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Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact
Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact: Sociolinguistic Case Studies provides an original and modern analysis of the development of Spanish and its contact with other languages using a sociolinguistic framework from both synchronic and diachronic angles. Split into three sections, (1) border speech communities, (2) outcomes and perceptions in situations of language and dialect contact and (3) contact and alternation: social boundaries of language switching, this collection offers new perspectives in the field of language contact and change. Each chapter presents an original study detailing the social factors that have shaped contact varieties of Spanish, providing principal arguments and theories about language use, contact, and change, as well as guided topics for discussion. With its wide scope, this book is a landmark in language interaction processes and studies, and will be a valuable reference for educators, scholars, language professionals, and students with an interest in the vitality of the Spanish language in contact with other languages. Eva Núñez-Méndez is professor of Spanish linguistics at Portland State University, where she has been part of the Department of World Languages and Literatures since 2002. Her research focuses primarily on linguistics (phonetics, syntax, and the history of the Spanish language) and on applied linguistics (language variation, text analysis, and translation). Her books include Diachronic Applications of Hispanic Linguistics (2016), Fundamentals of the History of the Spanish Language (2012), Fundamentals of Spanish Phonetics and Phonology (2012, 2005), and Troilus and Cressida: A Bilingual Edition (2008).
Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics Series Editor: Dale Koike University of Texas at Austin
The Routledge Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics series provides a showcase for the latest research on Spanish and Portuguese Linguistics. It publishes select research monographs on various topics in the field, reflecting strands of current interest. Titles in the series Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact Sociolinguistic Case Studies Edited by Eva Núñez-Méndez Collocations and Other Lexical Combinations in Spanish Theoretical, Lexicographical, and Applied Perspectives Edited by Sergi Toner and Elisenda Bernal Gallen Current Research in Puerto Rican Linguistics Edited by Melvin González-Rivera Lexical Borrowing and Deborrowing in Spanish in New York City Towards a Synthesis of the Social Correlates of Lexical Use and Diffusion in Immigrant Contexts Rachel Varra
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/languages/ series/RSHLL
Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact Sociolinguistic Case Studies
Edited by Eva Núñez-Méndez Series Editor: Dale Koike Spanish list advisor: Javier Muñoz-Basols
First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 selection and editorial matter, Eva Núñez-Méndez; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-29591-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10035-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of maps and figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Introduction
vii viii x xv xvi 1
E VA N Ú Ñ E Z - M É NDE Z
SECTION I
Border speech communities 1 Language and borders: case studies from the U.S. Southwest
7 9
G L E N N A . M A RT Í NE Z
2 Linguistic encounters in Texas
27
M A N U E L J . G UT I É RRE Z
3 Bilingualism in California: the case of Los Angeles
51
A N A S Á N C H E Z- MUÑOZ
4 Attitudes and language behavior at the Brazilian-Uruguayan border
69
G Ö Z K A U F M A NN
SECTION II
Outcomes and perceptions in situations of language and dialect contact
93
5 Languages in contact: pidginization and creolization, Spanish in the Caribbean
95
J O H N M . L I P S KI
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Contents
6 Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola: historical and sociolinguistic perspectives
119
L U I S A . O RTI Z L ÓP E Z
7 Languages in contact: the case of Colombia
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A R M I N S C H W E GL E R AND JOS É AL E JANDRO C O R R EA
SECTION III
Contact and alternation: social boundaries of language switching 8 Have monolingualism and monoculturalism been overcome in Mexico?
177
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M A R I A D E L A L UZ MAT US - ME NDOZ A
9 Language contact in Paraguay: cultural fusion in a unique sociolinguistic situation
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H A R A L A M B OS S YME ONI DI S
10 Language contact and the indigenous languages of Uruguay
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Y L I A N A V. RODRÍ GUE Z
11 Languages in contact: grammaticalization and complexification in northern Andean gerundianismo
239
K AT H L E E N S . GUE RRA
12 Spain’s language policies and the discourse of contact linguistics: a diachronic approach
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E VA N Ú Ñ E Z - MÉ NDE Z
Index
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Maps and figures
Maps 2.1 Northeastern New Spain in the late 18th century: missions and towns 6.1 Map of Hispaniola 7.1 Colombia with its three mountain ranges and wide llanos ‘plains’ to the east 7.2 Colombia’s population density in 2000 7.3a Linguistic diversity of Colombia 7.3b Major urban centers 7.4 Location of Palenque 7.5 Mayombe region (shaded), principal African origin of the Palenqueros (Schwegler 2012) 10.1 Missionary towns and land belonging to the Jesuit order in the middle of the 18th century 12.1 Iberian Peninsula languages during the Reconquest and in 2000
32 121 148 149 150 150 152 165 222 261
Figures 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 8.1 10.1 10.2 12.1
Palenquera lady Palenquera mother and her daughter Palenque’s newly designed Main Plaza Palenquero kids Setting up shop Ma hende ri tiela mi ‘People from my (home)land.’ Palenqueros Bilingualism growth in densely populated states Loanword availability Loanword assimilation North of Hispania in the Reconquest: peninsular languages, their kingdoms and origins
159 159 160 160 161 161 190 230 232 260
Tables
3.1 Estimated population of Latino/Hispanic groups in Los Angeles County for 2016, adapted from the U.S. Census 3.2 Differences between Central American and Mexican (Chicano) Spanish 4.1 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for competence in the contact language of 312 Brazilian and Uruguayan informants 4.2 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for competence in the contact language of 153 Brazilian informants 4.3 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for competence in the contact language of 159 Uruguayan informants 4.4 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact group of 272 Brazilian and Uruguayan informants 4.5 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact group of 137 Uruguayan informants 4.6 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact group of 135 Brazilian informants 4.7 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact language of 246 Brazilian and Uruguayan informants 4.8 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact language of 123 Brazilian informants 4.9 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact language of 123 Uruguayan informants 4.10 Attitudinal data of eight clusters of 262 Brazilian and Uruguayan informants 4.11 Factors showing significant differences with regard to the clusters of Table 4.10 4.12 Additional information on the clusters in Table 4.10 8.1 Historical demographics of Mexico 9.1 Bilingualism in Paraguay from 1950 to 2002 10.1 Guarani vowel system 10.2 Guarani and Uruguayan Spanish pronunciations 10.3 Availability levels 12.1 Minority language population of Autonomous Communities
56 57 73 74 75 76 78 79 81 81 82 83 83 86 181 200 228 229 230 269
Tables 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 12.6 12.7 12.8 12.9
Linguistic competence in Galicia based on the 2011 census Linguistic competence of Galician provinces in 2011 Population that speaks and understands Catalan in 2014 Origins of immigrants in Catalonia in 2014: main groups Linguistic competence in Catalan from 1986 to 2014 Language use by population percentage in Catalonia in 2013 Linguistic competence in the Basque Country in 2016 Linguistic competence in the Basque Country by province in 2016
ix 272 273 276 276 278 279 280 280
Contributors
José Alejandro Correa Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Bogotá, Colombia Correa is a Ph.D. student at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and is currently a researcher at the Instituto Caro y Cuervo, Bogotá. He specializes in experimental phonetics and Spanish dialectology, and investigates phonetic reduction and related speech processes in Colombian Spanish. His publications include: “Intonation of Palenquero Creole and Kateyano in San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia)” (2017), “Caracterización acústica de la reducción vocálica en el español hablado en Bogotá” (2017), “Manual de análisis acústico del habla con Praat” (2014), “El español del Pacífico de Colombia: dos rasgos fonéticos de presunto sustrato africano” (2011), and “Sobre el habla popular en la poesía de Candelario Obeso” (2010). Contact: [email protected] Kathleen S. Guerra University of California, Davis, USA Guerra is currently a Ph.D. student in Hispanic linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include contact linguistics, grammaticalization, and transfer in situations of sustained language contact, specifically in the northern Andean region of Ecuador. Her other interests include cultural appropriation, sociolinguistics, and second-language-learner identity. Contact: [email protected] Manuel J. Gutiérrez University of Houston, Texas, USA Gutiérrez is professor of Spanish linguistics at the University of Houston. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. He has conducted research on language variation and change phenomena in several Spanish dialects and has published articles about the subject in diverse journals in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. He has also conducted research on the active linguistic change occurring in the Spanish spoken in the United States due to its contact with English. Besides his numerous articles, he has published Ser y estar en el habla
Contributors
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de Michoacán, México (1994), and has co-edited Pablo Neruda: algunos poemas, algunos discursos, algunas campanas (2001); Pablo Neruda: Yo respondo con mi obra, 1930–1959 (2004); Perspectives in the Study of Spanish Language Variation (2014); and Pablo Neruda: al pueblo con mi acción y mi poesía, 1960–1973 (forthcoming). Contact: [email protected] Göz Kaufmann University of Freiburg, Germany Since 2009, Kaufmann has worked as a permanent lecturer (Akademischer Rat) in linguistics for the German Department of the University of Freiburg. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1997. Kaufmann has taught at universities in Germany, the United States, and Brazil. In Brazil, he worked for 10 years as a representative of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and as a guest professor at the UFRGS (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul) in Porto Alegre and the USP (Universidade de São Paulo) in São Paulo. His main fields of research are variation linguistics, syntax, German as a foreign language, and the linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects of language contact. Aside from his work on Mennonite communities in North and South America, language contact at the borders of Brazil with Argentina and Uruguay represents his major research focus. Website: http://paul.igl.uni-freiburg.de/kaufmann/en/ Contact: [email protected] John M. Lipski Pennsylvania State University, USA Lipski is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Pennsylvania State University. His research encompasses language contact, bilingualism, and the contributions of the African diaspora to the diversification of Spanish. His recent work combines ethnographic and psycholinguistic approaches to the study of bilingual speech communities in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia (Palenquero-Spanish), northern Ecuador (Quichua-Media Lengua), and northeastern Argentina (Portuguese-Spanish), with particular emphasis on code-switching constraints and morphosyntactic processing costs. Contact: [email protected] Glenn A. Martínez Ohio State University, Ohio, USA Martínez is professor of Hispanic linguistics and director of the Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Ohio State University. He has published dozens of articles and book chapters on sociolinguistic aspects of the border region. As a guest editor, he has contributed to a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language on language and borders and a special issue of Rio Bravo: A Journal of the Borderlands on the sociolinguistics of the U.S.-Mexico border. Contact: [email protected]
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Mariadelaluz Matus-Mendoza Drexel University, Pennsylvania, USA Matus-Mendoza is associate professor of Spanish and director of modern languages in the Department of Global Studies and Modern Languages at Drexel University. She works with migration and its effects on society as reflected in Mexican Spanish language variation. She has published in different venues, including Actas del IX congreso internacional de historia de la lengua española, Language Variation and Change, Southwest Journal of Linguistics, and Journal of Linguistics. More recently, her research interests include critical discourse analysis. On this approach, she co-authored the book chapter “Mexico City and the H1N1 Health Crisis: The Discursive Interconnectedness of Viruses, Kidnappings, Policy Fiascos and Tumbling Pesos” in Discourse and Crisis, Critical Perspectives, edited by Antoon De Rycher and Zuraidah Mohd Don. Her most recent publication is “The Powerlessness of the Word: A Critical Discourse Analysis to Discrimination.” Contact: [email protected] Eva Núñez-Méndez Portland State University, Oregon, USA Núñez-Méndez is professor of Spanish linguistics at Portland State University, where she has been part of the Department of World Languages and Literatures since 2002. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Salamanca (Spain). Her research focuses primarily on Spanish historical linguistics and applied linguistics (language variation, text analysis, and translation). Her recent publications include Diachronic Applications of Hispanic Linguistics (2016), Fundamentals of the History of the Spanish Language (2012), Fundamentals of Spanish Phonetics and Phonology (2012, 2005), and A Spanish Version of Troilus and Cressida: A Bilingual Edition (2008). She has also published numerous articles in peer reviewed international journals such as Hispanófila, Linguistica, Hispanic Research Journal, Romance Studies, Languages for Specific Purposes, IJ Lasso, and Revista de estudios hispánicos. Website: www.web.pdx.edu/~enunez Contact: [email protected] Luis A. Ortiz López University of Puerto Rico Ortiz López is professor of linguistics at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. His research interests include language variation and change, language contact, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition. His publications include numerous articles in peer reviewed international journals, book chapters, proceedings, and five books: Huellas etno-sociolingüísticas bozales y afrocubanas (1998); El Caribe hispánico: perspectivas lingüísticas actuales (editor) (1999); Contacto y contextos lingüísticos: el español en los Estados Unidos y en contacto con otras lenguas (co-editor) (2005); El español y el criollo haitiano: contacto de lenguas y adquisición de L2 (2010); and Selected Proceedings of the 13th Hispanic Linguistic Symposium (2011). Website: http://humanidades.uprrp.edu/luisortiz/ Contact: [email protected]
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Yliana V. Rodríguez Universidad de la República, Uruguay Rodríguez teaches at the Center of Foreign Languages at Universidad de la República, where she conducts research on linguistics (language contact in South America, loanwords, and place-names) and psycholinguistics (cognate facilitation effect and language learning). She received her Master in Sciences for which she studied Guarani-Spanish contact in Uruguay. She is currently studying Spanish and English contact in the Falkland Islands, Islas Malvinas. She is also an honorary collaborator with the UNESCO Chair in Youth and Adult Education, Uruguay. Website: http://investigadores.fhuce.edu.uy/ylianarodriguez/ Contact: [email protected] Ana Sánchez-Muñoz California State University, Northridge, California, USA Sánchez-Muñoz graduated from the University of Southern California in 2007 with a Ph.D. in Hispanic linguistics and later received a second Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) in 2011. She regularly teaches language and linguistics courses including sociolinguistics, language, and gender, language acquisition, and language development in ethnic minority students. Her research interests include language variation and change, bilingualism, language acquisition, and situations of language contact. In particular, she is interested in contact between Spanish and English in the United States and in studying how Spanish is developed, used, and maintained by heritage speakers. She has published several journal articles and book chapters on language variation, sociolinguistics, and Spanish as heritage language. She is the author of Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States: A Study of Speakers’ Register Variation (2009). She has also co-edited two books that deal with immigration issues in the United States and the realities of ethnic minorities in Southern California: Learning English/Learning America: Latino and Asian American Voices (2008) and Navigating the Great Recession: Immigrant Families’ Stories of Resilience (2011). Contact: [email protected] Armin Schwegler University of California, Irvine, USA Schwegler is professor of Hispanic linguistics at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include numerous articles and various books, such as “Chi ma nkongo”: lengua y rito ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia) (1996), Lengua y ritos del Palo Monte Mayombe: dioses cubanos y sus fuentes africanas (2005), and Fonética y fonología españolas: teoría y práctica (2010). He is co-editor of the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages and the series Lengua y sociedad en el mundo hispano. His latest co-edited volumes include The Iberian Challenge: Creole Languages beyond the Plantation Setting (2016) and Orality, Identity, and Resistance in Palenque (Colombia): An Interdisciplinary Approach (2017). Contact: [email protected]
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Haralambos Symeonidis University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA Symeonidis is professor of Spanish linguistics at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. He received his Ph.D. in Romance linguistics from the University of Muenster, Germany. He has conducted research on language contact and change phenomena in Judaeo-Spanish and Guaranitic area Spanish, and has published articles about these subjects in diverse venues in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. Much of his current research examines the ongoing changes occurring in the Guarani-Spanish contact regions of South America. Besides numerous articles, he has co-authored two volumes of the Átlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico (ALGR): Tomo I Léxico del cuerpo humano and Tomo II Léxico del parentesco, an international project of which he is co-director. He has co-authored and co-edited the two most recent volumes of Estudios y homenajes hispanoamericanos, an annual publication from the University of Athens, Greece. Website: https://hs.as.uky.edu/users/hsyme2 Contact: [email protected]
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to all the contributors for their support in the development of this book. Without their collaboration, this project would never have been possible. Their remarks and suggestions have contributed to the present outcome of this volume. The journey to complete it has incurred other debts, especially to those attentive readers who kindly reviewed and advised me on sections of the manuscript, providing feedback for the authors. My thanks also to the many colleagues whose writings and personal input have stimulated my ideas or caused me to modify them. Very special thanks go to the many scholars who have generously given up their time to read and comment on the chapters, and shared their insights: Mark Amengual (UC, Santa Cruz), Robert Blake (UC, Davis), Paul Chandler (U. of Hawaii), Patricia Cubitosi (U. of Massachusetts, Amherst), Justin Davidson (UC, Berkeley), Domnita Dumitrescu (California State U., L.A.), Steven Dworkin (U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Marta Fairclough (U. of Houston), John Hawkins (UC, Davis), Andrew Lynch (U. of Miami), Maria I. Moyna (Texas A&M U.), Enric Mallorquí-Ruscalleda (California State U., Fullerton), John McWhorter (Columbia U.), Martha Mendoza (Florida Atlantic U.), Pablo Oliva (Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey), and Daniel Villa (U. of New Mexico). I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very thorough readings of the manuscript and their helpful comments and suggestions. We are also grateful to Joe Romero for his design advise and Robert Daly for reading a draft of this book, spotting inconsistencies and typographical imperfections, and offering numerous valuable comments. Very special thanks go to Camille Burns, Laura Sandford, and the commissioning editor Samantha Vale Noya for their professionalism and help with the production of this volume. We would also like to thank Rosie McEwan and Hannah Rowe, editorial assistants, and Dale Koike, series editor. Without their editorial assistance, there would be no published book. Thank you! My thanks are also due to my students for their interest in sociolinguistics, their enthusiasm, and their input. Finally, and most importantly, very special thanks go to Portland State University for financially supporting this and earlier research projects with a Faculty Enhancement Grant.
