27.3430, Review: Anthro LIng; Hist Ling; Socioling: Sessarego (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3430. Tue Aug 30 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3430, Review: Anthro LIng; Hist Ling; Socioling: Sessarego (2015)

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Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 10:38:00
From: Natalie Operstein [natacha at ucla.edu]
Subject: Afro-Peruvian Spanish

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-4927.html

AUTHOR: Sandro  Sessarego
TITLE: Afro-Peruvian Spanish
SUBTITLE: Spanish slavery and the legacy of Spanish Creoles
SERIES TITLE: Creole Language Library 51
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Natalie Operstein, California State University, Fullerton

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Afro-Peruvian Spanish, by Sandro Sessarego, has both a descriptive and a
theoretical objective. The first objective is to provide a descriptive study
of an Afro-Hispanic dialect from the province of Chincha, Peru, based on the
author's fieldwork in several villages. The structural features of this
variety, which the author calls Afro-Peruvian Spanish, or APS for short, are
then discussed against the background question of why the number of
Spanish-based creoles in the Americas is significantly smaller than that of
creoles based on other European languages. Addressing this question
constitutes the second objective of the book, which is to offer a new
hypothesis, ''The Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis'', to help account for
the relative lack of Spanish creoles in the region. 

The book consists of five substantive chapters and a brief introduction and
conclusion. Chapter 1, ''Introduction'', provides a succinct overview of the
book; the stated objectives include documenting the history of slavery in the
region and identifying the characteristics of APS in order to properly situate
it within the Afro-Hispanic dialect continuum. 

Chapter 2, ''Spanish creole debate'', sets the scene for the theoretical
discussion later in the book by revisiting the principal proposed explanations
for the small number of Spanish-based creoles, as compared to creoles
lexically based on other European languages, that are currently attested in
the Americas. The reviewed hypotheses range from those that assume prior
existence of creolized Spanish in Spanish America and ascribe the currently
small number of Spanish-based creoles to their subsequent decreolization, to
those that employ demographic and socio-economic data to argue that creolized
Spanish never developed in the areas in question. A special place is accorded
to an evaluation of McWhorter's (2000) hypothesis, which assumes that
plantation creoles begin their life as pidgins and traces the small number of
Spanish-based creoles in the Americas to the absence of a Spanish-based pidgin
in West Africa. The latter is linked to the fact that Spain did not
participate in the direct transfer of slaves across the Atlantic: since no
Spanish posts were established in Africa, no Afro-Hispanic pidgin could have
developed and then travel to the Americas. The last section of this chapter
outlines the theoretical objective of the book, which is to offer a new
hypothesis, ''The Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis'', to account for the
lack of creoles in the region by looking at the history of slavery and the
laws governing slaves in the Americas. 

Chapter 3, ''A description of Afro-Peruvian Spanish grammar'', outlines the
phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features of traditional APS. These
are found mostly in the speech of elderly speakers, while younger speakers
seem to prefer the local prestige Spanish dialect. The methodology of the
fieldwork study included approximately sixty interviews in the rural areas of
the province of Chincha, with interviewees being of a wide educational and
social background range. Of these informants, only a few, the least-educated
elderly, could speak the variety farthest from the regional macro-dialect. The
author's fieldwork data are systematically compared with previous fieldwork-
and text-based studies of APS and/or other Afro-Hispanic varieties; the
phonetic/phonological data are also situated within the Peruvian Spanish
dialect continuum, establishing a context for APS. The phonological features
noted for APS are not exclusive to this variety but are found in other
Afro-Hispanic varieties and/or non-standard Spanish dialects and include
(infrequent) raising of mid vowels, lengthening of stressed vowels, addition
of paragogic vowels, yeísmo, aspiration and deletion of syllable-final /s/,
deletion of /ɾ/ word-finally and in /Cɾ/ clusters, and position-dependent
neutralization of /d/ and /ɾ/ and of /l/ and /ɾ/. The grammatical features
deviating from standard Spanish are likewise not specific to APS but have been
reported from other Afro-Hispanic varieties and/or L2 Spanish. These include
lack of nominal pluralization after numerals and plural determiners, variable
gender agreement between nouns and determiners and/or adjectives, the use of
determinerless nouns, regularization of irregular verb forms, overlap between
the uses of ‘haber’ and ‘tener’, omission or non-standard use of prepositions,
variable subject-verb agreement, use of non-emphatic overt subjects, and lack
of subject-verb inversion in questions. The vocabulary section contains a list
of forty lexical items characteristic of APS. 

