Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 30, Issue 2, 2015

The intense Berber-Songhay language contact that produced Northern Songhay cannot be understood adequately without taking into account the existence of a Northern Songhay language outside the Azawagh valley — Korandjé, in Algeria — showing few, if any, signs of Tuareg contact. This article proposes a new explanation based on linguistic, epigraphic, and historical data: Western Berber-speaking Masūfa, present throughout northern Mali around 1200, founded Tabelbala to facilitate a new trade route; they chose Northern Songhay speakers, already a distinct group, for their experience in oasis farming and possibly copper mining. As Masūfa influence waned, the language was reoriented towards North Africa.

This paper focuses on the two most distinct varieties of Cape Verdean Creole spoken on the islands of Santiago and São Vicente. These two varieties are consistently viewed as being in opposition to each other on historical, linguistic, political and cultural grounds. This paper examines the historical and linguistic aspects of this particular case. Historically, the island of Santiago was settled in 1461 and the island of São Vicente most likely around 1894 (Andrade, 1996), more than 400 years later. Linguistically, for the past 120 years (Brito, 1888), these two varieties have been traditionally described as being at opposite sides of the creole continuum, the Santiago variety, the oldest of the two, being portrayed as basilectal and the São Vicente variety, of more recent origins, as acrolectal. Focusing on the Tense Mood Aspect markers of these two varieties, the synchronic examination highlights their similarities and differences. The diachronic analysis explores the etymological origins of these forms and the developmental process that they have undergone and reveals that the traces of the founding languages may still be readily detectable in the Santiago variety. Finally, our findings invite us to revisit how these two varieties have been characterized for the past 120 years as being representative of a basilect (Santiago) and an acrolect (São Vicente) on the creole continuum. We show that such a characterization should be much more nuanced.

Our study shows that the extended projection of nominals in Jamaican Creole (JC) is composed of a rich array of hierarchically organized functional projections, in line with cartographic research (Cinque 2002, Rizzi 2004, Belletti 2004). The functional material identified strikes parallelisms with that previously reported for the clausal domain of JC, both in their distributive and interpretative properties and their tendency to overtly realize either their specifier or their head (Durrleman 2001, 2005, 2015). We argue that the identified nominal architecture, coupled with the last resort phenomenon of doubly filling both head and specifier positions (Chomsky & Lasnik 1977, Koopman 1993, Dimitrova-Vulchanova & Giusti 1998, Starke 2004), has implications for another construction in Creole, namely ‘bare sentences’ (Dechaine 1991). These sentences give rise to telicity effects depending on, amongst other things, properties of the internal argument, whose high functional structure must be made visible by respecting the doubly filled XP filter.

This article sheds new light on the history of Afro-Yungueño Spanish (AY), an isolated variety of Spanish spoken by descendants of slaves in the Bolivian Yungas valleys, and examines the possibility of a Portuguese input to it. First, new ethnographic and historical data are introduced to show that the AY speakers in Mururata, Chijchipa, and Tocaña probably descend from African slaves who arrived in Bolivia during the 18th century from different parts of the Portuguese slave trade area. As this suggests that Portuguese may have been involved in the history of AY, the second part of this paper, after describing some of its particularities, compares AY with Africanized varieties of Portuguese, above all Afro-Brazilian Portuguese, to show that there is evidence to assume that AY is related to certain varieties of Afro-Portuguese. The final discussion considers the contributions of AY to the debates on Afro-Iberian speech varieties.

Additional comments to Hebbletwhaite "Scrabble as a tool for Haitian Creole literacy." in JPCL 24:2.