16.2312, Review: Historical Ling/Socioling: Lipski (2005), 2nd rev.

[LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2312. Tue Aug 02 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2312, Review: Historical Ling/Socioling: Lipski (2005), 2nd rev.

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U <aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Aristar-Dry, Eastern Michigan U <hdry at linguistlist.org>
 
Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org) 
        Sheila Dooley, U of Arizona  
        Terry Langendoen, U of Arizona  

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomi at linguistlist.org>
================================================================  

What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
Book Discussion Forum. We expect discussions to be informal and 
interactive; and the author of the book discussed is cordially 
invited to join in. If you are interested in leading a book 
discussion, look for books announced on LINGUIST as "available 
for review." Then contact Sheila Dooley at collberg at linguistlist.org. 

===========================Directory==============================  

1)
Date: 02-Aug-2005
From: Angela Bartens < Angela.Bartens at helsinki.fi >
Subject: A History of Afro-Hispanic Language 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 17:00:58
From: Angela Bartens < Angela.Bartens at helsinki.fi >
Subject: A History of Afro-Hispanic Language 
 

AUTHOR: Lipski, John 
TITLE: A History of Afro-Hispanic Language 
SUBTITLE: Five centuries, five continents
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press. 
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-606.html

Angela Bartens, Department of Romance Languages, 
Section of Iberoromance Languages, University of Helsinki.

[Another review of this book appears in 
http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2183.html -- Eds.]

SUMMARY

As the information on the publisher's homepage states, the volume 
under review is the first book in English to provide an overview of the 
language contact situations that shaped Afro-Hispanic language. This 
is an understatement in the sense that no such reference exists in any 
other language, either, starting with the two Iberoromance languages 
concerned, Spanish and Portuguese.

At least among Iberocreolists, there is the saying that a given linguistic 
feature x does not exist in any known Iberoromance variety unless 
John Lipski has just discovered its occurrence in some more or less 
remote corner of the Hispanic world. The volume he is now offering to 
the scientific community bears ample evidence of this profound 
knowledge of the Hispanic world.

In the introductory chapter (pp. 1-13), Lipski raises the main issues to 
be discussed in the subsequent chapters: the presence of sub-
Saharan Africans in the Hispanic world over the time span of five 
centuries and the concomitant language contact situations; the 
difficulty of reconstructing Afro-Hispanic speech and the importance of 
this endeavor for the history of Spanish in general; and the main 
hypotheses regarding the nature of the Afro-Hispanic contact varieties 
that are supposed to have arisen from the mentioned settings.

The first half of chapter 1, Africans in the Iberian peninsula, the slave 
trade, and overview of Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts (pp. 14-50), 
constitutes a thorough overview of the first contacts Europeans had 
with sub-Saharan Africans and the rapid transformation of these early 
contacts into the increasingly expanding Atlantic slave trade. While 
there are fairly detailed surveys of the Atlantic slave trade, an 
important addition to the discussion of Afro-Hispanic language are the 
references to the Portuguese colonization of Asia (pp. 29-32). In the 
second half, Lipski tackles the difficult task of matching regions of 
origin and destination of the slaves taken to the Hispanic colonies of 
the New World as well as ethnic designations.

Chapters 2 and 3 deal with early Afro-Portuguese and Afro-Hispanic 
texts (pp. 51-70 and 71-94, respectively). In the case of the early Afro- 
Portuguese texts, this includes texts from fifteenth to eighteenth 
century Portugal, sixteenth to seventeenth century Africa, and colonial 
Brazil and Portuguese Asia. In the case of Portugal, an Afro-
Portuguese pidgin may have been used at least through the early part 
of the eighteenth century (p. 62). In the case of the early Afro-
Hispanic texts, the first occurrences in early sixteenth century Spain 
have a clear Afro-Portuguese imprint. Around the middle of the 
sixteenth century, a coherent Afro- Hispanic pidgin makes its first 
appearance in texts. While literary Afro- Hispanic flourished especially 
at the beginning of the seventeenth century and 'bozal' (L2-Spanish 
as spoken by Africans) was fading out by the middle of the same 
century, so-called black Spanish may still have been characterized by 
some ethnolinguistic markers during the eighteenth century. Both 
chapters include a panoramic discussion of the linguistic features 
found in the texts surveyed.

In chapter 4, Africans in colonial Spanish America (pp. 95-128), the 
author adopts a country-by-country approach when presenting the 
origins of the African laborers in the Spanish colonies. Where 
relevant, i.e., in the cases of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and 
Puerto Rico, he also documents the arrival of Afro-European creole 
speakers.

