16.2183, Review: Historical Ling/Socioling: Lipski (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2183. Sun Jul 17 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2183, Review: Historical Ling/Socioling: Lipski (2005)

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1)
Date: 14-Jul-2005
From: Silke Jansen < silkejansen at yahoo.de >
Subject: A History of Afro-Hispanic Language 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 15:10:43
From: Silke Jansen < silkejansen at yahoo.de >
Subject: A History of Afro-Hispanic Language 
 

AUTHOR: Lipski, John M.
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


Silke Jansen, Romanisches Seminar, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)

This book provides an overview about the historical development of Afro-
Hispanic language found in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America from 
the fifteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on both extra-linguistic 
conditions and linguistic impact of Afro-Iberian language contact. 

Chapter 1: Africans in the Iberian Peninsula, the slave trade, and 
overview of Afro-Iberian linguistic contacts
Following a brief introduction to the topic, chapter 1 describes the 
historical background of the formation and development of Afro-Iberian 
language, focusing on such aspects of the Atlantic slave trade that are 
pertinent to linguistic issues.

Starting with the Roman Empire, the author gives an overview about the 
African slave-trade and its cultural and linguistic implications. As Arab 
and other Muslims had been involved in slave trading since the Middle 
Ages, sub-Saharan Africans were present in Spain long before the beginning 
of the Atlantic slave trade. However, the number of black Africans 
increased beginning from the early fifteenth century, when the Portuguese 
explorations and exploitations, especially in the Congo Basin and Angola, 
laid the groundwork for the Atlantic slave trade. By the early sixteenth 
century, the Spanish government authorized the first importation of 
African slaves to the Americas, in order to compensate the unsuccessful 
attempts to enslave Native Americans. However, Spain and Portugal 
continued to export slaves until the middle of the nineteenth century.

As for the origin of the slave population, the geographic or ethnic names 
found in Golden Age texts from Spain and early colonial Latin America fail 
to give trustworthy information. Rather than referring to a particular 
region or tribe, they were meant to connote a vague sense of "black 
Africa". Estimates about the number of slaves brought to the New World 
vary between 3.5 million and 25 million. Again, it is the lack of reliable 
information in the historical sources, together with political and 
ideological issues, which makes it difficult to determine the real extent 
of slave introduction. 

Chapter 2: Early Afro-Portuguese texts
Chapter 2 presents the first attestations of Afro-Iberian language in 
Portugal. Although it is known through historical accounts that the 
initial Afro-Portuguese contacts took place in West Africa and gave rise 
to the formation of contact vernaculars, pidgins, and lingua francas, the 
first written attestations of Afro-Iberian language come not from Africa 
but from Portugal. The earliest known Afro-Portuguese text is a poem by 
Fernam da Silveira dated 1455 and published in 1516 in the Cancioneiro 
geral. The largest single corpus of early Afro-Lusitanian language, 
however, is provided by the plays of Gil Vicente, written in the 1520 and 
1530, which contain a number of grammatical features that are consistent 
with other Afro-Iberian literary examples and are also found in Afro-
Iberian creoles. 

The black character, linguistically characterized by his fala de preto or 
habla de negros, becomes an established stereotype in Portuguese and 
Spanish plays by the middle of the sixteenth century, which makes it 
difficult to determine to which extent his speech reflects authentic 
peculiarities of the Portuguese as learned by Africans, rather than 
stylized literary patterns. 

In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, most of the Afro-Portuguese 
accounts are anonymous songs and poem fragments which reflect a greater 
fluency in Portuguese than Gil Vicente's early examples. During the last 
phase of the Afro-Portuguese texts, the most consistent instances of 
língua de preto appear in the so-called literatura de cordel (pamphlets 
characterized by a formulaic use of stereotyped elements). According to 
the author, this pamphlet literature hints at the existence of a stable 
Afro-Portuguese pidgin in seventeenth-century Portugal. In addition, some 
occasional instances of Afro-Lusitanian speech reflect how African 
speakers in Africa, Brazil and Asia may have used Portuguese. 