Abbreviations
* */? 1p. 2p. 3p. Adv ALGR ALGR-L ALGR-S AVL BEN CNC CPLP DANE DGEIB DIM DIR DO EC, EU ECLAC EZLN GER HON
indicates that the utterance is ungrammatical and/or considered unnatural indicates that the utterance can be considered acceptable or unacceptable, according to the speaker first-person singular, yo ‘I’ second-person singular, tú ‘you’ third-person singular or plural, él, ella, ‘s/he,’ ellos/as ‘they’ adverb Atlas lingüístico guaraní románico. Guarani linguistic atlas Atlas lingüístico guaraní románico: Léxico. 1. Guarani linguistic atlas: Lexicon Atlas lingüístico guaraní románico: Sociología. 2. Guarani linguistic atlas: Sociology Academy of the Valencian Language benefactive case, Quechua case markers -wa (nominal), -pa (verbal) used to express an action that is carried out to the benefit of another Confederación Nacional de Campesinos. National Farmer Confederation, Mexico Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadísticas National Administrative Office of Statistics, Colombia Dirección General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe Department of Intercultural and Bilingual Education, Mexico diminutive, e.g. casita, cafecito direct object pronoun, me lo trae ‘he brings it (the bread)’ direct object, e.g. Me trae el pan ‘he brings me bread’ European Community, European Union Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean Zapatista Army of National Liberation, Mexico F15, F50+, M19 Female, 15 years old; Female, 50 years or older; Male, 19 years old gerund honorific, Quechua case marker -pa
Abbreviations xvii IEC IMF IMP IMPER INALI INEGI INF L1 L2 LIC NAFTA NAS PEE PREP PRES PRET PRI PRO RAE RAG SOV SS SSTC SVO TDSHS UCCLA UNAM
Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Institute of Catalan Studies International Monetary Fund imperfect, verb form, e.g. estudiaba ‘studied’ imperative, verb form, e.g. dame ‘give me!’ National Institute of Indigenous Languages, Mexico Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía National Institute of Statistics and Geography, Mexico infinitive, verb form, e.g. estudiar ‘to study’ first language, native language or mother tongue second language Language and Social Cohesion planning, Generalitat of Catalonia North American Free Trade Agreement northern Andean Spanish Plans Educatius d’Entorn. Local Education Planning, Generalitat of Catalonia preposition present indicative, verb form, e.g. estudias ‘you study’ preterite, verb form, e.g. estudió ‘studied’ Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico pronoun, e.g. yo, tú, le, se, ‘I, you, him’ Royal Academy of the Spanish Language Royal Galician Academy subject object verb word order Standard Spanish Sentencias Tribunal Constitucional. Constitutional Court Laws, Spain subject verb object word order Texas Department of State Health Services Union of Portuguese-Speaking Capitals National Autonomous University of Mexico
Introduction Eva Núñez-Méndez
Continuous innovation in technology, globalization, and the wide use of the Internet have transformed our perception of the world and the use of language internationally. Economic endeavors and foreign policies between countries promote multilingualism and language contact. Today, it is part of our daily life to be exposed to a different language from the one we speak on a regular basis. Furthermore, many countries have developed their unique national identity as a direct result of their linguistic diversity. Social, cultural, and political considerations intertwine to shape the language of a place and to define the identity of its speakers. More than ever before, access to authentic language input is available via smartphones, tablets, and electronic devices where Internet platforms provide immediate contact and communicative resources. In this context, it seems essential for linguists to ask ourselves how minority languages can be nurtured and maintained as they face the dominant languages’ supremacy and prestige. Resorting to a lingua franca for international relations makes practical sense; however, it may encourage assimilatory language practices that could hasten the loss of local language varieties and minority linguistic communities’ cultural heritage. The fact that many Amerindian indigenous languages have already been lost and continue to disappear because of the social status of Spanish, Portuguese, or English is not a new consideration. Language policies and government approaches to bilingualism and biculturalism are key factors in language attrition, maintenance, and revitalization. Coming from a European nation where bilingualism is common, and where four languages are official in the constitution and spoken regularly in daily practices in all kind of registers, it is natural for me to advocate for a sociopolitical system where legislation protects linguistic rights. Residing in Oregon, in the United States, where the Department of Motor Vehicles provides driving tests in five other languages (Spanish, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese), makes me reflect on government responses to multilingualism and multiculturalism. The general assumption is that language policies are needed to protect languages. Governments have a social responsibility to provide access to public services and to foster the political participation of speakers of minority languages. Nevertheless, some basic questions arise from this assumption. How do language policies encourage inclusive minority language practices and offer opportunities to assimilate to the majority language, whether it is official or not? How does linguistic identity
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operate with social assimilation in a multilingual landscape? To what extent do language policies replicate linguistic realities? Are official models being influenced by language contact? Let’s imagine that English and Spanish become official languages in the United States, which does not currently have an official language in its national constitution. What kind of political planning or legislative procedures would have to be developed to represent language demographics? There have been some language use initiatives to propose ad hoc responses to immediate needs or urgent political necessities; however, there has never been a real comprehensive national language policy regarding linguistic rights and language planning. There is not a coherent policy plan to reflect population changes and the variety of linguistic tendencies. This country, as many others in the world, does not have mandated language policies per se. What kind of language policies are in place today in regions where Spanish is in contact with other languages? Do these policies reflect reality? Are the demographics of the region representative of the language policies or tendencies? Is bilingualism or diglossia a result of the languages in contact in that region? Have sociopolitical factors (war, colonization, migrations, diasporas, dictatorships, historical events, etc.) influenced the evolution of languages in contact? Are new generations willing to maintain their heritage language? How can policy-makers prevent languages from disappearing? These are some of the many questions analyzed and answered in the following chapters. The areas chosen correspond to three main topics: Spanish in contact with English in Texas, California, and the Southwest United States; pidgins and creoles in the Caribbean; and Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Spain as examples of countries with two or more languages in contact. Besides border sites such as the Mexican-U.S. and Brazilian-Uruguayan regions, other social boundaries of language use and switching are considered here. These speech communities represent high demographic points for Spanish in contact with other languages. They have been selected as prototypes of study due to their linguistic profiles and sociohistorical scenarios in the contact situation, originating from contact both with indigenous languages and with immigrant languages. Therefore, the present volume covers a wide variety of cases distributed across both sides of the Atlantic, including the Caribbean and North, Central, and South America. This project explores the Spanish language in contact with other languages in the Hispanic world from a historical sociolinguistic perspective, including topics related to Spanish and its influence in the southwestern United States, language planning, policies, and other sociohistorical aspects of Spanish in the world. In doing so, it takes the form of an edited collection of original contributions and case studies, focusing on contact linguistics, border speech communities, and sociolinguistic forces that shape alternation, mixing, and switching between Spanish and other languages. In this book’s first section, Border Speech Communities, Chapter 1 surveys research on language contact along the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico. Martínez assesses early scholarship along this border area
Introduction 3 and the effect that political discourse around immigration has had on sociolinguistic research. In Chapter 2, Gutiérrez describes the contact among groups from diverse origins in the Texas region. He examines a number of linguistic features of this Spanish variety and the social motivations behind those linguistic changes. Sánchez-Muñoz, in Chapter 3, analyzes the city of Los Angeles as a natural sociolinguistic lab for the formation of new Latino speech communities, dialect contact areas, and dialect mergers. Chapter 4 explores the language behavior and attitudes of 424 Brazilian and Uruguayan high school students from eight border cities. Kaufmann links the results to the question of whether this region and its inhabitants can be characterized as bicultural or bilingual. The second section of the volume, Outcomes and Perceptions in Situations of Language and Dialect Contact, deals with linguistic variation and change in the Caribbean. Chapter 5 focuses on the Afro-Hispanic communities where Spanish may have briefly creolized. Lipski evaluates the possibility that local Spanish dialects where shaped by previous Spanish creoles that are no longer spoken. In Chapter 6, Ortiz López presents an account of the sociohistorical context of Dominican-Haitian contact and the linguistic features, attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes that have arisen from this ethno-sociolinguistic interaction. Chapter 7 develops a global overview of language contact in Colombia, concentrating on the peculiar geolinguistic distribution of its almost 60 ethnic languages. Schwegler and Correa discuss language contact in Palenque and the centuries-long social stigmatization of Palenquero creole, which has led to its endangerment. The last section, Contact and Alternation: Social Boundaries of Language Switching, introduces the reader to sociolinguistic variation and change in language contact situations in Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Spain. In Chapter 8, Matus-Mendoza studies the monolingualism and monoculturalism that have been imposed on Mexico through language policies and practices from the colonial period until modern times. In Chapter 9, Symeonidis provides an account of the high rate of bilingualism and diglossia in Paraguay. The author explains the linguistic traits of Paraguayan Spanish in contact zones. Chapter 10 investigates the impact of indigenous languages on the Spanish variety spoken in Uruguay. Rodríguez reveals that between 1770 and 1780 half of the population of Uruguay consisted of Guaraní Indians who had been born in the Jesuit missions. Chapter 11 examines the widespread use of the gerund in conversational phrases in the northern Andean Spanish of Ecuador and southern Colombia. Guerra evaluates modern gerundianismo as a simplifying feature in early stages of emergent bilingualism and as evidence of grammatical complexification. Chapter 12 summarizes Spain’s extensive background in multilingualism, language planning policies, and bilingual education. Núñez-Méndez offers insights from updated data on demographics and language laws to explain the trajectory of the peninsular linguistic landscape. This brief overview provides a useful background for understanding the book’s focus on contact linguistics. The chapters can be read individually. They present particular situations of Spanish in contact with English (in the United States); with other principal European and African languages (in the Caribbean); with Nahuatl, Maya, Guaraní, Quechua, and Aimara (in Central and South America); and with
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Basque, Catalan, and Galician (in Spain). Complete with lists of further readings, discussion topics, and a glossary, every chapter is richly documented, enhancing its appeal for readers new to the subject. We hope that this collection serves as a springboard for discussion and an incentive for further research both by experts in the field and younger academics. Many other variants have not been included in the book due to length constraints and deference to other more prototypical linguistic contact situations. Some of these varieties include Equatoguinean and Philippine Spanish; Spanish in contact with other languages, such as Quechua and Guarani in Bolivia; Quechua in northern Argentina; Portuguese in the Peninsula and on the Brazilian borders with Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela; and Mayan languages in Guatemala. Although fascinating topics, it is not feasible to include every single instance of contact between Spanish and other languages in this volume. These varieties remain open for future investigation. Hopefully, we will see more scholarly exploration of these contact situations. Why does the title include “biculturalism”? Based on the notion of biculturalism as the presence of two different cultures in the same country or region, a term which started to be used in the mid-1950s, the volume addresses language as a primal factor in cultural behavior. From this perspective, individuals are considered bicultural if they speak both the language of their heritage cultural context and of their receiving cultural context (Schwartz and Unger 2010). Some authors have gone further, suggesting that true biculturalism involves synthesizing the heritage and receiving cultures into a unique and personalized blend (Benet-Martínez et al. 2002). Biculturalism was originally derived from acculturation literature, and the term is here expanded to cultural practices, values, and identifications, involving more than just cultural behaviors. In the present volume, biculturalism is intrinsically related to language use and helps to filter the complexity of cultural and contextual forces that steer speakers toward some language options and away from others. These forces change over time, vary across local situations, and may operate differently according to the context: it could be for historical, political, geographic, generational, ethnic, or familial reasons. Parents, peers, school, media, and so forth influence the way language development unfolds to shape cultural identity and adaptation, even more so when two or more languages are in play. The advantages of being bicultural and bilingual may decrease with a hostile political climate when the immigrant language and culture is perceived as a threat to the receiving society and mainstream culture in question. Blending in and assimilating result from avoiding discrimination or persecution in monocultural and monolingual communities, where linguistic and cultural divergence may be perceived as a barrier for social integration and success. Based on the fact that sociolinguistics focuses on the study of the interaction between language and society, Biculturalism and Spanish in Contact: Sociolinguistic Case Studies intends to present contemporary original research on language policy and Spanish in contact with other languages. It contributes to the study of Hispanic contact phenomena and provides educators and learners with unexplored dimensions on case studies that have not been previously documented. It will
Introduction 5 interest a wide range of readers, including language instructors, policy-makers, administrators, students, and a general audience interested in linguistic contact. Its coverage is enhanced by contributions from scholars with a solid and stimulating approach to bicultural domains. Perhaps more importantly, the book aims to open a dialogue with the reader to underline that linguistic rights are human rights. It is my hope that the findings of this edited volume provide new and engaging discussions surrounding a variety of sociolinguistic scenarios. The current collection provides an opportunity to explore solid research in contact linguistics while pressing the reader to consider questions about the future of language planning and minority language rights.
References Benet-Martínez, V., J. Leu, F. Lee, and M. W. Morris. “Negotiating biculturalism: cultural frame switching in biculturals with oppositional versus compatible cultural identities.” Cross-Cultural Psychology 33 (2002): 492–516. Schwartz, Seth and Jennifer Unger. “Biculturalism and context: what is biculturalism, and when is it adaptive?” Human Development 53 (2010): 26–32.
Section I
Border speech communities
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Language and borders Case studies from the U.S. Southwest Glenn A. Martínez
The border is a geopolitical fact with social and cultural repercussions. Border theorists have argued that the degree of integration between borders and within borderlands may be characterized as maximal, minimal, or zero: a maximal borderland is a zone of extensive cultural contact and simultaneous indices of conflict and confluence; a minimal borderland is one in which there is little cultural or ethnic affinity; and a zero borderland is one in which a military or geographical blockade completely impedes interaction. This typology of borders and borderlands has been helpful in explaining the differences between borders on an international scale. However, it contributes little to our understanding of the varying degrees of economic volatility, social upheaval, and cultural conflict that plague specific borders. The southern border of the United States with Mexico, for example, tends to be perceived much differently than the country’s northern border with Canada. Even though it was well known that the preferred port of entry for access to the United States by terrorists was the northern border with Canada, the calls for heightened border security after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, focused exclusively on the southern border with Mexico. What makes the border with Mexico so different from the border with Canada? Why is the southern border a lightning rod for controversy, bitter disputes, and political pandering while the northern border is virtually ignored? Over the past two decades, border theorists have struggled with these questions, searching for ways to account for the deep social, cultural, and political resentment surrounding specific border regions. Many have articulated insights focusing on social construction, power deployment, asymmetry, and cluster interdependence that have opened up new avenues for understanding the social and cultural dynamic that occurs in bordered spaces. Martínez’s compelling chronicle (2001) reveal the multifaceted theoretical insights that have emerged from interdisciplinary reflections about the U.S.Mexico border. Martínez, for example, suggests that the border line drawn in sand, brush, and mud suddenly transforms into a line drawn in steel, wire, and concrete at the major points of border enforcement. This image recalls sociologist Rodríguez’s insight of the border as a social construction – a fictitious line that becomes real as it is traversed (1997). Martínez also suggests that the border line is enforced through the exertion of power in his image of the Border Patrol swallowing the shadow of those human figures who try to breach
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the line. The deployment of power in this image reminds one of Alejandro Lugo’s observation of the intrinsically contentious nature of borders and their embedded articulations of culture, capital, and conquest that has made it possible, over the past five hundred years, for so many millions of people, in this case in the Americas, not so much to die as to die slowly (and at times abruptly) so that others may live well-off. (Lugo 2008: 230) But Martínez’s image of human bodies as shadows facing an all too real Border Patrol force not only reveals the deployment of power but also demonstrates the fundamental asymmetry between the two sides of the dividing line. This insight is central to Moré’s economic analysis of border regions, which argues that social, economic, and cultural upheavals in border regions emerge because of pronounced inequalities between both sides. Border inequalities, not borders in and of themselves, he argues, generate territorial disputes, high degrees of corruption, drug trafficking and human smuggling, cultural antagonism, and illegal immigration. Moré (2011) contends that the solution to these problems is to be found in increasing measures of transborder integration that closes the gaps of inequality leading to sustainable symmetric patterns of social and economic development for both sides of the border. Finally, Martínez’s image of the Border Patrol swallowing shadows points to a degree of interdependence. Heyman has theorized the notion of interdependence along the U.S.-Mexico border arguing that rather than a wholesale interdependence between two whole cultures, the U.S.-Mexico border presents an array of distinctive interdependencies between cultural clusters. He suggests that clusters are defined by “broad ways of relating a group of similar people together, such as on the basis of making a livelihood in similar ways (that is, class situations) and accumulated cultural information (that is, ethnic backgrounds).” He continues: “among the most useful qualities of this way of thinking is that it reminds us that both Mexico and the United States are internally complex and highly unequal societies, rather than simple national units” (Heyman 2010: 22). In this way, the borderlands milieu is characterized both by hybridities emerging from border crossing and rigidities emerging from border reinforcement (cf. Vila 2000). The multiple linguistic reflexes of social construction, power deployment, inequality, and interdependence have not escaped the attention of sociolinguistic scholars studying border regions. Much of the sociolinguistic work on borders has explored the unique contributions of bordered space to our understanding of the relationship between language and identity. Omoniyi (2004), for example, brings into focus the multiple identities that border residents exhibit and their continuous processes of identity negotiation. Velázquez identifies the rich possibilities for the study of language and identity in border regions: they argue that “the linkage between how one talks, writes or signs and how one is labelled – or chooses to be labelled – is nowhere more obvious than in these liminal zones” (2014: 2). While these theorists have sketched out the impact of the border
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on language, other sociolinguists have sought instead to explore the impact of language on the construction of the border. Urciuoli argues that border marking language elements are locational markers; they assign people a place, often opposing places between those who have the language and those who do not. Borders are places where commonality ends abruptly; border making language elements stand for and performatively bring into being such places. (1995: 539) Under this view, language constructs the border as much as the border makes language. The multiple policies of language control both in the nation and at the border are, in themselves, responsible for perceptions of a porous border and are thus constitutive of increased militarization of the border region. Vélez-Ibáñez takes this notion of social construction of the border through language a step further in his analysis of language hegemonies, arguing that the development of the transborder region has evinced a consistent imposition of mega-scripts that disrupt linguistic and cultural multiplicities. Vélez-Ibáñez defines mega-scripts as “ideologically driven, always incomplete naturalized rationalizations of power, dominance, and exploitation buttressed by local and regional scripts” (2017: 18). Since language is the primary vehicle by which these mega-scripts are transmitted, the imposition of these scripts through language constitutes linguistic hegemonies. “Hegemonic impositions then,” writes Vélez-Ibáñez, “are deeply and profoundly historical, ecological, economic, cultural, social, and psychological in that hegemonic processes seep into the very consciousness of that which makes us us and them them.” He continues: and of course actual physical places and spaces become imbued with what they are called, termed, or categorized, so El Rio Grande in Spanish is not the same as the Rio Grand, as most Americans are prone to pronounce the both large and grand river. (2017: 27) In Vélez-Ibáñez’s view, language constitutes the border not only through current discourses but also through historical impositions of mega-scripts that seep into the consciousness and layer meaning onto the landscape. In this chapter, we will explore the manifestations of these emerging theories of border sociolinguistics through studies of Spanish in the U.S. Southwest. We will consider the role of the border in early dialectological studies of Southwest Spanish. In these studies, the border was largely seen as a region to be traversed in order to discover the lost dialects of isolated rural communities in the northern New Mexico–southern Colorado region. We will then demonstrate how the border has been reinserted within the dialectological study of Spanish in the Southwest. Our focus then shifts to the border in sociolinguistic studies focusing on language maintenance and perception. In these studies, the border is viewed as a catalyst for language maintenance and as a source of both national and regional identification.
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Finally, we will consider the place of the border in current scholarship focusing on the ideologies that motivate local language practice. These studies engage the complexity and contradictions of the border by highlighting the fluid language practices that shape and are shaped by flexible identities and conflicting loyalties along the convergence of nation, ethnicity, and social class.
1 The border in dialectological studies of Spanish in the Southwest 1.1
Erasing borders in dialectology
Aurelio Espinosa’s early dialectological study of the Spanish language in New Mexico and Southern Colorado made no room for the role of the border in shaping the linguistic forms described. Espinosa wrote in his 1911 treatise: For more than three hundred years, New Mexican Spanish has had an isolated and independent existence; completely divorced from any contact with the Spanish of Spain or Mexico. Other than the Nahuatl elements introduced from Mexico and the modern English influence, of which we shall speak later, no influence whatever has come to disturb the slow development of this original Castilian treasure, which wonderfully conservative, and deprived of the literary culture which enriches a language, remains to-day as it was brought here in the seventeenth century, a Spanish linguistic monument, which no influence or power can destroy. (1980: 8) Nieto-Phillips (2004) observes that Espinosa’s celebration of the endurance of “pure” forms in New Mexican Spanish was a tactic to counter disparaging accounts by Anglos of the native population in the region. This underlying motivation notwithstanding, Espinosa laid the groundwork for an approach to Spanish in the Southwest that erased rather than embraced its 2,000-mile border with Mexico. A similar perspective was articulated years later when Spanish expatriate and Mexican linguist Lope Blanch set out to document the Spanish of the Southwest in the mid-1980s. His findings, like those of Espinosa, heralded the fortitude of the language in resisting structural changes due to the influence of English. Unlike Espinosa, however, his analysis encompasses language samples from New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. He writes: La columna vertebral del idioma – su fundamento y esencia estructural – se ha conservado con evidente rigor en esa remota modalidad lingüística de la Hispania perdida que es el sudoeste de los Estados Unidos. [The backbone of the language – its foundational structure and essence – has been preserved, with obvious rigor, in that remote linguistic modality of the lost Hispania that is the U.S. Southwest.] (1990: 31)
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Lope Blanch’s characterization of the Spanish of the Southwest as a “remote linguistic modality of the lost Hispania” underscores the erasure of the border region. However, the erasure of the border was not limited to the description of rural varieties of Southwest Spanish. Coltharp’s study The Tongue of the Tirilones sought to describe the language of a specific subgroup of the El Paso–Juarez border area. The author focuses on the South El Paso barrio in her attempt to describe what she called ‘a criminal argot.’ Coltharp goes to great lengths to describe the isolation of the area. She writes: although there are thousands who pass through the area on the street car or in private cars on the way to and from Juarez, the glimpses of streams of people on two streets, Stanton and Santa Fe, hardly provide contact. (1965: 11) The language that she describes is presented as a mechanism to avoid contact. “Its original purpose,” the author writes, was to exclude the law-abiding element of both the Spanish and Englishspeaking groups. It provides protection from reprisals by police or from betrayal by informants. The language provides protection in the corre (specifically correctional institute but loosely used to indicate any jail) to cover the illegal or immoral activities of the inmates. (31) In reflecting on the extension of caló beyond El Paso to other regions such as Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Mexico City, the author surmises that “the influence might be attributable to the transportation of dope or to the movements and relocations of especially hard criminals who would demand respect and whose language would be copied” (33). Whether describing an idyllically pure variety of a lost civilization or the variety emerging from a criminal underworld, early dialectological studies of Spanish in the Southwest sought to erase the border and its influence in shaping linguistic forms. In the next section, we will discuss how later dialectological studies have overcome this early prejudice by engaging the border directly in their dialectological description. 1.2
Engaging borders in dialectology
Recent dialectological work in New Mexico has engaged the border in ways that previous studies missed. The exhaustive work of Bills and Vigil (2008) points to an ongoing tension in New Mexican Spanish where traditional forms are found to be in competition with more contemporary forms. For example, their data show that traditional forms such as naguas ‘skirt,’ dos reales ‘quarter,’ and salarata ‘baking soda’ are being displaced by more contemporary forms such as falda, peseta, and soda de martillo. This displacement appears to emanate from the border region toward the northern parts of the state.