Chapter 4, ''The status of Afro-Peruvian Spanish'', advances the hypothesis
that APS, in common with several other Afro-Hispanic varieties, may be
explainable as ''the result of L1 acquisition (nativization) of advanced L2
grammars'' (p. 66). This chapter briefly summarizes existing research on
connections between creole formation and second language acquisition,
including Ingo Plag's Interlanguage Hypothesis of Creole Formation (Plag 2008a
et seq.) which posits that creole genesis follows a universal path,
independent of the L1 of the speakers, and that creoles could be
''conventionalized interlanguages of an early stage''. The core argument in
this chapter is the proposal that the variations in APS as well as other
Afro-Hispanic varieties are indeed due to SLA strategies. The proposed model
is one of successive generational nativization, with each following generation
retaining fewer features from the previous generation’s L1, until the variety
more closely resembles the L2. This chapter presents a list of morphosyntactic
features shared by different Afro-Hispanic varieties, which in some cases have
been previously identified as potentially pointing to a preceding creole
stage. The features in question are the use of non-emphatic overt subjects,
variable subject-verb agreement, lack of number and gender agreement in the
noun phrase, lack of subject-verb inversion in questions, and presence of
determinerless nouns. It is then shown that each feature is also found in
advanced interlanguages, and thus is not necessarily indicative of
decreolization. 

Chapter 5, ''Black slavery in Peru'', breaks down the history of black slavery
in Peru into three main periods. The first period (1530-1650) is the
introduction of black slaves, black freed persons, and ‘ladinos’ (those who
adopted Spanish culture and language) from other Spanish-controlled regions
(i.e., not directly from Africa). The second period (1650-1760) involves the
increase in the population of ‘bozales’ (slaves imported directly from Africa)
who worked mostly in the urban regions of colonial Peru. The third period
(1760-1980) involved the gradual decrease in the import of slaves and the
establishment of civil rights laws for black Peruvians. Because of the highly
constrained nature of Spanish slave trading laws, owning black slaves,
especially skilled ones, was seen as a sign of privilege and wealth. In
Spanish Caribbean colonies, there was an industry which involved the buying of
slaves and teaching them skills in order to resell them at a higher price.
With this education came the working acquisition of the language, so that the
slave would have had to learn the language as an L2 rather than learning a
pidgin or creole among other black slaves. This supports the author's theory
that the Afro-Hispanic varieties were not creoles but rather advanced stages
of L2 Spanish acquisition. Continued need for a skilled Spanish-speaking
workforce along the rural coast of Peru for sugarcane plantations and the
logistic challenges associated with transporting slaves led to a gradual
migration of the urban black population to the rural areas of the colony,
where the language evidently settled. Because it was not a sudden, massive
migration, and because the landowners preferred skilled black slaves who could
speak the language, the author argues that the sociolinguistic conditions for
the development of a creole language in the rural plantations were not met
during any of the stages. 

Chapter 6, ''Solving the Spanish creole puzzle: the legal hypothesis of creole
genesis'', contains the main theoretical contribution of the book. In it, the
author puts forward the hypothesis that one of the reasons for the small
number of Spanish creoles in the Americas, as compared to creoles based on the
languages of other European powers, lies in the different legal status of the
Spanish slaves. This aspect of black slavery in the Americas has been
overlooked in previous discussions of the genesis of Spanish-based creoles.
Under the Spanish slave law of the time, grounded in the Justinian ‘Corpus
Juris Civilis’, slaves had a series of legal rights that were denied to slaves
in other European colonies including British, Dutch, French, and Portuguese.
The essential difference is that slaves under Spanish slave laws were granted
legal personality, which resulted in their right to be clothed and fed, to get
married, to not be punished too harshly, to take part in legal proceedings,
and to purchase their own manumission (p. 124). This set of laws was unique to
Spain also in that laws could not be changed locally, unlike the slave laws,
e.g., in English colonies, which used no historical precedent and changed from
locality to locality. The English slave laws were also much more harsh; slaves
were neither granted legal personality which allowed the ability to sue their
masters, nor could they pursue their own source of capital. A linguistic
aspect of these laws was that masters were not allowed to teach black slaves
how to read or write, which severely hindered their social integration. The
author adduces witness accounts by contemporary observers, and other types of
data, to argue that due to their different legal status, slaves in the Spanish
colonies had comparatively better living conditions and more opportunities for
social integration and upward mobility, which led them to better integrate
with colonial life and adopt the culture and language. Toward the end of the
chapter, the Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis is tested against three case
studies, which include the failure of a creole to develop in colonial Chocó,
Colombia or in nineteenth-century Cuba after the development of a large-scale
plantation system there, while a creole did develop and/or was preserved in
Barbados and South Carolina. 

