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

310 References

Bradshaw, A. T. von S. 1965. Vestiges of Portuguese in the languages of Sierra Leone.Sierra Leone Language Review 4.5–37.

Brady, Robert. 1965. The emergence of a Negro class in Mexico 1524–1640. Ph.D.dissertation, State University of Iowa.

Brandi, Luciana and Patrizia Cordin. 1989. Two Italian dialects and the null subjectparameter. The Null Subject Parameter, eds. Osvaldo Jaeggli and Kenneth Safir,111–42. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Brandt, Max Hans. 1987. Estudio etnomusicologico de tres conjuntos de tambores afro-venezolanos de Barlovento. Caracas: Consejo Nacional de la Cultura.

Braschi, Juan. 1959. La ironıa que pasa. Antologıa general del cuento puertorriqueno,vol. 1, eds. Cesareo Rosa-Nieves and Felix Franco Oppenheimer. San Juan: Edito-rial Camra.

Brasio, Antonio. 1944. Os pretos em Portugal. Lisbon: Divisao de Publicacoes e Bib-lioteca Agencia Geral das Colonias.

Brasio, Antonio, ed. 1952. Monumenta missionaria africana. T. I: Africa occidental(1471–1531). Lisbon: Agencia Geral do Ultramar.

1953b. Monumenta Missionario Africana T. II: Africa Occidental (1532–1569).Lisboa: Agencia Geral do Ultramar.

1953b. Monumenta Missionario Africana. T. III. Africa Occidental (1570–1599).Lisboa: Agencia Geral do Ultramar.

1894. Puerto Rico y su historia. Valencia: Imprenta de Francisco Vives Mora.Brau, Salvador. 1912. La isla de Vieques: bosquejos historicos. San Juan: Grafico.Bravo-Villa-Sante, Carmen, ed. 1978. Villancicos del siglo XVII y XVIII. Madrid: Edi-

torial Magisterio Espanol.Bridikhina, Eugenia. 1995. La mujer negra en Bolivia. La Paz: Ministerio de Desarrollo

Humano.Brito Figueroa, Federico. 1961. Las insurrecciones de los esclavos en la sociedad colo-

nial venezolana. Caracas: Cantaclaro.Britos Serrat, Alberto. 1999. Glosario de afronegrismos uruguayos. Montevideo: Edi-

ciones Mundo Afro-El Galeon.Bueno, Salvador, ed. 1959. Los mejores cuentos cubanos, tomo II. La Habana: Segundo

Festival del Libro Cubano.Caamano de Fernandez, Vicenta. 1989. El negro en la poesıa dominicana. San Juan:

Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe.Cabral, Antonio Carlos Pereira. 1975. Emprestimos linguısticos nas linguas mocam-

bicanas. Lourenco Marques: Empresa Moderna.Cabrales Arteaga, Jose. 1980. La poesıa de Rodrigo de Reinosa. Santander: Institucion

Cultural de Cantabria.Cabrera, Lydia. 1970a. La sociedad secreta Abakua. Miami: Editorial CR.

1970b. Refranes de negros viejos. Miami: Ediciones CR.1970c. Anago: vocabulario lucumı (el yoruba que se habla en Cuba). Miami: Edi-

ciones Universal.1971. Ayapa: cuentos de jicotea. Miami: Ediciones Universal.1972. Por que, cuentos negros de Cuba. Miami: Ediciones CR.1975. Anaforuana: ritual y sımbolos de la iniciacion en la sociedad secreta Abakua.

Madrid: Ediciones CR.1976. Francisco y Francisca: chascarrillos de negros viejos. Miami: Ediciones CR.

References 311

1979. Reglas de congo. Miami: Ediciones CR.1980a. Yemaya y Ochun. New York: Ediciones CR (Eliseo Torres).1980b. Siete cartas de Gabriela Mistral a Lydia Cabrera. Miami: Peninsular Printing,

Inc.1983. El monte. 3rd edn. Miami: Ediciones CR.1989a. Los animales en el folklore y la magia de Cuba. Miami: Ediciones Universal.1989b. Cuentos negros de Cuba (1936). Barcelona: ICARIA Editorial.

Cabrera Paz, Manuel. 1973. Fragmento de poema. Iniciacion a la poesıa afro-americana,eds. Oscar Fernandez de la Vega y Alberto Pamies, 122–31. Miami: EdicionesUniversal.

Cadilla de Martınez, Marıa. 1938. Costumbres y tradicionalismos de Mi tierra. San Juan:Imprenta Venezuela.

1941. Raices de la tierra. Arecibo: Tipografıa Hernandez.1945. Hitos de la raza. San Juan: Imprenta Venezuela.1953. La poesıa popular en Puerto Rico. San Juan: Imprenta Venezuela [doctoral

thesis, Universidad de Madrid, 1933].Calcagno, Francisco. 1877. Los crımenes de Concha: escenas cubanas. Havana:

Imprenta de E. F. Casona.1977. Romualdo: uno de tantos. Noveletas cubanas, ed. Imeldo Alvarez, 277–388.

Havana: Editorial de Arte y Literatura.Calderon de la Barca, Pedro. 1672. El gran prıncipe de Fez. Quarta parde de

Comedias nuevas. Madrid: Joseph Fernandez de Buendıa. Facsimile edition ofD. W. Cruishank and J. E. Varey. Comedias, vol. 10. London: Gregg InternationalPublishers Ltd./Tamesis Books Ltd., 1973.

1677. El jardın de Falerina. Quinta parde de Comedias. Barcelona: Antonio laCavallerıa. Facsimile edition of D. W. Cruishank and J. E. Varey. Comedias, vol.12. London: Gregg International Publishers Ltd./Tamesis Books Ltd., 1973.

1682. La sibila de oriente y gran reyna de Saba. Verdadera quinta parte de comedias deDon Pedro Calderon de la Barca. Madrid: Francisco Sanz. Facsimile edn. by D. W.Cruickshank and J. E. Varey, Calderon’s vol. 14 (Westmead: Gregg InternationalPublishers/Tamesis Books, 1973).

1691. Amar despues de la muerte. Novena parte de comedias del celebre poeta espanoldon Pedro Calderon de la Barca. Madrid: Francisco Sanz.

Cambier, Pere. 1891. Essai sur la langue congolaise. Brussels: Imprimerie Polleunis etCeuterick.

Canfield, D. Lincoln. 1960. Observaciones sobre el espanol salvadoreno. Filologıa6.29–76.

Carambula, Ruben. 1952a. Negro y tambor. Montevideo: Talleres Graficos “Cordoba.”1952b. Lenguaje afro-criollo de los negros rioplatenses. Boletın de Filologıa

(Montevideo). Reprinted in Negro y tambor, 193–205.1968. Pregones del Montevideo colonial. Montevideo: Editores Mosca Hnos.

Carbonell Fernandez, Ruben. 1988. Las compra-ventas de esclavos en San Juan1817–1873. M.A. Thesis, University of Puerto Rico.

Carden, Guy and William Stewart. 1988. Binding theory, bioprogram, and creolization:evidence from Haitian Creole. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages3.1–67.

Cardini, Franco. 1991. I fiorentini e l’espansione europea. Mare Liberum 2.31–36.

312 References

Carlson, F. A. 1941. American settlement in the Isla de Pinos, Cuba. The GeographicalReview 32.21–33.

Carrera Vergara, Eudocio. 1943. El gran doctor Copaiba: protomedico de la LimaJaranera. Lima: Sanmartı y Cıa.

Carreras, Carlos. 1958. Luna verde y otros cuentos. Barcelona: Ediciones Rumbos.Carriazo, J. de M. 1954. Negros esclavos y extranjeros en el barrio sevillano de San

Bernardo (1617–1629). Archivo Hispalense 20:64–65.121–33.Carrillo de Carle, Ricarda. 1974. Estudio linguıstico de Vieques. Madrid: Ediciones

Partenon.Carroll, Patrick. 1977. Mandinga: the evolution of a Mexican runaway slave community,

1735–1827. Comparative Studies in Society and History 19.488–505.1979. Black laborers and their experience in colonial Jalapa. El trabajo y los traba-

jadores en la historia de Mexico/Labor and Laborers through Mexican History,eds. Elsa Frost, Michael Meyer, Josefina Vazquez, 119–32. Mexico and Tucson:El Colegio de Mexico and University of Arizona Press.

1991. Blacks in Colonial Veracruz. Austin: University of Texas Press.Carvalho Neto, Paulo de. 1965. El negro uruguayo (hasta la abolicion). Quito: Editorial

Universitaria.1971. Estudios Afros-Brasil-Paraguay-Uruguay-Ecuador. Caracas: Universidad

Central de Venezuela.Castellanos, Isabel. 1983. Elegua quiere tambo: cosmovision religiosa afrocubana en

las canciones populares. Cali: Universidad del Valle.1985. Multilinguisme afro-cubain. Notre Librairie 80.15–21.1990. Grammatical structure, historical development, and religious usage of Afro-

Cuban bozal speech. Folklore Forum 23:1–2.57–84.Castellanos, Jorge and Isabel Castellanos. 1988. Cultura afrocubana 1: el negro en Cuba,

1492–1844. Miami: Ediciones Universal.Castillero Calvo, Alfredo. 1969. Los negros y los mulatos libres en la historia social

panamena. Panama City: n.p.Castro Chiriboga, Alfonso. 1990. La poblacion negra en el Quito de 1840. In Savoia,

ed., 75–83.Centurion Vallejo, Hector. 1954. Esclavitud y manumision de negros en Trujillo. Trujillo:

Imprenta de la Universidad.Cerron-Palomino, Rodolfo. 1976. Calcos sintacticos en el castellano andino. San Marcos

14.93 101.2003. Castellano andino: aspectos sociolinguısticos, pedagogicos, y gramaticales.

Lima: Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru.Chamorro Fernandez, Marıa Ines, ed. 1968. Segunda comedia de Celestina, Feliciano

de Silva. Madrid: Editorial Ciencia Nueva.Chasca, Edmund de. 1946. The phonology of the speech of the negroes in early Spanish

drama. Hispanic Review 14.322–39.Chatelain, Heli. 1888–89. Grammatica elementar do Kimbundu o lıngua de Angola.

Geneva: Typ. de Charles Schuchardt.Chaudenson, Robert. 2001. Creolization of Language and Culture. London and New

York: Routledge.Chaunu, Huguette and Pierre Chaunu. 1955–1960. Seville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650).

8 vols. Paris.

References 313

Chaves, Luis. 1933. O “cristao,” papia cristao, o “secanı.” A Lıngua Portuguesa3.169–78.

Chavez Franco, Modesto. 1930. Cronicas del Guayaquil antiguo. Guayaquil: Imp. yTalleres Municipales.

Chiado, Antonio Ribeiro. 1917. Auto da Natural lnvencao. Lisbon: Ferreira.1961. Pratica de oito figuras, facsimile edn. of Maria de Lourdes Belchior Pontes.

Lisbon: O Mundo do Livro.1968. Autos, vol. 1. Lisbon: Instituto Nacional do Livro.

Church, Eric. 1981. Le Systeme verbal du wolof. Dakar: Universite de Dakar.Cibrario, Luigi. 1868. Della schiavitu e del servaggio. Milano: Stabilimento Civelli. 2

vols.Cifre de Loubriel, Estela. 1962. Catalogo de extranjeros residentes en Puerto

Rico en el siglo XIX. Rıo Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de PuertoRico.

Ciplijauskaite, Birute (ed.). 1976. Sonetos completos de Gongora. Madrid: Castalia, 4thedn.

Claramonte, Andres de. 1951. La gran comedia de el valiente negro en Flandes.Dramaticos contemporaneos a Lope de Vega, ed. Ramon de Mesonero Romanos,491–509. Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles.

Claro, Samuel. 1974. Antologıa de la musica colonial en America del Sur. Santiago:Universidad de Chile.

Clements, J. Clancy. 1992. Foreigner talk and the origins of Pidgin Portuguese. Journalof Pidgin and Creole Languages 7.75–92.

1993. Rejoinder to Naro’s “Arguing about Arguin.” Journal of Pidgin and CreoleLanguages 8.119–24.

1996. The Genesis of a Language: the Formation and Development of KorlaiPortuguese. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Coelho, Adolfo. 1967. Os dialectos romanicos ou neo-latinos na Africa, Asia eAmerica. Published from 1880–1886. Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia deLisboa. Reprinted in Estudos Linguısticos Crioulos, ed. Jorge Morais-Barbosa,1–233. Lisbon: Academia Internacional da Cultura Portugesa.

Cohen, Pedro. 1971. Estudios de linguıstica descriptiva: temas panamenos. PanamaCity: Universidad de Panama.

1976a. Pronunciacion del ingles criollo de Panama. In Cohen, ed., 21–32.Cohen, Pedro, ed. 1976b. Primeras jornadas linguısticas: el ingles criollo de Panama.

Panama: Editorial Universitaria.Comes, Juan Bautista. 1977. Obras en lengua romance II: villancicos a la natividad,

trans. Jose Climent. Valencia: Institucion Alfonso el Magnanimo.Conniff, Michael. 1985. Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981. Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press.Contini-Morava, Ellen. 1989. Discourse Pragmatics and Semantic Categorization: the

Case of Negation and Tense-Aspect with Special Reference to Swahili. Berlin:Mouton de Gruyter.

Correa, Gaspar. 1858. Lendas da India, livro primeiro, ed. Rodrigo Jose de Lima Felner.Lisbon: Typographia da Academia Real das Sciencias.

Corro, Octaviano. 1951. Los cimarrones en Veracruz y la fundacion de Amapa. Jalapa:Imprenta Comercial, Veracruz.

314 References

Cortes Alonso, Vicenta. 1964. La esclavitud en Valencia durante el reinado de los ReyesCatolicos. Valencia: Excmo. Ayuntamiento.

1966. La poblacion negra de Palos de la Frontera 1568–1579. XXXVI Congreso Inter-nacional de Americanistas Espana 1964, Actas y Memorias, vol. 3, 609–18. Seville:ECESA.

Cortes Alonso, Vicenta. 1972. Procedencia de los esclavos negros en Valencia(1482–1516). Revista Espanola de Antropologıa Americana 7.

Cortes Cortes, Fernando. 1987. Esclavos en la Extremadura meriodional del siglo XVII.Badajoz: Excelentısima Diputacion Provincial de Badajoz.

Cortes Lopez, Jose Luis. 1986. Los orıgenes de la esclavitud negra en Espana. Madrid:Ediciones Mundo Negro/Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.

1989. La esclavitud negra en le Espana peninsular del siglo XVI. Salamanca: Uni-versidad de Salamanca.

Cossıo, Jose M. de, ed. 1950. Rodrigo de Reinosa. Santander: Antologıa de Escritoresy Artistas Montaneses XVI. Imp. y Enc. de la Librerıa Moderna.

Costa e Sa, Raul. 1948. Influencias do elemento afronegro na obra de Gil Vicente. SaoPaulo: Saraiva.

Cotarelo y Morı, Emilio. 1908. Prologue and vocabulary, Obras de Lope de Rueda,tomo I. Madrid: Librerıa de los Suc. de Hernando, edicion de la Real AcademiaEspanola.

1931. Mira de Amescua y su teatro: estudio biografico y crıtico. Madrid: Tipografıade la Revista de Archivos.

Cotarelo y Morı, Emilio, ed. 1911. Coleccion de entremeses, loas, bailes y mojigangasdesde fines del siglo XVI a mediados del XVIII, t. I. Madrid: Nueva Biblioteca deAutores Espanoles.

Cotton, Eleanor Greet and John Sharp. 1988. Spanish in the Americas. Washington:Georgetown University Press.

Crespo, Alberto. 1977. Esclavos negros en Bolivia. La Paz: Academia Nacional deCiencias de Bolivia.

Creto Ganga (Bartolome Jose Crespo y Borbon). 1975. Un ajiaco o la boda de PanchaJutıa y Canuto Raspadura. Teatro bufo siglo XIX, antologıa, tomo I, ed. Rine Leal,47–93. Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura.

Crow, John. 1985. Spain: the Root and the Flower, an Interpretation of Spain and theSpanish People. Berkeley: University of California Press, 3rd edn.

Cruz, Mary. 1974. Creto Ganga. Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro“Contemporaneos.”

Cruz, Sor Juana Ines de la. 1952. Obras completas de Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz II:villancicos y letras sacras. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica.

Cruz Carretero, Sagrario, Alfredo Martınez Maranto, Angelica Santiago Silva. 1990. Elcarnaval en Yanga: notas y comentarios sobre una fiesta de la negritud. Mexico:Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, Direccion General de CulturasPopulares.

Cuba, Marıa del Carmen. 1996. El castellano hablado en Chincha. Lima: UniversidadNacional Mayor de San Marcos, Escuela de Posgrado.

Cubena (Carlos Guillermo Wilson). 1981. Chombo. Miami: Ediciones Universal.1990. Los nietos de Felicidad Dolores. Miami: Ediciones Universal.

Cuche, Denys. 1981. Perou negre. Paris: L’Harmattan.

References 315

Curtin, Philip. 1969. The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census. Madison: University ofWisconsin Press.

Cushner, Nicholas. 1980. Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine, and Jesuit Estates of CoastalPeru, 1600–1767. Albany: State University of New York Press.

D’Albuquerque, A. Tenorio. 1953. Cubanismos e brasileirismos. Boletın de la AcademiaCubana de la Lengua 2.268 87.

Dalgado, Sebastiao. 1900–01. Dialecto indo-portugues de Goa. Revista Lusitana6.63–84.

1902–03. Dialecto indo-portugues de Dam o. Ta-ssi-yang-kuo 3.359–67; 5, 515–23,684–94, 746–50.

1906. Dialecto indo-portugues do norte. Revista Lusitana 9.142–66, 193–228.Separata Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional.

1917. Dialecto indo-portugues de Negapatao. Porto: Tipografia Sequeira.1922. Dialecto Indo-portugues de Goa. Rio de Janeiro: J. Leite and C. Facsimile edn.

Damasceno, Darcy. 1970. Vilancicos seiscentistas. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional,Colecao Rodolfo Garcia.

Damiani, Bruno. 1975. Francisco Delicado. New York: Twayne.Davidson, Basil. 1980. The African Slave Trade. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.Davidson, David. 1973. Negro slave control and resistance in colonial Mexico,

1519–1650. Maroon Societies, ed. Richard Price, 94–97. New York: AnchorPress/Doubleday.

Davis, Raymond. 1980. West Indian workers on the Panama Canal: a split laborinterpretation. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.

D’Ayalla, Frederico Diniz. 1888. Goa antiga e moderna. Lisbon: Typographia do Jornaldo Commercio.

DeBose, Charles. 1975. Papiamentu: a Spanish-based creole. Ph.D. dissertation, Stan-ford University.

1983. Samana English: a dialect that time forgot. Berkeley Linguistics Society,Proceedings 9.47–53.

1992. Samana English from an Afro-centric perspective. Presented at the Ninth Bien-nial Conference of the Society for Caribbean Linguistics, Cave Hill, Barbados,August 1992.

1995. Creole features in rural Samana English. Presented at the annual meeting of theSociety for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, New Orleans, January 7, 1995.

Degetau, Federico. 1925. Cuentos pedagogicos y literarios. San Juan: Editorial PuertoRico Ilustrado.

Deive, Carlos Esteban. 1980. La esclavitud del negro en Santo Domingo (1492–1844),tomo I. Santo Domingo: Museo del Hombre Dominicano.

1989a. Los guerrilleros negros: esclavos fugitivos y cimarrones en Santo Domingo.Santo Domingo: Fundacion Cultural Dominicana.

Del Busto Duthurburu, Jose Antonio. 2001. Breve historia de los negros del Peru. Lima:Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Peru.

Del Castillo Matthieu, Nicolas. 1981. La llave de las Indias. Bogota: Editorial El Tiempo.De la Cabada, Juan. 1980. La guaranducha (comparsa carnavalesca de Campeche).

Culiacan: Universidad Autonoma de Sinaloa.De la Cruz, Josefina. 1978. La sociedad dominicana de finales de siglo a traves de la

novela. Santo Domingo: Editora Cosmos.

316 References

De la Guardia, Roberto. 1977. Los negros en el istmo de Panama. Panama: EdicionesInstituto Nacional de Cultura.

De la Iglesia, Alvaro. 1969. Tradiciones cubanas. Havana: Instituto del Libro.De la Torriente, Lolo. 1946. La Habana de Cecilia Valdes (siglo XIX). Havana: Jesus

Montero, Editor.Delgado Aparicio, Luis. 2000. La africanıa en America. Lima: Fondo Editorial del

Congreso del Peru.Del Rosario, Ruben. 1956. La lengua de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Biblioteca de Autores

Puertorriquenos, 2nd edn.De Marıa, Isidoro. 1976. Montevideo antiguo: tradiciones y recuerdos, tomo I.

