Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages - Volume 32, Issue 1, 2017

The origins of the Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs), the languages that developed in Latin America from the contact of African languages and Spanish in colonial times, are extremely intriguing, since it still has to be explained why we do not find creole languages in certain regions of Spanish America, where the socio-demographic conditions for creole languages to emerge appear to have been in place in colonial times. Nowadays, in contrast, we can find such contact varieties in similar former colonies, which were ruled by the British, the French or the Dutch ( McWhorter 2000 ). Despite the fascinating implications of this phenomenon, our knowledge of the AHLAs remains extremely limited. Several hypotheses have been proposed to account for this situation, but no common consensus has yet been achieved ( Chaudenson 2001 ; Mintz 1971 ; Laurence 1974 ; Granda 1968 ; Schwegler 1993 , 2014 ; Lipski 1993 ; etc.). The pull of different views on the issue has been labelled in the literature as the ‘Spanish creole debate’ ( Lipski 2005 : ch.9).

The current study is aimed at casting new light on the Spanish creole debate by relying on a comparative analysis of slave laws in the Americas. This article highlights the role that legal differences played in shaping colonial societies and the Afro-European languages that developed in the New World.

Youth ‘languages’ are an important topic of research in the domain of linguistic change through language contact because the change is rapid and observable and also because the social dimension of change is inevitably present. Engsh, as a youth language in Kenya expresses not only modernity and Kenyan identity but also, the status of being educated, and it differs in this respect from Sheng, the dominant Kenyan youth language. The element of Engsh that expresses this aspect most directly is the use of a grammatical system from English whereas Sheng uses Swahili. In lexicon, Engsh draws upon Sheng and urban English slang. This is a first extensive description of Engsh. The social function of Engsh is interesting in that class is expressed in it, which is not often reported in African urban youth codes. Also the fact that Engsh is a non-exclusive register, which expands through its use in (social) media and most of all in computer mediated communication.

The present paper focuses on the speech of a rural Afro-Brazilian community called Cafundó, situated 150 km from São Paulo. In 1978, when linguistic data were collected, the community constituted approximately eighty individuals, descendants of two slave women who inherited their owners’ proprieties. According to earlier studies, when the inhabitants of Cafundó spoke in their supposed ‘African language’, Cupópia, they used structures borrowed from Portuguese and a vocabulary of possible African origin. A lexical analysis shows that the etymologies match historical and demographical data, indicating that speakers of varieties of Kimbundu, Kikongo, and Umbundu dominated in the community. Through a morphosyntactic analysis, specific features were found in the data, such as copula absence and variable agreement patterns. By showing that some of Cupópia’s specific grammatical features are not derived from the Portuguese spoken by the same speakers but are instead shared with more restructured varieties, this paper defends the hypothesis that this lexically driven in-group code is not simply a regional variety of Portuguese with a number of African-derived words.

Despite regular objections, creole research tends to regard Europeans-to-non-Europeans ratios in colonial settings as a decisive factor in degrees of restructuring. As a result, relatively high proportions of Europeans are seen as the explanation for the emergence of partially restructured varieties. Quite problematic, however, is that some colonial settings with relatively low proportions of Europeans show little historical evidence of restructuring. To address this apparent paradox while avoiding too locale-specific explanations, I attempt to sketch a unified sociolinguistic account of restructuring, or the absence thereof. Central to the account I propose is the notion of upward social mobility in colonial societies, whose linguistic impact I illustrate by means of a comparison between Orange River Afrikaans (ORA) 1 and Cape Malay Dutch (CMD), i.e. two partially restructured non-European varieties of Dutch that arose at the colonial Cape. I emphasize that ORA, which developed in socially fluid frontier settings, seems in certain respects to display less restructuring than CMD, which developed in increasingly segregated settings. I present the fact that Europeans were less represented where ORA developed than where CMD did as evidence that social mobility might to an extent override European/non-European demographics as a factor in degrees of restructuring. I finally discuss the extent to which a socio-historical reconstruction of ORA and CMD can shed light on historical sociolinguistic developments elsewhere than the Cape, such as in particular colonial Ibero-America.