Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular: Variation and Change in the Colombian Chocó (Cambridge Approaches to Language Contact)

Exploring creole studies from a linguistic, historical, and socio-cultural perspective, this study advances our knowledge of the subject by using a cohesive approach to provide new theoretical insights into language shift, language acquisition and language change. It compares the legal system regulating black slavery in Chocó, Colombia with the systems implemented by other European colonial powers in the Americas, to address questions such as what do Chocó Spanish linguistic features say about the nature of Afro-Hispanic vernaculars? What were the sociohistorical conditions in which Chocó Spanish formed? Was slavery in Chocó much different from slavery in other European colonies? Whilst primarily focused on Afro-Hispanic language varieties, Sessarego's findings and methodology can be easily applied and tested to other contact languages and settings, and used to address current debates on the origin of other black communities in the Americas and the languages they speak. "Introduction 1.1. Why this book? Of all the Afro-Hispanic languages of the Americas (AHLAs), the one that more than any other has puzzled linguists interested in the origin and evolution of these contact varieties is definitively Choco Spanish (CS) (McWhorter 2000; Lipski 2005). CS is the dialect spoken by the inhabitants of the Department of Choco, Colombia, a region where blacks represent more than ninety percent of today's total population (DANE 2005) and consist of the descendants of the slaves taken to this region during colonial times to work the rich gold mines of the area. Even though CS presents certain morphological and phonological reductions, the grammatical restructuring encountered in this language is not as intense as the one found in Palenquero, a Spanish creole spoken in San Basilio de Palenque, Department of Bolivar (Colombia) or in the many other European-based creoles spoken in the Americas (i.e., Jamaican English, Haitian French, etc.). At first glance, this may appear a bit surprising, since the conditions that have generally been held to be responsible for the creolization of other European languages in the Americas appear to have also been in place in colonial Choco, namely: (a) a high number of African-born slaves proceeding from all over the Western African coast, (b) a huge disproportion of blacks-to-whites, (c) extreme working conditions in gold mines, (d) a difficult-to-access region, isolated from the rest of Spanish- speaking Colombia (McWhorter 2000: 9)"-- Provided by publisher "Exploring creole studies from a linguistic, historical, and socio-cultural perspective, this study advances our knowledge of the subject by using a cohesive approach to provide new theoretical insights into language shift, language acquisition and language change. It compares the legal system regulating black slavery in Chocó, Colombia with the systems implemented by other European colonial powers in the Americas, to address questions such as what do Chocó Spanish linguistic features say about the nature of Afro-Hispanic vernaculars? What were the sociohistorical conditions in which Chocó Spanish formed? Was slavery in Chocó much different from slavery in other European colonies? Whilst primarily focused on Afro-Hispanic language varieties, Sessarego's findings and methodology can be easily applied and tested to other contact languages and settings, and used to addresses current debates on the origin of other black communities in the Americas and the languages they speak"-- Provided by publisher Exploring creole studies from a linguistic, historical, and socio-cultural perspective, this study advances our knowledge of the subject by using a cohesive approach to provide new theoretical insights into language shift, language acquisition and language change. It compares the legal system regulating black slavery in Chocó, Colombia with the systems implemented by other European colonial powers in the Americas, to address questions such as what do Chocó Spanish linguistic features say about the nature of Afro-Hispanic vernaculars? What were the sociohistorical conditions in which Chocó Spanish formed? Was slavery in Chocó much different from slavery in other European colonies? Whilst primarily focused on Afro-Hispanic language varieties, Sessarego's findings and methodology can be easily applied and tested to other contact languages and settings, and used to address current debates on the origin of other black communities in the Americas and the languages they speak. Contracubierta Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular Dedication Contents Figures Tables Maps Series Editor's Foreword Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. The Place of Chocó Spanish in the Spanish Creole Debate 3. A Sketch of Chocó Spanish 4. Roots of Some Languages 5. Black Slavery in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia 6. Testing the Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis on Colonial Chocó 7. Final Considerations Appendix References Index Using a cohesive approach that combines linguistics, legal history and colonial studies, this study advances our knowledge of creolistics. Focusing primarily on Afro-Hispanic varieties, it will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in language contact, historical linguistics, language variation and change, and Latin American studies.