Montevideo: Ministerio de Educacion y Cultura. [First edn. 1889].Delicado, Francisco. 1975. Retrato de la locana andaluza. Critical edn by Bruno Damiani

and Giovanni Allegra. Madrid: Ediciones Jose Porrua Turanzas.Deprez, Viviane and Amy Pierce. 1993. Negation and functional projections in early

grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 24.25–67.1982. Autenticidad de algunos negros y mulatos de Cecilia Valdes. In Alvarez, ed.,

229–32.Dias, Pedro. 1697. Arte da lingua de Angola. Lisbon: Officina de Miguel Deslandes.Dıaz Sanchez, Ramon. 1961. Cumboto. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria.Dıaz Soler, Luis. 1981. Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico. 2nd edn. Rıo

Piedras: Editorial Universitaria.Dıez Borque, Jose Marıa. 1978. Diego Sanchez de Badajoz, Farsas. Madrid: Catedra.Dıez Castillo, Luis. 1968. Los cimarrones y la esclavitud en Panama. Panama: Editorial

Litografica.Dipp, Hugo and Marcio Maggiolo. 1982. The historical approach to the study of

Dominican culture. In Caribbean Cultures, 262–75. Paris: UNESCO.Domınguez, Luis Arturo. 1989. Vivencia de un rito loango en el Tambu. Caracas: Talleres

de Hijos de Ramiro Paz.Donaire Vizarreta, Juan. 1987. Campina iquena, aspectos folkloricos. Lima: Talleres

Graficos de ITAL PERU.Donghi de Halperin, Renata. 1925. Contribucion al estudio del italianismo en la

Republica Argentina. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad de Buenos Aires.Drolet, Patricia. 1980a. The Congo ritual of northeastern Panama: an Afro-American

expressive structure of cultural adaptation. Ph.D. dissertation, University ofIllinois.

1980b. El ritual congo del noroeste de Panama: una estructura afro-americana expre-siva de adaptacion cultural. Panama: Instituto Nacional de Cultura.

Duffy, James. 1961. Portuguese Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Dunzo, Annette Ivory. 1974. Blacks of sub-Saharan African origin in Spain. Ph.D.

dissertation, University of California Los Angeles.Echevarrıa Alvarado, Felix. 1984. La plena. Santurce: Express Offset and Printing Ser-

vices.Eltis, David. 1977. The export of slaves from Africa, 1821–1843. Journal of Economic

History 37.409–33.Eltis, David, Stephen Behrendt, David Richardson, Herbert Klein, eds. 1999. The Trans-

Atlantic Slave Trade: a Database on CD-ROM. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

References 317

Emmer, P. C. 1973. The history of the Dutch slave trade: a bibliographical survey.Journal of Economic History 32.729–738.

Endruschat, Annette. 1990. Studien zur portugiesischen Sprache in Angola. Frankfurtam Main: Verlag Teo Ferrer de Mesquita.

Escalante, Aquiles. 1954. Notas sobre el Palenque de San Basilio, una comunidad negraen Colombia. Divulgaciones Etnologicas (Barranquilla) 3.207–359.

1964. El negro en Colombia. Bogota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultadde Sociologıa.

Escalona, Rafael. 1883a. Amor a la pompadour. San Juan: Imprenta de Carlos GonzalezFont.

1883b. Flor de una noche. San Juan: Imprenta de Carlos Gonzalez Font.Escobar, Alberto. 1978. Variaciones sociolinguısticas del castellano en el Peru. Lima:

Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.Espinosa, Aurelio. 1909. Studies in New Mexico Spanish, part 1: phonology. Bulletin of

the University of New Mexico 1.47–162. Translated and printed as “Estudios sobreel espanol de Nuevo Mejico” in Biblioteca de Dialectologıa Hispanoamericana 1(1930), 19–313.

Estenssoro Fuchs, Juan Carlos. 1988. Musica y comportamiento festivo de la poblacionnegra en Lima colonial. Cuadernos Hispanoamericans 451–52.160–68.

Estermann, Carlos. 1963. Aculturacao linguıstica no sul de Angola. Portugal em Africa20.8–14.

Estrada y Zenea, Ildefonso. 1980. El quitrın. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas.Estupinan Tello, Julio. 1967. El negro en Esmeraldas. Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecua-

toriana.Fabian, Johannes. 1986. Language and Colonial Power: the Appropriation of Swahili in

the Former Belgian Congo 1880–1938. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.1990. History from Below: the “Vocabulary of Elisabethville” by Andre Yav.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Fayer, Joan. 1990. Nigerian Pidgin English in Old Calabar in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries. Pidgin and Creole Tense-Mood-Aspect Systems, ed. JohnVictor Singler, 185–202. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Feijoo, Samuel, ed. 1960. Cuentos populares cubanos, tomo I. Santa Clara: UniversidadCentral de Las Villas.

1965. Sabidurıa guajira. Havana: Editorial Universitaria.1979. Cuentos cubanos de humor. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas.1980. Cuarteta y decima. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas.1981. Cuentos populares cubanos de humor. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas.

Feldman, Heidi. 2001. Black rhythms of Peru: staging cultural memory throughmusic and dance, 1956–2000. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, LosAngeles.

Felgas, Helio Esteves. 1958. Historia do Congo portugues. Carmona.Fernandez, P. L. 1951. Diccionario espanol-kombe. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios

Africanos.Fernandez Marrero, Jorge. 1987. Ein historiographisches Dokument zur “Lengua Bozal”

in Kuba: el Catecismo de los Negros bozales (1795). Beitrage zur Afrolusitanistikund Kreolistik, ed. Matthias Perl, 37–45. Berlin: Akademie der Wisschschaften derDDR, Zentralinstitut fur Sprachwissenschaft, Linguistische Studien 172.

318 References

Fernandez Martın, Luis. 1988. Comediantes, esclavos y moriscos en Valladolid siglosXVI y XVII. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.

Fernandez Repetto, Francisco and Genny Negroe Sierra. 1995. Una poblacion perdidaen la memoria: los negros de Yucatan. Merida: Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan.

Ferrara, Mario. 1950. Linguaggio di schiave del quattrocento. Studi di filologia italiana8.320–28.

Ferraz, Luis Ivens. 1979. The Creole of Sao Tome. Johannesburg: WitwatersrandUniversity Press.

1984. The substrate of Annobonese. African Studies 43.119–136.Ferreira, Jose dos Santos. 1978. Papia cristam di Macao. Macao: n. p.Ferreras, Ramon Alberto. 1982. Negros (media isla: 4). Santo Domingo: Editorial del

Nordeste.Ferro, Gaetano. 1991. Per una geografia storica degli insediamenti liguri in Porto-

gallo e nella penisola iberica meridionale, nell’eta delle scoperte. Mare Liberum2.37–41.

Fiaga, Kwasi. 1976. Grammaire Eve. Lome: Institut National de la RechercheScientifique.

Figueroa Navarro, Alfredo. 1978. Dominio y sociedad en el Panama colombiano(1821–1903). Panama: Impresora Panama.

Flores Galindo, Alberto. 1984. Aristocracia y plebe: Lima, 1760–1830: (estructura declases y sociedad colonial). San Isidro, Peru: Mosca Azul.

Florez, Luis. 1946. Resena de American Spanish Syntax. Boletın del Instituto Caro yCuervo 2.372–85.

1960. Observaciones sobre la pronunciacion del espanol en el Departamento deBolıvar (Colombia). Revista Colombiana de Folclor 2.157–59.

Fonfrıas, Ernesto Juan. 1963. Guasima, cuadros jıbaros. San Juan: Editorial Club de laPrensa.

Fontanella de Weinberg, Marıa Beatriz. 1987a. El espanol bonaerense: cuatro siglos deevolucion linguıstica (1580–1980). Buenos Aires: Hachette.

1987b. Variedades linguısticas usadas por la poblacion negra rioplatense. Anuario deLinguıstica Hispanica (Valladolid) 3.55–66.

Fortun de Ponce, Julia Elena. 1957. La navidad en Bolivia. La Paz: Ministerio de Edu-cacion.

Fortune, Armando. 1993. Obra selecta. Panama: Instituto Nacional de Cultura.Foulche-Delbosc, R., ed. 1919. Les romancerillos de la Bibliotheque Ambrosienne.

Revue Hispanique 45.510–624.Franca, Bento da. 1897. Macau e os seus habitantes, relacoes com Timor. Lisbon:

Imprensa Nacional.Franceschi, Vıctor. 1956. Carbones. Panama: Departamento de Bellas Artes y Publica-

ciones del Ministerio de Educacion.Franco, Jose. 1959. Folklore criollo y afrocubano. Havana: Junta Nacional de Arque-

ologıa y Etnologıa.1985. Comercio clandestino de esclavos. Havana: Editora de Ciencias Sociales.

Franco Silva, Alfonso. 1979. Registro documental sobre la esclavitud sevillana(1453–1513). Seville: Universidad de Sevilla.

Franco Silva, Alfonso. 1980. Los esclavos de Sevilla. Seville: Diputacion Provincial deSevilla.

References 319

Franklin, Robert. 1943. Ecuador: Portrait of a People. New York: Doubleday.Friedemann, Nina de. 1992. Huellas de africanıa en Colombia: nuevos escenarios de

investigacion. Thesaurus 47.543–60.1993. La saga del negro: presencia africana en Colombia. Santa Fe de Bogota:

Instituto de Genetica Humana, Facultad de Medecina, Pontificia Universidad Jave-rianana.

Friedemann, Nina de and Jaime Arocha. 1995. Colombia. In Minority Rights Group,ed., 47–76.

Friedemann, Nina S. de and Carlos Patino Rosselli. 1983. Lengua y sociedad en elPalenque de San Basilio. Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

Frisancho Pineda, Ignacio. 1983. Negros en el altiplano puneno. Puno: Editorial “SamuelFrisancho Pineda.”

Fuentes de Ho, Gloria. 1976. El bilinguismo y sus facetas. Cohen, ed. (1976: 99–108).Galan, Natalio. 1979. Cuba y sus sones. Valencia: Pre-Textos.Galvez Ronceros, Antonio. 1975. Monologo desde las tinieblas. Lima: Inti-Sol Editores.

1986. Monologo para Jutito. Lima: Lluvia Editores.Garay Arellano, Ezio. 1988a. La elite economica de los negros en Guayaquil de 1741 a

1765. In Savoia, ed., 113–21.1988b. Los negros en Guayaquil en 1850. In Savoia, ed., 123–33.1992. Dieciseis anos de historia documentada de las compraventas, cartas de horro y

libertad de los negros de Guayaquil en el siglo XVII (1630–1646). In Savoia, ed.,183–202.

Garcıa, Juan. 1980. Decimas de Esmeraldas. Quito: Cuadernos Afro-Ecuatorianos.1982. La poesıa negrista en el Ecuador. Esmeraldas: Banco Central del Ecuador.

Garcıa, Rosaura. 1990. La poblacion negra de Quito a fines de la colonia. In Savoia, ed.,49–56.

Garcıa Gonzalez, Jose. 1974. Remanentes linguısticos musundis: un estudio descriptivo.Islas 44.193–246.

Garcıa Gonzalez, Jose and Gema Valdes Acosta. 1978. Restos de lenguas bantues en laregion central de Cuba. Islas 59.3–49.

Garcıa Herrera, Rosalıa. 1972. Observaciones etnologicas de dos sectas religiosasafrocubanas en una comunidad lajera, La Guinea. Islas 43.143–81.

Gaudioso, Matteo. 1992. La schiavitu domestica in Sicilia dopo i normanni. Catania:Giuseppe Maimone Editore.

Gavaldon, Lourdes. 1970. Aspectos foneticos del habla de Muzquiz, Coahuila. Anuariode Letras 8.219–24.

Gelabert, Francisco de Paula. 1875. Cuadros de costumbres cubanas. Havana: Imprentade la Botica de Santo Domingo.

1984. Un chino, una mulata, y unas ranas. Costumbristas cubanos del siglo XIX, ed.Salvador Bueno, 459–63. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho.

Gifford, Douglas. 1973. Field notes on Chaco Spanish. Studia Iberica, Festschrift furHans Flasche, eds. Karl Hermann Korner and Klaus Ruhl, 166 74. Bern: Francke.

Gili Gaya, Samuel. 1960. Funciones gramaticales en el habla infantil. Rıo Piedras:Universidad de Puerto Rico. Publicaciones pedagogicas, serie II, numero 24.

1972. Estudios sobre lenguaje infantil. Barcelona: Bibliograf.Gioffre, Domenico. 1971. Il mercato degli schiavi a Genova nel secolo XV. Genova:

Fratelli Bozzi.

320 References

Giron, Socorro. n.d. El tema del negro en la literatura puertorriquena. Unpublishedmanuscript, Coleccion Puertorriquena, University of Puerto Rico Library, RıoPiedras.

Giron, Socorro. 1991. Vida y obra de Ramon Mendez Quinones. San Juan: Instituto deCultura Puertorriquena. 3rd edn.

Gobierno Municipal de la Paz. 1993. El negro no es un color, es una saya. La Paz:Gobierno Municipal de La Paz.

Golibart, Pablo. 1976a. Orıgenes de la vocalizacion en el habla cibaena. Eme Eme22.127–43.

1976b. Cibaeno vocalization. M.A. thesis, University of Kansas.Gomez de Toledo, Gaspar. 1973. Tercera parte de la tragicomedia de Celestina, ed. Mac

Barrick. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Gomez Garcıa, Marıa Carmen and Juan Marıa Martın Vergara. 1993. La esclavitud en

Malaga entre los siglos XVII y XVIII. Malaga: Excma. Diputacion Provincial deMalaga.

Goncalves, Perpetua. 1983. Situacao actual da lıngua portuguesa em Mocambique.Actas do Congresso sobre a Situacao Actual da Lıngua Portuguesa no Mundo, t. I,243–52. Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Lıngua Portuguesa.

Gonzalez, Carlisle y Celso Benavides. 1982. ¿Existen rasgos criollos en el hablade Samana? El espanol del Caribe, ed. Orlando Alba, 105–32. Santiago de losCaballeros: Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra.

Gonzalez de Leon, Felix. 1852. Historia crıtica y descriptiva de las cofradıas depenitencia, sangre y luz, fundadas en la ciudad de Sevilla. Seville: Imprenta, yLibrerıa de Antonio Alvarez.

Gonzalez Echegaray, Carlos. 1959. Estudios guineos, t. 1: filologıa. Madrid: Institutode Estudios Africanos.

1960. Morfologıa y sintaxis de la lengua bujeba. Madrid: Instituto de EstudiosAfricanos.

Gonzalez Huguet, Lydia and Jean Rene Baudry. 1967. Voces “bantu” en el vocabulario“palero.” Etnologıa y Folklore 3.31–65.

Goodman, Morris. 1987a. Pidgin origins reconsidered. Journal of Pidgin and CreoleLanguages 2.149–60.

Goodman, Morris. 1987b. The Portuguese element in the American creoles. Pidginand Creole Languages, Essays in Memory of John E. Reinecke, ed. Glenn Gilbert,361–405. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Goslinga, Cornelius. 1979. A Short History of the Netherlands Antilles and Surinam.The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

1990. The Dutch in the Caribbean and in Surinam 1791/5–1942. Assen/Maastricht:van Gorcum.

Graceras, Ulises. 1980. Informe preliminar sobre la situacion de la comunidad negraen el Uruguay. Montevideo: Universidad de la Republica, Instituto de EstudiosSociales.

Granda, German de. 1968. La tipologıa “criolla” de dos hablas del area linguısticahispanica. Thesaurus 23.193–205.

1969. Posibles vıas directas de introduccion de africanismos en el “habla de negro”literaria castellana. Thesaurus 24.459–69.

1970. Un temprano testimonio sobre las hablas “criollas” en Africa y America. The-saurus 25.1–11.

References 321

1971. Algunos datos sobre la pervivencia del “criollo” en Cuba. Boletın de la RealAcademia Espanola 51.481–91.

1972a. Estado actual y perspectivas de la investigacion sobre hablas criollas enHispanoamerica. Anuario de Letras 10.5–27.

1972b. Estructuras linguısticas y relacion genetica en un habla “criolla” deHispanoamerica. Filologıa 16.119–33.

1973a. Papiamento en Hispanoamerica (siglos XVII–XIX). Thesaurus 28.1–13.1973b. Materiales lexicos para la determinacion de la matriz africana de la “lengua

congo” de Cuba. Revista Espanola de Linguıstica 3.55–79.1976. Algunos rasgos morfosintacticos de posible origen criollo en el habla de areas

hispanoamericanas de poblacion negra. Anuario de Letras 14.5–22.1977. Estudios sobre un area dialectal hispanoamericana de poblacion negra: las

tierras bajas occidentales de Colombia. Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.1979. Calcos sintacticos del guaranı en el espanol del Paraguay. Nueva Revista de

Filologıa Hispanica 28.267–86.1988. Sociedad, historia y lengua en el Paraguay. Bogota: Instituto Caro y

Cuervo.1989. Condicionamiento Kikoongo de un fenomeno fonetico en el criollo palenquero.

Anuario de Linguıstica Hispanica 5.49–57.1991. Reexamen de un problema de la dialectologıa del Caribe hispanico: el origen

de la “vocalizacion cibaena” en su contexto antillano. Nueva Revista de FilologıaHispanica 39.771–89.

Graullera Sanz, Vicente. 1978. La esclavitud en Valencia en los siglos XVI y XVII.Valencia: Instituto Valenciano de Estudios Historicos.

Green, Katherine. 1997. Non-standard Dominican Spanish: evidence of partial restruc-turing. Ph.D. dissertation, City University of New York.

1999. The creole pronoun i in non-standard Dominican Spanish. Lenguas criollos debase lexical espanola y portuguesa, ed. Klaus Zimmermann, 373–87. Frankfurt:Vervuert.

2001. The past tense marker a: Palenquero in San Cristobal (Dominican Republic).Palenque, Cartagena y Afro-Caribe: historia y lengua, eds. Yves Monino andArmin Schwegler, 137–48. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

Greenberg, Joseph. 1966. The Languages of Africa. Bloomington and The Hague:Indiana University Press/Mouton.

Guerra, Armando. 1938. Presencia negra en la poesıa popular cubana del siglo XIX.Havana: Imprenta y Papelerıa “Alfa.”

Guerrero, Manuel Vicente. 1764. Comedia famosa: el negro valiente en Flandes,segunda parte. Valencia: Imprenta de la Viuda de Josef de Orga.

Guete, Jaime de. 1913. Comedia intitulada Tesorina. Teatro espanol del siglo XVI, tomoprimero, 81–170. Madrid: Sociedad de Bibliofilos.

Guimarais, A. J. Goncalvez, ed. 1910–17. Cancioneiro geral de Garcia de Resende.Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidad.

Guirao, Ramon. n. d. Cuentos y leyendas negras de Cuba. Havana: Ediciones Mirador.Guirao, Ramon. 1938. Orbita de la poesıa afrocubana 1928–1937. Havana: Ucar

Garcıa.Guitarte, Guillermo. 1971. Notas para la historia del yeismo. Sprache und Geschichte,

Festschrift fur Harri Meier zum 65. Geburtstag, 179–98. Munich: Wilhelm FinkVerlag.

322 References

Gunther, Wilfried. 1973. Das portugiesische Kreolisch der Jlha do Prıncipe. Marburgan der Lahn: Selbatverlag.

Guthrie, Malcolm. 1948. The Classification of the Bantu Languages. London: Dawsons;Oxford University Press for the IAI.

1951. Grammaire et dictionnaire de lingala. Leopoldville: Librarie Evangelique.1953. The Bantu Languages of Western Equatorial Africa. London: Oxford University

Press.1967–71. Comparative Bantu. 4 vols. Farnborough: Gregg International Publishers.1971. Western Bantu languages. Current Trends in Linguistics 7, Linguistics in Sub-

Saharan Africa, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 357–66. The Hague: Mouton.Gutierrez Avila, Miguel Angel. 1988. Corrido y violencia entre los afromestizos de

la Costa Chica de Guerrero y Oaxaca. Chilpancingo: Universidad Autonoma deGuerrero.

Guzman Navarro, Arturo. 1982. La trata esclavista en el istmo de Panama durante elsiglo XVIII. Panama: Editorial Universitaria.

Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo. 1992. Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress.

Hancock, Ian. 1973. Malacca creole Portuguese: a brief transformational outline. Te Reo16.23–44.

1975. Malacca creole Portuguese: Asian, African or European? AnthropologicalLinguistics 17.211–36.

1980. Texas Gullah: the creole English of the Bracketville Afro-Seminoles.Perspectives on American English, ed. J. L. Dillard, 305–33. The Hague: Mouton.

1986. On the classification of Afro-Seminole creole. Language Variety in the South:Perspectives in Black and White, eds. Michael Montgomery and Guy Bailey, 85–101. University, AL: University of Alabama Press.

Harris, Charles. 1951. Papiamentu phonology. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University.Harth-Terre, Emilio. 1971. Presencia del negro en el virreinato del Peru. Lima: Editorial

Universitaria.1973. Negros e indios: un estamento social ignorado del Peru colonial. Lima:

Librerıa/Editorial Juan Mejıa Baca.Hartog, J. 1961. Aruba Past and Present. Oranjestad: D. J. de Wit.