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The competition between traditional New Mexican Spanish and Border Spanish, however, extends well beyond word choice. As Bills and Vigil note: speakers of traditional Spanish have developed a pervasive sense of insecurity about their Spanish with the rise of awareness of the broader Spanish language represented by Border Spanish. Yet at the same time, they have generally considered themselves culturally superior to the more recent immigrants [. . .] those of traditional Spanish heritage tend to own land and have a traditional political power and economic stability, whereas the Border Spanish speakers are seen as menial, often migrant, laborers with less wealth and little power. (2014: 64) Traditional Spanish and Border Spanish serve as markers of identity and thus constitute what Bills and Vigil call an ‘internal border’ within New Mexico. The rigidity of internal borders and the lexical competition between Traditional Spanish and Border Spanish has come under closer scrutiny. Gorman studies mixed Mexican-nuevo-mexicano households in New Mexico and offers a penetrating qualitative analysis of the sociolinguistic dynamics that are present in family life. Her findings suggest that rather than competition and absorption, the contact between Traditional Spanish and Border Spanish can result in transculturation. She argues that the cultural and linguistic intertwining of family life can lead to an “embedding or inhabiting of the Mexican in the Nuevomexicano and the Nuevomexicano in the Mexican” (2015: 77). The “bending and blending of cultures,” she continues, “leads to a new mode of expression embodied within the transculturated daily realities of the Mexican-Nuevomexicano relationship” (78). Gorman’s study thus engages border theory in examining the dialectology of New Mexican Spanish by pointing to the hybrid language practices that emerge through transcultural interaction. Dialectological studies of Spanish in the Southwest began by squeezing out the influence of the border, opting instead to focus on the remote and ‘untainted’ varieties of the language. Later studies, however, engaged the border more fully, recognizing emerging interactions between traditional and border varieties of Spanish. More recently, dialectological studies have come to understand not only the interaction between traditional and border forms but also the border processes of hybridity and transculturation that may impact communities as interdependence increases.
2 The border in sociolinguistic studies of Spanish in the Southwest 2.1
Sociolinguistic studies of maintenance and shift
Studies of Spanish maintenance and shift to English in the U.S. Southwest have consistently engaged the border. Scholars working in this area of research have noted the significant social and cultural ramifications of proximity to the
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geopolitical border. Hudson, Hernández-Chávez and Bills (1995), in a comprehensive examination of U.S. Census data in the Southwest, demonstrate that proximity to the border is one of the most important factors in predicting language maintenance. The border, they argue, generates and multiplies opportunities for regular participation in familial, friendship, and business networks within Mexico itself. These opportunities make the border an attractive destination for new immigrants, which increases the density of Spanish speakers. Mejías and Anderson-Mejías (1984, 2002) have shown that attitudes toward Spanish are predictive of language maintenance in the border region of the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. They contend that even though there is functional overlap between Spanish and English which could lead to language shift, the incursion of Spanish into the business world and its importance in national and international politics continue to support Spanish maintenance. The most robust engagement of the border in studies of language maintenance and shift is to be found in the work of Hidalgo, who argues that border residents display a unique strand of loyalty to Spanish that distinguishes them significantly from their counterparts in other regions of the Southwest. While the value and functions of the language may have been displaced in regions further away from the border, in the border region they are merely minimized. “The prestige of Spanish in this context,” she writes, is engendered by a series of intertwined factors – such as its official status in Mexico, its public though restricted use on the U.S. side, its link to identity and ethnicity – that seem to shape, in harmonious concordance the attitudes and behaviors of those residing along the border. (1993: 66) She concludes that the value placed on Spanish at the border, while not completely obviating the pressures of shift to English, certainly minimizes that potential outcome. Scholars are in general agreement that the sociocultural environment in the border region is favorable to language maintenance. While some scholars focus on border proximity as a catalyst for greater opportunities for cross-border interactions, others identify additional spillover effects such as the sustaining influence of such opportunities on the perceived value and active functions of the language in a variety of interactional settings. 2.2
Sociolinguistic studies of language perceptions on the border
Studies of the perception of Spanish in the Southwest have also engaged the border as a particularly fruitful site of research. Following the theoretical insights gleaned by Urciuoli (1995), the border environment tends to sharpen the edges of language perception. Several studies serve to bear out this premise. Hidalgo studied the perception of code-switching between English and Spanish among residents of Cd. Juárez, Mexico. She finds that code-switching is evaluated
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negatively, yet she proposes that this negative perception is linked to broader perceptions of Mexican Americans in the border region. The general belief prevailing in Mexico since the late 19th century when masses of Mexicans emigrated to the United States is that emigration north of the border is a denigrating process that involves not only economic exploitation but also the loss of the national language and cultural values. (1989: 142) She continues: “when Mexicans evaluate code-switching, they partially base their judgement on Mexican-American status in the United States” (1989: 142). In another study, Hidalgo investigated perceptions of Spanish in Cd. Juárez, Mexico. She found that educated middle-class speakers tended to view local Juárez Spanish as incorrect and to be highly divergent from the Spanish spoken in Mexico City. Even so, there was a high degree of language loyalty to Spanish among her participants. “Claiming loyalty to Spanish seems to be one of the means utilized by Mexicans to assert their ethnic identity” (1986: 215). Combining the results of these two studies, we can get a sense of the ambiguities surrounding national and ethnic identity that emerge in border spaces. Martínez (2003) provides another perspective on these ambiguities by analyzing language perceptions in the border city of Reynosa, Mexico. Conducted nearly two decades after Hidalgo’s original research in Cd. Juárez, this study demonstrates the impact of political and economic changes in the border region due to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This study found that Reynosa Spanish speakers identified the Spanish spoken in Veracruz as the most unpleasant variety. This was largely due to an influx of lower-class Mexican workers who came to Reynosa to staff a growing maquiladora industry throughout the 1990s. Among the younger generations, it was ascertained that the perception of similarities between the Spanish of Reynosa and the Spanish of McAllen, Texas, was greater, suggesting a change in perceptions across generations. The study concluded that the incursion of a distinctive variety of Spanish indexing a socially stigmatized group not only heightened negative perceptions about that variety but also provoked more positive perceptions of the variety spoken on the other side of the border. Thus, the interdependence that manifested itself through subtle ambiguities in Hidalgo’s Cd. Juárez studies appeared to be more pronounced in the Reynosa study due to in-migration from southern Mexico. Meadows (2013) conducted a study of language perceptions on the U.S. side of the border, focusing on folk theories of language articulated in language complaints. The complaints analyzed in the study center on instances of perceived disruption of nationalized borders. The use of Spanish in spaces where English would be expected and the intermixing of Spanish and English were frequent focal points for the complaints analyzed in the study. He argues that these complaints reveal a ‘principle of national diversity’ that constitutes the national language as a nationalist icon. As a nationalist icon, the language becomes
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somewhat sacrosanct and generates heated sentiments when there is a perception of dissonance between nationalized space and nationalized language or between the boundaries that differentiate one language from the other. This sharpening of the perceptual edges around languages in the borderland can account for the ambiguous perceptions reported in Hidalgo’s study. At the same time, it sheds light on the potential mechanism of the perceptual change reported in Martínez (2003). From the perspective of Mexican border residents in Reynosa, Spanish may function as both a national and regional icon. The identification with the Spanish of McAllen and the growing dissociation with the Spanish from southern Mexico could be a reflection of a growing sense of regional solidarity among northern Mexican varieties of Spanish, including those of Mexican Americans on the U.S. side of the border.
3 The border in studies of the ideologies of Spanish in the Southwest Studies of language ideologies in the border region have shed considerable light on the conflicting and contradictory language perceptions described in the previous section. By looking at perception through the lens of ideology, scholars have been able to identify the underlying social and political forces that shape language perception and use. In this section, we will explore the ideological tensions surrounding Spanish in the border region, and we will discuss the multiple ways in which these tensions are negotiated through performance. Galindo conducted a study of women’s discourse in Laredo, Texas, in which she highlights the tensions around language ideology on the border. She argues that these tensions converge on the border as a site of discontinuities in linguistic features that carry social value. These discontinuities are revealed in the constant pressure that her participants identified in having to accommodate Spanish speakers from Mexico. Her participants discuss the need to avoid appearing too gringoized and the need to master appropriate professional vocabulary. “Estamos en medio,” says one of her participants, “y tenemos que poder con los dos y tenemos que hacerlo correctamente porque de cualquier manera somos discriminados aquí por la gente de México” [We’re in the middle and we have to be able to get by in both languages and do so correctly because we are discriminated against by the people from Mexico anyway] (1996: 16). The sense of being in the middle reflects the power dynamic and hegemony of language that shapes language ideologies on the border. 3.1
Engaging power dynamics in ideology
Power asymmetries in language ideologies in the Cd. Juárez, Mexico/El Paso, Texas, region have been identified in the works of Achugar and Velázquez. Achugar and Pessoa (2009) study language ideologies among members of the Bilingual Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Texas, El Paso.
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Their findings reveal that members of this elite academic community value Spanish language use and bilingualism in an academic context but disparage local varieties of the language in non-academic contexts. The ideologies of Spanish in this community reflect a dichotomy where Spanish is simultaneously viewed as a marker of membership in an exclusive academic community and an index of low socioeconomic status. The ideological tension is resolved by attaching the value of Spanish to the context in which it is used; Spanish used in academic contexts has positive value, and Spanish used in non-academic, local contexts has negative value. Achugar (2008) demonstrates how this dichotomized view of Spanish extends beyond the small elite context of an academic program in bilingual creative writing. In this study, she explores refutations of monolingual language ideologies among educational leaders in the El Paso area. Her findings reveal that monolingual language ideologies are rejected on historical grounds by invoking the role of the two languages in generating social and economic success in the border experience of El Paso. These educational leaders propose an alternative ideology in which bilingualism and Spanish are also legitimate pathways to success. Achugar and Oteíza (2009) conducted a discourse analysis of newspaper articles, opinion pieces, and editorial letters to shed light on competing and conflicting ideologies in El Paso. Their analysis points to the complexity of ideologies in multilingual spaces and the tensions and contradictions in beliefs about language, language users, and language learning. Their findings reveal that monolingual and multilingual ideologies coexist in a sort of complementary distribution in the border region. Whereas multilingual ideologies prevail in workplace settings where bilingual skills are seen to be an essential job qualification, monolingual ideologies dominate in educational settings where the development of academic competencies in Spanish is not seen as a priority in schooling. The ideological tensions and contradictions identified by Achugar have also been explored by Velázquez (2009), who studies the role of ideologies in parental initiative to transmit Spanish to their children. She finds that even though parents expressed positive attitudes toward Spanish and embraced a multilingual ideology, they did not always act on this ideology to invest time and resources to foster Spanish language development in their children. She makes three key arguments about the multiple impacts of parents’ language ideologies on maintenance and transmission. First, she notes that motivations for transmission or non-transmission of Spanish are rooted in beliefs about language that reflect underlying tensions present in the multilingual community. Second, she observes divergent understandings of bilingualism even among speakers in the same social network who share similar socioeconomic characteristics. Third, she identifies a coexistence of ideologies that simultaneously value Spanish while marginalizing working-class speakers of Spanish, similar to the dichotomization seen in Achugar’s work. In Velázquez (2013), these contradictions between language ideology and language maintenance are further explored through an examination of metaphorical references, metonyms, referential strategies, and expressions of deixis related to language and language users. She argues that contradictions are
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negotiated through a multilayered exercise of identity formation that goes beyond binaries of Latino/non-Latino and bilingual/monolingual. Instead, language ideologies in the border region are negotiated along layers of identity formation that include generation of arrival, place of birth, migratory status, ethnic identification, varieties of Spanish and English, context of interaction, socioeconomic class, perceived degree of cultural assimilation, and geographical location within the city. This negotiation is discursively actualized both through ontological metaphors that conceptualize language, culture, and ethnicity as physical objects or natural forces and through the referential and deictic strategies used to establish social boundaries. Velázquez and Achugar identify the complex and contradictory ideological landscapes that emerge on the U.S.-Mexico border and provide insight into key strategies used by border residents to negotiate these contradictions. Their findings show that multilingual ideologies are configured differentially in the border region with respect to sources of power. For example, academic varieties of Spanish were evaluated positively in an elite academic circle of bilingual creative writers, Spanish and bilingualism were proposed as alternative pathways to success by educational leaders, and the value of language maintenance was connected to identity formations rooted in socioeconomic class, migratory status, generation of arrival, and so forth. 3.2
Engaging power dynamics in performance
Asymmetrical power dynamics along the border are also confronted in performance. Several studies reveal the performative dimensions of conflicting ideologies on the border that shed additional light on the more conceptual studies discussed in the previous section. In this section, we will look at the performative negotiation of conflicting language ideologies in the context of upper-class Mexican Americans in Laredo, Texas; lower-class colonia residents in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas; and day laborers in Tucson, Arizona. Ramos conducted a multiple case study analysis of upper-class Latina/os in Laredo, Texas, to explore the ways in which bilingual practices were used to generate linguistic capital. In her study, she argues that the conflicts between language practice and language ideology in the border region requires individuals to continually perform specific class identities. Code-switching, she argues, is an essential part of this performance. Like the Cd. Juárez participants in Hidalgo’s study, described in Section 2, Laredoans display a view that code-switching represents a lower educational level and is to be avoided as part of an upper-class performativity. However, unlike the Juárez participants, the Laredo participants established a nuanced typology of code-switching that allows them to engage in the interwoven practices of code-switching in the border milieu while maintaining an upper-class distinction. Ramos explains: it is important to distinguish the kind of code-switching participants perceive negatively is code-switching from language to language intra-sententially, not
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Glenn A. Martínez necessarily inter-sententially or from standard to nonstandard varieties. Thus, intra-sentential code-switching is identified as a nonstandard variety associated with negative connotations and as having little value in the linguistic market. In navigating through a bilingual community, participants index their social class identities by reproducing language practices that reveal an effort to disassociate from the pocho habitus. (2015: 187)
Following Bourdieu, Ramos defines habitus as the ingrained habits and dispositions that inform language and identity practices. She sees pocho habitus as the habits and dispositions generated in the border environment that inform practices of intra-sentential code-switching. This typology of code-switching, argues Ramos, allows for selective code-switching as a type of crossing (Rampton 1995) that provides upper-class Laredoans an opportunity to express their bilingual identities as border dwellers without indicating allegiance to a pocho habitus. Smith and Murillo (2012) study performative negotiations of ideologies in a radically different context. Unlike Ramos, who studies upper-class Latina/os in Laredo, Smith, and Murillo study language and literacy practices in border colonias. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines a colonia as a “rural community within the US-Mexico border region that lacks adequate water, sewer, or decent housing or a combination of all three” (HUD 2015). Colonias are most often unincorporated rural areas under the jurisdiction of the county. They generally consist of inappropriately subdivided land with housing made of salvaged materials, although trailer homes are often present in many colonias. Dolhinow describes colonias as “neoliberal housing at its best” (2010: 47). In the absence of government sponsored affordable housing for new immigrant families arriving in border regions after multiple neoliberal development initiatives, including the Bracero Program, the Border Industrialization Program, and NAFTA, the neoliberal model of privatization generated an opportunity for land developers to step in. According to Dolhinow: Many colonias developed in a milieu of neoliberal retrenchment of the state and privatization of social services in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet these neoliberal cutbacks exist within a discriminatory housing market, especially on the border, and the inadequate and stigmatized public housing that does exist simply cannot house the growing population of Mexican working poor. It was in this particular convergence of limited housing, ethnic discrimination, neoliberal policy, and the prevalence of Mexican culture that colonias developed. (2010: 49) The colonia, then, provides a sense of ownership and investment to Mexican working poor that could not exist in public housing. Dolhinow shows that the colonia
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residents expressed a great deal of satisfaction and pride in their colonia dwellings and would be unlikely to leave. The neoliberal project of colonia production thus creates a sense of personal responsibility and entrepreneurship that permeates social life within the colonia. Smith and Murillo view this intrinsic sense of pride and self-realization as a key ingredient of human capital in border colonias. They further argue that the human capital generated through home ownership is replicated in other informal economic activities. Following Heyman, they characterize these informal economic activities as slantwise behavior. Slantwise is a conceptual category that captures the individual and collective actions that do not fit into a binary model of resistance and domination. Slantwise activities might include moving into a colonia for a better life or to avoid being identified by immigration, as well as engagement in informal entrepreneurial activities, such as reselling imported medications from Mexico without authorization. Smith and Murillo argue that colonia residents develop slantwise language and literacy practices as well. They read and write in Spanish for purposes related to household finances and religious faith in ways that contrast with school-based literacies that forbid Spanish or use it as a temporary bridge to English literacy. The performative negotiation of language ideologies in colonias, then, consists of a slantwise survival strategy in which transfronterizo literacy practices constitute instances of human capital. Dubord takes up the issue of the performative negotiation of language ideologies in the border region in her study of Spanish-speaking jornaleros at a Day Labor Center in Tucson, Arizona. She demonstrates how day laborers perform transnational identities as they legitimize unauthorized status, social integration, and participation in the informal economy. Jornaleros negotiate English monolingual ideologies and hegemonies in their day-to-day performances of the good worker. Dubord shows that all workers strived to present themselves as good workers during the daily self-promoting routines required in the drive-thru interviews at the Day Labor Center. Part of this performance was to highlight internal traits, such as being hardworking and having experience with a particular skill the employer sought. Other parts of the performance highlighted incidental traits, such as having their own form of transportation, the appropriate tools to get the job done, or the willingness to work for the lowest wage. The presentation of bilingual skills was a salient part of all performances. Dubord reports on various types of bilingual performance in the context of self-promoting routines. ‘High-level’ bilingual workers performed their bilingualism by greeting employers in English and asking about the job they were trying to fill. ‘Low-level’ bilingual workers typically avoided speaking directly to the employer in English but did state in Spanish that they spoke English. At times, the performance of bilingualism resulted in a competitive advantage. Dubord writes: An English-speaking employer asked the broker for a worker for a moving job. Lauro, a monolingual Spanish speaker and the next worker on the hiring list, came forward. Pedro, who was two slots down on the list, spoke directly
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Glenn A. Martínez to the employer in English, asking what kind of work it would be and how much he would pay. The employer said to the broker, “Oh, he speaks English, I want to take him.” Pedro got the job over Lauro. (2014: 145)
The competitive advantage of the bilingual performers was further enhanced by the preference among the jornaleros to work for Anglos rather than Mexicans. So bilingual performers tended to maintain the advantage for the most coveted jobs. But the performance of bilingualism did more than simply edge out Spanishspeaking workers. High-level bilingual workers were also selected as language brokers when a job required multiple workers. This role converted the high-level bilingual worker into a de facto foreman regardless of his knowledge of the work. The imbalance between high-level and low-level bilingual workers in Dubord’s analysis demonstrates how workers performatively negotiated the hegemony of English. High-level bilingual workers demonstrated the dexterity to write themselves into the mega-script of English language hegemony in order to increase their own advantage. The conflicting and complex ideologies of language on the border are thus performatively negotiated in multiple contexts. Upper-class Laredoans perform their class-based border identity through a fine-grained typology of code-switching practices. Colonia residents in the Rio Grande Valley engage in slantwise behaviors by maintaining Spanish language and literacy practices that contrast with the practices of schools and other institutions that interface with the colonia. Finally, day laborers perform bilingualism as a way of writing themselves into the megascript of English language hegemony.
4
Concluding remarks
The U.S.-Mexico border is a geopolitical line that generates unique complexities and challenging contradictions in social life and language practice. Our understanding of the border has evolved as increasingly perceptive sociological and cultural insights have shed new light on the border. Language study has been quick to take up these new insights and incorporate them into an ever more complex fabric of language description, maintenance, perception, ideology, and use. In this chapter, we have aimed to demonstrate the rich contributions that border theory has made to the sociolinguistic study of Spanish along the U.S.-Mexico border. We first considered the border in dialectological studies of Spanish in the Southwest. In this section, we found that while early studies tended to erase the border, later dialectological research has begun to engage the border quite powerfully leading to new understandings of the dynamics between traditional and Border Spanish in the Southwest. Next, we looked at sociolinguistic studies of language maintenance and perception in Southwest Spanish. The border creates a social environment in which positive attitudes toward Spanish can flourish. Numerous studies have borne out the link between these attitudes and language maintenance. At the
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same time, the social environment of the border adds new complexities to the perception of Spanish. While some studies suggested that the border sharpens differences in the perceptions of varieties of Spanish, other studies showed that the border can also soften those differences. We argued that economic changes along the border have played an important role in shaping the contours of these shifting perceptions of language. Finally, we looked at studies of language ideology on the border. These studies have brought into focus the complex and contradictory reflexes generated by the border environment. We looked at the multilayered power dynamics that shape ideologies on the border, and we considered the link between these ideologies and the daily and routinized performance of bilingualism along the border.
Glossary caló: a variety of Spanish characterized by intense word play, spoken by young, working-class Mexican Americans in urban centers such as El Paso and Los Angeles. colonia: rural community within the U.S.-Mexico border region that lacks adequate water, sewerage, or decent housing, or a combination of all three. dialectology: the study of the geographical distribution of competing linguistic variants. inter-sentential code-switching: switching between two languages in a single discourse at sentence boundaries. intra-sentential code-switching: switching between two languages in a single discourse within sentence or clause boundaries. maquiladora: a factory located on the Mexican side of the border to assemble components of products for export to the United States. maximal borderland: a zone of extensive cultural contact and simultaneous indices of conflict and confluence between two geopolitical entities. pocho (habitus): pocho is a derogatory term used in the U.S.-Mexico border region to refer to acculturated Mexican Americans. The notion of a pocho habitus, then, refers to the habits and dispositions generated in the border environment that inform practices of intra-sentential code-switching. slantwise behavior: a conceptual category that captures the individual and collective actions that do not fit into a binary model of resistance and domination. transculturation: the bending and blending of cultures when practices from one culture inhabit and take shape in the other culture and vice versa.