Chapter 3: Early Afro-Hispanic texts
As for accounts of Africanized language in the Spanish speaking world, the 
first known texts are some coplas by Rodrigo de Reinosa and the farsas of 
Sánchez de Badajoz. The best-known examples of sixteenth-century Afro-
Hispanic language, however, stem from Lope de Rueda, who uses the habla de 
negros in three of his plays written between 1538 and 1545. The 
Africanized features found in these texts do not only provide a high 
degree of mutual consistency, but are also consistent with Afro-Iberian 
texts from all time and periods, which makes them among the most important 
early literary accounts.

After Lope de Rueda, the habla de negros became an established stereotype 
in seventeenth-century Spanish and Portuguese literature, and the greatest 
writers of the Golden Age, namely Góngora, Lope de Vega and Calderón de la 
Barca, made use of this literary device in their works. However, the 
excessive appearance of African characters as buffoons in Golden Age 
plays, especially by Lope de Vega, casts some doubt about the authenticity 
of these sources, since the departures from Spanish usage could be due to 
established stereotypes rather than to an exact imitation of Afro-Hispanic 
models. During the course of the seventeenth century, examples of 
literary "Africanized" language become even more stereotyped. 

As for the accounts of "Africanized" speech in Baroque texts from Latin 
America, these don't show major deviation from the Spanish models and 
probably simply continue the established Iberian literary tradition. 
However, some innovations in the writings of Sor Juana de la Cruz, the 
most important writer to use bozal Spanish in seventeenth-century Latin 
America, already hint at some evolutions in Afro-Hispanic language that 
would later evolve into patterns that differ considerably from the models 
attested in the Iberian Peninsula.  

>From his brief overview about more than three centuries of Afro-Hispanic 
literary accounts, the author concludes that these documents are likely to 
be considered as a relatively viable source of evidence on earlier Afro-
Hispanic speech, appealing to three main arguments: First of all, the 
phonetic and morphological traits documented in Afro-Iberian speech are 
also attested in existing Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles or are logical 
extensions of African area characteristics. Secondly, there is no obvious 
non-African source for the linguistic traits that characterizes the 
literary habla de negros. Finally, historical and social circumstances 
suggest that both key authors and the general public were familiar with 
Afro-Hispanic pidgin. 

Chapter 4: Africans in colonial Spanish America
Chapter 4 presents historical data about the most significant African 
populations in Latin America in a country-by-country order. Although 
during the course of the centuries, the population of African descendent 
blended into the mestizo populations, Peru and Mexico presented a 
considerable African population at various times and places during the 
colonial period. However, due the social circumstances in the colonial 
societies, there are only few identifiable vestigial Afro-Hispanic 
linguistic traits in these areas. 

In contrast to Peru and Mexico, the majority of Africans in Argentina and 
Uruguay were still bozales, speaking African languages and little or no 
Spanish, in the early part of the eighteenth century. Africans in colonial 
Cuba, however, came from all parts of Africa, as well as from other 
Caribbean territories. Although the Dominican Republic contains a high 
proportion of population of African descent, there are no accounts of 
bozal language in the literary and folkloric corpus. In Puerto Rico, there 
was never a number of African bozales large enough to have a strong 
influence in Puerto Rican culture and language. Given that toward the end 
of the nineteenth century and continuing through the first decades of the 
twentieth century, labourers from other Caribbean territories migrated in 
significant number to Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, 
creoloid features in Caribbean Spanish may be due to language contact with 
Afro-European creole languages rather than to the creolization of Spanish 
in the American soil. The majority of the Afro-Ecuadorian population is 
concentrated in the northwest part of the country, although there is a 
significant African-descendant population in the highlands in the Chota 
river valley, whose origins remain uncertain. Through the port of 
Cartagena, which was the principal entry of African slaves to much of 
South America, Colombia received a large number of slaves who worked both 
in agriculture and in mines. During the colonial period, maroon 
communities were found throughout the country, in one of which - San 
Basilio de Palenque - a Spanish-based creole language emerged. Throughout 
its history, Panama has been characterized by strong Afro-Hispanic 
contacts, given that almost al slaves that were brought to the Pacific 
coast of Spanish America passed through Panamanian ports. Although 
Venezuela imported slaves during the colonial period, it was never a major 
agricultural producer, and racial mixture was immediate and continuous. 