1968. Curacao, from Colonial Independence to Autonomy. Aruba: de Wit, Inc.Hassaurek, Frederick. 1868. Four Years among Spanish-Americans. New York: Hurd

and Houghton.Hatherly, Ana. 1990. Poemas em lıngua de preto dos seculos XVII e XVIII. Lisboa:

Quimera.Heine, Bernd. 1976. A Typology of African Languages Based on the Order of Meaningful

Elements. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag.Henrıquez Urena, Max. 1951. El ideal de los trinitarios. Madrid: EDISOL.Henrıquez Urena, Pedro. 1940. El espanol en Santo Domingo. Buenos Aires: Biblioteca

de Dialectologıa Hispanoamericana, V.Henry, George. 1891. Grammar of Chinyanja. Aberdeen: G. and W. Fraser.Herbert, Robert. 1986. Language Universals, Markedness Theory, and Natural Phonetic

Processes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

References 323

Hernandez, Marıa Isabel. 1981. El habla de una zona rural de Barlovento en su entornosocio-cultural. Tesis de licenciatura, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Facultadde Humanidades y Educacion, Escuela de Letras.

Hernandez Cata, Alfonso. 1946. ‘Los chinos.’ Cuentos cubanos contemporaneos, ed.Jose Antonio Portuondo, 27–33. Mexico: Editorial Leyenda.

Hernandez-Chavez, Eduardo and Gilberto Perez. 1991. Epenthetic front vowels in NewMexican Spanish: archaism or innovation. Presented at the 12th conference ElEspanol en los Estados Unidos, Los Angeles.

Hernandez Soto, Carlos. 1996. Morir en Villa Mella: ritos funerarios afrodomini-canos. Santo Domingo: Centro para la Investigacion y Accion Social en el Caribe(CIASCA).

Herrera Casasus, Marıa Luisa. 1989. Presencia y esclavitud del negro en la huasteca.Ciudad Victoria: Universidad Autonoma de Tamaulipas.

1991. Piezas de Indias: la esclavitud negra en Mexico. Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzanode Cultura.

Herskovits, Melville. 1931. On the provenance of the Portuguese in Saramacca Tongo.De West-Indische Gids 12.545–57.

1941. The Myth of the Negro past. New York: Harper and Brothers.Hesseling, D. C. 1933. Papiamento en Negerhollands. Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche

Taal- en Letterkunde 52.265–88.Hidalgo Alzamora, Laura. 1982. Decimas esmeraldenas. Quito: Banco Central del

Ecuador.Hills, E. C. 1906. New Mexican Spanish. PMLA 21.706–53.Hill, Jane. 1987. Spanish as a pronominal argument language: the Spanish interlan-

guage of Mexicano speakers. Coyote Papers (University of Arizona, LinguisticsDepartment) 6.68–90.

Hilton, Anne. 1985. Kingdom of Kongo. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Hinnebusch, Thomas. 1989. Bantu. In Bendor-Samuel, ed., 450–57.Hitti, Philip. 1963. History of the Arabs. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 8th edn.Hoetink, H. 1972. El pueblo dominicano 1850–1900. Santiago de los Caballeros:

Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra, 2nd edn.1988. Pidgins and Creoles. Vol. 1: Theory and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.1989. Pidgins and Creoles. Vol. II: Reference Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.1990. Features in the noun phrase common to the Atlantic creoles. Linguistics 28.

867–81.Horta, Jose da Silva. 1991a. A imagem do africano pelos portugueses antes dos contactos.

O confronto do olhar: o encontro dos povos na epoca das navegacoes portuguesas,eds. Luıs de Albuquerque, Antonio Luıs Ferronha, Jose da Silva Horta and RuiLoureiro, 43–70. Lisbon: Caminho.

1991b. A representacao do africano na literatura de viagens, do Senegal a Serra Leoa(1453–1508). Mare Liberum 2.209–339.

Humboldt, Baron A. de. 1827. Ensayo polıtica sobre la isla de Cuba. Reprinted in 1969by Mnemosyne Publishing Inc., Miami.

1956. The Island of Cuba. New York: Derby and Jackson.

324 References

Hunefeldt, Christine. 1992. Lasmanuelos, vida cotidiana de una familia negra en laLima del S. XIX. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Hyams, Nina and Kenneth Wexler. 1993. On the grammatical basis for null subjects inchild language. Linguistic Inquiry 24.421–59.

Instituto Nacional de Cultura y Bellas Artes (INCIBA). 1970. Poesıa afrovenezolana.Caracas: n. p.

Isaacs, Jorge. 1967. Marıa. Mexico: Editorial Epoca.Jackson, Kenneth David. 1990. Sing without Shame: Oral Traditions in Indo-Portuguese

Creole Verse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Jamieson, Martın. 1992. Africanismos en el espanol de Panama. Anuario de Linguıstica

Hispanica (Valladolid) 8.149–70.Jammes, Robert. 1967. Etudes sur l’œuvre poetique de Don Luis de Gongora y Argote.

Bordeaux: Feret et fils.Jammes, Robert, ed. 1980. Luis de Gongora, Letrillas. Madrid: Castalia.Janson, Tore. 1984, Articles and plural formation in creoles: change and universals.

Lingua 64.291–323.Jason, Howard. 1965, The negro in Spanish literature to the end of the “Siglo de Oro.”

Atenea 3–4.13–21.Jenewari, Charles E. W. 1989. Ijoid. In Bendor-Samuel, ed., 105–18.Jeroslow, Elizabeth. 1974. Rural Cearense Portuguese: a study of one variety of non-

standard Brazilian speech. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University.Jibaja Rubio, Leopoldo. 1988. Casos de compra y venta de esclavos en la sierra

ecuatoriana (1778–1838). In Savoia, ed., 189–92.1990. Esclavitud en la Sierra 1738–1816. In Savoia, ed., 107–19.

Jimenez Sabater, Max. 1975. Mas datos sobre el espanol en la Republica Dominicana.Santo Domingo: Ediciones Intec.

Jimenez Torres, Julieta. 1998. El villanciquero mayor de Espana. Sor Juana y sumundo: una mirada actual, ed. Carmen Beatriz Lopez-Portillo, 275–84. Mexico:Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana/Fondo de Cultura Economica.

Johnson, Amandus. 1930. Mbundu English-Portuguese Dictionary with Grammar andSyntax. Philadelphia: International Printing Company.

Johnson, Lemuel. 1969. The Devil, the Gargoyle, and the Buffoon: the Negro as Metaphorin Western Literature. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press.

Joly, Luz Graciela. 1981. The ritual play of the Congos of north-central Panama: its socio-linguistic implications. Sociolinguistic Working Papers (Southwest EducationalDevelopment Laboratory, Austin, Texas), no. 85.

Jones, Adelaida. 1976. Same but different: Phonological comparison of Black Englishand Panamanian English Creole. In Cohen (ed.) 1976, 189–202.

Juanola, Joaquın. 1890. Primer paso a la lengua bubı. Madrid: A. Perez Dubrull.Junod, Henri. 1896. Grammaire ronga. Lausanne: Imprimerie Georges Bridel et Cie.

Jurado Noboa, Fernando. 1990a. Demografıa y trascendencia del grupo africano en elGuayaquil de 1738. In Savoia, ed., 143–45.

1990b. Esclavitud en la costa pacıfica: Iscuande, Barbacoas, Tumaco y Esmeraldassiglos XVI al XIX. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala.

1992a. Esmeraldas en los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII: sus tres afluentes negros colo-niales. In Savoia, ed., 31–39.

1992b. Una vision global sobre el Chota 1475–1813. In Savoia, ed., 145–54.

References 325

Ka, Omar. 1994. Wolof Phonology and Morphology. Lanham, MD: University Press ofAmerica.

Kany, Charles. 1951. American Spanish Syntax. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2nd edn.

Kihm, Alain. 1994. Kriyol Syntax: the Portuguese-Based Creole Language of Guinea-Bissau. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kiraithe, Jacqueline and Nancy Baden. 1976. Portuguese influences in East Africanlanguages. African Studies 35.5–31.

Klein, Herbert. 1986. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New Yorkand Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klumpp, Kathleen. 1970. Black traders of north highland Ecuador. Afro-AmericanAnthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Norman Whitten, Jr. and J. Szwed,245–62. New York: Free Press.

Knight, Franklin. 1970. Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century. Madison:University of Wisconsin Press.

Komolafe, Benjy, Ainde Kayode Durojayıe, and Ornato Jose da Silva. 1978. A linguagemcorreta dos orixas. Rio de Janeiro: Oxala Artes Graficas Ltda.

Kouwenberg, Silvia and Ian Robertson. 1988. The Marking of tense, mood, and aspectin the Berbice Dutch creole language. Beitrage Zum 4. Essener Kolloquiumuber “Sprach Kontakt, Sprach wandel, Sprach wechsel, Sprach tod,” eds. NorbertBoretzy, Werner Eminger, Thomas Stotz, 151–74. Bochum: Studien verlag Dr. N.Brockmeyer.

Lachatanere, Romulo. 1938. ¡Oh, mıo Yemaya! Manzanillo, Cuba: Editorial “ElArte.”

Ladefoged, Peter. 1968. A Phonetic Study of West African Languages: an Auditory-Instrumental Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laguerre, Enrique. 1935. La llamarada. Aguadilla: Talleres Tipograficos “Ruiz” de F.Ruiz Hernandez.

Langhorne, Elizabeth. 1987. Vieques: History of a Small Island. Vieques: Vieques Con-servation and Historial Trust.

Lanuza, Jose Luis. 1967. Morenada: una historia de la raza africana en el Rıo de laPlata. Buenos Aires: Editorial Schapire.

Lapesa, Rafael. 1980. Historia de la lengua espanola. Madrid: Gredos, 8th edn.Lapique Becali, Zoila. 1979. Musica colonial cubana en las publicaciones periodicas

(1812–1902). Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas.Larrazabal Blanco, Carlos. 1975. Los negros y la esclavitud en Santo Domingo. Santo

Domingo: Julio D. Postigo e hijos, Editores.Larrea Palacın, Arcadio de. 1952. Los negros en la provincia de Huelva. Archivos del

Instituto de Estudios Africanos 6:20.39–57.Laurence, Kemlin. 1974. Is Caribbean Spanish a case of decreolization? Orbis 23.

484–99.Lavandera, Beatriz. 1984. Variacion y significado. Buenos Aires: Hachette.Lavina, Javier, ed. 1989. Doctrina para negros: explicacion de la doctrina cristiana

acomodada a la capacidad de los negros bozales, de Nicolas Duque de Estrada.Barcelona: Sendai.

Law, Robin. 1991. The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550–1750. Oxford: ClarendonPress.

326 References

Lazaro, Vicenzo. 1862. Del traffico e delle condizioni degli schiavi in Venezia nei tempidi mezzo. Miscellanea di storia italiana, tomo I, ed. Regia Deputazione di StoriaPatria, 463–97. Torino: Stamperia Reale.

Leal, Rine. 1975. Teatro bufo, siglo XIX, antologıa, tomo I. Havana: Editorial de Arte yLiteratura.

1982. La selva oscura: de los bufos a la neocolonia. Havana: Editorial Arte yLiteratura.

Lebeaux, David. 1988. Language acquisition and the form of the grammar. Ph.D.dissertation, University of Massachusetts.

Lecompte, Ernesto. 1963. Metodo pratico da lıngua mbundu falada no distrito deBenguela. Coimbra: Grafica de Coimbra.

Leite de Vasconcellos, Jose. 1901. Esquisse d’une dialectologie portugaise. Paris:Aillaud and Co.

1933. Lıngua de preto num texto de Henrique da Mota. Revue Hispanique 81.241–46.

Leiva Vivas, Rafael. 1982. Trafico de esclavos negros a Honduras. Tegucigalpa:Guaymuras.

1993. Presencia negra en Honduras. Presencia africana en Centroamerica, ed. LuzMarıa Martınez Montiel, 113–50. Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y lasArtes.

Lenz, Rodolfo. 1928. El papiamento, la lengua criolla de Curazao. Santiago de Chile:Balcells y Cıa.

Leon, Julio. 1976. Poemas y cartas de los deportados cubanos en la isla de FernandoPoo. Wingate, North Carolina: published by the author.

Leons, William. 1984a. Pluralism and mobility in a Bolivian community. Anthropologi-cal Investigations in Bolivia, 13–27. Greeley, CO: University of Northern Colorado,Museum of Anthropology, Miscellaneous series No. 58.

1984b. Some notes on the demographic history of the Negro in the Bolivian Yungas.Anthropological Investigations in Bolivia, 28–36. Greeley, CO: University ofNorthern Colorado, Museum of Anthropology, Miscellaneous series No. 58.

Lewis, L. S. 1980. The West Indian in Panama: Black Labor in Panama 1850–1914.Washington DC: University Press of America.

Lewis, Marvin. 1992. Ethnicity and Identity in Contemporary Afro-VenezuelanLiterature: a Culturalist Approach. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Likangama, M. 1990. Les Emprunts linguistiques du kikongo au portugais. Taıra 2.91–109.

Liniger-Goumaz, Max. 1988. Breve histoire de la Guinee Equatoriale. Paris: EditionsL’Harmattan.

Lipski, John. 1982. Filibustero: origin and development. Journal of Hispanic Philology6.213–38.

1985a. The Spanish of Equatorial Guinea. Tubingen: Niemeyer.1985b. Black Spanish: the last frontier of Afro America. Crıtica 2:1.53–75.1986a. Golden Age “black Spanish”: existence and coexistence. Afro-Hispanic Review

5(1–2).7–12.1986b. On the weakening of /s/ in bozal Spanish. Neophilologus 70.208–16.1986c. Modern African Spanish phonetics: common features and historical

antecedents. General Linguistics 26.182–95.

References 327

1986d. Linguıstica afroecuatoriana: el valle del Chota. Anuario de Linguıstica His-panica (Valladolid) 2.153–76.

1986e. Convergence and divergence in bozal Spanish. Journal of Pidgin and CreoleLanguages 1.171–203.

1986f. Sobre la construccion ta + infinitivo en el espanol “bozal.” LinguısticaEspanola Actual 8.73–92.

1987a. The Chota Valley: Afro-Hispanic language in highland Ecuador. Latin Amer-ican Research Review 22.155–70.

1987b. The construction ta + infinitive in Caribbean bozal Spanish. Romance Philol-ogy 40.431–50.

1987c. On the origin and use of lan/nan in Caribbean bozal Spanish. Beitraege zurromanischen Philologie 24.281–90.

1988a. On the reduction of /s/ in “black” Spanish. On Spanish Portuguese, andCatalan linguistics, ed. John Staczek, 4–16. Washington: Georgetown UniversityPress.

1988b. Philippine creole Spanish: reassessing the Portuguese element. Zeitschrift furromanische Philologie 104.25–45.

1989. The Speech of THE NEGROS CONGOS of Panama. Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins.

1991a. On the emergence of (a)mı as subject in Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles. Lin-guistic Studies in Medieval Spanish, eds. Ray Harris-Northall and Thomas Cravens,39–61. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies.

1991b. Origen y evolucion de la partıcula ta en los criollos afrohispanicos. Papia1(2).16–41.

1992a. New thoughts on the origins of Zamboangueno (Philippine Creole Spanish).Language Sciences 14:3.197–231.

1992b. Spontaneous nasalization in Afro-Hispanic language. Journal of Pidgin andCreole Languages 7.261–305.

1992c. Origin and development of ta in Afro-Hispanic creoles. Atlantic Meets Pacific:a Global View of Pidginization and Creolization, eds. Francis Byrne and John Holm,217–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

1992d. Sobre el espanol bozal del Siglo de Oro: existencia y coexistencia. Scriptaphilologica in honorem Juan M. Lope Blanch, t. I, 383–96. Mexico: UniversidadNacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1992.

1992e. Pidgin English usage in Equatorial Guinea (Fernando Poo). English WorldWide 13.33–57.

1993. On the non-creole basis for Afro-Caribbean Spanish. Research Paper No. 24,Latin American Institute, University of New Mexico.

1994a. A new perspective on Afro-Dominican Spanish: the Haitian contribution.Research Paper No. 26, University of New Mexico Latin American Institute.

1994b. El espanol afroperuano: eslabon entre Africa y America. Anuario deLinguıstica Hispanica 10.179–216

1994c. Afro-Portuguese pidgin: separating innovation from imitation. Presented at theannual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese(AATSP), Philadelphia, August 1994.

1994d. Tracing Mexican Spanish /s/: a cross-section of history. Language Problemsand Language Planning 18.223–41.

328 References

1995a. Literary “Africanized” Spanish as a research tool: dating consonant reduction.Romance Philology 49.130–67.

1995b. Portuguese language in Angola: luso-creoles’ missing link? Presented at theannual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese(AATSP), San Diego, California, August 1995.

1995c. [round] and [labial] in Spanish and the “free-form” syllable. Linguistics33.283–304.

1996a. Contactos de criollos en el Caribe hispanico: contribuciones al espanol bozal.America Negra 11.31–60.

1996b. Spanish in the Pacific. Atlas of Languages of Intercultural Communication inthe Pacific, Asia, and the Americas, eds. Stephen Wurm, Peter Muhlhausler, andDarrell Tryon, vol. 1, pp. 271–98. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

1997. El lenguaje de los negros congos de Panama y el lumbalu palenquero: funcionsociolinguıstica de criptolectos afrohispanicos. America Negra 14.147–65.

1998a. Latin American Spanish: creolization and the African connection. PALARA(Publications of the Afro-Latin American Research Association) 2.54–78.

1998b. El espanol de los braceros chinos y la problematica del lenguaje bozal. Mon-talban 31.101–39.

1998c. El espanol bozal. America negra: panoramica actual de los estudioslinguısticos sobre variedades criollas y afrohispanas, eds. Matthias Perl and ArminSchwegler, 293–327. Frankfurt: Vervuert.

1999a. Creole-to-creole contacts in the Spanish Caribbean: the genesis of Afro His-panic language. Publications of the Afro-Latin American Research Association(PALARA) 3.5–46.

1999b. El sufijo -ico y las palabras afroibericas ague/awe y aguora/ahuora: rutas deevolucion y entorno dialectologico. El Caribe hispanico: perspectivas linguısticasactuales, ed. Luis Ortiz Lopez, 17–42. Frankfurt: Vervuert.

1999c. Evolucion de los verbos copulativos en el espanol bozal. Lenguas criollos debase lexical espanola y portuguesa, ed. Klaus Zimmermann, 145–76. Frankfurt:Vervuert.

1999d. Sobre la valoracion popular y la investigacion empırica del “espanol negro”caribeno. Identidad cultural y linguıstica en Colombia, Venezuela y en el Caribehispanico, eds. Matthias Perl and Klaus Portl, 271–95. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

1999e. Chinese-Cuban pidgin Spanish: implications for the Afro-creole debate. CreoleGenesis, Attitudes and Discourse, eds. John Rickford and Suzanne Romaine, 215–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

2000a. Bozal Spanish: Restructuring or creolization? Degrees of Restructuring inCreole Languages, eds. Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh and Edgar Schneider, 55–83.Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

2000b. Las cartas congolesas del siglo XVI: un temprano testimonio del contactolinguıstico afro-lusitano. Homenaje al Dr. German de Granda, vol. 2, 925–38.Special number of the Anuario de Linguıstica Hispanica, vols. 12–13 [1996–97].

2000c. Afro-Asian and Afro-indigenous linguistic contacts in Spanish America.Presented at the annual meeting, Afro-Latin American Research Association(ALARA), Port-au-Prince, Haiti, August, 2000.

2000d. Strategies of double negation in Spanish and Portuguese. Presented at SpanishLinguistics Symposium, Indiana University-Bloomington, November, 2000.

References 329

2001a. On the source of the infinitive in Romance-derived pidgins and creoles.Presented at the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL) meeting,Washington, DC, January, 2001.

2001b. From bozal to boricua: implications of Afro Puerto Rican language in litera-ture. Hispania 82.850–59.

2001c. Panorama del lenguaje afrorrioplatense: vıas de evolucion fonetica. Anuariode Lingustica Hispanica 14.281–315.

2002a. Contacto de criollos y la genesis del espanol (afro)caribeno. La Romaniaamericana: procesos linguısticos en situaciones de contacto, eds. Norma Dıaz,Ralph Ludwig, and Stefan Pfander, 53–95. Frankfurt: Vervuert.

2002b. Epenthesis vs. elision in Afro-Iberian language: a constraint-based approachto creole phonology. Current Issues in Romance Languages, eds. Teresa Satterfield,Christina Tortora, and Diana Cresti, 173–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

2002c. Genesis y evolucion de la copula en los criollos afro-ibericos. Palenque, Carta-gena y Afro-Caribe: historia y lengua, eds. Yves Monino and Armin Schwegler,65–101. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

2002d. “Partial” Spanish: strategies of pidginization and simplification (from lin-gua franca to “Gringo Lingo”). Romance Phonology and Variation, eds. CarolineWiltshire and Joaquim Camps, 117–43. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Livi, Ridolfo. 1928. La schiavitu domestica nei tempi di mezzo e ni moderni. Padova:Casa Editrice Dott. Antonio Milani.