References Achugar, Mariana. “Counter-hegemonic language practices and ideologies: creating a new space for Spanish in Southwest Texas.” Spanish in Context 5 (2008): 1–19. ——— and Teresa Oteíza. “In whatever language people feel comfortable: conflicting language ideologies in the U.S. Southwest border.” Text and Talk 29 (2009): 371–391. ——— and Silvia Pessoa. “Power and place: language attitudes towards Spanish in a bilingual academic community in Southwest Texas.” Spanish in Context 6 (2009): 199–223.
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Bills, Garland and Neddy Vigil. The Spanish language of New Mexico and Southern Colorado: a linguistic atlas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. ———. “Spanish language variation and ethnic identity in New Mexico: internal and external borders.” In Language, borders and identity, edited by D. Watt and C. Llamas, 55–69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Coltharp, Lurline. The tongue of the Tirilones: a linguistic study of a criminal argot. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1965. Dolhinow, Rebecca. A jumble of needs: women’s activism and neoliberalism in the colonias of the Southwest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Dubord, Elise. Language, immigration and labor: negotiating work in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Espinosa, Aurelio M. “The Spanish language in New Mexico and Southern Colorado.” In Spanish and Portuguese languages in the United States, edited by C. Cortés, 1–37. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Galindo, Letticia. “Language use and language attitudes: a study of border women.” The Bilingual Review 21 (1996): 5–17. Gorman, Lillian. “Ethnolinguistic contact zones: identity and language use within Mexican-Nuevomexicano families in New Mexico.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Chicago, 2015. Heyman, Josiah McC. “U.S.-Mexico border cultures and the challenge of asymmetrical interpenetration.” In Borderlands: ethnographic approaches to security, power, and identity, edited by H. Donnan and T. Wilson, 21–34. Lanham: University Press of America, 2010. Hidalgo, Margarita. “Language contact, language loyalty, and language prejudice on the Mexican border.” Language in Society 15 (1986): 193–220. ———. “Perceptions of Spanish-English code-switching in Juárez, Mexico.” In MexicanAmerican Spanish in its societal and cultural contexts, edited by D. Bixler-Márquez, J. Ornstein-Galicia, and G. Green, 131–150. Brownsville: University of Texas Pan American at Brownsville, 1989. ———. “The dialectics of Spanish language loyalty and maintenance on the U.S.Mexico border: a two generation study.” In Spanish in the United States: linguistic contact and diversity, edited by A. Roca and J. Lipski, 47–74. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. HUD Exchange Colonias History. 2015. www.hudexchange.info/cdbg-colonias/ colonias-history Hudson, Alan, Eduardo Hernández-Chávez, and Garland Bills. “The many faces of language maintenance: Spanish language claiming in five Southwestern states.” In Spanish in four continents, edited by C. Silva-Corvalán, 165–183. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995. Lope Blanch, Juan M. El español hablado en el suroeste de los Estados Unidos: materiales para su estudio. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Nacional de México, 1990. Lugo, Alejandro. Fragmented lives, assembled parts: culture, capitalism and conquest at the U.S.-Mexico border. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Martínez, Glenn. “Perceptions of dialect in a changing society: folk linguistics along the Texas-Mexico border.” Sociolinguistics 7 (2003): 38–49. Martínez, Rubén. Crossing over: a Mexican family on the migrant trail. New York: Picador, 2001.
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Meadows, Bryan. “Examining the role of nationalism in folk theories of language: the case of language complaints in multilingual settings.” Applied Linguistics 24 (2013): 337–356. Mejías, Hugo and Pamela Anderson-Mejías. “Language maintenance in Southern Texas.” Southwest Journal of Linguistics 7 (1984): 116–124. ———. “Attitudes toward Spanish language maintenance or shift in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of South Texas.” Sociology of Language 158 (2002): 121–140. Moré, Iñigo. The borders of inequality: where wealth and poverty collide. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2011. Nieto-Phillips, John. The language of blood: the making of Spanish-American identity in New Mexico, 1880–1930. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Omoniyi, Tope. The sociolinguistics of borderlands: two nations, one community. Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 2004. Ramos, Carolina. “The utilization of bilingual practices as linguistic capital: a multiple case study of upper class Latinas/os on the U.S.-Mexico border.” PhD diss., The University of Texas, San Antonio, 2015. Rampton, Ben. Crossing: language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longmans, 1995. Rodríguez, Nestor. “The social construction of the U.S-Mexico border.” In Immigrants, out! The new nativism and the anti-immigrant impulse in the United States, edited by J. Perea, 223–243. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Smith, Patrick and Luz Murillo. “Researching transfronterizo literacies in Texas border colonias.” Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 15 (2012): 635–651. Urciuoli, Bonnie. “Language and borders.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 525–546. Velázquez, Isabel. “Intergenerational Spanish transmission in El Paso, Texas: parental perceptions of cost/benefit.” Spanish in Context 6 (2009): 69–84. ———. “Individual discourse, language ideology, and Spanish transmission in El Paso, Texas.” Critical Discourse Studies 10 (2013): 245–262. ———. “Spanish language variation and ethnic identity in New Mexico: internal and external borders.” In Language, borders and identity, edited by D. Watt and C. Llamas, 55–69. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos. Hegemonies of language and their discontents: the Southwest North American region since 1540. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2017. Vila, Pablo. Crossing borders, reinforcing borders: social categories, metaphors, and narrative identities on the U.S.-Mexico frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Watt, Dominic and Carmen Llamas. Language, borders and identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Further readings Dubord, Elise. “Language, church, and state in territorial Arizona.” In A political history of Spanish: the making of a language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Potowski, Kim and Richard Cameron, eds. Spanish in contact: policy, social and linguistic inquiries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos. Border visions: Mexican cultures of the Southwest. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1997. ———. An impossible living in a transborder world culture, confianza, and economy of Mexican-origin populations. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2010.
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Topics for discussion 1
What factors make the border a rich site for the study of language? Are all borders equally rich? Why or why not?
2
Dialectology assumes a stable linkage between language and place. Does your understanding of the border problematize traditional dialectological assumptions and methods? Explain.
3
Scholars studying language maintenance suggest that the U.S.-Mexico border environment is favorable to the maintenance of Spanish because it provides opportunities to sustain social networks across geopolitical divides. Do you think that the advent of relatively inexpensive communication technologies has the potential to produce the same outcome at distances that are further removed from the geopolitical border? Why or why not?
4
Language ideologies tend to become dichotomized at the border. Rather than index an entire language or language practice, border dwellers tend to dichotomize languages and practices in order to reinsert them within the distinctive power dynamics at the border. How might changes in border enforcement and control impact language ideologies on the border? Explain.
5
Language ideologies on the border are routinized and performed on a daily basis. How do the performances of language ideology discussed in this chapter serve as border marking language practices? Explain.
2
Linguistic encounters in Texas Manuel J. Gutiérrez
I notice that this name Tejas includes all the friendly tribes. The name is common to all of them, even though their language may be different. And, since this name is a general term, it must be used for no other reason than to indicate the long-standing friendship, which they entertain towards each other. And, therefore, among all these tribes ‘Tejias’ means friends. [. . .] But such a head they have not, and I, therefore, infer that this province which in New Spain is called ‘Tejias’ – which really expresses just what they are, because each tribe is a friend to all the others – cannot be called a kingdom. —Friar Francisco Casañas to the Viceroy of Mexico, August 15, 1691
1
Explorers
Although contact with explorers may have occurred as early as 1519 as a result of Alonso Álvarez Pineda’s expedition along ‘Amichel,’ the Gulf Coast region, the first official encounters between Spanish explorers and the inhabitants of Texas did not occur until late 1528. The disasters surrounding Pánfilo de Narváez’s early 1528 expedition to the west from Florida left Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and a number of survivors washed ashore along the coast of Mal Hado, which was probably modern-day Galveston Island (Cabeza de Vaca 1994: 35). A six-year stay with the Karankawas, the natives who populated part of the Texas Gulf Coast, and a year journey to western lands, in which he and his small group related to other native groups, constitute the first encounters between Europeans and Texas natives. He crossed to Mexico in the late spring of 1535. Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his experience and those of the few other survivors of the original expedition offer testimony of the many languages the Spanish speakers encountered during that time. For survival, they had to learn some of these languages to some extent. The Europeans immediately learned about the complex linguistic situation that they had found, as can be seen in the following passage of Cabeza de Vaca’s account: Nosotros enviamos al negro tras él, y como vio que iba solo, aguardólo. El negro le dijo que íbamos a buscar aquella gente que hacía aquellos humos. Él respondió que cerca de allí estaban las casas, y que nos guiaría allá, y así, lo fuimos siguiendo; y él corrió a dar aviso de cómo íbamos, y a puesta
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Manuel J. Gutiérrez del sol vimos las casas, y dos tiros de ballesta antes que llegásemos a ellas hallamos cuatro indios que nos esperaban, y nos recibieron bien. Dijímosles en lengua de mareames que íbamos a buscarlos, y ellos mostraron que se holgaban con nuestra compañía; y así, nos llevaron a sus casas, y a Dorantes y al negro aposentaron en casa de un físico, y a mí y a Castillo en casa de otro. Estos tienen otra lengua y llámanse avavares, y son aquellos que solían llevar los arcos a los nuestros e iban a contratar con ellos; y aunque son de otra nación y lengua, entienden la lengua de aquellos con quien antes estábamos, y aquel mismo día habían llegado allí con sus casas. (Cabeza de Vaca 1994: 61)
In his extended stay among Texas natives, the Spanish explorer noted the various housing and communicative patterns between the indigenous groups inhabiting the region, and he wrote specific comments in relation to the linguistic situation. In Chapter 26, De las naciones y lenguas, he specifically offers a detailed recount of the languages used by the different groups with which he lived: En la isla de Mal Hado hay dos lenguas: a los unos llaman Caoques y a los otros llaman de Han. En Tierra Firme, enfrente de la isla, hay otros que se llaman de Chorruco, y toman el nombre de los montes donde viven. Adelante, en la costa del mar, habitan otros que se llaman Doguenes, y enfrente de ellos otros que tienen por nombre de Mendica. Más adelante [. . .] Todas estas gentes tienen habitaciones y pueblos y lenguas diversas. (Cabeza de Vaca 1994: 76) It is clear that the survivors of this expedition lived with different groups during the seven years that Cabeza de Vaca spent in the South of Texas. He lived with the first group for six years; after that, he lived six months with another, then two months with a different one, and for shorter periods with other Texas native groups. The Spanish language was in contact with an important number of other languages, and the European survivors, due to their communicative needs, made efforts to learn some of these languages; although they probably only partially learned most of these languages, we can assume that in some cases there were some Spaniards who acquired high levels of proficiency. In spite of the fact that most of the native tribes were nomads, many of them had communicated with the others, peacefully in some cases and more aggressively with others. In a number of cases, when Cabeza de Vaca met a group, its members had already received news about the Europeans’ presence. This fact, along with the extensive periods that Spaniards spent with the natives, suggests that some of them also learned some Spanish; however, written testimony is scarce in this respect. Cabeza de Vaca describes his group’s experience with the different languages they encountered and how they successfully managed these communicative challenges: Pasamos por gran número y diversidades de lenguas; con todas ellas Dios nuestro Señor nos favoreció, porque siempre nos entendieron y les entendimos. Y así, preguntábamos y respondían por señas, como si ellos hablaran nuestra lengua
Linguistic encounters in Texas 29 y nosotros la suya; porque, aunque sabíamos seis lenguas, no nos podíamos en todas partes aprovechar de ellas, porque hallamos más de mil diferencias. (Cabeza de Vaca 1994: 94–95) It is known that in situations in which speakers from different languages interact, an amount of transfer occurs depending on the characteristics of each particular situation. In Cabeza de Vaca’s case, given that the four Spanish speakers were far outnumbered, they had to adopt communicative tools from the native languages and from speakers’ paralinguistic resources; as we can verify from the preceding paragraph, they learned six languages and probably had limited knowledge of other languages. But considering the extended periods they spent with some native groups, some transfer from Spanish to the native language had to occur. Unfortunately, documentation of this phenomenon is very limited in the valuable account by Cabeza de Vaca. Mal Hado, the name given by Spaniards to the island where they arrived, was used by them and probably by some of the natives. As we know, this name did not survive and the island has a different name now, so the life of this Spanish form was brief, even if it was used by others besides the four Spaniards who were on or near the island; the Hans, Capoques, and Karankawas would have been the first Texas native groups in contact with the Spanish explorers. In Cabeza de Vaca’s account, the explorer mentions Mala Cosa and clarifies that this is a form used by the natives in reference to a man (and probably other nouns) that brings bad things to them. One possible explanation might be that in this passage Cabeza de Vaca was translating the native language’s form that corresponds to the Spanish form Mala Cosa; but it is also plausible that the natives had taken the form from the Spaniards, a form that might have been used by them considering the circumstances in which they were living. In any case, taking literally what is said in the following passage, we can only understand that the natives used the Spanish linguistic form: Estos y los de más atrás nos contaron una cosa extraña, y por la cuenta que nos figuraron parecía que había quince o diez y seis años que había acontecido, que decian que por aquella tierra anduvo un hombre, que ellos llaman Mala Cosa, y que era pequeño de cuerpo, y que tenía barbas, aunque nunca claramente le pudieron ver el rostro, y que cuando venía a la casa donde estaban se les levantaban los cabellos y temblaban, y luego parecía a la puerta de la casa un tizón ardiendo. Y luego, aquel hombre entraba y tomaba al que quería de ellos, y dábales tres cuchilladas grandes por las ijadas con un pedernal muy agudo, tan ancho como una mano y dos palmos en luengo, y metía la mano por aquellas cuchilladas y sacábales las tripas. (Cabeza de Vaca 1994: 66)
2
Missions and first settlers
Although explorations continued after Cabeza de Vaca’s arrival in Mexico, none of them justified the establishment of settlements in the area of Texas because of the scarcity of wealth and resources found there. However, the Church wanted to
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Manuel J. Gutiérrez
evangelize the natives of this territory. From 1681 to 1722, a series of missions, settlements, and presidios were built covering extensive areas of the Texas territory. Due to the nature of the Church missions, the contact that occurred in these four decades with Texas native groups was fundamental for the establishment of the Spanish language as a tool to communicate with natives. The learning of native languages by priests and the assistance of translators were also of great importance in achieving their religious objective. An important number of place-names established during that time are testaments to the influence of the new language in the region. However, in spite of the support offered by the Marquis de Aguayo, the Governor of Coahuila and Texas between 1719 and 1722, the settlements consisted mainly of soldiers and priests, with few colonists. Not much information is available about the degree of the linguistic contact during the time, but while priests made efforts to convert the natives to the Christian faith, they used both native languages and Spanish. The fact that many native tribes were nomadic or semi-nomadic was a clear limitation for the development of a more in-depth linguistic contact between Spanish and the different native languages. However, we can assume that besides the Spanish influence evidenced by place-names, native people learned Spanish to some extent, and transfer from native languages had to occur. For instance, the most widely accepted hypothesis on the origin of the name of the state of Texas is that the word tejas is an example of transfer to Spanish from the Caddo native language: the word tasha was used by the Hassinai group from east Texas (for an alternative hypothesis, see García Ruiz 2016). The first real setters arrived in 1731 to San Antonio and consisted of 16 families from the Canary Islands. By the end of the first part of the 18th century, 1,800 Spaniards lived in Texas, sharing the territory with 1,300 Native Americans. Los Adaes in east Texas housed the Spanish government’s headquarters, but San Antonio was home to the largest and most important settlement. During this period, some schools were established as well. At the end of the 18th century, Nacogdoches was the most important Spanish settlement in east Texas, and the rate of colonization in this area experienced a (momentary) decline. To the settlers from the Canary Islands, colonist families from other parts of Spain and Mexico were added as the population in the south of Texas grew during this century. Improvements in the Mexican province of Nuevo Santander, which shared a border with Texas, helped the growth in population. Contacts with the native groups were strained due to the fact that both Spaniards and natives obviously wanted control of the same territory. Peace treaties with some native groups occurred to isolate other native groups, but later, new peace treaties were necessary to isolate the influence of the previous groups. These tense relations, in addition to the previously mentioned nomadic tendencies of the natives, made the transfer of forms between Spanish and native languages difficult. It is likely that native languages took words from Spanish, considering that this was the most extensively used language in the Texas territory. Moreno Fernández (2008) affirms that it is not improbable to think that Spanish could have served as a lingua franca in different moments between the 17th and 19th centuries (184). Father Morfi’s (1777) description of the Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo states that the natives
Linguistic encounters in Texas 31 of this mission were well educated, civilized, and knew how to work on diverse tasks. According to his description, the Texas natives who lived on the missions spoke Spanish perfectly. En la actualidad estos indios tienen mucha educación, son civilizados y saben trabajar muy bien en sus oficios mecánicos y tienen competencia en algunas de las artes. Hablan español perfectamente, con excepción de aquellos que son traidos diariamente del bosque gracias al afán de los misioneros. Muchos tocan bien el arpa, el violín y la guitarra, cantan bien y bailan las mismas danzas que los españoles. (Morfi 1935: 7) According to the 1783 census of Spanish Texas, this province had 2,809 inhabitants around that time. There were 935 men, 777 women, 587 boys, 474 girls, 17 male slaves, and 19 female slaves (Wallace et al. 2002: 28). 2.1 Adaeseño legacy: people from the Adaes In 1717 Father Antonio Margil de Jesús and Father Francisco Hidalgo founded a mission among the Adaes Indians situated on the border of Texas and Louisiana. Besides the priests, one soldier was also living in the mission that year. The following year, the mission was populated with 72 people, but a year later residents from French Louisiana attacked them, and the Spanish population returned to San Antonio (see Map 2.1). They returned to the east after two years, but this time they built more missions in that area (Pratt 2008). The number of colonists and soldiers, and the resources they brought in 1721, allowed them to develop and consolidate a life in that region which was of great interest to Spain because of the continuous threat from French Louisiana. According to Lipski, “by the second half of the eighteen century the settlements were well established and were indisputable home to all residents” (2008: 215). However, when Louisiana was ceded to Spain in 1762, the importance of the area decreased because no strong presence was needed at that border. In 1773, Spain decided to close Los Adaes and other settlements built in the region; in spite of protest from the population, most of the settlers returned to the area of San Antonio. They were not treated well in their new home and requested authorization to go back to the east; in 1779 their petition was finally accepted, and an important number of them returned and reunited with the numerous colonists who ignored the official order and had never left. The return of Louisiana to French administration in 1800 made no difference in the lives of Spanish settlers, but when this state was sold to the United States, the arrival of a new English-speaking population produced significant changes (Lipski 2008: 216). Pratt describes the situation of the Adaeseño group at present in the following way: Today, the Adaeseños no longer have communities. They can be found scattered on both sides of the Sabine River, along the Camino Real in Texas and Louisiana. They know very little about their origins. Some of them say they
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Manuel J. Gutiérrez are Spanish, some say they are Spanish and Indian, and others do not know what they are. (2008: 194)
Pratt, after having great difficulties finding descendants of this group with knowledge of Spanish, conducted oral interviews with 17 informants of this variety. The oldest speaker was 91 years old and the youngest was 55. They acquired Spanish orally, and their knowledge of the language varies among speakers. The author characterizes this dialect as similar to Castilian and rural Mexican Spanish of the 17th and 18th centuries. She also found Nahuatl elements, which proves transfer to Spanish from the language used by the Indians in Mexico and by settlers who came from Mexico to populate the region. Elements from French and English are also found in their Spanish system. Although it shows characteristics of vestigial and rural varieties of Spanish, the mentioned combination of features distinguishes it from other dialects. Pratt offers a complete grammatical analysis of the system of Adaeseño Spanish spoken by the participants in all aspects and demonstrates that the sum of its linguistic features make this variety different from others; however, she also concludes that Adaeseño faces an imminent death due to the fact it is only spoken by a small, aging population (2008: 209). Lipski lists the linguistic features of the Spanish system of Adaeseño descendants. He characterizes this variety as phonologically conservative due to the fact that most of the original settlers were from Mexico. They retain consonants
Map 2.1 Northeastern New Spain in the late 18th century: missions and towns Internet public map of old Texas
Linguistic encounters in Texas 33 (i.e. retention of /-s/, /n/ is always alveolar) and lack neutralizations, which can be found in other Spanish dialects; he also lists phonological misidentifications and analogical creations. At the morphological level, among other features, the author lists transfer from English, as has occurred in other Spanish dialects in contact with this language (i.e. venga patrás mañana). Among the lexical characteristics, he mentions mexicanisms (i.e. comal), arcaisms, rural/popular Spanish items, some French loans, and indigenous elements (2008: 217).