Chapter 5, Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America: sixteenth to 
twentieth centuries (pp. 129-196), follows the same country-by-
country presentation mode. While the earliest texts still imitate the 
stereotypes of peninsular literary Afro-Hispanic speech, an authentic 
tradition emerges by the end of the eighteenth century. A well-known 
example of the earliest texts are the villancicos of Sor Juana Ines de la 
Cruz and Gabriel de Santillana (p. 140). The most important corpus of 
Afro-Hispanic texts comes, however, from nineteenth and twentieth 
century Cuba. Among these texts, Lydia Cabrera's writings constitute 
the most important single source for bozal language in the Caribbean 
when considered with certain caution. From the late eighteenth 
century onwards, Afro-Cuban speech has also been influenced by 
Haitian creole. In the case of Afro-Dominican speech, the majority of 
texts depicts the Spanish of Haitians (p. 172). Another Caribbean 
creole, Papiamentu, has influenced Afro-Hispanic speech in Cuba, 
Puerto Rico and Venezuela.

In chapter 6 (pp. 197-203), Lipski presents a survey of the major 
African language families, with special reference to those families 
which contributed to the formation of Afro-Hispanic speech and 
argues that the composition of the slave population was frequently 
more homogeneous than what has been assumed before.

Although specific linguistic features were already listed in the 
presentation of Afro-Hispanic texts from different countries, Lipski 
proceeds to a systematic discussion of the phonetics/phonology and 
grammatical features of Afro-Hispanic language in chapters 7 and 8 
(pp. 204- 244 and 205-276, respectively). 

On the level of phonetics/phonology, he deals with tonal phenomena, 
syllabic structure, the realization of liquid consonants and nasalization 
among other things. In this very detailed presentation, the author also 
draws on data from the adaptation of European loanwords into African 
language and from Spanish and Portuguese spoken by speakers of 
Bantu languages. Because of qualitative differences at least in part 
due to developments within Spanish dialects independent of language 
contact, the main phonetic and phonological tendencies of early Afro-
Iberian language and nineteenth-century Spanish American bozal 
Spanish are summarized separately (pp. 240-242 and 242-244).

Among the grammatical features discussed are word order, subjects 
and subject pronouns as well as objects and object pronouns, 
negation, interrogative constructions, nominal plural formation, definite 
articles, copulative verbs (a very short note, p. 269, since African 
languages appear to have exerted very little influence on Afro-
Hispanic language in this area), genitive constructions, verb systems, 
and prepositions and postpositions.

The chapter of most theoretical interest is the final chapter 9, The 
Spanish-Creole debate (pp. 277-304). For a long time, the fact that so 
few Spanish-based creoles crystallized in the Americas -- 
Papiamentu is both Spanish- and Portuguese-based although some 
scholars maintain Spanish was the only lexifier language and 
Colombian Palenquero still preserves Afro- Portuguese features -- 
has constituted an enigma for creolists of all theoretical persuasions. 
Answers have been sought in the proposals of the slow shift in 
population proportions allowing slaves to acquire a vernacular variety 
of the colonizers' language, a more gentle colonization by the 
Spaniards, the disappearance of once more wide-spread Spanish- 
lexifier creoles, and, most recently by McWhorter (1995, 2000) that a 
pidgin of the corresponding lexifier language formed in the forts on the 
West African coast obligatorily precedes the jelling of Caribbean 
creoles. A fifth argument not mentioned by the author in this context 
(e.g. p. 277) is the existence of African linguae francae like Yoruba 
during the late stages of the slave economy when the slave to white 
population ratio disfavored the acquisition of the colonizers' language. 
Lipski admits that race relations were somewhat different in the 
Spanish Caribbean during the centuries of economic stagnation but 
refuses that population proportions alone could account for the non-
formation of Spanish creoles (p. 278). Unlike any other scholar before, 
he also quite convincingly argues against McWhorter's thesis that only 
a pidgin formed in West Africa can be at the root of Caribbean creole 
formation. As in his previous work (e.g., Lipski 1994), the author is 
very careful about making any categorical statements about the 
Spanish creole question, ending the book with the sentence: The last 
word on the status of Afro-Hispanic language in the Americas has yet 
to be written (p. 304). Based on the available evidence and critically 
evaluated previous research, he nevertheless qualifies most Afro-
Hispanic speech in the Americas as highly variable approximations at 
learning Spanish as an L2 but concedes that this bozal Spanish 
assumed more homogeneity in nineteenth century Cuba and, albeit 
represented by a much smaller corpus, Puerto Rico. According to the 
author (p. 300), the shared features of bozal Spanish from the middle 
of the sixteenth until the beginning of the twentieth century are 
unstable and variable nominal gender and occasionally number 
inflection; unstable verb conjugation and occasional uninflected 
infinitives, variable loss of articles and prepositions; occasional 
confusion of pronominal case and frequent phonetic and phonological 
deformation (I would speak of alteration).