Llanos Allende, Victorio. 1962. Marimbembe (el raton y el gato). Barcelona: EdicionesRumbos.

1968. El toromandinga. Barcelona: Ediciones Rumbos.Llorente, M. L. 1994. Materiales para el estudio del patois de Guiria. Licenciatura thesis,

Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, Caracas.1995. El patois de Guria: una lengua criolla del estado Sucre. Montalban

28.7–19.Lobato, Marıa Luisa, ed. 1989. Pedro Calderon de la Barca, teatro comico breve. Kassel:

Edition Reichenberger.Lockhart, James. 1968. Spanish Peru, 1532–1560. Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press.Lopez, Oscar. 1981. La radio en Cuba. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas.Lopez Albujar, Enrique. 1966. Matalache. 3rd edn. Lima: Editorial Juan Mejıa.Lopez Morales, Humberto. 1980. Sobre la pretendida existencia y pervivencia del

“criollo” cubano. Anuario de Letras 18.85–116.1998. La aventura del espanol en America. Madrid: Espase Calpe.

Lopez Prudencio, J., ed. 1910. Recopilacion en metro de Diego Sanchez de Badajoz.Badajoz: Tipografıa de Antonio Arqueros.

1915. Diego Sanchez de Badajoz: estudio crıtico, biografico y bibliografico. Madrid:Tipografıa de la Revista de Archivos.

Lopez-Calo, Jose. 1983. Historia de la musica espanola. Madrid: Alianza.Lopez Mena, Sergio, ed. 1992. Teatro mexicano, historia y dramaturgia. Vol. 10:

Escenificaciones neoclasicas y populares (1797–1825). Mexico: Consejo Nacionalpara la Cultura y las Artes.

Lorenzo Ramos, Antonio. 1976. El habla de los Silos. Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Caja deAhorros de Santa Cruz.

330 References

Lucchini, Enrica. 1990. La merce umana: schiavitu e riscatto dei liguri nel seicento.Rome: Bonacci Editore.

Lucena Salmoral, Manuel. 1994. Sangre sobre piel negra. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala.Luciano, Jose and Humberto Rodrıguez Pastor. 1995. Peru. In Minority Rights Group,

ed., 271–86.Luciano Huapaya, Jose Carlos. 1995. The African presence in Peru. In Saunders and

Moore, eds., 119–30.Luis, William. 1990. Literary Bondage: Slavery in Cuban Narrative. Austin: University

of Texas Press.Luz, Alejandrina da. 1995. Uruguay. In Minority Rights Group, ed., 332–44.

2001. Los conventillos de Barrio Sur y Palermo: mucho mas que casas de inquilinato.Montevideo: Ediciones Odos.

Machado Filho, Aires de Mata. 1964. Onegro e o garimpo em Minas Gerais. Rio deJaneiro: Editora Civilizacao Brasileira.

MacLean y Estenos, Roberto. 1947. Negros en el Peru. Lima: Imprenta D. M.MacCurdy, Ramond. 1950. The Spanish Dialect of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana.

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico.Mack, Isabel. 1973. The Segunda Celestina of Feliciano de Silva: a study and an edition.

Ph.D. dissertation, University of Exeter.Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University.Madriz Galindo, Fernando. 1969. Una vision de Barlovento. Los Teques: Gobierno del

Estado Miranda, Ediciones Casa de la Cultura.Magarinos, Santiago, ed. 1944. Canciones populares de la Edad de Oro. Barcelona:

Ediciones Lauro.Magarinos Cervantes, Alejandro. 1878. Album de poesıas coleccionadas, con algunas

breves notas. Montevideo: Imprenta La Tribuna.Malpica La Barca, Domingo. 1890. En el cafetal. Havana: Tipografıa de “Los ninos

huerfanos.”Manessy, Gabriel. 1964/1985. Remarques sur la Pluralisation du nom en creole et dans

les langues africaines. Etudes Creoles 8.129–43.Manrique Cabrera, Francisco. 1967. Poemas de mi tierra. San Juan: Editorial del Depart-

mento de Instruccion Publica.Manso, Visconde de Paiva. 1877. Historia do Congo (documentos). Lisbon: Typographia

da Academia.Mansour, Monica. 1973. La poesıa negrista. Mexico: Ediciones Era.Marazzi, Rosa. n.d. El impacto de la inmigracion a Puerto Rico 1800–1830: analisis

estadıstico. Rıo Piedras: Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, publication No. 14.Marchese, Lynell. 1989. Kru. In Bendor-Samuel, ed., pp. 119–39.Marınez, Pablo. 1986. Relaciones dominico-haitianas y raıces historico culturales

africanas en la Republica Dominicana: bibliografıa basica. Santo Domingo: Edi-tora Universitaria.

Marques, Irene Guerra. 1983. Algumas consideracoes sobre a problematica linguısticaem Angola. Actas do Congresso sobre a Situacao Actual da Lıngua Portuguesa noMundo, t. I, 205–23. Lisbon: Instituto de Cultura e Lıngua Portuguesa.

Marrero Aristy, Ramon. 1939. Over. Ciudad Trujillo: Imp. “La Opinion, C. por A.”Marrero Lobinot, Francisco. 1984. Nuestros ancestros de las Antillas francesas. Panama:

n. p.

References 331

Martınez Gordo, Isabel. 1982. Lengua “bozal” como lengua criolla: un problemalinguıstico. Santiago 46.47–53.

1985a. Los cantos de las tumbas francesas desde el punto de vista linguıstico. Santiago59.33–71.

1985b. Situaciones de bilinguismo en Cuba. Anuario L/L 16.334–44.1989. Algunas consideraciones sobre Patoi s cubain de F. Boytel Jambu. Havana:

Editorial Academia.Martınez Maranto, Alfredo. 1995. Dios pinta como quiere: identidad y cultura en un

pueblo afromestizo de Veracruz. In Martınez Montiel, ed., 525–73.Martınez Montiel, Luz Marıa, ed. 1995. Presencia africana en Mexico. Mexico: Consejo

Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.Martınez Montiel, Luz Marıa and Juan Carlos Reyes, eds. 1993. Memoria del III Encuen-

tro Nacional de Afromexicanistas. Colima: Gobierno del Estado de Colima/ConsejoNacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

Martınez Suarez, Juan de Dios. 1983. Chimbangueles: antecedentes y orıgenes.Maracaibo: Coleccion Afrovenezolana no 1.

1986a. Las barbuas: mitos y leyendas de origen africano presentes en el sur del Lagode Maracaibo, tomo I. Maracaibo: Juan de Dios Martınez S.

1986b. Presencia africana en el sur del Lago de Maracaibo (Zulia, Merida y Trujillo).Maracaibo: Juan de Dios Martınez S.

1994. Las barbuas. Maracaibo: Gobernacion del Estado Zulia, Universidad del Zulia.Martins, Fermino. 1939. Folclore do Concelho de Vinhais, vol. 2. Lisbon: Imprensa

Nacional.Martins, Manuel de Morais. 1958a. Contribucao para o estudo da influencia do portugues

na lıngua quicongo. Garcia de Orta 6.33–51.1958b. Contacto de culturas no Congo portugues. Lisbon: Junta de Investigacoes de

Ultramar.Masini, Jose. 1962. La esclavitud negra en Mendoza. Mendoza: Tallers Graficos

D’Accurzio.Mason, J. Alden and Aurelio Espinosa. 1918. Porto Rican folklore: decimas, Christ-

mas carols, nursery rhymes and other songs. Journal of American Folklore34.143–208.

Massa, Carlo. 1908. La schiavitu in terra di Bari (dal XV al XVIII secolo). Trani: DittaTipografica Editrice.

Matamoro, Blas. 1976. Orıgenes musicales: raıces negras del tango. La historia deltango, t. I, 55–79. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor.

Mayer, Vincent, Jr. 1974. The Black on New Spain’s Northern Frontier: San Jose deParral 1631 to 1641. Durango, Colorado: Fort Lewis College, Center of SouthwestStudies.

Mayo, Carlos, ed. 1980. Poblaciones esclavas de Cordoba colonial, siglo XVIII. Mardel Plata: Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata.

McLaren, J. 1906. A Grammar of the Kaffir Language. London: Longmans, Green andCo.

McSpadden, George. 1934. Some semantic and philological facts of the Spanish spokenin Chilili, New Mexico. University of New Mexico Bulletin 5(2).72–102.

McWhorter, John. 1995. The scarcity of Spanish-based creoles. Language in Society24.213–44.

332 References

McWhorter, John. 2000. The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth ofPlantation Contact Languages. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Megenney, William. 1979. El elemento subsaharico en el lexico venezolano. RevistaEspanola de Linguıstica 9.405–51.

1980. Sub-Saharan influences in Palenquero and Barloventero. Revista/ReviewInteramericana 10.143–55.

1982. Elementos subsaharicos en el espanol dominicano. In Alba, ed., 183–201.1983. Common words of African origin used in Latin America. Hispania 66.1–10.1984a. Traces of Portuguese in three Caribbean creoles: evidence in support of the

monogenetic theory. Hispanic Linguistics 1.177–89.1984b. El habla bozal cubana ¿lenguaje criollo o adquisicion imperfecta? La Torre

(Universidad de Puerto Rico) 33, no. 123.109–39.1985a. La influencia criollo-portuguesa en el espanol caribeno. Anuario de Linguıstica

Hispanica (Valladolid) 1.157–80.1985b. Rasgos criollos en algunos villancicos negroides de Puebla, Mexico. Anuario

de Letras 23.161–202.1985c. Africa en Venezuela: su herencia linguıstica y cultura literaria. Montalban

15.3–56.1986. El palenquero: un lenguaje post-criollo colombiano. Bogota: Instituto Caro y

Cuervo.1989a. Black rural speech in Venezuela. Neophilologus 73.52–61.1989b. An etiology of /-s/ deletion in the Hispanic Caribbean: internal process

or substratum influence? Estudios sobre el espanol de America y linguısticaAfroamericana, 300–27. Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

1990a. Africa en Santo Domingo: la herencia linguıstica. Santo Domingo: Museo delHombre Dominicano.

1990b. Basilectal speech patterns of Barolvento, Venezuela. Journal of CaribbeanStudies 7:2–3.245–60.

1993. Elementos criollo-portugueses en el espanol dominicano. Motalban 25.149–71.1999. Aspectos del lenguaje afronegroide en Venezuela. Frankfurt: Vervuert.

Melia, Bartolomeu. 1974. Hacia una “tercera lengua” en el Paraguay. EstudiosParaguayos 2(2).31–72.

1980. La entrada del castellano en el guaranı del Paraguay. Sprachkontakte, ed. Rein-hold Werner, 151–60. Tubingen: Gunter Narr.

Mellado y Montana, Manuel. 1975. La casa de Taita Andres, semi-parodia de la casa deCampo. Juguete comico del genero bufo en un acto. Teatro bufo siglo XIX, tomo I,ed. Rine Leal, 263–303. Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura.

Mendonca, Renato. 1935. A influencia africana no portugues do Brasil. Sao Paulo:Companhia Editora Nacional.

Mendoza, Aıda. 1976. Sistema fonologico del castellano y variantes regionales. Lima:I. N. I. D. E.

1978. Variantes foneticas regionales. Linguıstica y educacion: Actas del IV CongresoInternacional de la ALFAL, 445–56. Lima: ALFAL/Universidad Nacional Mayorde San Marcos.

Mendoza, Vicente. 1956. Algo de folklore negro en Mexico. Miscelanea de estudiosdedicados a Fernando Ortiz por sus discıpulos, colegas y amigos, t. II, 1092–111.Havana: Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Paıs.

References 333

Menendez, Carlos. 1928. Historia del infame y vergonzoso comercio de indios vendidosa los esclavistas de Cuba por los polıticos yucatecos, desde 1848 hasta 1861.Merida: Tallers de la Companıa Tipografica Yucateca, S. A.

1932. Las memorias de D. Buenaventura Vivo y la venta de indios yucatecos en Cuba.Merida: Tallers de la Companıa Tipografica Yucateca, S. A.

Merlin, Marıa de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Comtesse de. 1974. Viaje a LaHabana. Havana: Editorial de Arte y Literatura.

Mesquita, Alfredo. 1903. Lisboa (Portugal pittoresco e illustrado). Lisbon: Empreza daHistoria de Portugal.

Michaelis de Vasconcellos, Carolina. 1909. Taibo. Revista Lusitana 12.133–38.Migeod, Frederick. 1908. The Mende Language. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner

and Co. Ltd.1911. The Languages of West Africa, 2 vols. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner

& Co. Ltd.Miller, Joseph. 1976. Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola. Oxford:

Clarendon Press.Millones Santagadea, Luis. 1973. Minorıas etnicas en el Peru. Lima: Pontıfica Univer-

sidad Catolica del Peru.Minority Rights Group, ed. 1995. No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today.

London: Minority Rights Publications.Mintz, Sidney. 1971. The socio-historical background to pidginization and creolization.

In Hymes, ed., 481–96.Mira Ademescua, Antonio. 1653. El negro del mejor amo. Laurel de comedias, quarta

parte de diferentes autores, dirigidas a Don Bernardino Blancalana. Madrid:Imprenta Real, por Diego Balbuena.

Miranda, Jacintho Caetano Barreto. 1863. Quadros historicos de Goa. Margao:Typographia do Ultramar.

Miro, Rodrigo. 1962. Tomas Martın Feuillet, prototipo romantico. Panama: ImprentaNacional.

Missionarios da Companhia de Jesus. 1964. Elementos de gramatica cinyanja. Lisbon:Imprensa Portuguesa.

Molina Molina, Angel Luis. 1978. Contribucion al estudio de la esclavitud en Murcia afines de la Edad Media (1475–1516). Murgetana 53.

Molinari, Diego. 1944. La trata de negros, datos para su estudio en el Rıo de la Plata.Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Mondejar, Jose. 1970. El verbo andaluz. Madrid: Consejo Superior de InvestigacionCientıfica.

Monguio, Luis, ed. 1973. Poesıas de don Felipe Pardo y Aliaga: introduccion, ediciony notas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Moniz, Antonio Francisco. 1925. The Negroes and St. Benedict’s feast. In the MissionField: the Diocese of Damaun, 567–72. Bombay: E. G. Pearson at the Times Press.

Montano, Oscar. 1987. Umkhonto: la lanza negra; historia del aporte negro-africanoen la formacion del Uruguay. Montevideo: Rosebud.

Montenegro, Carlos. 1934. El negro Torcuato. Bohemia 26 (Aug. 26, 1934): 46–47,153–54.

Montes Giraldo, Jose Joaquın. 1959. Del espanol hablado en Bolıvar (Colombia).Thesaurus 14.82–110.

334 References

1962. Sobre el habla de San Basilio de Palenque (Bolıvar, Colombia). Thesaurus17.446–450.

Montes Huidobro, Matıas. 1987. Teorıa y practica del catedratismo en Los negroscatedraticos de Francisco Fernandez. Miami: Editorial Persona.

Morais-Barbosa, Jorge, ed. 1963. Estudos linguisticos crioulos. Lisboa: AcademiaInternacional de Cultura Portuguesa.

1975. Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and Sao Tome and Prıncipe: the linguistic situation.In Valkhoff, ed., 133–51.

Morales Carrion, Arturo. 1978. Auge y decadencia de la trata negrera en Puerto Rico(1820–1860). San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena.

1958. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partiefrancaise de l’isle Saint Domingue. Paris: Societe de l’Histoire des ColoniesFrancaises.

Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. 1978. El ingenio: complejo economico social cubano deazucar. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Moro, America and Mercedes Ramırez. 1981. La macumba y otros cultos afro-brasilenosen Montevideo. Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental.

Morua Delgado, Martın. 1972. Sofıa. Havana: Biblioteca Basica de Autores Cubanos,Instituto Cubano del Libro.

1975. La familia Unzuazu. Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura.Moscoso Puello, Francisco. 1975. Canas y bueyes. Santo Domingo: Asociacion

Serie 23.Mosonyi, Esteban Emilio, Marıa Hernandez, Elizabeth Alvarado. 1983. Informe

preliminar sobre la especificidad antropolinguıstica del “luango” de Barlovento.Actas del III Encuentro de Linguistas, 159–67. Caracas: Instituto Pedagogico deCaracas, Departamento de Castellano, Literatura y Latın, Departamento de IdiomasModernas.

Mota Acosta, Julio Cesar. 1977. Los cocolos en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo:Editorial La Gaviota.

Moya Pons, Frank. 1978. La dominacion haitiana 1822–1844. Santiago de losCaballeros: Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra.

Muhammad, Jameelah. 1995. Mexico. In Minority Rights Group, ed., 163–80.Muhn, Juan. 1946. La Argentina vista por viajeros del siglo XVIII. Buenos Aires:

Huarpes.Muysken, Pieter. 1981a. Creole tense/mood/aspect systems: the unmarked case? Gen-

erative Studies in Creole Languages, ed. Pieter Muysken, 181–200. Dordrecht:FORIS.

1981b. Halfway between Quechua and Spanish: the case for relexification. Historicityand Variation in Creole Studies, eds. Arnold Highfield and Albert Valdman, 52–78.Ann Arbor: Karoma.

Muysken, Pieter and Norval Smith. 1990. Question words in pidgin and creole languages.Linguistics 28.883–903.

Naro, Anthony. 1978. A study on the origins of pidginization. Language 45.314–47.1988. A reply to “Pidgin origins reconsidered” by Morris Goodman. Journal of Pidgin

and Creole Languages 3.95–102.1993. Arguing about Arguim. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages

8.109–18.

References 335

Naveda Chavez-Hita, Adriana. 1979. Trabajadores esclavos en las haciendas azucarerasde Cordoba, Veracruz, 1714–1763. El trabajo y los trabajadores en la historia deMexico/Labor and Laborers through Mexican History, eds. Elsa Frost, MichaelMeyer, and Josefina Vazquez, 162–82. Mexico and Tucson: El Colegio de Mexicoand University of Arizona Press.

1987. Esclavos negros en las haciendas azucareras de Cordoba, Veracruz, 1690–1830. Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana.

Naxara, Joseph de. 1672. Espejo mystico en que el hombre interior se mira practicamenteilustrado para los conocimientos de Dios. Madrid: Colegio Imperial de Companıade Jesus (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional MS 3/63664).

Nazoa, Aquiles. 1970. Humor y amor. Caracas: Venediciones.Ndamba Kabongo, Albert M. 1970. Les esclaves a Seville au debut du XVIIe siecle.

Masters’ thesis, Universite de Toulouse-Le Mirail.1975. Les esclaves a Cordoue au debut du XVIIe siecle (1600–1621). Doctoral dis-

sertation, Universite de Toulouse-Le Mirail.Ndongo Esono, Salvador. 1956. Gramatica pamue. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios

Africanos.Ngou-Mve, Nicolas. 1994. El Africa bantu en la colonizacion de Mexico 1595–1640.

Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientıficas, Agencia Espanola deCooperacion Internacional.

Nunez Cedeno, Rafael. 1982. El espanol de Villa Mella: en desafıo a las teorıasfonologicas modernas. El espanol del Caribe, ed. Orlando Alba, 221–36. Santiagode los Caballeros: Universidad Catolica Madre y Maestra.

1986. La /s/ ultracorrectiva en dominicano y la estructura silabica. Actas del II Con-greso Internacional sobre el Espanol de America, ed. Jose Moreno de Alba, 337–47.Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

1987a. Structure-preserving properties of an epenthetic rule in Spanish. Advancesin Romance Linguistics, eds. David Birdsong and Jean-Pierre Montreuil, 319–35.Dordrecht: Foris.

Nunez Cedeno, Rafael. 1987b. Intervocalic /d/ rhotacism in Dominican Spanish: a nonlinear analysis. Hispania 70.363–68.

Nze Abuy, Rafael Marıa. 1975. La lengua fan o Nkobo fan. Barcelona: Editorial Claret.Obeso, Candelario. 1960. Cantos populares de mi tierra. Bogota: Ministerio de

Educacion.Ochoa, Gabriel, ed. 1914. Obras dramaticas del siglo XVI. Madrid: n. p.Ochoa Franco, Jose. 1945. Consideraciones generales sobre costumbres y lenguaje

palenqueros. Cartagena: Direccion de Educacion Publica de Bolıvar.Ojo, Valentine. 1977. English-Yoruba language contact in Nigeria. Ph.D. dissertation,

University of Tubingen. Alterdorf: Grabner.Olmsted, David. 1953. Comparative notes on Yoruba and Lucumı. Language

29.157–64.Origa. Iris. 1955. The Domestic Enemy: the eastern slaves in Tuscany in the fourteenth

and fifteenth centuries. Speculum 1955. 321–66.Ortiz, Adalberto. 1945. Tierra, son y tambor. Mexico: Ediciones La Cigarra.

1976. Juyungo. Barcelona: Seix Barral. 2nd edn.Ortiz, Fernando. 1916. Hampa afro-cubana: los negros esclavos. Havana: Revista

Bimestre Cubana.

336 References

1985. Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba. Havana: EditorialLetras Cubanas.