3
Nineteenth century
The 300 years of Spanish rule in Texas left an enormous influence on all aspects of life, but without a doubt, the language was the most lasting contribution. The Spanish language was retained during the Texas Mexican period, then by Spanish speakers living under English-speaking administration, and later in the last two centuries by new waves of immigration from Mexico. At the beginning of the 1800s, the Spanish population of Texas was about 3,000. With new arrivals from Mexico, Spain, and Louisiana, by 1810 around 7,000 settlers lived in the territory. The most important cities of the time, particularly San Antonio and Nacogdoches, increased their population, and new towns were established, like San Marcos de Neve (80 families) and Trinidad de Salcedo (30 families). However, due to natural and political causes the settlers of the latter two were forced to leave between 1812 and 1813. The new independence wave in Latin America around that time, as well as the permanent threat from the Anglo-Americans, now owners of Louisiana, obliged Spain to send soldiers to the presidios of San Antonio and east Texas, which helped provide some stability to the colonies. This lasted until a new wave of revolts triggered similar events in Mexico. Spain was able to keep Texas as a colony, but the number of settlers dropped to 2,500 around 1820. A year later, once Mexico gained its independence, Texas and its population became part of Mexico. The first decades of the 19th century brought many political changes that strongly affected the social life of the Spanish community. Although Spanish was mainly used within the limits of settlements, not only for security reasons but also due to the nomadic nature of the native population, this language was the most powerful means of communication among colonists and between colonists and natives. Efforts to learn native languages were conducted, especially and with great success by priests, while the Spanish population also used interpreters to conduct commercial and social transactions of any type. It is only natural that linguistic transfer occurred frequently as elements from each of the languages were exchanged. But since administrative business was conducted in Spanish, transfer from this language to other languages was more frequent. New settlers from the United States and from European countries allowed by the new Mexican administration had to accept and support regulations that were dictated by the Mexican government. Some of them learned Spanish, as illustrated by the case of Stephen F. Austin. Austin brought 300 families from the United States in his first endeavor as an empresario supported by the Mexican government; he used Spanish to conduct
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business not only in Texas but also in Mexico. In fact, changes in nationality were quite common, and Austin was one of the most notable; he started as American, then became Spanish, then Mexican, Texan, and then American again (Smith 2014: 180). What really happened with the new settlers, however, is well illustrated with their use of the Spanish language, because they simply did not assimilate in this respect. “Although the national language was Spanish, Anglos rejected its use and instead conducted their affairs in English” (San Miguel 2016: 15). Around 1835, the Hispanic population in Texas centered around urban settlements. Out of a total of 6,037 inhabitants, the majority were concentrated in the following settlements: San Antonio (with a population of 2,500), Goliad (700), Nacogdoches (537), Victoria (300), and Laredo (2,000). But the arrival of English-speaking colonists gradually changed the territory’s demographics. This was an important fact that impacted the variety of Spanish spoken in Texas, but there were other key factors that helped to shape the language. These were a series of political events that shook the region during the first half of the 19th century: after the Mexican independence in 1821, the Texas Revolution occurred in 1836, and Texas was incorporated into the United States in 1845. There is no doubt that the years surrounding these historical events brought many social changes to the lives of the people who inhabited the territory. Linguistic changes occurred as a result of the mentioned transformations. The Republic of Texas experienced conflicts from the beginning due to different perspectives on dealing with Mexico. Some of the new administrators wanted to continue military incursions to the south while others thought that the need for international recognition made it unadvisable to adopt an aggressive military policy. Efforts to be annexed to the United States were turned down because of the abolitionists’ opposition to accept Texas as a new state of the union. Lack of funds was probably one of the most urgent problems to solve and trade accords with European nations were very important, especially in a period in which the United States wanted to maintain amicable relations with Mexico by taking a neutral position. Hispanic Texas natives immediately suffered discriminatory treatment, and part of the Texas administration did not want to honor previous agreements regarding land property. Texas Hispanics who were in charge of the territory for centuries were relegated to an inferior social status during those years. The first years of the Republic, however, showed tolerance with respect to language differences and it was acceptable to conduct public affairs in Spanish. The government wanted the institution at the local level to work, so it was interested in accommodating individuals who did not speak English as a practical matter (San Miguel 2016: 9). After the two presidential terms of Sam Houston (the first and third, chronologically), one of Mirabeau Lamar, and a short one of Anson Jones, Texas joined the United States on December 29, 1845. However, as demonstrated by some historians, the conflicts related to the frontier accompanied the Texas Republic throughout its existence, and Anglo hegemony was not fully achieved until 1948 when the treaty with Mexico was signed (Smith 2014: 185). In spite of the conflicts with Mexico, native groups, and its economic problems, the population grew rapidly during the years of the Texas Republic due to its
Linguistic encounters in Texas 35 attractive immigration policy that brought people from many European countries. Irish, French, English, Scottish, Swiss, Czech, Polish, and other settlers established colonies between 1840 and 1850. By 1848 a population of 162,500 is estimated; most Anglos were concentrated in the eastern territory while Mexican Texans continued living in the area of San Antonio (Calvert 2004: 90). While Mexican Independence, the Texas Revolution, and the annexation to the United States were events that strongly affected the future of the Texas region during the 19th century, other events also greatly altered the demographic and linguistic composition of the region. First, the conflict with Mexico brought changes to the map of the Mexican state and later to the Texas Republic. El Paso and other areas, for example, were considered part of Texas only after the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Second, the invasion of Mexico by France in 1862 and the American Civil War made migration from both directions unavoidable. The population of Texas continued to increase after being annexed to the United States. By the end of the Republic, the Texas population grew to 142,000; a few years later 212,000 people were living in the new state, and by 1860 this number almost tripled to 604,215, yet only around 12,000–14,000 were Hispanics. The economy became more dynamic as the population of other areas increased, particularly in the western part of the state. The transportation and communication problems, however, were still unresolved, so contact between different regions was still very limited. With the construction of roads and the building of railroads, which started in 1852, communication improved. In any case, the newcomers were mainly English speakers and contributed to the increased presence of English. On the official side, beginning in 1856, Texas legislators passed a series of discriminatory laws in relation to education where the use of English was emphasized; while the first version of the law was moderate, successive versions were sending a clear message that English should be the only instructional language (San Miguel 2016: 19). Although most Hispanics maintained their language, religion, and customs, the minority status of Spanish and the need to speak English in the territory under the new rules relegated Spanish to domestic use. In the following decades, Hispanics were gradually displaced as government officials and business operators, and they could sense prejudice from Anglos. Despite this fact, many languages were spoken in the state; however, English or bilingualism was the new way to have a successful life. 3.1
Linguistic changes motivated by historical events
Martínez examines legal documents written between 1791 and 1853, which covers the years of the three political events mentioned above. The author studies the -ra/-se variation that occurs in the imperfect tense of the Spanish subjunctive verbal mood, as illustrated in the following examples (2001: 117). Y no consiguiendo otra cosa en este paso que quedar descarados y el asunto quedase en tal estado. (Laredo Archive 1842)
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Manuel J. Gutiérrez Muy satisfactorio me sería el que este ilustre cuerpo nombrara una diputación que prediciera dicho acto. (Matamoros Archive 1847)
The author limited his investigation to the area of the Nuevo Santander, which now corresponds to the current Mexican state of Tamaulipas, part of the Nuevo León, and South Texas. Results from this investigation indicate that this linguistic phenomenon is responsive to the historical period, as can be seen with the following percentages.
1791–1819 1820–1836 1837–1853
-ra
-se
36.4 35.8 70.6
63.6 64.2 29.4
Martínez interprets his results the following way. The higher use of -se during the first period is associated with the colonial identity of the settlers from the south Texas region, an idea that has been documented by historians. The drastic change that occurs after 1836, after the Texas Revolution displaced Mexican rule, reflects a change in identity. During this time, Hispanic people in the region united against the mentioned treaty under a single identity as Mexican. Linguistically, this change of identity prompted the abandonment of linguistic features of Peninsular Spanish like the one represented by -se. The other form, -ra, which is perceived as an indicator of Mexican identity, will start being favored by the Hispanic population of the area. Gubitosi studies a syntactic opposition in the Spanish of the U.S. Southwest between 1850 and 1950; the investigation is divided per geographical areas, one of which is the region of Texas. Using data from newspapers published in these periods, she follows the periphrastic passive constructions and the passive constructions with -se; the author included only those constructions that can be considered equivalents from a logic-semantic point of view, like the following two examples (2013: 75). En el futuro no serán expedidos pasaportes a señoras y niños que deseen regresar a México. Esta orden fue dada el día 11 del presente. La orden fue recibida en la oficina de la corte del distrito. No se dio ninguna explicación sobre el motivo de prohibir pasaportes. Taking into consideration the social and political changes that took place in the Texas region during the 100 years considered, the author selected 1,065 cases with contexts in which the two forms were used. Then, she discussed her findings in relation to the diverse linguistic and social variables considered in her study. It is interesting to note that in the first period considered (1855–1880), the results for the Texas region are very similar to those of México (passive con -se 56/55; periphrasis 44/45), which are very different from the results from California
Linguistic encounters in Texas 37 and New Mexico. The similarities found between Texas and Mexico might be explained by the constant contact between these two areas in the recent past, which is corroborated by the divergent future they will show in the following decades in which the two regions present a divergent social development. In the following period (1881–1905), Mexico does not show changes, but Texas increases its favoritism for the passive with -se from 56% to 66%. The fact that California and New Mexico favored the periphrastic form in the first and second period and tend to change toward the passive with -se, indicates that the latter is the innovative form. Texas, therefore, presents its own behavioral pattern, which is corroborated by the findings related to other linguistic variables. 3.2
Newspapers
The events that took place in Texas during the 19th century and their effects on the Hispanic population motivated the surge of a number of newspapers with the purpose of informing, educating, and defending the Hispanic population. A number of them are found digitized under Early Texas Newspapers on the Portal of Texas History (The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History 2017), and this section is based on them. Hispanics owned some of these periodicals while others were owned by Anglos or people of European origin. They usually consisted of four pages, two in English and two in Spanish, with the exception of those published entirely in Spanish. Most of them had a biweekly frequency, but in some cases they became weekly distributions. The publication of these newspapers in Spanish (or in the two languages) is evidence of a large enough readership to justify their existence, although a number of Hispanics had no access to these publications. After decades without direct official ties with Mexico or Spain, the decreasing number of Hispanics who remained or arrived in the Texas region had the possibility of connecting with Hispanics from other areas of the state and from Mexico. The number of advertisements on the pages of some of the newspapers shows that the commercial motivation was also very important for the owners. One of the first newspapers, the Corpus Christi Star/La Estrella de Corpus Christi, which appeared in 1848, had two pages in English and two in Spanish. The edition of September 26, 1848, among other things, inserted comments about the security of the territory with the purpose of attracting new settlers: “ahora que el pas está en manos de los Estados Unidos, y la proteccion es segura, han comenzado a mudarse y continuaran mudandose hasta que toda esa parte del pais este poblado” (3). The newspaper took this editorial stance since the beginning, as illustrated in the previous week’s edition: “é informaros de los movimientos de las tropas Americanas segun sean estacionadas sobre vuestras fronteras ó presigan al Indio bárbaro y á los ladrones de vuestras inmediaciones” (September 19, 1848, 3). Just a few years after the annexation of Texas to the United States, the objective was clear: to inform about the advantages that the new Anglo administration would bring to the inhabitants. The intention was the cultural and legal education of these new Americans. Further proof of this is found in the edition of October 10, 1848, in which the newspaper used the Spanish language as an instrument to
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pursue this goal; the idea was not only to inform but also to teach how to behave under the new order: Como es nuestra intencion tener al lector Mejicano al corriente de todos los grandes acontecimientos del dia, en su propio idioma, y poner un cuidado esmerado en todos los asuntos que puedan interesarles – publicar esas leyes con las cuales es necesario que los nuevos ciudadanos se familiaricen. (3) The Corpus Christi Star started offering two pages in English and two in Spanish, and then reduced the Spanish section to one and a half; some editions even published its four pages in English with only advertisements in Spanish. The Spanish language was very important in those years, but was only used as a tool to promote the new way of life in the United States. El Centinela, published in Brownsville, followed the same editorial line. Besides the commercial purpose, it sought to educate the Hispanic population about the new laws that they should follow. The Spanish language serves clearly this objective, as we can see in the following passages: Como la mayoria de los habitantes de esta parte de nuestro pais ignoran generalmente la lengua en que se publican las leyes de nuestro Estado, insertará en cada Numero de este periodico para su veneficio particular, una traduccion de aquellas leyes que son de un interés general para ellos. (August 25, 1848, 1) Al emprender el publicar una gaceta en una lengua diferente de la nuestra sabemos que las dificultades que superar son grandes [. . .] La necesidad de este conducto de información para la parte Mejicana del pueblo que son Ciudadanos de los EE.UU. debe ser aparente para todos. Todo el sistema de gobierno es para ellos nuevo y estraño, enteramente ignorante de nuestra lengua y nuestras leyes hacen mal con los mas inocentes motivos; para oviar este mal publicamos, como ya tenemos dicho; en su idioma aquellas partes de nuestras leyes que les serán mas útiles, y encargamos encarecidamente á los mas competentes que nos ayuden en esta empresa. (August 25, 1848, 1) El Bejareño was a biweekly newspaper published in San Antonio from 1855; in 1856 it began weekly publications, with international, national, state, and local news as well as advertisements. The edition of September 29, 1855, included, among other things, an abbreviated history of the United States and a translation of a Seminole tradition about the creation of humans with a clear educational purpose; it also included, like the ones from the last decade, news from several European countries and from Mexico and El Paso (Correo del Paso). On May 10, 1856, a letter by Juan Smith was published to request the vote of the electors from Bexar County for his candidacy, which indicates that the written press was an
Linguistic encounters in Texas 39 important means to communicate with electors who spoke Spanish, at least with those who were able to read. According to the goal mentioned at the top of this publication in the editorial of its first edition, this newspaper written in Spanish, with its office in the Plaza de Armas, was dedicado principalmente a los intereses de la población Mejico-Tejana (“dedicated mainly to the interests of the Mexican-Texan population”). This editorial is very important because it represents the viewpoint of the newspaper; the editor recognizes the violent nature of the separation from Mexico to become a republic and then a state of the United States, but then compares the life of the two places separated by the Rio Grande River. The newspaper clearly favored the American sector. The first editorial of El Bejareño supports the idea of maintaining Spanish but affirms that children should acquire English. The periodical describes an ideal situation that Hispanics would supposedly find in the territory under the new rule: language would play an important role and the acquisition of English would bring, according to this Hispanic newspaper, a better way of life. Nos empeñamos siempre en promover la fundacion y el fomento de las Escuelas Publicas en las cuales, sin perder el idioma de Cervantes, los niños Mejico-Tejanos, adquirirán el idioma nacional serán instruidos en los deberes ciudadamos, su creencia religiosa será respetada, y se harán ciudadanos utiles y dignos de pertenecer á un pais libre. (El Bejareño, February 7, 1855, 1) Analyzing the statement related to the language, it can be said that the writer of the editorial wanted to encourage new generations of Hispanics to learn English to take full advantage of the country where they were living by giving an idealistic view of the life that awaited Hispanics in the United States. It also expresses a wish to maintain Spanish, sin perder el idioma de Cervantes, a promotion of bilingualism or, perhaps, a resigned view of a future reality that awaited them. El Ranchero was a weekly newspaper from San Antonio that intended to attract Mexican people to the ideals of the Democratic Party. The publication stated that it aimed to defend Mexicans who live in the regions due to the attacks they received and also due to the “naturales simpatias que nos ligan a todos los pueblos de nuestra raza que hablan aquende los mares la lengua senora de Castilla” (July 4, 1856, 1). In this edition, the newspaper includes excerpts of an article that appeared in a newspaper with a clear xenophobic agenda: Bastrop Advertiser, periodico que hace algun tiempo ha declarado guerra a muerte a todo lo que no es americano, – i que por la hiel conque desahoga su ira contra los mejicanos [. . .] ha alcanzado algun renombre en la arena periodistica. (2) This newspaper, an organ of the American Party (previously the Native American Party) with an anti-Catholic and an anti-immigrant agenda, published an article
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crudely attacking the Mexican people who live in the region; the letter was basically against their voting rights: Quereis reconocer a los mejicanos como vuestros iguales social, moral ó politicamente? [. . .] Si animais a los Mejicanos a que voten alimentareis una serpiente que os esta envenenando [. . .] Vosotros armais una banda de hombres que os despojara de vuestras propiedades como ya lo han hecho con otros – Vosotros incorporais bajo la bandera Democratica un ejercito de abolicionistas, bajos, ignorantes i estupidos [. . .] son instrumento de un sacerdocio corrompido forzados a obedecer el mandato de todo fraile i villano de capucha. (2) Having received critical comments from readers for publishing these excerpts, the next edition of the El Ranchero (July 11, 1956, 3) included a clarification. It states that passages from the article were included to let the readers know about the caliber of the attacks. Also, in this and in following editions, the newspaper recommends bookstores with books in Spanish: El maestro de espáñol, libro de frases i coloquios; Olendorf, metodo para aprender español; several novels; and books to learn English and French. Immediately after the publishing of this newspaper there were reactions from El Bejareño about the editorial line of El Ranchero. Mutual attacks appeared in future editions of both newspapers. A reading of the newspapers published during that time indicates that El Ranchero was one of the newspapers that most decisively defended Hispanics during that time and also the one that most promoted the teaching of Spanish, as indicated by the number of ads related to this topic within its pages. Kanellos compares El Bejareño with El Clamor Publico from California that was published between 1855 and 1859; according to this author, while the newspaper from Texas showed clear signs in defense of public schools and defended the rights of Mexico-Texans, it “never assumed the aggressiveness that Francisco Ramírez’s El Clamor Publico had in California.” Kanellos presents a list with excellent descriptions of other newspapers that appeared in Texas at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries (2000: 99). The reading suggests that the issues incorporated in Hispanic newspapers were mostly related to the social problems of the Hispanic population; language preservation was not among the most important, so the conservation of Spanish in the region was left to individual families and immigrants from Mexico who first came because of livestock and agricultural opportunities and later because of social conflicts. The American Flag (Brownsville), El Correo (San Antonio), the Daily Ranchero and Republican (Brownsville), and El Mundo (Brownsville) were other Hispanic newspapers that published during those decades.
4 The changing Texan-Hispanic population After the American Civil War, the expansion of the railroads produced a big impact on the cattle and agriculture industries, particularly the cotton industry. Improvements in transportation led to better infrastructure and increased economic
Linguistic encounters in Texas 41 development. However, the rural lifestyle of previous decades continued to prevail, as most of the population still lived on small farms. By the end of the 19th century, only 2% of the working population of Texas worked in the industrial sector; these workers and their families lived in towns and cities. Starting in 1901, however, 10 years after the discovery of the first deposit of oil, the economy of Texas changed completely. Although the agricultural sector was still important, the economy of the state became more diversified. With the development of this and other industries that grew in the last decades of the 19th century, the oil industry would soon become the most important part of the modern Texas economy. As a consequence of all these changes in the economy, more and more people arrived in Texas; while many Texans maintained their rural lifestyle, an important portion of them moved to the cities, along with newcomers to the state. Considering the growth of the population in Texas in the different periods, it can be said that the Hispanic presence was rapidly outnumbered in the 19th century; however, a number of events and economic factors caused the population of Mexican origin to return to a significant role at the end of that century and during the 20th century. In the first decades of the 19th century, the Hispanic population was about 5,000 and fluctuated until the Texas Revolution, but by 1835 the eastern area of Texas, mostly populated by settlers, had a total population of 6,000. By 1850, the year of the first federal census, there were more than 14,000 inhabitants of Mexican origin, but at that time the total population of Texas was 212,592. The slave population grew enormously now that slavery was permitted (it was not during the Mexican period). There were 58,161 slaves, which was more than four times the Hispanic population at the time. After that, a series of events motivated different immigration waves from Mexico to Texas. The first one was related to the development of the agricultural sector in the U.S. economy, then the War of the Reform in Mexico (1855–1861) that made many Mexicans move north. After that, immigration was triggered by the French intervention in Mexico (1861–1867). Mexican people also sought refuge in the United States during the deep economic crisis of the two periods of Porfirio Díaz as president of the country (1877–1880 and 1884–1911), which left numerous people in poverty. Another immigration wave occurred during the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), which significantly increased the number of Mexicans in Texas and in other U.S. regions. Then, another improvement in agriculture in several states of the Southwest produced a very significant movement from Mexico to Texas after 1920. By 1930, 700,000 people of Mexican origin were living in Texas. There was now another factor that was contributing to the growth of the Hispanic population: new U.S. natives of Mexican origin, the children of immigrants. This factor, along with a labor shortage in the United States during that period, caused the population of Mexican origin to double, so by 1960 that population was 1.4 million in Texas. After that period, the same two factors explained the growth of the Texas population of Mexican origin to four million by 1990. However, with immigrants only comprising 20% of the U.S. population, native-born Hispanics were now the largest contributor to the growth of the Latino population (Ersdal 2012; De León 2017). The trend has been maintained to date in the case of the Texan-Hispanics, and they constitute a significant proportion of the total population; among Hispanics,
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those of Mexican origin constitute 87%. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services (TDSHS) projection for 2017, Hispanics represent 40.99% (11,804,795) of the total population of 28,797,290 (TDSHS 2017). After several centuries, this sector of the population has surpassed the Anglo population, which represents 40.90% (11,779,132) of the total population. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) characterizes a metropolitan area as A central urban area surrounded by other urban areas that work together economically or socially. The central urban area must have a population of at least 50,000 people with a combined regional population of 100,000. (TDSHS 2017) A huge proportion of Hispanic people (90.58%) live in metropolitan areas; in fact, they live in the most populated areas in the state of Texas. In the cities located on the U.S.-Mexican border, the Hispanic population has the largest presence; there are more than two million concentrated in four metropolitan areas: El Paso (84.33%, 766,152); Laredo (96%, 284,353); Brownsville-Harlingen (89.68%, 418,652); McAllen-Edinburg-Mission (91%, 849,214). At the same time, a few cities of the state have attracted more than nine million people of Hispanic origin. San Antonio, which has historically had a strong Hispanic presence, has a Hispanic population of 1,391,324, which represents the 56.10% of the total population of the San AntonioNew Braunfels metropolitan area, while Anglos represent 33.22% (823,832) of its total population. Austin, another historically urban area, and Dallas, established in the mid-19th century and whose development is closely related to the cotton industry and later to the oil industry, both have an enormous Hispanic population. Houston, the most populous city in the state of Texas, was founded in 1836 and named after General Sam Houston, president of the Republic of Texas and hero of the decisive Battle of San Jacinto against Mexican forces. The development of this city and the area was closely related to the development of the port and railroad industry, which in conjunction with the oil industry produced continuous population growth during the 20th century. The largest concentration of institutions that offer medical services and the NASA Space Center are also responsible for the burgeoning of this metropolitan area. According to the projection of the TDSHS for 2017, the metropolitan area of Houston/The Woodlands/Sugar Land has a Hispanic population of 2,718,686, which represents 39.24% of the total population, while the Anglo population represents 34.67% (2,402,601) of the total population. This metropolitan area is home to 23% of all Hispanics in Texas. The largest three groups of Hispanic origin in this metropolitan area are Mexican 75.7%, Salvadoran 8.2%, and Honduran 3.2%.