CHAPTER 5: Afro-Hispanic texts from Latin America: sixteenth to twentieth 
centuries
Country by country, chapter 5 discusses the most salient Afro-Hispanic 
texts found in Spanish America over the last centuries. 

While the first examples of Afro-Hispanic language in Latin America, 
coming from the mining regions in Peru, Bolivia, Mexico and Colombia, 
still reflect the established Spanish stereotype of habla de negros, 
plausible examples of the imitation of "Africanized" speech can be found 
in Latin American literary works by the end of the eighteenth century. 

A special focus lies on the Cuban bozal texts, which form the centre of 
the reconstruction of earlier Afro-Hispanic speech and its presumable 
contributions to Caribbean varieties of Spanish. A great amount of Cuban 
costumbrista texts, narratives, anthropological works, popular songs, and 
a few religious texts, together with occasional fragments in stories, 
newspaper articles and travellers' descriptions, depict what could have 
been the speech of Cuban bozales. Given the extent of the Afro-Cuban 
corpus, the author limits his analysis to a representative selection of 
texts, paying special attention to the problem of linguistic authenticity 
of bozal representations. After having presented some early references to 
and attestations of Cuban bozal Spanish, he discusses the work of 
Bartolomé José Crespo y Borbón, who, under the pseudonym Creto Gangá, used 
a literary version of bozal language in newspaper columns and plays - one 
of the most extensive, but at the same time most controversial sources of 
Afro-Cuban bozal language in the nineteenth century. Comparing them to 
other sources of bozal language, which show the same kind of deviations 
from standard Spanish, Lipski ascribes a high degree of credibility to 
Crespo y Borbón literary production. 

Fernando Ortiz, the Cuban anthropologist and ethnographer, can be seen as 
another key figure in the study of Afro-Cuban language and culture. His 
works, which mainly deal with Afro-Cuban cultural and religious practices, 
are filled with words and phrases used by the Afro-Cuban population. These 
examples, according to Lipski, are crucial to the study of bozal speech in 
that they represent authentic transcriptions by the author, and not 
literary inventions as the bulk of the Afro-Hispanic corpus. 

Another key figure in the study of Afro-Cuban language and culture is 
Lydia Cabrera, whose writings play a central role in the current debates 
on the nature of bozal language and its possible creolization. However, as 
for the other bozal sources already mentioned, the reliability of 
Cabrera's transcriptions is highly controversial among scholars. 
Considering Cabrera's research methods - she used notebooks and note cards 
to record her observations during her field interviews - as well as her 
comments about her own anthropological and fictional work, Lipski warns 
against seeing her writings as accurate linguistic transcriptions. Rather, 
her bozal fragments represent "approximations written on the fly, or 
reconstructed long after the fact from the author's recollections of the 
general speech patterns of her Afro-Cuban informants." (p. 167) According 
to the author, this does not invalidate her entire corpus, but should 
nonetheless "introduce a critical element of caution" (p. 168) as for 
detailed linguistic analyses on her writings. 