1986. Los negros curros, ed. Diana Iznaga. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.Ortiz Lopez, Luis. 1998. Huellas etno-sociolinguısticas bozales y afrocubanas.

Frankfurt: Vervuert.1999a. El espanol haitiano en Cuba y su relacion con el habla bozal. Lenguas criollas

de base lexical espanola y portuguesa, ed. Klaus Zimmermann, 177–203. Frankfurt:Vervuert.

1999b. La variante hispanica haitianizada en Cuba: otro rostro del contacto linguısticoen el Caribe. Estudios de linguıstica hispanica: homenaje a Marıa Vaquero, eds.Amparo Morales et al., 428–56. Rıo Piedras: Editorial de la UPR.

2001. El sistema verbal del espanol haitiano en Cuba: implicaciones para las lenguasen contacto en el Caribe. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 20:2.175–92.

Ortiz Lugo, Julia Cristina. 1995. De aranas, conejos y tortugas: presencia de Africaen la cuentıstica de tradicion oral en Puerto Rico. San Juan: Centro de EstudiosAvanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe.

Ortiz Oderigo, Nestor. 1969. Calunga: croquis del candombe. Buenos Aires: EditorialUniversitaria de Buenos Aires (EUDEBA).

1974. Aspectos de la cultura africana en el Rıo de la Plata. Buenos Aires: EditorialPlus Ultra.

Otheguy, Ricardo. 1973. The Spanish Caribbean: a creole perspective. New Waysof Analyzing Variation in English, eds. Charles-James Bailey and Roger Shuy,323–39. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Ovalles, Vıctor Manuel. 1935. Mas frases criollas. Caracas: Editorial Bolıvar.Padron, Alfredo. 1949. Giros sintacticos usados en Cuba. Boletın del Instituto Caro y

Cuervo 5.163–75.Palacios, Eustaquio. 1954. El alferez real. Bogota: Editorial Cosmos.Palacios, Arnoldo. 1971. Las estrellas son negras. Bogota: Ed. Revista Colombiana.Pallavicino, Marıa. 1987. Umbanda: investigacion sobre religiosidad afro-brasilena en

Montevideo. Montevideo: Pettirossi Hnos.Palma, Danilo. 1974. El negro en las relaciones etnicas de la segunda mitad del siglo

XVIII y principios del siglo XIX en Guatemala. Guatemala: Universidad de SanCarlos, Escuela de Historia.

Palma, Ricardo. 1961. Semblanzas. Ed. and prologue Alberto Tauro. Lima: LibrerıaEditorial Juan Mejıa Baca.

Palmer, Colin. 1976. Slaves of the white god: blacks in Mexico 1570–1650. Cambridge:Harvard University Press.

Pardo y Aliaga, Felipe. 1869. Poesıas y escritos en prosa de Don Felipe Pardo. Paris:Imprenta de los Caminos de Hierro A. Chaix et Cie.

1971. El espejo de mi tierra. Lima: Editorial Universo, edition of Alberto Tauro.Paredes-Candia, Antonio. 1984. Cuentos populares bolivianos (de la tradicion oral). La

Paz: Librerıa-Editorial Popular. 3rd edn.1987. Tradiciones de Bolivia. La Paz: Librerıa-Editorial Popular.

Parkvall, Mikael. 2000. Out of Africa: African Influences in Atlantic Creoles. London:Battlebridge.

Pasarell, Emilio. 1951. Orıgenes y desarrollo de la aficion teatral en Puerto Rico. RıoPiedras: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico.

References 337

Pearson, M. N. 1987. The New Cambridge History of India. 1.1: The Portuguese inIndia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Penny, Ralph. 2000. Variation and Change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Penafiel Ramon, Antonio. 1992. Amos y esclavos en la Murcia del setecientos. Murcia:Real Academia Alfonso X el Sabio.

Penaherrera de Costales, Piedad and Alfredo Costales Samaniego. 1959. Coangueo historia cultural y social de los negros del Chota y Salinas. Quito:Llacta.

Perdomo Escobar, Jose Ignacio. 1976. El archivo musical de la catedral de Bogota.Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

Pereda Valdes, Ildefonso. 1929. Raza negra: poemas de negros, cantos africanos,cancionero afro-montevideano. Montevideo: Edicion del Periodico Negro LaVanguardia.

1937. El negro rioplatense. Montevideo: C. Garcıa.1941. Negros esclavos y negros libres. Montevideo: Imprenta Gaceta Comercial.1965. El negro en el Uruguay: pasado y presente. Montevideo: Revista del Instituto

Historico y Geografico del Uruguay, no. XXV.Perera, Hilda. 1971. Idapo: el sincretismo en los Cuentos Negros de Lydia

Cabrera. Miami: Ediciones Universal.Perez, Nancy, Clara Domınguez, Rosa Rodrıguez, Orlando Silva, and Danubia Terry.

1982. El cabildo carabalı isuama. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente.Perez Cabral, Pedro Andres. 1978. Jengibre. Santo Domingo: Editorial Alfa y Omega,

2nd edn.Perez de la Riva, Juan. 1978. El barracon: esclavitud y capitalismo en Cuba. Barcelona:

Editorial Crıtica, 2nd edn.1979. El monto de la inmigracion forzada en el siglo XIX. Havana: Editorial de

Ciencias Sociales.Perez de la Riva, Juan, ed. 1981. La isla de Cuba en el siglo XIX vista por los extranjeros.

Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.Perez Fernandez, Rolando. 1990. La musica afromestiza mexicana. Xalapa: Universidad

Veracruzana.Perez Vidal, Jose. 1944. Portugues is mos en el espanol canqrio. El Museo Canario

9.30–42.Perl, Matthias. 1981. La influencia del frances y del frances criollo en el espanol del

Caribe. Islas 68.163–76.1982. Creole morphosyntax in the Cuban “habla bozal.” Studii Si, Cercetari

Lingvistice 5.424–33.1984. Las estructuras de comunicacion de los esclavos negros en Cuba en el siglo

XIX. Islas 77.43–59.1985. El fenomeno de descriollizacion del “habla bozal” y el lenguaje coloquial

de la variante cubana del espanol. Anuario de Linguıstica Hispanica (Valladolid)1.191–202.

1987. “Habla bozal” – eine spanisch-basierte Kreolsprache? Beitrage zurAfrolusitanistik und Kreolistik, ed. Matthias Perl, 1–17. Berlin: Akademie derWisschschaften der DDR, Zentralinstitut fur Sprachwissenschaft, LinguistischeStudien 172.

338 References

1988. Rasgos poscriollos lexicos en el lenguaje coloquial cubano. Thesaurus 43.47–64.

1989a. El “habla bozal” ¿una lengua criolla de base espanola? Anuario de LinguısticaHispanica (Valladolid) 5.205–20.

1989b. Algunos resultados de la comparacion de fenomenos morfosintacticos del“habla bozal,” de la “linguagem dos musseques,” del “palenquero,” y de lenguascriollas de base portuguesa. Estudios sobre espanol de America y linguısticaafroamericana, 368–80. Bogota: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

1989c. Zur Prasenz des kreolisierten Portugiesisch in der Karibik – ein Beitragzur Dialektologie des karibischen Spanisch. Beitrage zur romanischen Philologie28.131–48.

1989d. Zur Morphosyntax der Habla Bozal. Vielfalt der Kontakte: Beitragezum 5. Essener Kolloquium uber “Grammatikalisierung: Naturlichkeit undSystemokonomie,” eds. Norbert Boretzky, Werner Enninger, and Thomas Stolz,81–94. Bochum: Universitatsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer.

Perl, Matthias and Sybille Grosse. 1994. Dos textos de “Catecismos para Negros” deCuba y de Haitı – criollo o registro didactico simplificado? Presented at Coloquiode Crioulos de Base Lexical Portuguesa e Espanhola, Universidad de Brasılia,September 1994.

1995. Textos afro-hispanicos y criollos del siglo XIX. Cultura y literature colombianasy linguıstica afro-hispanica, eds. Peter Konder, Matthias Perl, and Klaus Portl.Frankfurt an Main: Peter Lang-Verlag.

Perl, Matthias and Sergio Valdes. 1991. Espanol vestigial y minorıas linguısticas enCuba. El espanol de America, Actas del III Congreso Internacional de El Espanolde America, eds. C. Hernandez, G. de Granda, C. Hoyos, V. Fernandez, D. Dietrick,and Y. Carballera, t. III, 1305–09. Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y Leon.

Peverada, Enrico. 1981. Schiavi a Ferrara nel quattrocento. Ferrara: Industrie GraficheFerrara.

Pichardo, Esteban. 1849. Diccionario provincial casi razonado de voces cubanas.Havana: Imprenta de M. Soler.

1866. El fatalista. Havana: Imprenta Militar de M. Soler.1976. Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanos. Havana: Edi-

torial de Ciencias Sociales, 5th edn. (1st edn. 1836.)Pietersz, Jorge. 1985. De arubaanse arbeidsmigratie 1890–1930. Leiden: Caraıbische

Afdeling Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde. Antillen WorkingPapers 9.

Pierce, Amy. 1992. Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory: a Comparative Analysisof French and English Child Grammars. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Piersen, William. 1996. From Africa to America: African American History from theColonial Era to the Early Republic, 1526–1790. New York: Twayne Publishers.

Pike, Ruth. 1967. Sevillian society in the sixteenth century: slaves and freedmen. His-panic American Historical Review 47.344–59.

Pimentel, Alberto. 1889. Obras do poeta Chiado. Lisbon: Livraria de Antonio MariaPereira.

Pires, Sebastiao. 1922. Auto da bella menina. Autos portugueses de Gil Vicente yde la escuela vicentina, ed. Carolina Michaelis de Vasconcellos. Madrid: Junta

References 339

para Ampliacion de Estudios e Investigaciones Cientıficas, Centro de EstudiosHistoricos.

Pizarroso Cuenca, Arturo. 1977. La cultura negra en Bolivia. La Paz: Ediciones ISLA.Placido, Antonio. 1966. Carnaval: evocacion de Montevideo en la historia y la tradicion.

Montevideo: s. n.Pollak-Eltz, Angelina. 1972. Vestigios africanos en la cultura del pueblo Venezolano.

Caracas: Universidad Catolica “Andres Bello.”1991. La negritud en Venezuela. Caracas: Cuadernos Lagoven.

Polome, Edgar. 1968. Lubumbashi Swahili. Journal of African Languages 7.14–25.Poplack, Shana. 1980. The notion of the plural in Puerto Rican Spanish: competing

constraints on (s) deletion. Locating Language in Time and Space, ed. WilliamLabov, 55–67. New York: Academic Press.

Poplack, Shana and David Sankoff. 1980. El ingles de Samana y la hipotesis del origencriollo. Boletın de la Academia Puertorriquena de la Lengua Espanola 8:2.103–21.

1987. The Philadelphia story in the Spanish Caribbean. American Speech 62.291–314.Poplack, Shana and Sali Tagliamonte. 1989. There’s no tense like the present: verbal -s

inflection in Early Black English. Language Variation and Change 1.47–84.Porzecanski, Teresa and Beatriz Santos. 1994. Historias de vida: negros en el Uruguay.

Montevideo: Ediciones Populares para America Latina.Portal, Ismael. 1932. Del pasado limeno. Lima: Librerıa e Imprenta Gil.Portugal, Fernandes. 1985. Yoruba, a lıngua dos orısa. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas.Portugal Ortiz, Max. 1977. La esclavitud negra en las epocas colonial y nacional de

Bolivia. La Paz: Instituto Boliviano de Cultura.Post, Anike. 1995. Fa d’Ambu. Pidgins and Creoles, an Introduction, eds. Jacques

Arends, Pieter Muysken, and Norval Smith, 191–204. Amsterdam and Philadelphia:John Benjamins.

Postigo de de Bedıa, Ana Marıa. 1994. La enunciacion negativa en bilingues de Quechuay espanol. Anuario de Linguıstica Hispanica 10.355–65.

Postma, Johannes. 1970. The Dutch participation in the African slave trade: slaving onthe Guinea Coast 1675–1795. Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University.

1972. The dimension of the Dutch slave trade from western Africa. Journal of AfricanHistory 13.237–48.

1975. The Dutch slave trade: a quantitative assessment. Revue Francaise d’Histoired’Outre-mer 62.226–27, 232–44.

Powell, Philip. 1952. Soldiers, Indians and Silver: the Northward Advance of New Spain,1550–1600. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Prata, A. Pires. 1983. A influencia da lıngua portuguesa sobre o suahıli e quatro lınguasde Mocambique. Lisbon: Instituto de Investigacao Cientıfica Tropical.

Preciado Bedoya, Antonio. 1995. Considerations on the life of the blacks in Ecuador. InSaunders and Moore, eds., 143–53.

Puccia, Enrique. 1974. Breve historia del carnaval porteno. Buenos Aires: Municipali-dad de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires.

Puig Ortiz, Jose Augusto. 1978. Emigracion de libertos norteamericanos a Puerto Plataen la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Santo Domingo: Editorial Alfa y Omega.

Pulleyblank, Douglas. 1986. Clitics in Yoruba. Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 19: The Syntaxof Pronominal Clitics, ed. Hagit Borer, 43–64. Orlando: Academic Press.

340 References

Quant, Ines de and Jose Miguel Irigoyen. 1980. Interferencia guaranı en la morfosintaxisy lexico del espanol substandard de Resistencia. Resistencia: Universidad Nacionaldel Nordeste.

Quevedo, Francisco de. 1988. Obras completas, t. 1. Prosa. Madrid: Aguilar.Quilis, Antonio and Celia Casado-Fresnillo. 1992. Fonologıa y fonetica de la

lengua espanola hablada en Guinea Ecuatorial. Revue de Linguistique Romane56.71–89.

1995. La lengua espanola en Guinea Ecuatorial. Madrid: Universidad Nacional deEducacion a Distancia.

Quintao, Jose Luıs. 1951. Gramatica de xironga (landim). Lisbon: Agecia Geral dasColonias.

Radford, Andrew. 1988. Small children’s small clauses. Transactions of the PhilologicalSociety 86:1.1–43.

Radford, Andrew. 1990. Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax. Oxford:Basil Blackwell.

Rael, Juan. 1937. A study of the phonology and morphology of New Mexico Spanishbased on a collection of 400 folktales. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.

Rahier, Jean. 1985. La decima: poesıa oral negra del Ecuador. Quito and Guayaquil:Edicions Abya-Yala/Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano.

Raimundo, Jacques. 1933. O elemento afro-negro na lıngua portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro:Renascenca Editora.

Ramırez de Moron, Mireya. 1975. Andarele. Quito: n. p.Ramon y Rivera, Luis Felipe. 1965. Los estribillos en la poesıa cantada del negro

venezolano. Folklore Americano 13.99–120.1971. La musica afrovenezolana. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela,

Imprenta Universitaria.1992. La poesıa folklorica en Venezuela. Caracas: Monte Avila.

Ramos, Arthur. 1935. O folk-lore negro do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacao Brasileira.1963. Caniquı, Trinidad, 1830. Havana: Consejo Nacional de Cultura.

Ramos Mattei, Andres. 1981. La importacion de trabajadores contratados para la indus-tria azucarera puertorriquena: 1860–1880. Inmigracion y clases sociales en elPuerto Rico del siglo XIX, ed. Francisco A. Scarano, 125–41.

Rawley, James. 1981. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: a History. New York: W. W. Nortonand Company.

Rego, Antonio da Silva. 1943. Apontamentos para o estudo do dialecto portugues deMalacca. Lisbon: Agencia Geral das Colonias.

1965. Portuguese Colonization in the Sixteenth Century: a Study of the Royal Ordi-nances (Regimentos). Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press.

Reinecke, John. 1937. Marginal languages: a sociological survey of the creole languagesand trade jargons. Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University.

Reinosa, Rodrigo de. 1950. Antologıa de escritores y artistas montaneses, critical editionby Jose Marıa de Cossıo. Santander: Librerıa Moderna.

Rhodes, Elizabeth. 1998. Saracunde of Panama: a look at the dance on the street andon the stage. The Art of the Moment: Looking at Dance Performance from Insideand Out (Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference Congress on Research inDance), ed. Nancy Stokes, 133–40. Columbus: Ohio State University, Departmentof Dance.

References 341

Riley, Carroll. 1952. Trade Spanish of the Pinaguero Panare. Studies in Linguistics10:1.6–11.

Ripodas Ardanaz, Daisy, ed. 1986. El indiano en el teatro menor espanol del setecientos.Madrid: Ediciones Atlas. Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles No. 294.

Ripodas Ardanaz, Daisy, ed. 1991. El indiano en el teatro menor espanol de los siglosXVI y XVII. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas. Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles No. 301.

1990. La formacion linguıstica de Hispanoamerica. Lima: Pontıfica UniversidadCatolica del Peru.

Rizzi, Luigi. 1986. On the status of subject clitics in Romance. Studies in RomanceLinguistics, eds. Osvaldo Jaeggli and Carmen Silva-Corvalan, 391–419. Dordrecht:Foris.

Robe, Stanley. 1960. The Spanish of Rural Panama. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Robertson, Ian. 1979. Berbice Dutch: a description. Ph.D. dissertation, University of theWest Indies.

Rodney, Walter. 1970. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545–1800. Oxford: Claren-don Press.

Rodrıguez, Jose Silvio. 1982. La esquina de la viajaca. In Leal.Rodrıguez, Luis Felipe. 1969. Cienaga. Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Inc.

1971. Marcos Antilla, relatos de canaveral. Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro.Rodrıguez-Cardenas, Manuel. 1938. Tambor (poemas para negros y mulatos). Caracas:

Editorial Elite.Rodrıguez Demorizi, Emilio. 1973. Samana, pasado y porvenir. Santo Domingo: Editora

del Caribe, C. por A., 2nd edn.1975. Lengua y folklore de Santo Domingo. Santiago de los Caballeros: Universidad

Catolica Madre y Maestra.1979. Poesıa popular dominicana. Santiago de los Caballeros: Universidad Catolica

Madre y Maestra, 3rd edn.Rodrıguez Demorizi, Emilio, ed. 1944. Documentos para la historia de la Republica

Dominicana, vol. 1. Ciudad Trujillo: Editorial Montalvo.1964. Papeles de Pedro F. Bono. Santo Domingo: Editora del Caribe.1970. Relaciones geograficas de Santo Domingo, vol. 1. Santo Domingo: Editora del

Caribe.Rodrıguez de Nolla, Olga. 1947. Cauce hondo (poemas). San Juan: Imprenta Venezuela.Rodrıguez Herrera, Esteban. 1982. Estudio crıtico a Cecilia Valdes. In Alvarez, ed.,

133–81.Rodrıguez Molas, Ricardo. 1957. La musica y la danza de los negros en el Buenos Aires

de los siglos XVIII y XIX. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Clio.1961. Negros libres rioplatenses. Buenos Aires, Revista de Humanidades 1:1.99–126.

Rojas, Elena. 1985. Evolucion historica del espanol en Tucuman entre los siglos XVI yXIX. Tucuman: Universidad Nacional de Tucuman.

Romer, Raul. 1977. Polarization phenomena in Papiamentu. Amsterdam Creole Studies1.69–79.

1980. Proclisis y enclisis en una lengua tonal: algunas comparaciones entre el papia-mento y el espanol. Dialogos Hispanicos de Amsterdam 1.113–23.

1983. Papiamentu tones: how speakers use them and how they bind speakers. Papia-mentu Problems and Possibilities, 85–96. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers.

342 References

Romer, Rene. 1981. Curacao. Willemstad: UNICA (Caribbean Universities andResearch Institutes).

Romero, Carlos Alberto. 1904. Negros y caballos. Lima: Tip. Nacional.Romero, Fernando. 1987. El negro en el Peru y su transculturacion linguıstica. Lima:

Editorial Milla Batres.1988. Quimba, fa, malamba, neque – afronegrismos en el Peru. Lima: Instituto de

Estudios Peruanos.Rosa-Nieves, Cesareo. 1957. La lampara del faro: variaciones crıticas sobre temas

puertorriquenos. San Juan: Editorial Club de la Prensa.Rosell, Cayetano, ed. 1874. Entremeses, loas y jacaras escritas por el licenciado Luis

Quinones de Benavente, t. II. Madrid: Librerıa de los Bibliofilos.Rossi, Vicente. 1950. Cosas de negros. Buenos Aires: Librerıa Hachette.Rossi y Rubı, Joseph [pseudonym Hesperiophylo]. 1791. Idea de las congregaciones

publicas de los negros bozales. Mercurio Peruano 48 (June 16), 112–17; 49 (June19), 120–25.

Rout, Leslie. 1976. The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the PresentDay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rowlands, E. C. 1959. A Grammar of Gambian Mandinka. London: University of Lon-don, School of Oriental and African Studies.

Rueda, Lope de. 1908. Obras de Lope de Rueda. Madrid: Librerıa de los Sucesores deHernando.

Rueda, Manuel and Lupo Hernandez Rueda. 1972. Antologıa panoramica de la poesıadominicana contemporanea (1912–1962). Santiago de los Caballeros: UniversidadCatolica Madre y Maestra.