5 Texas and language today Seventy-six percent of Hispanics speak a language other than only English at home, while 24% speak only English. As at the national level, although Spanish is spoken by several million speakers in the state of Texas, it is considered a minority
Linguistic encounters in Texas 43 language due to the fact that English is the language used to conduct most of the state’s business and daily activities. Because support of bilingual education by official institutions is very limited, programs related to Spanish and other languages tend to be transitional programs, which aim to replace other languages with English. Therefore, Spanish is not a language used in formal instruction. Available written sources, such as newspapers, magazines, and books, reach a small number of members of Spanish communities around the state. Spanish is used by Hispanics mainly in its oral variety; its written component is only used among a small number of participants in electronic discussions. As a result of this sociolinguistic situation, proficiency in Spanish has diminished among the new generations of the Hispanic community. The level of bilingualism by speakers of both Spanish and English is not balanced: speakers who have been in contact with English for a shorter period of time are more proficient in Spanish than English, but those who were born in the United States or who arrived at an early age are more proficient in English than in Spanish. Specialists describe bilingualism as a continuum; at one extreme are speakers with a native proficiency in Spanish and scarce knowledge of English, while at the other extreme are speakers with a native proficiency in English and scarce knowledge of Spanish (Elías-Olivares 1979). A wide array of combinations can be found in between, among them speakers capable of conducting the different dimensions of their lives in either of the two languages. 5.1
Language transfer
As in any situation of linguistic contact, in Texas, as well as in other places in the United States, transfer from one language to the other can be verified in any component of the linguistic system. Speakers can incorporate sounds, words, meanings, and syntactic features from one language into another. Spanish presents transfer from English, for instance, when its speakers use elements that belong to English while speaking Spanish. When Spanish-English bilingual speakers pronounce the letter v as a labiodental sound, they pronounce this letter as it is pronounced in English, a language in which the sound represented by this letter is used to distinguish meaning from a word that contains the bilabial b, as in the opposition vote/boat. Monolingual Spanish does not differentiate the pronunciation between these two letters; therefore, it can be said that speakers who do this transfer a feature from English to Spanish. Words and expressions are the most notorious features subject to transfer from one language to another. The Spanish spoken in Texas has taken an important number of words and expressions from English and adapted them to the sound system of Spanish, usually with their associated meaning: carpeta ‘carpet,’ yarda ‘yard,’ troca ‘truck,’ and so on. Sometimes speakers literally translate words and expressions: llamar para atrás ‘to call back,’ no son tus negocios ‘it is none of your business,’ escuela alta ‘high school,’ la máquina no está trabajando ‘the machine is not working,’ and so on. The meaning of a word is also transferred in some cases; this is what takes place when a word like aplicación is used with the meaning of ‘application.’ While the word aplicación is part of the Spanish monolingual system, its meaning is ‘the implementation of an idea,’ but speakers of Texas use this word with the meaning it has in English,
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not in Spanish. The following model of linguistic interaction presents the different cases that can be found (based on Silva-Corvalán 1994; Otheguy 1993; Otheguy et al. 1989; Gutiérrez and Fairclough 2006): (1) Single-word transfers (1.1)
Switches: preserve English phonology Ellas son más educated
(1.2) Borrowings: adapted to Spanish phonology (1.2.a) Loans (transfer of form + meaning) Troca (= truck → camioneta) (1.2.b) Calques (transfer of meaning only) Aplicación (= application → solicitud) (2) Multiple-word transfers (2.1) Switches: preserve English phonology (2.1.a) Intersentential switches Él no sabe hacerlo. I’ll do it. (2.1.b) Intrasentential switches Y luego during the war, él se fue al Valle. (3) Calques: adapted to Spanish phonology (3.1)
Conceptual, cultural calques Estampillas de comida (= food stamps)
(3.2)
Calques of bound collocations, idioms, and proverbs So él sabrá si se cambia su mente (= If (he) changes his mind → si cambia de opinión, de idea)
(3.3)
Lexico-syntactic calques Tuvimos un buen tiempo (= we had a good time = lo pasamos bien)
Transfer is also found in components related to the structure of the language, although at this level it is sometimes difficult to identify. The use of object pronouns presents some difficulties for Spanish-English bilingual speakers because there is no direct correspondence between the pronoun systems of the two languages. That is why we often find sentences with omission of this category (i.e. Voy a graduar en diciembre instead of Voy a graduarme/Me voy a graduar en diciembre). Overuse of subject pronouns and combinations of words following the English word order are also cases of transfer related to the structure of the recipient language system. Code-switching, the alternate use of two languages in
Linguistic encounters in Texas 45 the discourse of bilinguals, is another phenomenon frequently found in the Spanish spoken in Texas. Although all Spanish speakers in bilingual situations use some elements of English when they speak, this phenomenon is more frequent and more elaborated in speakers who have been in contact with English for extended periods of time (i.e. Ya estaba oscuro when they arrived in Houston). The amount and the type of transfers are related to the particular sociolinguistic situation and factors such as the social status of the languages and/or the frequency in which speakers use the languages. When the language of a minority group is in contact with a language used by the general community to conduct all aspects of life, one can expect that, although there will be transfer in both directions, the minority language will receive more influence than the dominant language. In the case of Texas, the contact between Spanish and English has been extensive and intense because it has occurred for centuries and affects millions of speakers. The prestige of the language, however, is usually associated with the social characteristics of its speakers, especially those related to the jobs they acquire. Spanish speakers perform all types of jobs, but the general community does not associate them with jobs that are rated as prestigious. This attitude of the general community is also responsible for the amount of transfer from Spanish to English. 5.2
Main theoretical issues
Among the main issues discussed by specialists in relation to situations of linguistic contact are the degree of transferability of the structures of a language and the role played by the contact language in the changes that take place in the receptive language. In relation to the first problem, some specialists state that any feature of a language can be transferred to another language; others state that a feature of a language that might cause a radical impact on the system of the receptive language is not likely to be transferred. A sort of intermediate position indicates that features from those areas that show some similarities between two languages are more likely to be adopted by speakers and accommodated into the receptive language. Progressive constructions, formed by combining forms of the verb to be with the -ing form of the main verb, offer evidence in favor of the last position. They are part of both English and Spanish systems, and in both languages, can appear with forms of the verb to be (ser/estar) in any verb tense. A comparison between bilinguals and Spanish monolingual speakers has revealed that bilingual speakers use present progressive constructions (I am studying to be a lawyer/Estudio/Estoy estudiando para ser abogado) with a higher frequency than Spanish monolingual speakers due to the high frequency that this construction has in English (Klein 1980). The transfer of this feature from English does not have a radical impact on Spanish grammar. In fact, the resulting construction in Spanish is not ungrammatical; the transfer is reflected only in terms of frequency. In relation to the motivation of changes, it has been demonstrated that, with the exception of the loan of lexical items (words and expressions) and pronunciation
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features, which in many cases clearly come from the contact language, it is difficult to prove direct influence from the contact language. Minority languages present several processes of language change along the bilingual continuum due to partial transmission of the language to new generations and the necessity of bilingual speakers to lighten the cognitive load in order to perform in more than one language (Silva-Corvalán 1994). Speakers achieve this latter goal by simplifying the language (i.e. using the same words and structures in more contexts) to avoid more complex language that can lead to stressful situations. While the origin of these changes can be found in the monolingual system, specialists agree that contact situations accelerate internal changes. Spanish monolingual environments have experienced changes in the expression of future and conditional constructions and the ser/estar opposition, to name a few. All these of cases involve different linguistic forms in competition which eventually result in an increased preference for the innovative form. In the case of the expression of future, there are three forms used by speakers: morphological future (cantaré), periphrastic future (voy a cantar), and present indicative (canto mañana). In the past, the morphological future was the most used by Spanish monolingual speakers, but in the last decades it has been demonstrated that the other two forms have increased in frequency, thereby diminishing the frequency of the morphological future. In this contact variety of Spanish this change has accelerated: the periphrastic future and the present indicative forms are the only ones regularly used by speakers; the morphological future has almost disappeared in reference to future situations. A similar situation occurs with the other cases mentioned; the innovative forms present a higher frequency in the contact situation than in monolingual environments. 5.3
External versus internal motivation of changes
Gutiérrez (2001) explores the role of the contact situation in Houston in relation to the use of the copula estar in the Spanish spoken by the Mexican American community. The following example shows this form in a construction with an adjective, indicating a class norm, rather than an individual evaluation. The speaker, a female third generation Mexican American, associates the noun phrase, un pueblo chiquito, with all the entities that in her opinion belong to the group of not big towns. No, yo nací, pues no es Monterrey, es a [. . .] como media hora de Monterrey [. . .] viene siendo Nuevo Leó [. . .] [En] un pueblito chiquito, no está muy grande [. . .] y yo nací en la casa. Ser is the verbal copula that monolingual varieties traditionally use to establish class norm, therefore this is an innovative use of the copula estar (Silva-Corvalán 1986). Findings in this research indicate that speakers increase the use of innovative estar along three generations determined by the author according to the length of time they have been in contact with English. While the first generation uses the innovative estar in 24% of phrases indicating a class norm, its usage increases to
Linguistic encounters in Texas 47 36% in the second generation and 46% in the third generation. The phenomenon is clearly progressive, which is corroborated by a previous investigation conducted in Los Angeles, California (Silva-Corvalán 1986), that also shows an increase along generations. In an investigation conducted in Morelia, Michoacán, an environment where Spanish is mostly monolingual, Gutiérrez (1994) observed this same phenomenon (16% of innovative estar), which proves that the innovation did not originate in the contact situation of the United States. The motivation of this change, therefore, is internal, and transfer from English is not the cause; it is part of an old dispute between these two verbal copulas that started in the 12th century when estar began appearing in contexts previously occupied by ser (Vañó Cerdá 1982). But because the process of change increases from one generation to the next, the author concludes that the role of the contact situation is the acceleration of this internally motivated change. 5.4
Spanish dialect contact
With the arrival of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries other than Mexico to Texas and other states, dialect contact has occurred for several decades. As we have seen, for historical, geographical, and other reasons, Texan-Mexicans constitute the most numerous group of Hispanics in the city of Houston, but people from some Central American countries have arrived mainly due to political and economic instability in their countries. Salvadorans started arriving in the early 1980s and at present represent 8.2% of the Hispanic population in the city, surpassed largely (but only) by the community of Mexican origin (75.7%). These two dialects have characteristic features that make them easily distinguishable. Salvadoran Spanish (and other Central American Spanish dialects) uses a Lowland Spanish, while the Spanish spoken by Texan-Mexicans is considered an example of Highland Spanish (Parodi 2014). Aaron and Hernández (2007) explore dialect accommodation in relation to the /-s/ reduction patterns by Salvadoran speakers in the situation of dialect contact with Texan-Mexican Spanish. Since the reduction of /-s/ is a feature already present in the Salvadoran dialect, the authors try to determine if the frequency or distribution patterns are altered due to the contact dialect, since Mexican speakers from northern areas do not employ the reduction. The analysis is based on 12 sociolinguistic interviews with Salvadoran speakers who had been living in Houston for at least five years; they selected the first 100 instances of the variants [s], [h] and [ø] in implosive position. The findings of this research indicate that reduction of /-s/ is highly related to the age of arrival to Houston, because the realization of /-s/ tends to increase when the age of arrival decreases. Salvadoran speakers are abandoning a characteristic feature of their dialect due to the intense contact with the majority Spanish dialect, Texan-Mexican Spanish, which does not reduce /-s/ in the final syllable position. In spite of all the changes that the Texas and U.S. varieties of Spanish have experienced and continue to experience, the changes can be interpreted as strategies developed by the speakers to keep their language alive. The number of Spanish speakers reported by the latest census indicates that they are successfully achieving
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this goal, but it is up to future investigations to determine whether Texan-Hispanics will continue to maintain the Spanish language.
Glossary bilabial sound: a sound that is articulated by approaching the lower lip to the upper lip, as the b and v in Spanish bueno, vino, había, and uva. empresario: in the Mexican Texas period, the Mexican government authorized a number of people to bring settlers to the Texas territory. They were called empresarios. Stephen F. Austin was the first empresario in Texas. implosive position: in a syllable, the consonant that is located between the vowel and the next syllable. In the Spanish words mismo and apto, s and p are in an implosive position. innovative form: in a process of linguistic change, the form that diverges from others already present in the system. labiodental sound: a sound that is articulated by approaching the inferior lip to the upper teeth. In Spanish, f in foca is a labiodental sound. lingua franca: a language used for communication between groups who do not have any language in common. English works as a lingua franca in the business world. object pronouns: a personal pronoun used for a direct or indirect object such as me, te, la, le, etc. in Spanish. subject pronouns: a personal pronoun used for the subject of the verb, yo, tú, etc. in Spanish. variation: linguistic variation occurs when different alternant forms appear in the same context. In some Spanish dialects, s is sometimes pronounced (vamos) or aspirated (vamoh).
References Aaron, Jessica and José Hernández. “Quantitative evidence for contact-induced accommodation: shifts in /s/ reduction patterns in Salvadoran Spanish in Houston.” In Spanish in contact; policy, social and linguistic inquiries, 327–341. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez. Naufragios. Madrid: Alianza, 1994 [1542]. Calvert, Robert A., Arnoldo de León, and Gregg Cantrell. The history of Texas. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2004. De León, Arnoldo. “Mexican Americans.” Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed June 4, 2017. www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pqmue The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. “Early Texas Newspapers.” The Portal of Texas History, June 2017. https://texashistory.unt.edu/explore/collections/ETXNP/ browse/?start=0&fq=dc_language%3Aspa Elías-Olivares, Lucía. “Language use in a Chicano community.” Sociolinguistic Aspects of Language Learning and Teaching (1979): 120–134. Ersdal, Kjetil. “Anglo-American colonization in Texas.” American History: From Revolution to Reconstruction and Beyond, 2012. www.let.rug.nl/usa/essays/1801-1900/ anglo-american-colonization-in-texas/
Linguistic encounters in Texas 49 García Ruiz, Jorge L. “Texas o Tejas. El posible origen del nombre.” Academia.edu, 2016. www.academia.edu/30671180/Texas_o_Tejas._El_posible_origen_del_nombre Gubitosi, Patricia. La expresión de la pasividad en el sudoeste de los Estados Unidos y México (1855–1950). New York: Peter Lang, 2013. Gutiérrez, Manuel J. Ser y estar en el habla de Michoacán, México. México, DF: UNAM, 1994. ———. “Estar innovador en el continuo generacional bilingüe de Houston.” Proceedings VII Simposio Internacional de Comunicación Social (2001): 210–213. Santiago de Cuba. ——— and Marta Fairclough. “Incorporating linguistic variation into the classroom.” In The art of teaching Spanish: second language acquisition from research to praxis, edited by R. Salaberry and B. Lafford, 173–191. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006. Kanellos, Nicolás and Helvetia Martell. Hispanic periodicals in the United States: origins to 1960: a brief history and comprehensive bibliography. Houston: Arte Público, 2000. Klein, Flora. “A quantitative study of syntactic and pragmatic indications of change in the Spanish of bilinguals in the U.S.” In Locating language in the time and space, edited by W. Labov, 69–82. New York: Academic Press, 1980. Lipski, John. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008. Martínez, Glenn. “Política lingüística y contacto social en el español méxico-tejano: La Oposición – ra y – se en Tejas Durante el Siglo XIX.” Hispania 84.1 (2001): 114–124. Moreno Fernández, Francisco. “Caracterización del español patrimonial.” In El español de los Estados Unidos. Centro Cervantes, 2008. http://cvc.cervantes.es/lengua/anuario/ anuario_08/pdf/espanol01.pdf Morfi, Juan Agustín. Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, from father Morfí’s history of Texas written in 1777. San Antonio: Mexican Arts & Crafts, 1935 [1777]. Otheguy, Ricardo. “A reconsideration of the notion of loan translation in the analysis of U.S. Spanish.” In Spanish in the United States, edited by A. Roca and J. Lipski, 21–45. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. ———, Ofelia García, and Mariela Fernández. “Transferring, switching, and modeling in West New York Spanish: an intergenerational study.” Sociology of Language 79 (1989): 41–52. Parodi, Claudia. “El español de tierras altas y tierras bajas: sus reflejos en el español de Los Angeles.” In Perspectives in the study of Spanish language variation, edited by A. Enrique-Arias, M. J. Gutiérrez, et al., 342–359. Santiago, Spain: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, 2014. Pratt, Comfort. “The case of Adaeseño Spanish in Northwest Louisiana.” In Recovering the U.S. Hispanic linguistic heritage: sociohistorical approaches to Spanish in the United States, edited by A. Balestra, G. Martínez, et al., 191–214. Houston: Arte Público, 2008. San Miguel, Guadalupe. “Race, culture, and politics in the schooling of ethnic Mexicans in the New American Southwest: the case of Texas, 1836–1860.” Interdisciplinary Educational Studies 11.3 (2016): 13–21. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. “Bilingualism and language change: the extension of estar in Los Angeles Spanish.” Language 62 (1986): 587–608. ———. Language contact and change: Spanish in Los Angeles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Smith, F. Todd. “Spanish, Mexican, and Republican Texas to 1845.” In Discovering Texas History, edited by B. A. Glasrud, et al., 169–196. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2014. TDSHS. “Texas metropolitan status by county.” Texas Department of State Health Services, 2017. www.dshs.texas.gov/chs/info/current-msa.shtm
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———. “Texas population, 2017 (projections).” Texas Department of State Health Services, 2017. www.dshs.texas.gov/chs/popdat/ST2017.shtm Vañó Cerdá, Antonio. Ser y estar + adjetivos: un estudio sincrónico y diacrónico. Tübingen: Narr, 1982. Wallace, Ernest, David Vigness, and George Ward. Documents of Texas History. Austin, TX: The Portal of Texas History, 2002. Accessed May 12, 2017. https://texashistory.unt. edu/ark:/67531/metapth296840/m1/41/
Further readings Fairclough, Marta. “El (denominado) Spanglish en Estados Unidos: polémicas y realidades.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 2 (2003): 185–204. Gutiérrez, Manuel J. “Hablando en chiquito: -ito en el español de Houston.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 90.3 (2013): 295–313. Montrul, Silvina. El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Thomason, Sarah and Terrence Kaufman. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Weinreich, Uriel. Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1974.
Topics for discussion 1
Was it difficult for Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca to communicate with Texas natives? Describe the communicative strategies he used.
2
What complications did Spanish friars experience in installing missions in Texas? Why?
3
What is the origin of the Adaeseño dialect? What is its situation at present?
4
What was the real purpose of Spanish newspapers around 1850 in Texas? Do you think this differs from the goals of current Spanish newspapers?