Chapter 6: Survey of major African language families
After having discussed the extra-linguistic circumstances of the formation 
and documentation of bozal language in Chapter 1 to 5, the author turns to 
essentially linguistic problems in chapter 6, which gives an overview 
about the main African language families and their linguistic features in 
order to discuss possible substratum influence on Afro-Hispanic language. 
Although, according to Lipski, the deviations from standard Spanish found 
in bozal texts can generally be put down to imperfect second language 
acquisition rather than to language contact phenomena, there are some 
recurring traits which may reflect African patterns. However, substratum 
influence can probably be found only in those linguistic domains where 
African patterns coincide with more efficient learner's strategies. 

Among the 13 major African language families discussed by Lipski, the 
Bantu family plays a significant role thanks to the remarkable 
resemblances in formal structure, which suggests a higher degree of 
substratum coherence for certain time periods and colonial regions where 
the Bantu element was predominant. 

As for the consequences of the diversity of African languages in Afro-
Iberian contact situations, Lipski calls into question the widespread 
assumed linguistic heterogeneity aboard slaving vessels, stating that the 
chances for slave dealers of obtaining a linguistic more or less 
homogenous group where rather high. Under these circumstances, the 
pressure to creolize Portuguese and Spanish would have been relatively 
low, and the chances of noticeable substratum influence increases. 

Chapter 7: Phonetics/phonology of Afro-Hispanic language
Chapter 7 focuses on phonetic and phonological peculiarities of bozal 
varieties and their possible African origins.

One major typological difference between European and African language is 
the presence of phonemic lexical tones among the latter. Like contemporary 
learner's varieties of Spanish in Africa, bozal speech may once have been 
influenced by African intonation patterns. Among the syllabic structures 
shared by a wide range of prominent African languages, the lack of coda 
consonants, the non-distinction between /l/ and /r/, the presence of nasal 
vowels and prenasalized consonants as well as the absence of onset 
clusters are noteworthy. Some, but not all of these characteristics can be 
found also in early Afro-Iberian language. While the reduction of onset 
clusters through loss of the liquid is almost never found, the treatment 
of the Spanish opposition /l/ : /r/ varies across time and space. 

Special mention must be made of the elimination of syllable-final /s/ in 
Afro-Hispanic speech, for which Lipski suggests a morphological origin 
(reduction of the redundant plural-markers). At the same time, he rejects 
that this change could be due to an Andalusian influence. In connection 
with the striving for a canonical CV syllable and the breaking of 
consonant clusters, he claims that the strategies involved are more 
complicated than a simple truncation, paragogic and epenthetic vowels or 
metathesis also being used. Another typical feature of bozal consonantism 
is the introduction of the nasal /n/ in word-final or word-internal 
syllable-final position (cf. negro > nengtre/ningre/nengue/nenglo, p. 
233). The frequency of word-final nasalization in bozal texts sheds a new 
light on the particles lan/nan, which have been analyzed as direct 
transfers from African languages or creoles. Actually, what was 
interpreted as a word-final /n/ reflects the presence of a prenasalized 
obstruent in the following word, which is a common feature of many West 
African languages. 

As, in the course of the eighteenth century, certain South American 
Spanish dialects undergoe some important phonetic transformations, the 
phonetic shape of Afro-Hispanic language changes. The weakening of 
syllable-final consonants (especially /s/, sometimes also /r/ and /l/) in 
Spanish is also reflected by bozal texts. 

Chapter 8: Grammatical features of Afro-Hispanic language
Chapter 8 focuses on grammatical features of Afro-Iberian language. Again, 
Lipski compares the peculiarities found in bozal texts to the most 
important characteristics of African languages in order to detect possible 
substratum influence. 

As the majority of African languages involved are SVO-languages, no 
modification of Spanish or Portuguese word-order would be expected. Given 
the possibility of OV-constructions in medieval Spanish and Portuguese, it 
is problematic to attribute occasional lapses into SOV word order to an 
African substratum. The overuse of overt subject pronouns in bozal texts, 
especially from the Caribbean, could possibly have its origin in African 
languages where subject clitics take the place of verbal suffixes. 
However, no cases of Ibero-Romance pronouns being used as real subject 
clitics (e.g. *Juan él sabe..., p. 251) have been documented, and, at the 
same time, even in non-creole Spanish dialects the obliteration of verbal 
endings may lead to categorical use of subject pronouns (Andalusia, 
Caribbean Spanish). 