Ruız Garcıa, Armanda. 1957. Mas alla de la nada. Santa Clara: Offset Cancio.Ruız Garcıa, Marta. 2000. El espanol popular del Choco: evidencia de una reestruc-

turacion parcial. Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico.Russell, P. E. 1973. Towards an interpretation of Rodrigo de Reinosa’s “poesıa negra.”

Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age Presented to Edward M. Wilson,ed. R. Jones, 225–45. London: Tamesis.

Safir, Kenneth. 1985. Syntactic Chains. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Salami, Adebisi. 1982. Vowel and consonant harmony and vowel restriction in assimi-

lated English loan words in Yoruba. Yoruba Language and Literature, ed. AdebisiAfolayan, 118–44. Ibadan and Ife: University Press Limited and University of IfePress. Also in African Language Studies 13 (1972), 162–81.

Salazar, Briseida. 1990. San Benito canta y baila con sus chimbangueleros. Caracas:Fundacion Bigott.

Salmons, Joe. 1992. Accentual Change and Language Contact. Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press.

Saluvet, J. B. 1892. Los deportados a Fernando Poo en 1869. Matanzas: n. p.Salvador, Francisco. 1978. La neutralizacion l/r explosivas agrupadas y su area

andaluza. Granada: Universidad de Granada.Salvador, Gregorio. 1981. Discordancias dialectales en el espanol atlantico. I Simposio

Internacional de Lengua Espanola, ed. Manuel Alvar, 351–62. Las Palmas: Excmo.Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria.

Samarin, William. 1967. A Grammar of Sango. The Hague: Mouton.

References 343

Sanchez, Reinaldo, Jose Antonio Modrigal, Ricardo Viera, Jose Sanchez-Boudy, eds.1978. Homenaje a Lydia Cabrera. Miami: Ediciones Universal.

Sanchez, Roberto. 1979. Luis Velez de Guevara, “El negro del seraphın,” a crit-ical and annotated edition with introduction. Ph.D. dissertation, Florida StateUniversity.

Sanchez-Boudy, Jose. 1970. Alegrıas de coco. Barcelona: Bosch, Casa Editorial.Sanchez Maldonado, Benjamın. 1961a. La herencia de Canuto, zarzuela bufa en un acto.

Teatro bufo, siete obras, tomo I, 83–120. Universidad Central de las Villas.1961b. Los hijos de Thalıa o bufos de fin del siglo. Teatro bufo, siete obras, tomo I,

217–55. Universidad Central de las Villas.Sandoval, Alonso de. 1956. De instauranda aethiopum salute; el mundo de la escla-

vitud negra en America. Bogota: Impresa Nacional de Publicaciones, facsimileedn.

San Filippo, Pietro Amat di. 1894. Della schiavitu e del servaggio in Sardegna. Torino:Stamperia Reale Della Ditta G. B. Paravia.

Santa Cruz, Marıa de. 1908. Historias campesinas. Havana: Imprenta y Librerıa de M.Ricoy.

Santa Cruz, Nicomedes. 1982. La decima en el Peru. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peru-anos.

Santa Gertrudis, Fray Juan de. 1970. Maravillas de la naturaleza, tomo III. Bogota:Biblioteca Banco Popular, vol. 12.

Santiago, David. 1995. Bombareyto. San Juan: Universidad Interamericana de PuertoRico.

Santos Domınguez, Luis Antonio. 1986. Conexiones entre la lingua franca mediterraneay el criollo portugues: a proposito de taybo y marfuz. Anuario de LinguısticaHispanica (Valladolid) 2.221–27.

Sapir, David. 1965. A Grammar of Diola-Fogny. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Sarracino, Rodolfo. 1988. Los que volvieron a Africa. Havana: Editorial de CienciasSociales.

Sarro Lopez, Pilar. 1988. Notas sobre la morfosintaxis del habla de las negras de Lopede Rueda. Actas del I Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua Espanola,eds. M. Ariza, A. Salvador, and A.Viudas, t. I, 601–10. Madrid: Arco.

Saunders, A. C. de C. M. 1982. A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen inPortugal 1441–1555. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sauvageot, Serge. 1965. Description synchronique d’un dialecte wolof: le parler duDyolof. Dakar: IFAN.

Savoia, Rafael, ed. 1988. Actas del primer congreso de historia del negro en el Ecuadory sur de Colombia. Quito and Guayaquil: Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano.

1990. El negro en la historia: aportes para el conocimiento de las raıces en AmericaLatina. Guayaquil: Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano.

1992. El negro en la historia: raıces africanas en la nacionalidad ecuatoriana.Guayaquil: Centro Cultural Afroecuatoriano.

Schadeberg, Thilo. 1990. A Sketch of Umbundu. Koln: Rudiger Koppe Verlag.Scheuss de Studer, Elena. 1958. La trata de negros en el Rıo de la Plata durante el siglo

XVIII. Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires.

344 References

Schuchardt, Hugo. 1882. Kreolische Studien I: ueber das Negerportugiesische vonS. Thome (Westafrika). Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wis-senschaften zu Wien 101.889–917.

1883a. Kreolische Studien III: ueber das Indoportugiesische von Diu. Sitzungsberichteder kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien 103.3–18.

1883b. Kreolische Studien VI: ueber das Indoportugiesischen von Manga-lore. Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien105.881–904.

1883c. Kreolischen Studien II: ueber das Indoportugiesische von Cochim.Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien102.799–816.

1888a. Kreolische Studien VII. Ueber das Negerportugiesische von Annobom.Sitzungsberichte der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Wien116:1.193–226.

1888b. Beitrage zur Kenntnis des kreolischen Romanisch II. Zum Negerportugiesis-chen Senegambiens. Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie 12.301–12.

1888c. Beitrage zur Kenntnis des kreolischen Romanisch III. Zum Negerportugiesis-che des Kapverden. Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie 12.312–22.

1888d. Beitrage zur Kenntnis des kreolischen Romanisch I: Allgemeineres uber dasNegerportugiesische. Zeitschrift fur romanische Philologie 12.242–54. Englishtranslation in Schuchardt (1979), 59–72.

Schuchardt, Hugo. 1889. Allgemeiners ueber das Indoportugiesishe. Zeitschrift furromanische Philologie 13.476–524.

Schwegler, Armin. 1989. Notas etimologicas palenqueras: “casariambe,” “tunganana,”“ague,” “monicongo,” “maricongo,” y otras voces africanas y pseudo-africanas.Thesaurus 44.1–28.

1991a. El espanol del Choco. America Negra 2.85–119.1991b. Zur Problematik der afroportugiesischen Kontaktsprache in Amerika: Neues

aus El Palenque de San Basilio (Kolumbien). Lusorama 15:54–79.1993. Rasgos (afro-) portuguese en el criollo del palenque de San Basilio (Colom-

bia). Homenaje a Jose Perez Vidal, ed. Carmen Dıaz Alayon, 667–96. La Laguna:Litografıa A. Romero.

1994. Black Spanish of highland Ecuador: new data and fuel for controversy about theorigin(s) of Caribbean Spanish. Presented at the twenty-fourth Linguistic Sympo-sium on Romance Languages, University of California Los Angeles and Universityof Southern California, March 1994.

1996a. La doble negacion dominicana y la genesis del espanol caribeno. HispanicLinguistics 8.247–315.

1996b. “Chi ma nkongo”: lengua y rito ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio(Colombia). Frankfurt: Vervuert. 2 vols.

1999. Monogenesis revisited: the Spanish perspective. Creole Genesis, Attitudes andDiscourse, ed. John Rickford and Suzanne Romaine, 235–62. Amsterdam andPhiladelphia: John Benjamins (Creole Language Library vol. 20).

2002. On the (African) origins of Palenquero subject pronouns. Diachronica19(2).273–332.

Seminario, Lee Ann. 1975. The History of the Blacks, the Jews and the Moors in Spain.Madrid: Playor.

References 345

Sempat Assadourian, Carlos. 1966. El trafico de esclavos en Cordoba de Angola aPotosı, siglox XVI–XVII. Cordoba: Universidad Nacional de Cordoba.

Sepa Bonaba, Edmundo. 1993. Els negres catalans. Barcelona: Fundicio Serveis deCultura Popular, Editorial Alta Fulla.

Serrano Lopez, Lilia. 1993. Poblacion de color en la ciudad de Mexico siglos XVI–XVII.Martınez Montiel and Reyes, eds., 72–88.

Serrano y Sanz, Manuel. 1903. Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras espanolasdesde el ano 1401 al 1833, tomo I. Madrid: Est. Tipografico “Sucesores de Ruiv-adeneyra.”

Serviat, Pedro. 1986. El problema negro en Cuba y su solucion definitiva. Havana:Editora Polıtica.

Setse, Theophilus Kwadzo. 1965. Some aspects of the tonal structure of Ewe and theirimplications for the teaching of English. Ed. D. dissertation, Columbia University.

Siade, Giorgina Paulın de. 1974. Los indıgenas bilingues de Mexico frente a la castel-lanizacion. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

Silva, Chandra Richard de. 1972. The Portuguese in Ceylon 1617–1638. Colombo:H. W. Cave and Company.

Silva, Edson Nunes da. 1958. Introducao ao estudo grammatical da lingua Yoruba.Salvador da Bahia: Universidade da Bahia.

Silva, Feliciano de. 1988. Segunda Celestina, ed. Consolacion Baranda. Madrid: Catedra.Silva-Brummel, Maria Fernanda. 1984. As formas de tratamento no portugues angolano.

Umgangssprache in der Iberoromania, Festschrift fur Heinz Kroll, eds. GunterHoltus and Edgar Radtke, 271–86.

Silva Neto, Serafim. 1940. Capıtulos de historia da lıngua portuguesa no Brasil. Rio deJaneiro: Livros de Portugal.

1963. Introducao ao estudo da lıngua portuguesa no Brasil. Rio Instituto Nacionaldo Livro, 2nd edn.

Simo, Ana Marıa. 1984. Lydia Cabrera: an Intimate Portrait [booklet to accompany artexhibition]. New York: Intar Latin American Gallery.

Sloman, Albert. 1949. The phonology of Moorish jargon in the works of early Spanishdramatists and Lope de Vega. Modern Language Review 44.207–17.

Smith, Bishop and John Matthews. 1902. A Vocabulary with a Short Grammar of Xilenge.London: Society for Christian Knowledge.

Smith, Ian. 1978. Sri Lanka creole Portuguese phonology. International Journal ofDravidian Linguistics 7.248–406.

1979. Convergence in South Asia: a creole example. Lingua 48.193–222.1984. The development of morphosyntax in Sri Lanka Portuguese. York Papers in

Linguistics 11.291–301.Smith, Norval, Irvine Robertson, and Kay Williamson. 1987. The Ijo element in Berbice

Dutch. Language in Society 16.49–90.Smith Cordoba, Amir. 1984. Vida y obra de Candelario Obeso. Bogota: Centro para la

Investigacion de la Cultura Negra.Sojo, Juan Pablo. 1943. Temas y apuntes afro-venezolanos. Caracas: Tip. La Nacion.

1967. Algunas supervivencias negro-culturales en Venezuela. Archivos Venezolanosde Folklore 8.309–25.

1968. Nochebuena negra. El Teque: Gobierno del Estado Mirando, Ediciones Casade la Cultura. 2nd edn.

346 References

1986. Estudios del folklore venezolano. Los Teques: Biblioteca de Autores y TemasMirandinos, Instituto Autonomo Biblioteca Nacional y de Servicios de Biblioteca.

Soler Canas, Luis. 1958. Negros, gauchos y compadres en el cancionero de la federacion(1830–1848). Buenos Aires: Ediciones Theorıa.

Solıs, Antonio de. 1681. Entremes del nino cavallero. Comedias de Don Antonio deSolıs, 58. Madrid: Melchor Alvarez.

Soto, Sara. 1988. Magia e historia en los “Cuentos negros,” “Por que,” y “Ayapa” deLydia Cabrera. Miami: Ediciones Universal.

Spedding, Alison. 1995. Bolivia. In Minority Rights Group, ed., 319–44.Stapleton, Walter. 1903. Comparative Handbook of Congo Languages. Yakusu, Stanley

Falls, Congo Independent State: “Hannah Wade” Printing Press.Stevenson, Robert. 1969. The Music of Peru, Aboriginal and Vicroyal Epochs.

Washington: Pan American Union.1974. Christmas Music from Baroque Mexico. Berkeley: University of California

Press.1975. Latin American Colonial Music Anthology. Washington: General Secretariat,

Organization of American States.Stewart, John. 1989. Kwa. In Bendor-Samuel, ed., pp. 216–45.Stride, G. T. and Caroline Ifeka. 1971. Peoples and empires of West Africa: West Africa

in History 1000–1800. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation.Suarez y Romero, Anselmo. 1947. Francisco. 2nd edn. Havana: Ministerio de Educacion.Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1990. Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlements

in the Bay of Bengal 1500–1700. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Sued Badillo, Jalil and Angel Lopez Cantos. 1986. Puerto Rico negro. Rıo Piedras:

Editorial Cultural.Sundiata, I. K. 1990. Equatorial Guinea: Colonialism, State Terror, and the Search for

Stability. Boulder: Westview Press.Suner, Margarita. 1986. Lexical subjects of infinitives in Caribbean Spanish. In Studies in

Romance Linguistics, eds. Osvaldo Jaeggli and Carmen Silva-Corvalan, 189–204.Dordrecht: FORIS.

Sypkens Smit, M. P. 1995. Beyond the Tourist Trap: a Study of Sint-Maarten Culture.Amsterdam: Foundation for Scientific Research in the Caribbean Region.

Tagliamonte, Sali. 1991. A matter of time: past temporal reference verbal structuresin Samana English and the ex-slave recordings. Ph.D. dissertation, University ofOttawa.

1997. Obsolescence in the English perfect? Evidence from Samana English. AmericanSpeech 72.33–68.

Tardieu, Jean-Pierre. 1993. L’eglise et les noirs au Perou, XVIe et XVIIe siecles. Paris:Universite de la Reunion/Editions L’Harmattan. 2 vols.

1997. Noirs et nouveaux maıtres dans les “vallees sanglantes” de l’Equateur 1778–1820. Paris: L’Harmattan.

1998. El negro en el Cuzco: los caminos de la alienacion en la segunda mitad del sigloXVII. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru/Banco Central de Reserva delPeru.

Tauro, Alberto. 1961. Prologo. In Palma, 7–29.Taylor, Douglas. 1971. Grammatical and lexical affinities of creoles. In Hymes, ed.,

293–96.

References 347

Teixeira, Manuel. 1976. O comercio de escravos em Macau. Boletim do Instituto Luısde Camoes (Macau) 10(1–2).5–21.

Tejeda Ortiz, Dagoberto, ed. 1984. Cultura y folklore en Samana. Santo Domingo:Editorial Alfa y Omega.

Tejeira, Gil Blas. 1964. El habla del panameno. Panama: Ministerio de Educacion,Direccion Nacional de Cultura.

Tejerizo Robles, German. 1989. Villancicos barrocos en la Capilla Real de Granada(500 letrillas cantadas la noche de Navidad 1673 a 1830). Vol. 1. Seville: Junta deAndalucıa, Consejerıa de Cultura.

Teyssier, Paul. 1959. La langue de Gil Vicente. Paris: Klincksieck.1993. “Avoir” au sens d’“etre” dans les creoles portugais d’Asie. Semiotica e

linguıstica portuguesa e romanica, homenagem a Jose Goncalo Herculano de Car-valho, ed. Jurgen Schmidt-Radefeldt, 209–18. Tubingen: Gunter Narr.

Theban, Laurentiu. 1975. From creole syntax to universal semantics. Revue Roumainede Linguistique 20.207–24.

1977. Indo-Romanica: estructuras sintacticas em contacto. Revue Roumaine de Lin-guistique 22.245–48.

Theban, Maria. 1973. Structura propozitiei in portugheza si indo-portugheza. Studii siCercetari Lingvistice 24.639–45.

1974. A evolucao sintactica dos dialectos indo-portugueses. Bulletin de la SocieteRoumaine de Linguistique 10.107–10.

Theban, Maria y Laurentiu Theban. 1980. L’evolution du sisteme verbal dans lescreoles indo-portugais. Le verbe roman. Bucarest: Universitatea din Bucuresti,149–61.

Thompson, Robert. 1961. A note on some possible affinities between the creole dialectsof the Old World and those of the new. Creole Language Studies 2.107–13.(Proceedings of the Conference of Creole Language Studies, ed. Robert Le Page,London: Macmillan.)

Thornton, John. 1983. The Kingdom of Kongo: Civil War and Transition 1641–1718.Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

1992. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1680. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Tinhorao, Jose Ramos. 1988. Os negros em Portugal. Lisbon: Editorial Caminho.Toribio Medina, Jose. 1978. La inquisicion en Cartagena de Indias. Bogota: Carlos

Valencia Editores. 2nd edn.Torreblanca, Maximo. 1989a. El paso de /l/ a /r/ postconsonantica en espanol. Hispania

72.690–99.1989b. La /s/ implosiva en espanol: sobre las fechas de su aspiracion. Thesaurus

44.281–303.Torrend, J. 1891. A Comparative Grammar of the South-African Bantu Languages.

London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co.Torres Quintero, Gregorio. 1931. Cuentos colimotes. Mexico: Herrero Hermanos Suce-

sores.Torres Stinga, Manuel. 1981. Influencia portuguesa en el habla de Lanzarote. Revista de

Filologıa de la Universidad de La Laguna 0.103–10.Toscano Mateus, Humberto. 1953. El espanol del Ecuador. Madrid: Consejo Superior

de Investigaciones Cientıficas.

348 References

Tompkins, William. 1981. The musical traditions of the blacks of coastal Peru. Ph.D.dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.

Turner, Lorenzo Dow. 1969. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. New York: Arno Pressand the New York Times.

Ugarte Chamorro, Guillermo. 1974. Estudio preliminar. In Ugarte Chamorro, ed.,vol. 1, xi–xc.

Ugarte Chamorro, Guillermo, ed. 1974. El teatro en la independencia. Coleccion Doc-umental de la Independencia del Peru, tomo XXV. Lima: Comision Nacional delSesquicentenario de la Independencia del Peru. 2 vol.

Usher de Herreros, Beatriz. 1976. Castellano paraguayo: notas para una gramaticacontrastiva castellano guaranı. Suplemento Antropologico (Asuncion: UniversidadCatolica) 11(1/2).29–123.

Ussel, Pere. 1888. Petite grammaire de la langue fiote, dialecte du Loango. Loango:Imprimerie de la Mission.

Valdes, Carlos Manuel and Ildefonso Davila. 1989. Esclavos negros en Saltillo. Saltillo:Ayuntamiento de Saltillo.

Valdes Acosta, Gema. 1974. Descripcion de remanentes de lenguas bantues en SantaIsabel de las Lajas. Islas 48.67–85.

1978. Las lenguas africanas y el espanol coloquial de Cuba. Santiago 31.81–107.1987. Las lenguas del Africa subsaharana y el espanol de Cuba. Havana: Editorial

Academia.Valdes-Cruz, Rosa. 1974. Lo ancestral africano en la narrativa de Lydia Cabrera.

Barcelona: Editorial Vosgos.1978. Los cuentos de Lydia Cabrera, ¿transposiciones o creaciones? In Sanchez et al.

(eds.), 93–99.Valkhoff, Marius. 1966. Studies in Portuguese and Creole. Johannesburgh: Witwaters-

rand University Press.Valkhoff, Marius, ed. 1975. Miscelanea Luso-Africana. Lisbon: Junta do Ultramar.Vasconcellos, Jose Leite de. 1933. Lıngua de preto num texto de Henrique da Mota.

Revue Hispanique 81.241–46.Vazquez Rodrıguez, Rosa Elena. 1982. La practica musical de la poblacion negra en

Peru: la danza de negritos de El Carmen. Havana: Casa de las Americas.Vega Carpio, Lope de. 1893. Obras de Lope de Vega. Madrid: Real Academia

Espanola.1917. Obras de Lope de Vega. Madrid: Real Academia Espanola.1930. Obras completas de Lope de Vega. Madrid: Real Academia Espanola.1955. Obras escogidas, ed. Federico Carlos Sainz de Robles. Madrid: Aguilar.

Veres, Ernesto. 1950. Juegos idiomaticos en las obras de Lope de Rueda. Revista deFilologıa Espanola 34.195–217.

Verlinden, Charles. 1934. L’esclavage dans le monde iberique medieval. Madrid:Tipografıa de Archivos.

1977. L’esclavage dans l’Europe medievale, t. II: Italie, colonies italiennes du Levant,Levant latin, empire byzantin. Ghent: Rijksuniversiteit te Gent.

Vermeer, Hans. 1972. Das Portugiesische in Sud-Asien: Probleme und Publikationen.Aufsatze zur portugieisischen Kulturgesischichte 9.136–226.

Vicente, Gil. 1834. Obras de Gil Vicente, t. II. Hamburg: Langhoff.1907. Obras de Gil Vicente, T. IX. Coimbra: Franca Amado.