5
What are the main characteristics of the Spanish spoken in Texas at present?
6
Is the Spanish in Texas disappearing? Simplifying? Explain how it has changed over time.
7
How and why have historical events determined the size of the Spanish population in Texas?
8
How do historical events affect languages? Elaborate and give examples.
3
Bilingualism in California The case of Los Angeles Ana Sánchez-Muñoz
California is the most linguistically diverse state in the United States, and its most populated urban space, the Los Angeles Metro area (L.A.), is a natural sociolinguistic lab. From the Mexican neighborhood of East L.A. to the mostly Armenian community of Glendale, from the Chinese in the San Gabriel Valley to the buzzing downtown communities of Little Tokyo or Koreatown, L.A.’s many distinct neighborhoods evidence the huge ethnocultural and linguistic diversity of the city. Despite the great diversity of sounds heard in the L.A. Basin, two linguistic giants dominate the urban landscape: Spanish and English. These two colonial languages have been coexisting in California since the 1800s, when English started moving west. Even though English gradually replaced Spanish as the language of economy and power, Spanish continued to be spoken and used, especially in Southern California. In fact, to this day, Spanish is the most commonly spoken language in many areas of Los Angeles and San Diego Counties. In addition to Spanish’s historical presence in the area, immigration from Latin American countries, especially Mexico and Central America, has continued to increase. As a result, almost 50% of the L.A. Metro population is classified as Hispanic/Latino (U.S. Census), Spanish is the most frequently spoken language after English, and it is the predominant language in many communities. Because immigration brings high linguistic diversity, L.A. is thus an ideal place to examine the formation of new Latino speech communities, dialect contact areas, and dialect mergers. This chapter describes the bilingual and bicultural nature of Los Angeles. The chapter begins with a historical overview of the presence of Spanish and its contact with English in California. Then, moving on to the present linguistic landscape, we focus on the distinct vernacular Spanish of L.A. (Chicana/o Spanish) and the contact between this and other varieties of Spanish that make L.A. their home. Finally, this chapter concludes with a look into the future, considering the current sociopolitical climate and its impact on non-English-speaking residents through restrictive language policies.
1
California’s linguistic gold
It is estimated that between 80 and 90 different languages were spoken in the territory of what is now the state of California before the arrival of the European settlers (Survey of California and Other Indian Languages). The indigenous
52 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz languages of California belong to as many as 20 major language families. Despite this linguistic richness, little is known about the history and spread of indigenous languages before the arrival of the first European settlers. According to Moyna (2005), the early Spanish settlements in California were multilingual and multidialectal. The establishment of the mission system in the Californias started in 1697 and continued for over two centuries, with the founding of Sonoma’s San Francisco Solano in 1823. The Spanish missionaries spoke not only several varieties of peninsular Spanish but also of Catalan (notably mallorquín ‘from Majorca, Spain’); additionally, soldiers and settlers from Baja California and the northern territories of present-day Mexico brought their own varieties of Spanish, as well as many indigenous languages (Perissinotto 1992). Therefore, when other European and Anglo settlers started arriving, the linguistic landscape of California was a complex one, including not only the native indigenous languages of the region but also other indigenous languages of present-day Mexico and many distinct varieties of Spanish and Catalan. Although Spanish was indeed the language of power associated with the mission system, that situation started to change rather quickly after 1848, the year of the American annexation of the state. The number of fortune seekers, adventurers, and entrepreneurs moving westward to California increased dramatically while the indigenous population (and their languages) was dwindling due to displacement, dispossession, illness, and forced assimilation (Macri et al. 2004). During the 19th and 20th centuries, the attrition and loss of indigenous languages continued. Spanish and English had established themselves as the two most powerful colonial languages in California. During the second half of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, English gradually replaced Spanish as the language of power and economy in California. However, the power differential between languages did not happen overnight. Indeed, both languages coexist in documents, and there is evidence of Spanish being used by many Anglos – at least in writing – to communicate with Californios (Moyna et al. 2005: 172). Spanish and English share more than a colonial past in the region. These two linguistic conquerors have been in contact for over 200 years and continue to coexist to this day in California’s towns, urban neighborhoods, and Hispanic and Latino bilingual communities. The situation of contact between Spanish and English has led to many linguistic consequences for both of the regional varieties of these languages. The next section describes the typical features of contact that characterize the Spanish spoken on the U.S. side of the border, specifically in the Los Angeles Metro area.
2
Los Angeles as a multiethnic Spanish-speaking city
Despite the advance of English as the language of commerce, education, and business in California, Spanish has continued to be used and spoken. Currently, Spanish is the main language of almost 11 million, 33%, of the documented population aged five years or older in the state, both U.S.-born and immigrant (the numbers would be much higher if we considered non-documented speakers).
Bilingualism in California 53 This chapter focuses on the L.A. Metro area, which, while it is a multicultural city, has a definite predominance of Spanish in bilingual and bicultural spaces. However, bilingual Spanish-English places are not easily defined. To what extent Spanish is spoken and maintained in L.A. and elsewhere in the United States varies greatly in each community and family. Most Latinos in the L.A. Metro area are bilingual, but English is the dominant language. Many speakers can function in Spanish, but theirs is a variety of Spanish characterized by unique contact features which are not typical of monolingual varieties of the language. I explain some of those characteristics in the following paragraphs. 2.1
Chicana/o Spanish
I use the term ‘Chicana/o Spanish’ to refer to the language spoken by most of the L.A. born and/or raised Latinos (1.5/2nd generation and beyond), who are mainly Mexican Americans. Previous research conducted in the region described U.S. Spanish, including L.A. Spanish, as an urban contact variety that, in addition to its contact with English, contains many features of rural Spanish varieties (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1994; Parodi 2004, 2009, 2011). Despite being vibrant and widely used, this variety exhibits various degrees of attrition (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1991). Parodi referred to L.A. Spanish as EVLA, Español Vernáculo de Los Angeles, ‘L.A. Spanish Vernacular,’ and described it as an evolving koine with a strong rural Mexican base and some influence from the Spanish of Central American immigrants. I prefer the term ‘Chicana/o Spanish’ because it emphasizes a sense of local ownership and pride. As opposed to previous studies, which compared L.A. Spanish to monolingual standards of the language (e.g. Silva-Corvalán 1998; Sánchez-Muñoz 2009), I argue that L.A. Spanish is, as is the case with any of the other ‘U.S. Spanishes,’ a bilingual variety which should not be judged against monolingual norms or expected monolingual behaviors. The term ‘Chicana/o’ was originally a derogatory term applied to the descendants of Mexican people in the United States. This term was later adopted as a term of ethnic pride and political consciousness during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. To identify oneself as Chicana/o, as opposed to Mexican American, Latino, or Hispanic, means reasserting a unique ethnic and sociopolitical bond. It means claiming a distinctive culture that is not a simple ‘mixture’ of two colonial pasts but rather a culture with its own history, aesthetics, music, and unique linguistic expression. The Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa writes about this in her most famous work Borderlands: “we don’t identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don’t identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of ‘Mexicannes’ or ‘Angloness’” (1999: 85). Chicanas/os encode those various degrees of ‘Mexicanness’ or ‘Angloness’ through their distinct codes, Chicano Spanish and Chicano English, that are commonly associated both with Chicanos and Latinos in the United States in general, but mainly throughout the Southwest. The population at large uses the term ‘Spanglish’ to refer to Chicana/o Spanish frequently and widely; however, there is no consensus in the literature as to what
54 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz exactly this term refers to (see Dumitrescu 2010, which includes, among other topics, a lengthy discussion about the perception of and the attitudes toward the term ‘Spanglish’). Some authors claim it to be a rather new American language, produced by the blending of two languages and two identities into a single one, usually referred to with the transparent name of Spanglish (Stavans 2003). By contrast, many scholars (see for instance Otheguy and Stern 2011; Lipski 2008) believe that the term does not serve the Latino community well, as it blurs many scientifically well-studied linguistic phenomena into a mesh of a half-baked language system. Chicana/o Spanish, as I mentioned earlier, is the term that I prefer to use for what is mainly an urban variety of Spanish in contact with English. It features code-switching, code-mixing, borrowings, and other language contact phenomena commonly employed by bilinguals. Since Chicanos often inhabit bilingual and bicultural spaces, it is natural to expect that such features will characterize their linguistic expressions (Sánchez-Muñoz 2013). Chicana/o Spanish indeed has its own particular flavor. Parodi (2004, 2009, 2011) and her students at the research center for Spanish studies in the States, CEEEUS, have been tracking the formation and evolution of EVLA, Español Vernáculo de Los Angeles, a Spanish koine in Los Angeles which has a distinct Mexican essence spiced with linguistic features typical of intimate contact with English: convergence, borrowings, calques, switches, and so forth. This is the variety spoken by Chicanos in L.A., and according to Parodi it is also the one acquired by second generation Latinos/Hispanics in the city regardless of their self-identification as Chicana/o or other. There are two main factors that characterize Chicana/o Spanish as an urban ethnic dialect: its connection to rural varieties of Mexican Spanish and the aforementioned features of language contact. Regarding the first, in its rural origins in the Mexican ranchos of Querétaro, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, and Jalisco (Parodi 2009), we find syntactic features such as the generalization of the morpheme ‘-s’ for the second person of the simple preterit (e.g. comistes instead of the standard comiste) and archaisms such as haiga (instead of the canonical haya). Phonologically, Chicano Spanish has normalized processes typical of casual nonstandard production, such as contractions of the definite article before a vocalic sound (e.g. l’avena, l’alfalfa), contractions or deletions of entire syllables in high frequency connectors, prepositions, or verbs (e.g. pa’, pos, tá’ instead of para, pues, or está); or simplification of consonant clusters (e.g. dotor instead of doctor). These features are traditionally stigmatized in monolingual varieties since they are typical of rural environments and associated with uneducated or undereducated speakers, and thus carry little or no linguistic prestige. However, in a situation of bilingualism where another language, English in this case, is the language of power, the variety of the most numerous minority (rural Mexican Spanish) becomes the one that carries more weight and enjoys covert prestige in the formation of a distinct immigrant dialect. Regarding the linguistic phenomena that develop in language contact situations, Chicano Spanish displays several well-known traits. In previous studies, I found
Bilingualism in California 55 that colloquial/informal production by second generation Chicanos is marked by lexical transfer and switches to English (Sánchez-Muñoz 2009). The general category of ‘transfer’ refers to a common linguistic phenomenon which develops in language contact situations. The transfer of features from one language into another is a common strategy used by bilinguals to cope with the task of using two different linguistic systems. Usually, the direction of transfer is toward the dominant language, and for most second (and beyond) generations of Latino bilinguals in L.A., English is the dominant language. There are several types of lexical transfer phenomena in Chicana/o Spanish, which can be classified as code-switches, borrowings, and lexical creations. Simply put, code-switching refers to the back-and-forth movement between two or more languages in a single communicative interaction, while borrowings are words from a (donor) language that become part of a different (recipient) language. When stretches of English elements appearing in Spanish discourse are several words long, it is easy to identify them as cases of code-switching. However, it is hard to differentiate between single-word code-switches and single-word borrowings. I use phonological assimilation as the criteria to distinguish switches from borrowings (Otheguy 1998). In other words, Chicana/o Spanish may include cases of lexical transfer classified as single-word switches (items that preserve English phonology), as in example 1, and single-word borrowings (items adapted to Spanish phonology). In this latter group, I found cases of loanwords where both form and meaning are transferred from English, as in example 2, and cases of semantic extensions where only the meaning is transferred to an already existing Spanish form, as in example 3. Furthermore, my data show items that I call lexical creations, as in example 4. This category is similar to loanwords in that the speaker transfers the form and the meaning; however, the difference is in the frequency and the degree of social integration and spread among speakers. Words such as troca ‘truck’ or lonche ‘lunch’ are well established among U.S. Spanish-speaking communities (even among predominantly monolingual Spanish speakers), and are considered loans. However, certain words such as endurar ‘endure’ or enviromento ‘environment’ have low frequency, are idiosyncratic to individual speakers rather than widespread, and are not included in any dictionary of Spanish in the United States. These items are here classified as lexical creations. The following examples, produced by second generation Chicano bilinguals, illustrate each of the lexical phenomena analyzed in this section: single switches (1), loans (2), semantic extension (3), and lexical creations (4): (1) ¿Puedo ir al wedding? “Can I go to the wedding?” (2) En mi mente yo pensé que me iba a pegar la troca, so ah . . . Frené y cuando frené, se meneó la motocicleta y se resbaló so . . . “In my mind I thought that the truck was going to hit me, so I braked and when I did, the bike swerved and slipped so . . .”
56 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz (3) No realizan de que toma mucho trabajo [el sueño americano]. “They don’t realize that it takes a lot of work [the American dream].” (4) No puedo envisionarme en 10 años viviendo en Europa. “I can’t envision myself in 10 years living in Europe.” Code-switching, which involves incorporating larger chunks of discourse from Spanish into English and vice versa, is perhaps the more salient feature. It is ubiquitous in the streets of L.A., in markets, on public transportation, and on several Latino TV and radio stations (e.g. KSSE 107.1 FM, KLAX 97.9 FM, and KDLD 103.1 FM). Indeed, code-switching is a very common linguistic strategy present all over the world in bilingual and multilingual speech communities. Speakers of L.A. Spanish use these linguistic resources that set them apart from monolingual varieties of the language. Thus, Chicana/o speakers perform the various pieces of their cultural heritage in their language use, as a kind of linguistic Nepantla ‘third space’ (Sánchez-Muñoz 2013). Chicana/o Spanish can be heard in many L.A. barrios, sometimes alongside Chicano English, an urban ethnic dialect of English which is characterized by contact with the Spanish of the region (for an in-depth analysis of Chicano English, please see Penfield 1985; Fought 2003). But just as Chicano English is not the only variety of English heard on the streets of L.A., Chicana/o Spanish is not the only Spanish either. A growing number of Central Americans have made their linguistic mark on the city, too. The following section discusses some of the consequences of dialect contact among speakers of Spanish from different regions of the Spanishspeaking world. 2.2
Dialect contact: Central Americans and Mexican Americans
As mentioned earlier, according to the last U.S. Census, half of the population in Los Angeles is Latino or Hispanic, and if we took into consideration those not included in the official statistics, these numbers would be much higher. Even though the majority of the Latino population in L.A. is of Mexican descent or origin, the number of Central Americans has increased dramatically in the last 30 years. Table 3.1 offers a glimpse of the most recent Latino demographics for L.A. County.
Table 3.1 Estimated population of Latino/Hispanic groups in Los Angeles County for 2016, adapted from the U.S. Census Region of origin
Percentage of the Latino/ Hispanic population
Mexican Central American South American Caribbean islands (Spanish-speaking) Other (Latino/Hispanic)
75% 14.5% 2.5% 1.9% 6.2%
Bilingualism in California 57 As Table 3.1 indicates, even though the majority of the Latino population is of Mexican descent or origin, there are other ethnicities and varieties of Spanish that make L.A. their home. Central American varieties are increasingly making their way into the linguistic landscape of Los Angeles; in fact, the number of Central Americans has more than doubled since the 1980s (U.S. Census). As shown in Table 3.1, the number of Central Americans in L.A. County, mainly Salvadorans and Guatemalans, is significant, with close to 700,000 people representing more than 14% of the Latino population. Central American Spanish differs from Chicana/o Spanish in various ways: phonologically, syntactically, and lexically. These differences correspond to dialectal variation between Spanish varieties of the ‘highlands’ in Mexico (which is the base of Chicana/o Spanish, Parodi 2004, 2009, 2011) and the ‘lowlands’ in Central America. Some of the main differences are summarized in Table 3.2. Table 3.2 shows examples of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical differences between Mexican and Central American Spanish; however, as is to be expected, most notable differences occur at the lexical level. Table 3.2 Differences between Central American and Mexican (Chicano) Spanish
Phonological features
Morphosyntactic features
Lexical features (variation in vocabulary)
Central American varieties
Mexican varieties (N/Bajío)
Aspiration: s → h e.g. las costas [lah kóhtah] ‘the coasts’ Velarization: n → ŋ • in word-final position: e.g. [bastóŋ] bastón ‘stick’ [páŋ] pan ‘bread’ • nasals before [n]: e.g. [kolúŋna] column ‘column,’ [íŋno] himno ‘hymn, anthem’ Velarization: b → k [asektáɾ] aceptar ‘to accept’ [konsékto] concepto ‘concept’ Epenthesis: addition of a sound in the word, e.g. tiguere [tíγeɾe], tigre [tíγɾe] ‘tiger’ Use of the 2nd personal singular personal pronoun VOS and its verbal conjugation: vos venís, vos comés (Alongside the TÚ form)
No aspiration
Use of the 2nd personal singular personal pronoun TÚ and its verbal conjugation: tú vienes, tú comes
Examples: ayote ‘pumpkin’ chumpa ‘jacket’ chele ‘light-skinned person’ yinas ‘sandals/flip flops’ pacha ‘baby bottle’ piscucha ‘kite’
Examples: calabacita ‘pumpkin’ saco, chamarra ‘jacket’ güero ‘light-skinned person’ chanclas ‘sandals/flip flops’ mamila ‘baby bottle’ papalote ‘kite’
No velarization
No epenthesis
58 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz Just as language contact results in unique linguistic phenomena such as loans, calques, or switches, the contact situation between two dialects of the same language also leads to distinct linguistic outcomes. There are some important linguistic notions that inform the research of dialect contact and that form the theoretical framework of my study of dialect contact in Los Angeles. These are some of the main theories: 1
2
3
4
Accommodation theory: Giles and Coupland (1991) argue that people adjust their speech, gestures, and vocal patterns to accommodate others. This framework explores the various reasons why individuals emphasize or minimize the social differences between themselves and their interlocutors through verbal and nonverbal communication. This theory addresses the links between language, context, and identity by exploring intergroup and interpersonal factors that lead to accommodating communicative behaviors (Gallois et al. 2005). There are two main accommodation processes described by this theory: ‘convergence’ refers to the strategies through which interlocutors adapt to each other’s communicative behaviors in order to reduce differences, while ‘divergence’ refers to the instances in which individuals accentuate their speech and non-verbal differences. In the case of dialect contact, when speakers of different varieties of the same language interact continuously and inhabit the same spaces, we can expect that convergence, or even divergence, will take place. It is also expected that the accommodation will favor the most prestigious or predominant dialect (Chicana/o Spanish in this case). Dialect leveling refers to the assimilation of dialects by reducing the “variation between dialects of the same language in situations where speakers of these dialects are brought together” (Lefebvre 1998). Dialect leveling is triggered by contact between dialects, and has been observed in many parts of the world as the result of language standardization. As opposed to accommodation, which is short-term approximation between speakers of different dialects in communication, dialect leveling is a long-term process that leads to convergence and the disappearance of distinct features in the pre-contact varieties. Koineization is the mixing of features from different dialects, which leads to a new dialect. It results from the integration or unification of the speakers of the varieties in contact (Siegel 1993). A koine is a structurally stabilized variety that is the product of heavy intermixture. According to Parodi (2011), Chicana/o Spanish is a koine mainly derived from rural varieties of Spanish in Mexico. This koine is the predominant variety of Spanish in L.A. (el Español Vernáculo de Los Ángeles). Diglossia refers to the specialized use of two languages that are in contact within the same geographical area (Ferguson 1959; Fishman 1967; Gumperz 1962). Diglossic situations are also very common around the world. Usually one of the languages or varieties is considered ‘high’ and is associated with official status (carries overt prestige), while the ‘low’ variety is often relegated to less formal situations.