The book also concludes an impressive list of references (pp. 305-
351) and an index (pp. 352-363) which compensates for the brevity of 
the table of contents (p. vii) where no subchapter titles are given 
(actually a very sensible decision). By itself, the volume has x + 363 
pages. Its Appendix, available at http://www.cambridge.org/0521822653, 
not only comprises a volume on its own as far as its length is 
concerned: it consists of 305 pages downloadable in pdf-format. Also 
by content it could well have been published as a traditional book as it 
is the most comprehensive anthology of Afro-Hispanic texts compiled 
until today (cf., e.g., Granda et al. 1996, which admittedly aims at 
being a selection). Now it is available to an even wider public.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Perhaps more than in any of his previous, very numerous publications, 
Lipski is offering us an overwhelming wealth of data and analyses. He 
has managed to tie together all the strands of the growing field of Afro-
 Hispanic studies, linking it to historical data, Hispanic dialectology and 
other creole studies. The suggestion of pursuing creole-to-
creole/bozal contacts, present in some of his earlier work (e.g. Lipski 
2005), may very well be the very direction Afro-Hispanic studies 
should turn to, at least when dealing with the (circum-)Caribbean 
region. For example, taking into account the presence of creole input, 
Lipski is able to trace the double negation of the Cuban and 
Dominican data to Haitian creole while the same construction of 
Brazilian Portuguese and in some varieties of Colombian Spanish 
(above all Chocó) is traceable to Bantu languages (pp. 258-259). 
There are also innumerous little details usually not found in studies of 
the field, e.g. the mention that the word bozals was first attested in 
Catalan (p. 15) or acknowledgement of the Iberian-Italian slave 
connection (p. 14ff.).

Looking for shortcomings in this astounding book is like looking for 
microscopic needles in a huge haystack. They are essentially due to 
the dimensions of the book. There might have been other ways in 
which to organize the book. There is some vacillation in the use and 
presentation of classifications of African language families (cf. pp. 9, 
44, 105-107, chapter 7). For someone not familiar with the field, it is 
no easy task to match the ethnic Afro-Peruvian designations of p. 96 
with the more common language names on p. 97 (maybe the reader 
could be referred to pp. 105- 107?). There are a few typos, something 
I consider too trivial for listing the pages here, and a few cases have 
crept in where very brief passages look as if they had been pasted 
from one page to the other (cf. pp. 25 and 26, 167 and 168, and 282 
and 285). When reference is made to the decline of sugar production 
on Sao Tome, Lipski quotes Curtin's hypothesis that it was occasioned 
by the competition of Brazil (p. 48). Without the slave revolts of the 
1570s, 80s and 90s, sugar production might not have declined on Sao 
Tome in the first place. On p. 66, there is one case where the 
sequence should be /r/ > [l], not the reverse. Most of note 68 on p. 
117 on Papiamentu speakers would fit better into the section on 
Africans in Cuba (and not Puerto Rico). The formulation of note 42 on 
p. 226 suggests that Afro-Brazilian Portuguese is actually a creole, a 
thesis which is now-a- days unsustainable. The observation that even 
in non-creole Spanish dialects categorical use of subject pronouns 
may arise when verbal endings are obliterated through consonantal 
reduction (p. 252) seems a plea for the functional hypothesis, a thesis 
no longer supported by contemporaneous studies of e.g. Caribbean 
Spanish (cf. Flores 2002). 

Notwithstanding these very minor observations, this is a major 
reference for Afro-Hispanists, creolists and Hispanic dialectologists 
which should not lack from any well-furnished library and which cannot 
be surpassed unless a huge amount of radically different Afro-
Hispanic texts comes to light, something which unfortunately is 
extremely unlikely to happen.

REFERENCES

Flores-Ferran, Nydia (2002): Subject personal pronouns in Spanish 
Narrative of Puerto Ricans in New York City. Munchen: Lincom 
Europa.

Granda, German de et al. (1996): Antologia de textos afro-
hispanicos.Mainz: CELA.

Lipski, John M. (1994): Latin American Spanish. London: Longman.

Lipski, John M. (2005): El espanol en el mundo: Frutos del ultimo siglo 
de contactos linguisticos. In: Luis A. Ortiz Lopez & Manuel Lacorte 
(eds.): Contactos y contextos linguisticos. Madrid/Frankfurt: 
Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 29-53.

McWhorter, John (1995): The scarcity of Spanish-based creoles 
explained. In: Language in Society 24, 213-244.

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

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr.phil. Angela Bartens is Acting chair of Iberoromance Languages at 
the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include language 
contact including pidgins and creoles, sociolinguistics and applied 
sociolinguistics including language policy and language planning.





-----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2312