References 349

1912. Obras de Gil Vicente. Coimbra: Franca Amado.1943. Obras completas. T. IV. Lisbon: Livraria de Sa Costa.

Vicente Rosalıa, Rene. 1992. La represion de expresiones culturales afrocurazolenasa traves de la ley y por la Iglesia Catolica durante y despues de la esclavi-tud. Encuentro: Revista de la Comision Puertorriquena de la Celebracion delQuinto Centenario del Descubrimiento de America y Puerto Rico, Ano 19921.48–42.

Vignolo, Griselda. 1976. Cancionero federal. Buenos Aires: Crisis.Vila, Isidro. 1891. Elementos de la gramatica ambu o de Annobon. Madrid: Imprenta

de A. Perez Dubrull.Villa, Ignacio. 1938a. Drumi, Mobila. En Guirao, 1938, 183–84.

1938b. Calota ta morı. En Guirao, 1938, 184–86.Villaverde, Cirilo. 1979. Cecilia Valdes. Critical edn. Raimundo Lazo. Mexico: Porrua.

1981. Excursion a Vuelta Abajo. Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas.Vinueza, Marıa Elena. 1988. Presencia arara en la musica folclorica de Matanzas.

Havana: Casa de las Americas.Vodovozova [Operstein], Natalie. 1996. A contribution to the history of the villancico

de negros. M.A. thesis, University of British Columbia.Vogt, John. 1979. Portuguese Rule on the Gold Coast 1469–1682. Athens: University

of Georgia Press.Von Hagen, Victor. 1940. Ecuador the Unknown. New York: Oxford University Press.Wade, Peter. 1993. Blackness and Race Mixture: the Dynamics of Racial Identity in

Colombia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Wagner, Max Leopold. 1949. Lingua e dialetti dell’America spagnola. Florence: Edi-

zioni “Le Lingue Estere.”Wallace, Caroline. 1898. Santiago de Cuba before the War; or Recuerdos de Santiago.

London and New York: F. Tennyson Neely.Walsh, Thomas. 1985. The historical origin of syllable-final aspirated /s/ in dialectal

Spanish. Journal of Hispanic Philology 9.231–46.Warburton, Irene, Prosper Kpotufe, and Roland Glover. 1968. Ewe Basic Course.

Bloomington: Indiana University, African Studies Program.Ward, Ida. 1933. The Phonetic and Tonal Structure of Efik. Cambridge: W. Heffer and

Sons Ltd.1936. An Introduction to the Ibo Language. Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons Ltd.

Warner-Lewis, Maureen. 1971. Trinidad Yoruba – notes on survivals. Caribbean Quar-terly 17.40–49.

1982. The Yoruba language in Trinidad. Ph.D. dissertation, University of the WestIndies.

1991. Guinea’s Other Suns: the African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. Dover, MA:Majority Press.

Weber de Kurlat, Frida. 1962a. Sobre el negro como tipo comico en el teatro espanoldel siglo XVI. Romance Philology 17.380–91.

1962b. El tipo comico del negro en el teatro prelopesco: fonetica. Filologıa 8.139–68.1968. Sobre el portuguesismo de Diego Sanchez de Badajoz: el portugues hablado

en farsas espanolas del siglo XVI. Filologıa 13.349–59.1970. El tipo del negro en el teatro de Lope de Vega: tradicion y creacion. Nueva

Revista de Filologıa Hispanica 19.337–59.

350 References

1971. Acerca del portuguesismo de Diego Sanchez de Badajoz. Homenaje a W. L.Fichter, eds. A. David Kossoff and Jose Amor y Vazquez, 785–800. Madrid:Castalia.

1974. Occidentalismos y portuguesismos en el idiolecto de Diego Sanchez de Badajoz.Estudios filologicos y linguısticos: homenaje a Angel Rosenblat en sus 70 anos, ed.Luis Quiroga Torrealba, 521–41. Caracas: Instituto Pedagogico.

Weil, Thomas et al. 1973. Area Handbook for Ecuador. Washington: Superintendent ofDocuments.

Welmers, William. 1945. A descriptive grammar of Fanti. Ph.D. dissertation, Universityof Pennsylvania.

1973. African Language Structures. Berkeley: University of California Press.1976. A Grammar of Vai. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Welti, Marıa Cristina R. de. 1979. Bilinguismo en el Paraguay: los lımites de la comu-nicacion. Revista Paraguaya de Sociologıa 16:46.63–97.

West, Robert. 1957. The Pacific Lowlands of Colombia: a Negroid Area of the AmericanTropics. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press.

Westergaard, Waldemar. 1917. The Danish West Indies under Company Rule (1671–1754). New York: Macmillan Company.

Westerman, George. 1951. The West Indian Worker on the Canal Zone. Panama: n. p.Wexler, Paul. 1983. Kristang as a tool for recovering the mid-fifteenth century Portuguese

reconnaissance language. Romance Philology 37.139–50.Whinnom, Keith. 1956. Spanish Contact Vernaculars in the Philippines. Hong Kong:

Hong Kong University.1965. Origin of European-based creoles and pidgins. Orbis 14.510–27.

Whitten, Norman. 1965. Class, Kinship and Power in an Ecuadorian Town: the Negroesof San Lorenzo. Stanford: Stanford University.

Whitten, Norman, Diego Quiroga and Rafael Savoia. 1995. Ecuador. In Minority RightsGroup, ed., 287–317.

Wilde, Jose Antonio. 1960. Buenos Aires desde setenta anos atras (1810–1880). BuenosAires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.

Williams, Lorna Valerie. 1994. The Representation of Slavery in Cuban Fiction.Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Williamson, Kay. 1965. A Grammar of the Kolukuma Dialect of Ijo. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

1989a. Niger-Congo overview. In Bendor-Samuel, ed., 3–45.1989b. Benue-Congo overview. In Bendor-Samuel, ed., 246–74.

Wilson, Carlos Guillermo. 1982. Sinopsis de la poesıa afro-panamena. Afro-HispanicReview 1(2).14–16.

Wilson, W. A. A. 1961. An Outline of the Temne Language. London: School of Orientaland African Languages, University of London.

1989. Atlantic. In Bendor-Samuel, ed., 81–104.Winfield Capitaine, Fernando. 1993. Los negros en Veracruz en la etapa colonial.

Martınez Montiel and Reyes, eds., 133–41.Wolf, Teodoro. 1892. Geografıa y geologıa del Ecuador. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus.Wright, Leavit and Stanley Robe. 1939. Final consonant plus ‘n’-glide in Jalisco, Mexico.

Modern Language Notes 54.439–42.

References 351

Wright, Winthrop. 1990. Cafe con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela.Austin: University of Texas Press.

Yacou, Alain. 1977. A propos du parler bossal, langue creole de Cuba. Espace Creole2.73–92.

Yai, Olabiyi Babalola. 1978. Influence Yoruba dans la poesie cubaine: NicolasGuillen et la tradition poetique yoruba. Actes du XLII eCongres International desAmericanistes, Vol. 6, 643–58. Paris: Societe des Americanistes.

Young, Caroll Mills. 1990. Afro-Uruguayan expression: a cultural perspective. Ph.D.dissertation, University of Missouri, Columbia.

Zalamea Borda, Eduardo. 1958. Cuatro anos a bordo de mı mismo. Bogota: BibliotecaBasica de Cultura Colombiana.

Zaldıvar, Gladys. 1986. Lydia Cabrera: de mitos y contemporaneos. Miami: Publica-ciones de la Asociacion Americana de Hispanistas.

Zanelli, Agostino. 1885. Le schiave orientali a Firenze nei secoli XIV e XV. Florence:Arnaldo Forni Editore.

Zavalıa Matienzo, Roberto. 1973. La esclavitud en Tucuman despues de la asamblea de1813. Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia.

Zell, Rosa Hilda. 1953. “La sombra del caudillo.” Antologıa del cuento en Cuba (1902–1952), ed. Salvador Bueno, 293–95. Havana: Direccion de Cultura del Ministeriode Educacion, Ediciones del Cincuentenario.

Ziegler, Douglas-Val. 1981. A preliminary study of Afro-Cuban creole. Unpublishedmanuscript, San Diego State University.

Zielina, Marıa Carmen. 1998. Teatralizacion de la condicion “villana” del negro en losvillancicos de Sor Juana: una perspectiva afrocentrista. Sor Juana y su mundo: unamirada actual, ed. Carmen Beatriz Lopez-Portillo, 459–67. Mexico: Universidaddel Claustro de Sor Juana/Fondo de Cultura Economica.

Zimmermann, J. 1858. A Grammatical Sketch of the Akra- or Ga-language. Stuttgart:Basle Missionary Society.

Zimmermann, Klaus. 1993. Zur Sprache der afrohispanischen Bevolkerung im Mexikoder Kolonialzeit. Iberoamericana 17:50.89–111.

1995. Sobre la poblacion afrohispana en el Mexico de la epoca colonial. Papia 4:1.62–84.

Index

abakua, Afro-Cuban 11Acapulco, Mexico, Africans in 2, 43, 97Acosta-Rubio, Raul 161–162Acosta Saignes, Miguel 127, 129Acuna de Figueroa, Francisco 102Adamwa-Ubangui language family 199affirmation, double, see double affirmationAfrica, slavery 20–21African-American English, United States 5,

85, 114, 148, 213, 301, 303Africanisms in Spanish 4Afro-Asiatic language family 198Afro-Caribbean Spanish 276Afro-Cuban language 8, 234–236, 243,

251–253, 259, 263, 268, 276, 281, 285,299, 301

Afro-Lusitanian elements in Spanish texts72–73

Afro-Peruvian language 242, 243, 264,268

Afro-Portuguese pidgin 6, 74Afro-Puerto Rican language 235–236, 276,

299Aguado, Simon 41, 42, 82–83, 218Aguirre Beltran, Gonzalo 47, 138, 142Aimes, Hubert 103Ajuda 38Akan languages and peoples 18, 19, 39, 60,

97, 106, 200, 202, 203, 214, 217, 218,247, 256, 269, 271

Alba, Julio 162–163Alix, Juan Antonio 149, 174–175Alleyne, Mervyn 206–208, 219Alonso, Manuel 184Althoff, F. Daniel 138Alvarez de Peralta, Jose 112Alvarez Nazario, Manuel 115, 147, 178, 183,

223, 233, 236, 283, 290, 294Alzola, Concepcion Teresa 153(a)mı, subject pronoun 30, 53, 54, 57, 58, 67,

73, 82, 93, 158, 162, 249, 275, 276, 303Amaro, Ana Maria 70

Andalusia 32slavery in 43, 74Spanish dialects 76, 78, 87, 89, 189, 218,

220, 222, 223, 225, 240, 251, 252, 298Andean region 9, 251, 252, 279Andrews, George Reid 103Angola 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 138Angolar creole language 226Annobon 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, 266Aragon, slavery in 19Arara language and people 11, 105, 122, 126,

198Araujo, Juan de 130Ardra 36, 66, 105Aretz de Ramon, Isabel 193Argentina

Africans in 2, 46, 100–103, 129, 142–145,216, 220, 229, 243, 258

Italians in 4Spanish dialects 260, 295, 300

Arguin Island 24, 36Arizona, Africans in 2Arona, Juan de 134articles

definite 57, 141, 149, 179, 180, 196,267–268, 275, 295, 297, 300

indefinite 275, 297, 300asiento, slaving monopoly 33, 35, 37, 44, 107,

121, 125Asturian language 75Atkins, Guy 208Atlantic-Congo language family 199Atlantic language family, see West Atlantic

language family

352

Index 353

Austen, Ralph 18Auto de Vicente Anes Joeira, anonymous play

58Avellaneda, Francisco de 88Avila, Spain, slavery in 43Ayacucho, Peru 133Aymara language and people 137–138Azevedo, Rafael Avila de 69

Bachiller y Morales, Antonio 146, 154–156,284

Badajoz, Spain 73Bahia, Brazil, Africans in 46Bai, invariant form of ir 58, 61Bakongo, see CongoBalearic Islands, slavery in 15Ballagas, Emilio 168Bambara language and people 106, 199, 246,

264, 266, 267, 269, 271Bantu languages 9, 19, 70, 200–201, 204, 242,

247, 266Bari, slavery in 15Barlovento region, Venezuela 285Barnet, Miguel 169, 290Basque country, Spain, slavery in 43Basque dialect of Spanish 88, 92, 93Basque language and people 3Bassein, India 31Batalha, Graciete Nogueira 69Batavia, Indonesia 30Benavides, Celso 177Benguela 28, 34, 37, 103, 257Benin

modern nation 11, 26, 32, 34–40, 44, 66,103, 105, 199

ancient kingdom 18, 39, 40Benıtez del Cristo, Ignacio 293Berber language and people 24, 198Berbesi language and people 47Berbice, Guyana 34, 246Berbice Dutch creole 106, 199, 246–247Bergman, Hannah 88Biafada, see Biafara language and peopleBiafara language and people 47, 115, 126,

247Bibı language and people 105Bijago language and people 248Bilad Ghana 23Bioko (Fernando Poo) 211Bissau 25Black English, US, see African-American

Englishblack Portuguese 62Bogota, Colombia 91, 240Bola de Nieve, see Villa, Ignacio

BoliviaAfricans in 1, 5, 46–48, 95, 100, 127, 129,

137–138, 187Spanish dialects 131, 137

Bologna, slavery in 15Bombay 30, 181Bonny, Nigeria 44Bono, Pedro 112–113Bosch, Gerardus 107Bosch, Juan 175Boyd-Bowman, Peter 185bozal, definition 5bozal Portuguese 29bozal Spanish, hypotheses regarding formation

6bozals, used in Catalan 15Braccesi, Alessandro 16–17Bram, see Bran language and peopleBran language and people 47, 247Braschi, Juan 184Brasio, Antonio 66Brau, Salvador 236Brazil

Africans in 10, 25, 28, 29, 34–39, 44–46,48, 49, 105, 126, 128, 258

Afro-Portuguese dialects 29, 56, 62Portuguese dialects, vernacular 57, 93, 216,

223, 224, 255–258, 268, 294British, slave trade, see English, slave tradeBubi language and people 211, 257, 261, 264,

269Buenos Aires, Argentina

Africans in 6, 37, 38, 43, 48, 81, 100–103,126, 127, 242, 243

Spanish dialect 221, 225Bujeba language and people 211, 257Burgos, Spain, slavery in 43Burkina Faso (Upper Volta) 199

Caamano de Fernandez, Vicenta 177Cabada, Juan de la 141Caballero, Ramon 178–179Cabinda language and people 200Cabrales Arteaga, Jose 71–73Cabrera, Lydia 6, 8, 106, 163–168, 259, 273,

292, 293Cabrera, Manuel 151, 292Cadilla de Martınez, Marıa 180–182Cadiz, Spain, slavery in 43Calabar region, Nigeria 36, 37, 44, 105,

115Calcagno, Francisco 153, 160–161Calderon de la Barca, Pedro 87–88Calicut 30calo 4, 96

354 Index

Cambunda 96, 103Cameroon 201, 247Campeche, Mexico 97, 99Canary Islands 15, 25, 45

Spanish dialects 89, 189, 220, 222, 262, 298Cancioneiro geral, Garcia de Resende 40,

52–55, 57, 71, 72, 75cancionero, song collections 8Canga 96Cao, Diego 26capataces 11Cape 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, 203Peninsula, Senegal 39

Carabalı language and people 11, 44, 96,105–106, 115, 122, 126, 198, 246

Carden, Guy 114Caribbean, Spanish dialects 225, 251, 252,

261Caro de Mallen, Ana 88Carpentier, Alejo 108, 165, 170Carrera Vergara, Eudocio 135, 216Carreras, Carlos 170Cartagena de Indias, Colombia 10, 12, 35, 43,

121, 258Carthaginian language and people 3Casamance 38, 248Castellanos, Jorge and Isabel 104, 106, 146,

284Castile

slavery in 43Spanish dialects 230, 240

Catalan language 15Catalonia, slavery in 15Caviedes, Juan del Valle 131Ceuta 23Ceylon, see Sri LankaChabacano (Philippine Creole Spanish) 154,

163, 181, 220, 248, 282, 297Chasca, Edmund de 77, 233Chaudenson, Robert 279–281, 286Chaul 29, 31Chavez Franco, Modesto 185Chevai 29Chiado, Antonio Ribeiro 57–58, 219Chile 4, 46, 47

Pacific island labor 8China Coast Pidgin English 303Chincha, Peru 216Chinese pidgin Spanish 301Chinese, language and people in Latin

America 4, 49, 108–109, 148, 303Chinyanga language and people 264

Choco region, Colombia 48, 56, 76, 121, 258,260, 281, 283, 285, 293, 294

Chota Valley, Ecuador 119, 185, 187,281–283, 285, 294, 295

Ciplijauskaite, Birute 83Ciudad Real, Spain, slavery in 43Claramonte, Andres de 86, 90, 218, 251Clements, J. Clancy 51clitics, subject 250, 262, 265Cochin 29–31Cocoliche 81, 225cofradıa, Afro-Hispanic brotherhoods 19, 60,

72, 96Colombia

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

Colon, Panama 263Combe language and people 211, 257, 261Comes, Juan Bautista 91, 93concordance, loss of 84, 137, 148, 149, 151,

162, 171, 179, 189, 275, 276, 300, 303Congo, 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, 67consonants, syllable-final in African languages

214Consuegra Guzman, Ismael 292contramayoral 11copula 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

Cordoba, Spain 18, 83slavery in 43

Coromandel Coast 31Coromantine 36, 38Correa, Gaspar 49Cortes Cortes, Fernando 74Cossıo, Jose M. de 71, 72Cotarelo y Morı, Emilio 77, 81, 86creole languages in the Spanish Caribbean

116–117Crespo y Borbon, Jose (Creto Ganga) 147,

152–154, 162, 293Creto Ganga, see Crespo y Borbon, JoseCruz, Celia 169Cruz, Mary 152, 153Cruz, Sor Juana Ines 5, 85, 91–93, 139, 140,

219, 224

Index 355

Cuajicuinalapa, Mexico 98, 142Cuango language and people 126Cuba

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 4Spanish dialects 221, 243, 260, 263, 295

Cuijla, see CuajicuinalapaCumana, Venezuela 35Curacao 8, 34–35, 46, 107–108, 113, 192,

275Curtin, Philip 45–48, 104Cuzco, Peru 91, 95, 132, 240CV syllable structure 228

/d/elision 140realized 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, 115Damao 29, 31, 68De la Guardia, Roberto 125De la Torriente, Lolo 159Degetau, Federico 180Delicado, Francisco 80–81Demerara 34demonstratives, postposed 298Denmark 38Derkes, Eleuterio 179Deschamps Chapeaux, Pedro 159Diola language and people 106, 199, 247, 248,

256, 261, 264, 266, 271diphthongs in verb forms 80direct objects 137, 253–255Diu 29, 31, 68Dogon language family 199Domınguez, Luis Arturo 192, 193Dominican 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 27double affirmation 259Dunzo, Annette Ivory 223Duque de Estrada, Nicolas 145–146, 284,

293durative aspect 292, 299Dutch slave trade 18, 33–35

Eannes, Gil 23Easter Island forced labor 8Ecuador

Africans in 6, 46, 48, 118, 184–187Spanish dialects 91, 93, 224, 226, 295, 300

Edo language group 200, 202, 214, 247Efik 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, 106Eltis, David 46, 103, 105, 113, 115Encina, Juan del 74English creoles 114–115, 177, 190, 191, 263,

265, 282, 301English, slave trade 35–37entremes, Afro-Hispanic 8epenthetic vowels 216, 217Equatorial Guinea 56, 92–93, 211–214, 222,

224, 230, 232, 241, 257, 300Escalante, Aquiles 121Escalona, Rafael 179Esmeraldas, Ecuador 119–120, 185–187Essequibo 34Estupinan Bass, Nelson 6Ethiopia 18eu as subject pronoun 58Ewe/Fon language and people 11, 44, 67, 97,

105, 193, 200, 203, 210, 217, 247,263–266, 270, 271

existential verbs 297Extremadura, slavery in 43, 74Extremeno 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 peopleFernandes, Gaspar 91, 139Fernandez, Francisco 293Fernandez, Lucas 74Fernando Poo 110, 247, 257Ferrara, Mario 16Ferraz, Luis Ivens 226Ferreras, Ramon Alberto 175Fiote language 261, 264first person plural verb forms as invariant 85,

87, 89, 253, 275Florence, slavery in 15, 16Florence, Italian dialect 16–17Fongbe, see Ewe/Fon language and people

356 Index

Fontanella de Weinberg, Beatriz 221foreigner talk 73, 77Franceschi, Vıctor 189, 190French

creoles 110, 126, 128, 170–171, 177, 191,263, 282, 301, 303

language and people 3slave trade 33, 35

Frıas Galvez, Antonio 175Fuentes, Manuel Atanasio 134–135Fula language and people 44, 115, 126, 199,