As for the use of direct objects, Afro-Iberian language maintains SVO 
order even with direct objects pronouns and uses disjunctive pronouns 
wherever possible (cf. vêjo ele in Brazilian Portuguese), according to 
recurring patterns among most African language families. 

Double negation is among the Afro-Iberian features that have been traced 
to Bantu influence. However, Lipski claims that, given the diversity of 
negation patterns among African languages, a unified "African" negation 
pattern in bozal Spanish is rather unlikely. It also seems possible that 
double negation is the result of contact with other languages (e.g. French 
Creole, Quechua etc.). 

As for interrogative construction, the sentence-initial position of 
interrogative words is frequent among African languages, but as Spanish 
and Portuguese possess the same strategy, no deviations from standard 
Spanish would be expected. African languages also lack subject inversion 
both in WH- and in yes-no questions, but similar structures are found in 
the Canary Island, Galicia and the Caribbean area, which makes an African 
interpretation difficult. 

Bozal language does not expose special syntactic or morphological devices 
for signalling plural, although Bantu and other African languages possess 
pluralization strategies clustering around the use of prenominal and 
postnominal particles. Eventually, a tendency of marking plurality only on 
the first element of the noun phrase could be observed.

In the use of definite articles, bozal speech often fails to agree the 
articles in gender and number with the respective noun phrase. A striking 
element is the preference of la before masculine nouns, rather then the 
generalization of the unmarked masculine article el generally found in 
creole languages, probably due to phonetic factors.

The verb system has been a key argument in the discussion of a possible 
creolization of Spanish. As African languages of the Kwa-Benue group and 
all Afro-European creoles use verbal subject clitics instead of verbal 
inflection, the wide use of ta as an obvious aspectual particle in 19th 
century Cuban bozal texts has led to claims that Spanish and Portuguese 
elements were reinterpreted as verbal markers. However, according to 
Lipski, this only holds for the Cuban case, where a strong Yoruba 
substratum can be postulated. 

Chronologically speaking, Afro-Iberian speech previous to the 19th century 
is characterized by imperfectly conjugated verbs, the sue of (a)mí as 
subject pronoun, disjunctive object pronouns, the omission of definite and 
indefinite articles, only sporadic gender and number concord between nouns 
and adjectives and the invariant copula sa/sã alternated with correctly 
and incorrectly conjugated forms of ser and estar. Nineteenth-century Afro-
Caribbean speech, however, is qualitatively different from bozal languages 
of other periods and regions, and among its most salient traits are the 
frequent use of third person singular verb forms as invariant verbs, the 
use of son as invariant copula, alternating with correct forms, the 
frequent lack of noun-adjective concordance, the frequent use of 
disjunctive postverbal object pronouns, especially mí, instead of object 
clitics, and the frequent use of the third person singular 
undifferentiated pronoun elle/nelle. 

Chapter 9: The Spanish-Creole debate
This chapter discusses the question of whether Spanish ever creolized, 
which continues to be a controversial issue among scholars. In connection 
with colonial bozal speech, the hypothesis that Spanish DID once creolize 
in the Americas is of particular interest, given that those text may 
contain evidence in support of this viewpoint.