In Chapter 7, ''Concluding remarks'', the author reiterates the main points of
the study, including his conclusion that several Afro-Hispanic dialects of the
Americas, among them APS, do not descend from a preceding creole stage but
rather represent a fossilized advanced stage of Spanish second language
acquisition.   

EVALUATION

This study provides valuable first-hand documentation of traditional
Afro-Peruvian Spanish and usefully contributes to the evolving research area
on the borderline between genetic creolistics and naturalistic second language
acquisition (see, e.g., Mufwene 2010). APS is found to share many features
with L2 Spanish, and it is argued that this dialect, along with several other
Afro-Hispanic dialects in the Americas, does not descend from a preceding
creole in either the Americas or the African mainland, but rather is a
fossilized advanced stage of Spanish language acquisition, or what the author
calls ‘advanced conventionalized second language’. 

An interesting aspect of this hypothesis is spelled out in section 4.3 of the
book: APS and several other Afro-Hispanic varieties are hypothesized to have
resulted from ''L1 acquisition (nativization) of advanced L2 grammars''. This
study thus helps to identify specific instances of L1 grammars ''built on L2
inputs'', and is very timely in light of the current discussion over the
agents and loci of diachronic language change. In particular, the author's
hypothesis appears to resonate with a similar perspective on the role of L2
inputs in L1 acquisition discussed in Meisel (2011: 139). The hypothesis that
selected Afro-Hispanic varieties may be characterized as advanced
conventionalized L2 Spanish also may open interesting lines of inquiry into a
comparative study between these and other conventionalized L2 varieties of
Spanish, such as ‘español indígena’ (Zimmermann 2004; Guerrero and San Giacomo
2010). 

By drawing attention to a previously overlooked aspect of African slavery in
the Americas, this book also contributes a new dimension to the theoretical
debate over the ''missing Spanish creoles''. ''The Legal Hypothesis of Creole
Genesis'', proposed by the author, links the relative lack of Spanish-based
creoles with the laws governing slaves in the Americas. This proposal appears
well-founded with the evidence provided; further research outside former
Spanish colonies is required to clarify the role of the law in the formation
or inhibition of creoles in other parts of the world. 

Finally, by showing that linguistic facts alone can be used to lend support to
a variety of theories, this multi-faceted study of APS also succeeds in
stressing the need for cooperation between different fields of inquiry and for
basing the study of contact varieties on detailed studies of the demographic
and other socio-historical conditions of their development. 

REFERENCES

Guerrero Galván, Alonso and Marcela San Giacomo. 2010. El llamado español
indígena en el contexto del bilingüismo. In Historia sociolingüística de
México, vol. 3, Espacio, contacto y discurso político, Rebeca Barriga
Villanueva and Pedro Martin Butragueno (eds), 1457-1523. México, D.F.: El
Colegio de México. 

McWhorter, John. 2000. The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of 
Plantation Contact Languages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 

Meisel, Jürgen M. 2011. Bilingual language acquisition and theories of
diachronic 
change: Bilingualism as cause and effect of grammatical change. Bilingualism: 
Language and Cognition 14: 121-145. 

Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2010. SLA and the emergence of creoles. Studies in Second
Language Acquisition 32: 359-400. 

Plag, Ingo. 2008a. Creoles as interlanguages: Inflectional morphology. Journal
of Pidgin 
and Creole Languages 23: 109-130. 

Plag, Ingo. 2008b. Creoles as interlanguages: Syntactic structures. Journal of
Pidgin and 
Creole Languages 23: 307-328.  

Plag, Ingo. 2009a. Creoles as interlanguages: Phonology. Journal of Pidgin and
Creole 
Languages 24: 119-138. 

Plag, Ingo. 2009b. Creoles as interlanguages: Word-formation. Journal of
Pidgin and 
Creole Languages 24: 339-362.  

Zimmermann, Klaus. 2004. El contacto de las lenguas amerindias con el español
en México. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 2: 19-39.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

ABOUT THE REVIEWERS 

Natalie Operstein is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English,
Comparative Literature, and Linguistics of California State University,
Fullerton. Her research interests include historical and comparative
linguistics, phonology, and language contact. 

Ben Wood is a graduate student of linguistics at California State University.
His research interests include anthropological linguistics, historical and
comparative linguistics, and public linguistic education.





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