205, 247, 248, 264, 266, 267, 269future marking 60, 271, 272, 293

Ga language and people 200, 247, 256, 261,264, 266, 267, 269

Gabon 201, 214Galicia, slavery in 43Galician language 75, 92, 93, 262Galvez Ronceros, Antonio 131, 216Gama, Vasco da 30, 52, 54Gambia 36–38Ganga language and people 105–107, 115gauchos 1, 100, 101Gbe language group 200gemination of consonants 147gender agreement, loss of 61, 275, 297, 300genitive constructions in African languages

269–270Genoa slavery in 15German language and people 4Ghana

ancient kingdom 18modern nation 25, 26, 39, 60, 106, 199,

210Giron, Socorro 184Goa 29–31, 69, 181Gold Coast 20, 22, 25, 26, 34–37, 39, 47, 60,

106, 115, 121, 125–127, 129Gomez de Toledo, Gaspar 81–82Goncalvez, Antam 24Gongora, Luis de 41, 42, 83–85, 91, 93, 218,

223, 235, 260Gonzalez, Carlisle 177Gonzalez Rubı, Pedro Antonio 89Goodman, Morris 51Goree Island 34, 36–38, 125Grain Coast 39, 44, 217, 246, 247Granda, German de 71, 107, 163, 178, 193,

288–290Greek language and people 3Green, Katherine 182Guadalajara, Spain, slavery in 43Guadeloupe 36, 280Guanche language and people 15

GuatemalaAfricans in 5, 48, 139Pacific island labor 8

Guatemala City 91Guerrero, Manuel Vicente 90Guete, Jaime de 82Guillen, Nicolas 6Guinea, designations 40–41Guinea-Bissau 25, 35, 38, 47, 122, 199, 202,

248–249Kriyol language 70, 219, 263, 270, 271, 275Portuguese dialect 230

Guirao, Ramon 168Guiria Peninsula, Venezuela 259, 260, 263,

303Gullah language and people 99, 213, 237, 240,

266Gur language family 199Gutierrez de Padilla, Juan 139Guyana 246Guyanese Creole 8Guzman Navarro, Arturo 125Gypsy, see Roma language and people

habitual aspect 271, 292habla 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, PanamaHaiti 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 302revolution 10, 99

Hassaurek, Frederick 185Hatherly, Ana 59Hausa language and people 214, 264, 266,

267, 269Havana, Cuba 10, 35, 43, 126, 127Heine, Bernd 245Henrıquez Urena, Pedro 114, 234Henry, Prince of Portugal 23Herskovits, Melville 213Hesseling, D. C. 107Holm, John 67, 287, 291Honduras, Africans in 1, 2, 35, 48Hong Kong 51Huelva, slavery in 43Humboldt, Baron A. von 103, 126, 128

Iberian language and people 3Ibibio language and people 106, 179

Index 357

Ibo language 271Ica, Peru 131, 135Idoma language group 200Igbo 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 199imperfective aspect 292, 299in situ questions, see questions, in situIndia, Portuguese colonies in 29, 30, 68indigenous lexical items in Spanish 9Indonesia 30, 51infinitives

uninflected 53, 54, 58, 73, 80, 89, 141, 147,151, 162, 171, 178, 180, 184, 187, 188,195, 253, 272

with preverbal subject 141, 298ingenio, sugar plantation 11interrogation, see questionsinterrogative constructions in African

languages 260–263invariant verb forms 61, 70ir 58Italian language and people 3, 4, 93Italy, slavery in 14–16, 18, 19Ivory Coast 15, 26, 35, 38, 39, 199, 201

Jamaica 49, 108, 118Creole language 8, 108, 163, 263,

303English dialect 302

Jamieson, Martın 190Jammes, Robert 83Japan 30, 31

language and people 4Jimenez Rivera, Chery 176Jimenez Torres, Julieta 92–94Joao, king of Portugal 23Johnson, Lemuel 52Judeo Spanish 3–4judezmo, see Judeo SpanishJurado Noboa, Fernando 119, 120juruminga/jurumingue 149

Kanem, kingdom 18Kanura language 264Kasanje kingdom 28Kele language and people 269Kenya 32Kikongo 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,

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 231Kongo, see CongoKorlai 30, 181Kpelle language and people 199, 214, 247Krio language (Sierra Leone) 206, 207Kru languages and peoples 9, 44, 199, 204,

217, 247Kwa 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, 138La Paz, Bolivia 91Ladefoged, Peter 217ladino, see Judeo SpanishLaguerre, Enrique 182–183Lapesa, Rafael 163, 289Larrazabal Blanco, Carlos 173Latin language 267Laurence, Kemlin 7, 278Lenca language, influence on Spanish 252Lenz, Rodolfo 234Leon, Spain, slavery in 43Leonese language 75, 218Liberia 39, 44, 199, 201licencia, slaving monopoly 43–44Liguria

slavery in 15language and people 3

Lima, Peru 91, 126Lingala language 231, 257, 264lıngua de guine Afro-Portuguese imitations 60Lingua Franca, Mediterranean 80–81, 198,

274Lipski, John 16–17, 130, 154, 288liquid consonants

in African languages 217neutralization in Afro-Iberian language 59,

66, 147, 189, 196, 217–220, 241, 300Lisbon, Africans in 16, 42, 55, 60literatura de cordel 61, 71Llanos Allende, Victorio 180, 183Loango 101, 121, 126, 128, 192, 193Lombardia slavery in 15Lopez Albujar, Enrique 135–136, 216, 268Lopez Prudencio, J. 75Louisiana Creole French 174

358 Index

Lower Guinea 201–202Luanda 25, 27, 28, 34, 37, 66Lubolo 103Lucumı (Yoruba) language and people 11, 44,

96, 105, 107, 126, 148, 161, 206, 207Luis, William 159lunarios 61

Macao 30–32, 51, 69, 108–109Portuguese creole 301, 303

Machado Filho, Aires da Mata 229Madden, Richard 11Madeira Islands 25, 45Magarinos Cervantes, Alejandro 101Majorca, Africans in 15, 19Malacca 30–32, 69Malaga, slavery in 43Malaysia 30, 51Mali

ancient kingdom 18, 23modern nation 41, 199

Malinke language and people 47Malpica la Barca, Domingo 163, 284, 293Mande languages and people 9, 198–199, 201,

202, 246, 248–250, 253, 255, 270, 271Mandinga, see Mandinka language and peopleMandinka 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, 68manicongo 19, 22, 25–27, 63Manila 43Manjaku language and people 248Manrique Cabrera, Francisco 183Manzano, Juan Francisco 284Marıa Lionza, Afro-Venezuelan cult 127, 129Marrero Aristy, Ramon 149, 175Martinique 36, 280mas nunca, mas nada, mas nadie 298mayoral 11mayordomo 11Mazatlan, Mexico, Africans in 2Mbundu people 27, 28McWhorter, John 7, 281–286Megenney, William 138, 213, 223, 258, 291,

294Melaka, see MalaccaMende language and people 44, 199, 204,

217, 246, 249, 253, 255, 261, 264, 266,267, 269, 270

Mendez Quinones, Ramon 182Menendez y Pelayo, Marcelino 80Merlın, Condesa de, see Santa Cruz y

Montalvo, Marıa de las Mercedes

Mesquita, Alfredo 212metathesis 63, 66, 149, 229–230Mexican-American Spanish dialects 78Mexico

Africans in 1, 2, 5, 46–49, 91, 95, 97–100,111, 127, 129, 138–143, 187, 220, 285

Pacific island labor 8Spanish dialects 221, 222, 295, 300

Mexico City, Spaniards in 9, 91, 240mı, subject pronoun, see (a)mıMilan, slavery in 15mim, subject pronoun, see (a)mıMina, language and people 60, 103, 105–106,

115, 122, 126, 198, 203Mintz, Sidney 278Mira de Amescua, Antonio 86Mombasa 32Moncın, Luis 89Montejo, Esteban 106, 169–170Montevideo, Uruguay

Africans in 6, 39, 43, 81, 100–103, 242, 243Spanish dialect 225

Moors (in the Iberian Peninsula) language andpeople 3, 18, 77, 92, 93, 274

Moreau de Saint-Mery, M. L. 114Moreno Fraginals, Manuel 105–106Moreto, Agustın 88Morocco 23moros, see Moors (in the lberian Peninsula)

language and peopleMorua Delgado, Martın 159–160Moscoso Puello, Francisco 175Mosonyi, Esteban Emilio 192Mota, Henrique da 53–54, 248Mozambique 32, 45, 47, 103, 126, 200, 247,

257Portuguese dialects 20, 56, 63, 230, 232,

257Mozarabic language and people 3Mpumbu language and people 27Muhammad, Jameelah 98Murcia

slavery in 43Spanish dialect 89, 220

musseques, popular neighborhoods of Luanda,Angola 261, 268, 294

/n/, denasalization 58, 75Nago language and people 198Nahuatl language, influence on Spanish

252Naniguismo 161Naples, slavery in 15Naro, Anthony 51nasal vowels 58

Index 359

nasalization, intrusive 78, 82, 85, 87, 90, 93,135, 147, 178, 233–239

Naxara, Joseph de 66, 69Ndjuka language 237Ndongo 27, 28Ndowe language and people 211, 257, 261Negapatao 29, 31negation

double 62, 110, 194, 256–260, 293–294,302

in African languages 255–258postverbal 62, 257, 258

Negerhollands language 8, 107, 108, 116–117,163, 303

Negra lectora, anonymous play 42negrillo songs 8negro catedratico, comic figure 8, 136,

151–152, 179negros congos, Panama 17, 124, 148, 149,

220, 282, 295negros curros, Cuba 286Netherlands Antilles 6neutralization of /l/ and /r/, see liquid

consonants, neutralization in Afro-lberianlanguage

New MexicoAfricans in 2Spanish dialects 294

Ngala language and people 269Ngola 27, 28Ngombe language 269Niger-Congo language family 198–199Nigeria 11, 18, 32, 36, 39, 40, 44, 105, 115,

121, 148, 179, 199, 247Niger-Kordofanian language family 198Nilo-Saharan language family 198Nombre de Dios, Panama 123noun phrases 59, 65null subjects, see subjects, nullnumber agreement, loss of 275, 297, 300Nupe language and people 256, 269Nzinga, rebel queen 28Nzinga a Nkuwa 26Nzinga Mbemba 26

obstruent + liquid clusters 215onset clusters

in African languages 214–215reduction 135, 141, 181, 188, 194, 216–217

Ortiz, Adalberto 6Ortiz, Fernando 8, 109, 148, 156–157, 292Ortiz Lopez, Luis 150, 171, 191, 282, 294, 303Os preto astrologo 61Oscan language and people 3Otheguy, Ricardo 164, 290

Ovimbundu (Umbundu) people 28, 103, 200,218, 247, 257, 258, 260

Oyo, kingdom 18

Palacios, Arnaldo 188palangana, Afro-Peruvian slang 136palatalization of /s/, see /s/, palatalizationPalenque de San Basilio, Colombia 6, 12, 56,

121, 122, 187, 189, 258, 263, 275, 278Palenquero 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 98Palmer, Colin 97Panama

Africans in 10, 12, 16–17, 46, 123–126,148, 149, 191

Spanish dialects 263, 282, 295West Indians in 124

Papia Kristang language 69Papiamento 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, 300Pardo y Aliaga, Felipe 133–135Parkvall, Mikael 258particles, preverbal 68, 141, 298past tense marking 271, 272, 293Pastor, Juan 80payadores 1, 100Pepper Coast 39Pereda Valdes, Ildefonso 223Perez Cabral, Pedro Andres 150, 176Perez de la Riva, Juan 104perfective aspect 272, 293Perl, Matthias 164, 289–291Pernambuco, Africans in 46Peru

Africans in 1, 5, 6, 46–49, 95–97, 111, 123,126–137, 143, 148, 187, 216, 220, 242,258

Chinese in 4Pacific island labor 8Spanish dialects 221, 222, 295, 300

Philippine Creole Spanish, see ChabacanoPhoenician language and people 3Pichardo, 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 51Piemonte, slavery in 15Pipil language, influence on Spanish

252Pires, Sebastiao 58Pisa, slavery in 15plural marking

noun phrases 59–61, 65, 194, 196,265–267, 296

verb phrases 65, 85Polynesian forced labor 8Popayan, Colombia 281Popo language and people 126pororo Afro-Dominican dialect 303Portobelo, Panama 35, 43, 120, 123, 125Portugal

Africans in 1, 19–20, 62history of 13, 17, 18

Portuguese-derived creoles, Asia 30Portuguese language

elements in Afro-Hispanic language 139words in African languages 19,

207–208postpositions 274Potosı 25, 132, 240pregones, street vendors 8, 144, 212, 216prenasalized consonants 84, 89, 149prepositions 171, 274, 297–298, 300present tense marking 271, 299Prıncipe

creole language 26, 54, 66, 226, 231, 267,275

Island 33Proclama que en un cablido de negros congos

de la ciudad de La Habana pronuncio supresidente, Rey Monfundi Siliman,anonymous document 147–150, 283

prognosticos 61progressive aspect 271, 272, 292pronouns

clitic 57, 65, 151, 249, 251–252, 275invariant 149, 300object, disjunctive 57, 65, 275, 276, 295,

300subject 30, 53, 54, 57, 58, 67, 73, 82, 93,

158, 162, 249, 252–253, 265, 275, 296,297, 303; invariant 296

Puebla, Mexico 91Puerto 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 Spanish133, 252, 260

questionsin situ 109, 260–262non-inverted 262–263, 295yes-no 263–265

Quevedo, Francisco de 66, 88, 90, 221Quinones 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, 300Raimundo, Jacques 230Ramon y Rivera, Luis Felipe 193Ramos, Arthur 229Ramos, Jose Antonio 161Rawley, James 46Reinecke, John 286, 291Reinosa, Rodrigo de 29, 40, 71–73, 248, 252,

267, 268Resende, Garcia de 40, 52, 252Rıo de la Plata

Africans in 2, 8, 28, 45, 46, 242, 288language of 102–103, 243Spanish dialects 222

Rıo de Oro 24Rıo Muni 257Robertson, Irvine 247Rodney, Walter 25Rodrıguez Demorizi, Emilio 172, 174Rodrıguez de Nolla, Olga 193Rodrıguez Herrera, Esteban 158Roma language and people 4, 87, 89, 92, 93Rome

ancient empire 14slavery in 15

Romero, Fernando 129, 233Ronga language and people 264Rosario, Ruben del 233Rossi y Rubı, Joseph 96Rowlands, E. C. 249Rueda, Lope de 29, 42, 70, 74, 76–79, 85, 88,

155–156, 159, 218, 223, 252, 262, 267Ruız Garcıa, Armanda 162Russell, 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 361

139, 140, 143–144, 186, 187, 189, 196,223–225, 241–242, 300

palatalization 53, 73, 81, 82sa as Afro-Iberian copula 53, 57–61, 65–70,

73, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 89, 93, 193,275, 297

sainete, Afro-Hispanic 8Sa qui turo, anonymous song 59Saint-Domingue 1, 10, 36, 46, 49, 111, 115,

279, 280Salamanca 74Salvador, Gregorio 223sam as first person singular of ser 65Samana, Dominican Republic 112, 114, 148,

172, 174, 177, 259, 303San Basilio de Palenque, see Palenque de San

Basilio, ColombiaSanchez de Badajoz, Diego 73–76, 218, 223,

224Sandoval, Alonso de 106, 122–123, 288–289Sango language and people 199, 256, 261,

264Santa Cruz, Marıa de 163, 292Santa Cruz, Nicomedes 6, 96, 268Santa Cruz y Montalvo, Marıa de las Mercedes

157–158santar/sentar as Afro-Iberian copula 58santerıa, Afro-Cuban 11, 207Santillana, Gabriel de 140Santo Domingo, see Dominican RepublicSao Tome

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 230Saramaccan language 34, 85, 206, 207, 213,

219, 228, 299Sardinia, slavery in 15Sarro Lopez, Pilar 77Savoia, Rafael 120sayagues literary dialect 73, 75, 87, 88, 93,

218Schuchardt, Hugo 68, 155, 234, 284Schwegler, Armin 258, 260, 282, 294second person pronouns 295Sena language and people 264Senegal 38, 103, 199Senegambia 25, 33, 34, 40, 44, 47, 48, 127,

129, 246Sephardic Jews 34, 113Sephardic Spanish (see Judeo Spanish)Serer language and people 47, 199, 205

ser/estar, confusion 73, 80, 82Serial verbs, see verbs, serialseseo 89Setse, Theophilus Kwadzo 210Seville, Africans in 16, 19, 43, 72, 76, 83, 84,

97Sicily, slavery in 14–16, 18, 19Sierra Leone 25, 26, 36–40, 44, 52, 103, 115,

199, 203, 206, 207, 247Silva, Feliciano de 81, 262Silveira, Fernam da 40, 52–54, 72Singapore 51slave, origin of term 14Slave Coast 32, 35, 38, 39, 44, 66, 70, 103,

121, 126, 127Smith, Norval 247Soffia, Bernardo 134Sojo, Juan Pablo 193Soko language and people 269Solıs, Antonio 88son as invariant copula 135, 147–151, 160,

162, 178, 181, 182, 190, 276Songhai, kingdom 18Songhay language 264, 266, 267, 269SOV word order 245–249, 254, 274Spain

Africans in 17–20dialects of Spanish 56history of 13slavery in 14

Spedding, Alison 138Sri Lanka 30–31Srnan Tongo 8, 85, 206, 207, 219St. Eustatius 34, 107St. Kitts 36Stewart, William 114stress, in African languages 205–206Suarez y Romero, Anselmo 159, 292subject pronouns, see pronouns, subjectsubjects

grammatical 249–252null 249

Suevi 3Surinam 34Suro, Ramon 150, 154–176Susu language and people 199, 266SVO word order 245, 247, 254–255,

274Swahili language and people 205, 231, 257,

269syllable structure, African languages

213–216

ta, preverbal particle 68, 151, 162, 163, 178,189–190, 276, 292, 303

362 Index

taibo 54Takrur, kingdom 18tango 100teatro bufo, Cuba 8, 152Tecelaria 29Tejeira, Gil Blas 190Teke language and people 27Temne language and people 44, 199, 217, 247,

256, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271Terranovo 96Teyssier, Paul 54, 57third person pronoun as plural marker 296third 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, 201Timor 30, 31Tiv language and people 217, 247Tobago 36Togo 11, 32, 35, 39, 103, 199Toledo, slavery in 43tone, lexical in African languages 205–206tones

European loan-words in African languages206–208

in Afro-Hispanic language 208–210, 241Torices, Alonso 91, 130Trinidad 11, 105, 126, 128, 259, 263, 303Tristao, Nuno 24Turin, slavery in 15Turner, Lorenzo Dow 213Twi language 264, 266, 267, 269, 271type A languages 245–246type B languages 246

Umbria, slavery in 15Umbrian language and people 3Umbundu, see Ovimbundu (Umbundu) peopleUpper Guinea 201–202Uruguay

Africans in 46, 100–103, 129, 142–145,148, 216, 220, 229, 243, 258

Italians in 4Spanish dialects 295

vai, see baiVai language and people 44, 126, 199, 217,

246, 256, 261, 264, 266, 267, 269, 271Valdes, Miguelito 169Valdes Bernal, Sergio 289–290Valdes-Cruz, Rosa 168Valencia, Spain

slavery in 15, 19, 43Spanish dialects 230

Valkhoff, Marius 181, 291Valladolid, Spain, slavery in 43Van Name, Addison 286Vandals 3Vega, Lope de 41–42, 83–88, 218, 224Velez de Guevara, Luis 86, 223Venezuela

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, 16Veracruz, Mexico, Africans in 2, 43, 97–99verbs

African languages 270–274serial 273

Veres, Ernesto 77–78, 223Vicente, Gil 40, 54–59, 70, 71, 74, 75, 79,

219, 223, 260, 272Villa, Ignacio (Bola de Nieve) 169, 292Villa Mella, Dominican Republic 56, 114,

173, 213, 303villancicos 90–93Villaverde, Cirilo 149, 158–159Visigoths 3vizcaıno literary dialect, see Basque dialect of

SpanishVon Hagen, Victor 118–120vos, pronoun 295vowel harmony 56

Wagner, Max 234, 288, 290Walsh, Thomas 81Weber de Kurlat, Frida 71, 72, 75, 77Weil, Thomas 185West, Robert 118West Atlantic language family 9, 44, 197,

199, 201, 202, 204, 246–248, 256,271

Whinnom, Keith 282Whitten, Norman 118Whydah 36, 66, 115Wilde, Jose Antonio 101Williamson, Kay 247Windward Coast 35–37, 103, 115, 121,

125–127, 217, 247Wolof 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, 264Xilenge language and people 264

Index 363

Yanga 98yeısmo 56, 89, 131yes-no questions, see questions, yes-noyijo (hijo) 160Yoruba 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

Yucatan, Africans in 97–100Yungas, region of Bolivia 137

/z/, realizations of 59Zaire 11, 103Zapata Olivella, Manuel 6Ziegler, Douglas-Val 272, 291Zielina, Marıa Carmen 92, 93