A number of creole researchers and Hispanists have claimed that bozal 
Spanish creolized in the Caribbean and perhaps elsewhere in the New World, 
given that many characteristic features of bozal language can also be 
found in creoles. Lipski, however, makes clear that, for several reasons, 
the historical documents do not support this hypothesis. First of all, the 
considerable disparities among Afro-Hispanic manifestations suggest that 
bozal speech was rather a transitory phenomenon that did not survive 
transgenerationally. It is true that 19th century Cuban and Puerto Rican 
bozal Spanish forms a nucleus of shared characteristics (unstable 
inflections and verb conjugation, variable loss of articles and 
prepositions, occasional confusion of pronominal case, frequent phonetic 
and phonological deformation), but these features are also found in 
vestigial Spanish varieties where no African influence can be 
demonstrated. They should therefore be considered as natural consequences 
of imperfect second language learning: "All of these characteristics are 
natural consequences of imperfect learning, of the possible interference 
of a variety of non-Romance languages, of the lack of a wide pool of 
adequate native speaker models, and the absence of individual and societal 
monitoring and feedback mechanisms that would partially counteract 
reductive tendencies." (p. 300) At the same time, the presence of a range 
of European creole languages in the Caribbean in the 19th and 20th century 
may have lead to the borrowing of creoloid features into Spanish or have 
reinforced certain creoloid patterns already existent in bozal Spanish. 

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Lipski's book provides an excellent and very detailed overview of all 
significant issues and aspects related with Afro-Hispanic language, 
something that - to my knowledge - had never been done before in such 
great detail. 

The text is very accessible, but, given the enormous amount of 
information, a short summary of the most important ideas at the end of 
each chapter would facilitate the reading of the book. Although the 
structure of the book is en general very clear, it would sometimes have 
been more natural to organize the information according to subject 
matters, rather than presenting it country-by-country, which at times 
leads to repetitions. It is sure that the last chapter dealing with the 
Spanish-Creole debate many of the ideas presented in the preceding 
chapters are taken up again to underpin the author's position, but 
nonetheless, it would be useful to have a final chapter to summarize the 
whole book and present some overall conclusions about bozal speech. 

Special mention must be made of the Appendix, available as a free online 
resource in pdf-format, which contains not only the largest-known 
anthology of primary texts on Afro-Hispanic speech, but also listings of 
bozal-attestations in different countries and a compilation of phonetic, 
morphologic and syntactic examples that complete the examples discussed in 
the book and exemplify the author's argumentation. Comprising more than 
300 pages, it is almost as extensive as the book itself. The material is 
organized according to the structure of the book, what facilitates 
utilization. However, if one is looking for a special example or text, a 
table of contents and/or an index would be useful.

One innovative element of the book is the detailed and critical discussion 
of the historical bozal documentation, which - in addition to problems 
related with the fact that most of the sources reflect established 
literary patterns often used to ridicule a socially marginalized group - 
also considers biographic instances of the bozal authors in order to 
determine the degree of authenticity of their texts. For example, Lipski's 
critical evaluation of Lydia Cabrera's works (p. 163 ff.), often regarded 
as being one of the best sources of information about Cuban bozal 
language, seems very convincing to me inasmuch as he discusses Cabrera's 
texts in a biographic setting, taking into account her working methods as 
well as her personal attitude on her work.

Although the author's aim is to give a general overview about Hispanic 
bozal language, he does not desist to discuss single problems in a 
detailed way, giving some interesting and innovative interpretations on 
many occasions (e.g. his analysis of lan/nan as a "unique combination of 
African areal characteristics and a particular interpretation of Spanish 
and Afro-Hispanic phonotactic patterns by Africans and Spanish speakers 
alike", p. 235-57). In this and in many other cases, the author weighs his 
arguments with a great deal of caution, always trying to build his 
hypothesis on an empirical basis. Given the ideological turn that the 
study of Afro-Hispanic language and culture contact has sometimes taken, 
this is one of the most significant merits of this book. 

A History of Afro-Hispanic Language is a very well substantiated and 
highly informative book that should not be missing in any collection with 
holdings on Afro-Hispanic language contact. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Silke Jansen received her Ph.D. in Romance Linguistics from the University 
of Münster (Germany). She is currently a lecturer for Romance linguistics 
at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany). Her teaching and 
research interests include semantics, languages in contact and historical 
linguistics of the Romance languages.





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