Bilingualism in California 59 Accommodation, leveling, koineization, and diglossia are all at play in the linguistic landscape of Los Angeles, both in the centuries-long contact between Spanish and English and the more recent contact among the different varieties of Spanish. In previous studies, Parodi (2009, 2011) claimed that Central Americans living in Los Angeles acquire Chicana/o Spanish regardless of their parents’ vernacular variety. Parodi studied the Spanish of Central Americans (mostly Salvadorians) in L.A. She divided her population into two groups: those born in L.A. or who arrived before eight years of age, and those who came as adults in their twenties and beyond. Parodi examined various linguistic features including morphological, phonological, and lexical traits, which are different between Mexican and Central American Spanish (see Table 3.2). For instance, the use of vos in Central America for the second person singular alongside the tú form used in Mexico. She found that Central Americans born and raised in L.A do not produce typical Central American words and morphosyntactic features such as vos. Thus, Parodi concludes, there is evidence of dialect leveling resulting in a koine that is mainly characterized by features of the most numerous, oldest, or prestigious dialect (Chicana/o Spanish). Recent research examining contact between Central Americans and Chicanos in Los Angeles (Sánchez-Muñoz 2017) agrees with Parodi’s results for the most part: some speakers abandon the use of vos and tend to produce words and terms that are typical of Chicana/o Spanish. However, recent data show a stronger tendency toward bidialectalism rather than a complete leveling or adoption of a koine. Specifically, in my study of dialect contact between Central American and Chicana/o Spanish in L.A., I examine how much convergence, if any, first generation Central American immigrants show toward the predominant variety of Spanish in Los Angeles. To this end, I have been collecting data from second and first generation Salvadorians, Guatemalans, and Nicaraguans (with at least 10 years of continuous residence in L.A.). The data collection procedures include open-ended sociolinguistic interviews that range between 45 and 60 minutes and elicit information related to the speakers’ ethnic and linguistic identity and dialect awareness. Speakers must also complete a picture-naming task that determines whether they first produce the local Chicana or Central American vernacular word for a given image. For instance, when presented with a picture of a kite, whether the speaker says piscucha (Central American) first, or papalote (Mexican). The picture-naming task contains 70 images of objects or actions that are commonly referred to by different words or expressions in Mexican and Central American varieties. The results indicate a clear tendency toward bidialectalism. Most speakers produce the Chicana word first about 50% of the time, usually for common daily words such as sucio ‘dirty’ or chanclas ‘flip flops’ instead of the Central American variants: shuco for ‘dirty’ and yinas for ‘flip flops.’ However, speakers often explain that they would name that object differently if they were in their places of origin. It seems that most speakers easily code-switch between varieties depending on the situation and interlocutor. This diglossic use of Central American variants for some situations may indicate a negotiation not only of linguistic spaces but also of ethnocultural alliances. This
60 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz is more clearly evidenced in the open-ended interviews where we find comments such as “soy latino aquí en Los Angeles y es bueno poder hablar mi idioma con mucha de la gente de aquí, pero soy chapín de corazón” (“I am Latino here in Los Angeles and it’s good to be able to speak my language with many of the people here, but I’m Guatemalan in my heart”). I argue that just as code-switching between Spanish and English is a way of negotiating the multifaceted identities of Chicanas/os in Los Angeles, the code-switching between different dialects also evidences negotiations of different aspects of being ‘Latino’ in which both convergence and divergence are at play (Sánchez-Muñoz 2017). Also, as indicated earlier, even though most L.A. Latino communities are bilingual, that does not necessarily imply that every member of the community speaks both Spanish and English. There is indeed a continuum between recently arrived monolingual Spanish speakers and U.S.-born monolingual English speakers, with various degrees of bilingualism between those poles. In general, older speakers show greater retention and production of the vernacular, whereas the opposite is true for younger speakers. In sum, Chicana/o Spanish, with its distinct Mexican base and features of contact with English, dominates the non-English spaces of L.A. Additionally, Central American varieties also have a significant presence in the region, and at current growth rates, may influence the Spanish varieties of future generations of Angelenos. 2.3
Biculturalism
The situation of bilingualism in Los Angeles is related to but does not necessarily equate to biculturalism. Different researchers have defined biculturalism differently, but it generally refers to proficiency and ease with both one’s heritage culture and the culture of the country or region of residence (e.g. Berry 2003; Schwartz and Zamboanga 2008). This is applicable to both immigrants and children of immigrants, who are still deeply connected to the heritage culture even though they have been born and raised in the United States. There is a clear ethnic component to biculturalism as a response to discrimination from the receiving society, but there is also a sense of pride in one’s heritage and a need and/or desire to maintain it (Umaña-Taylor 2004). Language is a crucial vehicle for the transmission of culture; however, there are other cultural behaviors such as choice of friends, media preferences, and even aesthetic tendencies that play a role in bicultural practices. Furthermore, values and cultural identification are also considered important factors for achieving biculturalism (Schwartz et al. 2010b). Therefore, one can be bicultural and not bilingual. Indeed, many L.A. Latinos identify as Chicana/o, participate in Chicano community events and cultural productions, have political and social values rooted in the Chicano movement, and overall behave in ways consistent with a Mexican American cultural stream even though they may not be Spanish speakers at all, or at best have a passive knowledge of the heritage language.
Bilingualism in California 61 The reality is that biculturalism and bilingualism are facilitated by specific environmental conditions. That is, they are likely to emerge when both the heritage and the mainstream culture are valued and encouraged (Schwartz and Unger 2010a). This is not the case in the United States as a whole, which has historically engaged in assimilatory practices that promote Anglo cultural and linguistic practices, with English portrayed as the sole truly ‘American’ language. Additionally, the current political climate shows a continued hostility toward immigrants from Mexico and Central America, with legislators focusing on the deportation of undocumented immigrants. Therefore, even though in Los Angeles, as well as many other urban spaces throughout the country, it may look like bilingualism and biculturalism are common, the task of maintaining one’s heritage culture and language is not easy and often represents a constant trial for minority individuals. Whether Spanish is passed onto following generation or only survives if there is continued immigration remains an open question. The many non-English languages of Los Angeles and California, immigrant (like Spanish) and native alike, continue to struggle for intergenerational survival as the power and prestige of English has led to restrictive language policies which accelerate heritage language attrition and loss (Gándara and Hopkins 2010). In the next section, we will have a look at the current anti-immigrant climate and its effect on educational policies and social practices that negatively impact language maintenance and demand that we question the possibilities of a true bilingual/bicultural California.
3
Language in times of fear: the sociopolitical climate and educational policies that affect the future of Spanish in California
As I pointed out in the previous section, Americanization efforts and cultural assimilation have been politically important since at least the beginning of the 20th century. In education, this focus on being a ‘real’ American has been paired with the role of English as the sole or main vehicle of teaching and learning (Wiley 2007). For a long time in the United States, a lack of English skills has been viewed negatively by society, and a desire to hold on to one’s heritage language and culture is often considered un-American. In this last part of the chapter, I will focus on the current sociopolitical climate of the Trump era and the effect that anti-immigrant and anti-bilingual policies may have on the maintenance and transmission of Spanish and other heritage languages and cultures in California and elsewhere. 3.1
Racist linguistic practices: differential bilingualism and Mock Spanish
Differential bilingualism (Aparicio 1998) refers to how society views bilingual Anglos and Latinos differently, with the bilingualism of the Anglo who studies a language other than English seen as a positive resource, while bilingual Latinos
62 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz and other language minority speakers are viewed as deficient and problematic. This situation of differential bilingualism is not new in the United States at all; however, even though these attitudes precede the current administration, the Trump era has unleashed an overt attack on anything non-English, and anyone non-Anglo-conforming is labeled un-American. Since the presidential campaign of 2016 until the present, we have witnessed openly xenophobic attacks targeting Latinos, and Mexicans in particular, whom the president referred to as criminals and rapists. During the presidential debate with Hillary Clinton in October 2016, Trump’s use of Spanish to refer to many Mexicans as ‘bad hombres’ evidenced the discourse against Latinos through a racist linguistic practice called Mock Spanish (Hill 1993, 2008). Schwartz (2016) explains that Trump’s usage of ‘bad hombres’ instead of ‘bad men’ is an example of Mock Spanish by which an ordinarily positive or neutral word in Spanish (hombres) is used to indicate a whole range of negative associations. Using the word hombres, Trump connected the notion of ‘immigrant’ not simply to ‘men’ (the literal translation of that word) but to Mexican men as inherently undesirable, criminal, and violent. The framework of Mock Spanish analyzes the production of Spanish in the Southwest as a strategy of white Americans who do not necessarily “manifest some abstract zero degree of monolingualism. They do use Spanish, but in limited and specialized ways that support a broader project of social and economic domination of Spanish speakers in the region” (Hill 1993: 147). According to Schwartz (2016), while the context of Trump’s identification as a white man is not limited to his relationship with the U.S. Southwest (which includes states like California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas), his use of the word hombres was deployed to uphold larger racial order within the context of his perception of social disorder. Differential bilingualism and Mock Spanish are widespread practices and values exercised by the hegemonic culture to maintain the status quo. Again, even though these are not new ideas or behaviors, the Trump administration is providing a platform that legitimizes such practices. This does not correspond to a climate that promotes diversity and multilingualism, and thus jeopardizes the future of and the hope for a truly bilingual/bicultural population, even in so-called liberal states such as California. 3.2
Restrictive language policies
As the energy of inclusion from the social movements of the 1960s and the civil rights movement faded in the 1970s, attitudes turned sour as a response to increased immigration, economic downturn, and Anglo fears about losing their long-enjoyed privileges. Indeed, California is not as liberal as many would think, at least not in the realms of linguistic and immigration policies, as evidenced in the passage of Proposition 187 (1994) and Proposition 227 (1998). Proposition 187 prohibited undocumented people from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services in the state of California. Even though Proposition 187 was
Bilingualism in California 63 later challenged in court and found unconstitutional, its passage was an indication of the anti-immigrant sentiments of the time. Another clear indication of the antiimmigrant and anti-bilingual (as in differential bilingualism) climate in California was the implementation of one of the largest and most divisive restrictive language policies in the United States at the time: Proposition 227 (1998). Proposition 227 was a by-product of the English-only movement that started gaining ground in the 1980s and ’90s among conservatives, and essentially sought to outlaw instruction in languages other than English. The bill required California public schools to teach Limited English Proficiency (LEP) students in special classes for one year and then be mainstreamed to English-only instruction. This provision had the effect of eliminating ‘bilingual’ classes in most cases as well as most programs in the state that provided multiyear special classes to LEP students. It is very important to underscore that this bill was passed in the state of California, where about 25% of the school-aged population comes from non-English-speaking households. Not surprisingly, the population most negatively impacted by Proposition 227 was the Latino/a community. There were many arguments against Proposition 227, which made it one of the most divisive bills in the California educational arena. First, one year of English language instruction using any model or method is not enough to attain proficiency in academic English. It has been demonstrated that it takes five to seven years for LEP students to meet reclassification criteria (Cummins 1991, 1994). Second, focus on English language learning without literacy and content learning has been proven to be detrimental for academic achievement. Third, a ‘onesize-fits-all’ approach to English language education cannot work. Furthermore, research has shown that bilingual education supports and enhances academic achievement. Ultimately, restricting bilingual education does not result in greater levels of ‘gap closure’ or in accelerated rates of English acquisition. Despite its purported goal of increased social and economic opportunities through English acquisition, the anti-bilingual education initiatives in California and elsewhere really end up taking back civil rights gained by language minorities in the 1960s (Cashman 2009). Despite all the concerns and arguments against Proposition 227, California was under its mandate for almost 20 years. In the last election of November 8, 2016, Proposition 58 (Senate Bill 1174) was passed, thereby replacing Proposition 227. The new bill repeals the English-only immersion requirement and waiver provisions required by Proposition 227, and once again allows non-English languages to be used in public schools. Although Proposition 58 theoretically restores funds to a number of dual-immersion and bilingual programs throughout the state, how exactly these will be implemented, developed, and protected remains to be seen. While California may have taken a turn toward more inclusive language policies that will hopefully promote multilingualism and multiculturalism, it is not clear where the nation as a whole is headed. As indicated earlier, the current antiimmigrant climate and the discourse of divisiveness rather than inclusion are not conducive to the maintenance of heritage languages and cultures.
64 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz The state of California continues to be one of the most diverse in the United States. It has the largest Latino/Hispanic population of any state, and 30% of the population five years and over speaks Spanish (U.S. Census). However, whether Spanish as a heritage language is passed on to future generations of California Latinos depends on many factors, including the social, political, and environmental climate. Despite turning bilingual education and immigration into a political debate, there remains the fact that people move, have always moved, and will continue moving in search of opportunities, growth, and peace. When we move, we bring our languages and our traditions with us. This in and of itself is an asset for plural societies and a challenge for hegemonic ones. Will California embrace a climate that values and encourages multiculturalism and multilingualism? The answer is in the actions we take here and now to protect our children’s civil rights in spite of political pressure or linguistic repression.
Glossary borrowings: these are loanwords, words or phrases from one language that are used in another language. Borrowings become morpho-phonologically adapted to the recipient language and are not considered switches (cf. ‘code-switching’). Californios: the people who lived in Alta California (modern-day California on the U.S. side of the border). A Californio was a Spanish-speaking Catholic person of Spanish ancestry born in Alta California when the region was under Spanish and later Mexican control (roughly between 1769 and 1848). The decline of the Californio came with increasing Anglo colonization. Chicana/o: the term Chicana/o was originally a derogatory term applied to the descendants of Mexican people in the United States. This term was later adopted as a term of ethnic pride and political consciousness during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. To identify oneself as Chicana/o, as opposed to Mexican American, Latino, or Hispanic, means reasserting a unique ethnic and sociopolitical bond. code-switching: the concept of code-switching refers to the back-and-forth movement between two languages or two distinct dialects by the same speaker in one single communicative situation. It is a common linguistic feature in bilingual situations around the world. diglossia: this occurs when a speech community uses two linguistic varieties of the same language or two different languages for separate social functions, one considered the ‘high’ variety (dominant, prestigious, for writing and official use) and the other the ‘low’ (colloquial, for speech and private use), such as Spanish in the United States or Guarani in Paraguay. epenthesis: the addition of one or more sounds to the interior of a word. heritage language: the term ‘heritage language’ is used to identify minority languages other than the dominant language (or languages) in a given social context. In the United States, English is the de facto dominant language used in government, education, and public communication; thus,
Bilingualism in California 65 any language other than English can be considered a ‘heritage language’ for speakers of that language. Spanish is considered a heritage language in the United States. koine: in linguistics, a koine language (from the Greek for ‘common’ or ‘shared’) is a standard language or dialect that exists as the result of contact between two or more mutually intelligible varieties of the same language. It results from the integration or unification of the speakers of the varieties in contact. A koine is a structurally stabilized variety that is the product of heavy intermixture. Mock Spanish: a framework of analysis popularized by linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill that refers to Spanish inspired words or phrases common in some otherwise monolingual Anglo-American circles. Hill argues that the incorporation of pseudo-Spanish terms, such as ‘el cheapo,’ ‘no problemo,’ and other adaptations, constitutes a type of covert racism. By direct indexicality, Mock Spanish presents speakers as possessing desirable personal qualities. By indirect indexicality, it reproduces highly negative racializing stereotypes of Chicanos and Latinos. In addition, it indirectly indexes ‘whiteness’ as the unmarked normative order.
References Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands. La frontera: the new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. Aparicio, Frances. “Whose Spanish, whose language, whose power? An ethnographic inquiry into differential bilingualism.” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures 12 (1998): 5–25. Berry, John W. “Conceptual approaches to acculturation.” In Acculturation: advances in theory, measurement, and applied research, edited by K. M. Chun, P. Balls Organista, and G. Marin, 3–13. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003. Cashman, Holly R. “The dynamics of Spanish maintenance and shift in Arizona: ethnolinguistic vitality, language panic and language pride.” Spanish in Context 6 (2009): 43–68. Cummins, Jim. “Language development and academic learning.” In Language, culture and cognition, edited by L. M. Malavé and G. Duquette, 161–175. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1991. ———. “The acquisition of English as a second language.” In Kids come in all languages: reading instruction for ESL students, edited by K. Spangenberg-Urbschat and R. Pritchard, 36–62. Delaware: International Reading Association, 1994. Dumitrescu, Domnita. “Spanglish: an ongoing controversy.” In Building communities and making connections, edited by S. Rivera-Mills and J. A. Trujillo, 136–167. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Ferguson, Charles A. “Diglossia.” Word-Journal of the International Linguistic Association 15.2 (1959): 325–340. Fishman, Joshua A. “Bilingualism with and without diglossia: diglossia with and without bilingualism.” Social Issues 23.2 (1967): 29–38. Fought, Carmen. Chicano English in context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
66 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz Gallois, Cynthia, Tania Ogay, and Howard Giles. “Communication accommodation theory: a look back and a look ahead.” In Theorizing about intercultural communication, edited by W. B. Gudykunst, 121–148. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005. Gándara, Patricia and Megan Hopkins. Forbidden language: English learners and restrictive language policies. Multicultural Education Series. New York: Teachers College, 2010. Giles, Howard and Nikolas Coupland. Language: contexts and consequences. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1991. Gumperz, John J. “Types of linguistic communities.” Anthropological Linguistics (1962): 28–40. Hill, Jane H. “Hasta la vista, baby.” Critique of Anthropology 13.2 (1993): 145–176. Accessed September 21, 2017. doi:10.1177/0308275X9301300203 ———. The everyday language of white racism. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2008. Lefebvre, Claire. Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar: the case of Haitian creole. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lipski, John M. Varieties of Spanish in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2008. Macri, Martha J., Victor K. Golla, and Lisa L. Woodward. “J. P. Harrington project: academic and community participation.” In Language is life, edited by W. Y. Leonard and S.E.B. Gardner, 1–12. UC Berkeley Press, 2004. Accessed August 19, 2017. http:// linguistics.berkeley.edu/~survey/documents/survey-reports/survey-report14.02-macri-etal.pdf Moyna, María Irene, Wendy L. Decker, and M. Eugenia Martín. “Spanish/English contact in historical perspective: 19th century documents of the Californias.” In Selected proceedings of the 7th Hispanic linguistics symposium, edited by D. Eddington, 169–179. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 2005. Otheguy, Ricardo. Review of “Puerto Rican discourse: a sociolinguistic study of a New York suburb by L. Torres. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Publishers, 1997.” Modern Language Journal 82 (1998): 440. ——— and Nancy Stern. “On so-called Spanglish.” Bilingualism 15.1 (2011): 85–100. Parodi, Claudia. “Contacto de dialectos en Los Ángeles. Español chicano y español mexicano.” In Séptimo encuentro internacional de lingüística en el noroeste, edited by I. Barreras Aguilar and M. Castro Llamas, 277–293. Hermosillo, México: UniSon, 2004. ———. “Normatividad y diglosia en Los Ángeles. Un modelo de contacto lingüístico.” In normatividad y uso lingüístico, edited by F. Colombo and M. Á. Soler, 47–67. Mexico City: UNAM, 2009. ———. “El otro México: español chicano, koineización y diglosia en Los Ángeles, California.” In Realismo en el análisis de Corpus Orales, coloquio de cambio y variación, edited by P. M. Butragueño, 217–243. Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2011. Penfield, Joyce and Jacob L. Ornstein-Galicia. Chicano English: an ethnic contact dialect. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1985. Perissinotto, Giorgio. “El español de los presidios y misiones de California en 1782.” Estudios de Lingüística Aplicada 10 (1992): 35–47. Sánchez-Muñoz, Ana. Spanish as a heritage language in the United States: a study of speakers’ register variation. Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2009. ———. “Identidad y confianza lingüística en jóvenes latinos en el sur de California.” In El español en los Estados Unidos: e Pluribus Unum? Enfoques multidisciplinarios, edited by D. Dumitrescu and G. Piña-Rosales, 217–232. New York: North American Academy of the Spanish Language, 2013.
Bilingualism in California 67 ———. “Tempted by the words of another: linguistic choices of Chicanas/os and other Latinos in Los Angeles.” In Spanish perspectives on Chicano literature literary and cultural essays, edited by J. Rosales and V. Fonseca, 71–81. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Schwartz, Adam. “Trump relies on Spanish to talk about immigration.” Latino Rebels, October 20, 2016. Accessed September 21, 2017. www.latinorebels.com/2016/10/20/ trump-relies-on-mock-spanish-to-talk-about-immigration-opinion/ Schwartz, Seth J. and Jennifer B. Unger. “Biculturalism and context: what is biculturalism, and when is it adaptive?” Human Development 53 (2010a): 26–32. doi:10.1159/000268137 ———, Jennifer B. Unger, Byron L. Zamboanga, and José Szapocznik. “Rethinking the concept of acculturation: implications for theory and research.” American Psychologist 65.4 (2010b): 237–251. doi:10.1037/a0019330 ——— and Byron L. Zamboanga. “Testing Berry’s model of acculturation: a confirmatory latent class approach.” Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 14 (2008): 275–285. doi:10.1037/a0012818 Siegel, Jeff. “Dialect contact and koineization.” Sociology of Language 99 (1993): 105–121. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. “Spanish language attrition in a contact situation with English.” In First language attrition, edited by H. W. Seliger and R. Vago, 151–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. Language contact and change. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. ———. “On borrowings as a mechanism of syntactic change.” In Romance linguistics: theoretical perspectives, edited by A. Schwegler, B. Tranel, and M. Uribe-Etxebarria, 225–246. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998. Stavans, Ian. Spanglish: the making of a New American language. New York: Rayo, 2003. Survey of California and other Indian languages. Accessed August 27, 2017. http:// linguistics.berkeley.edu/~survey/languages/california-languages.php Umaña-Taylor, Adriana J. “Ethnic identity and self-esteem: examining the role of social context.” Journal of Adolescence 27.2 (2004): 139–146. U.S. Census Bureau. Accessed August 27, 2017. www.census.gov/ Wiley, Terrence G. “Immigrant language minorities in the United States.” In Handbook of applied linguistics, edited by M. Hellinger and A. Pauwels, 53–85. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007.
Further readings Field, Fredric. Bilingualism in the USA: the case of the Chicano-Latino community. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Otheguy, Ricardo and Ana Zentella. Spanish in New York: language contact, dialectal leveling, and structural continuity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Parodi, Claudia. Orígenes del español americano. Mexico City: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 1995. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. Bilingual language acquisition: Spanish and English in the first six years. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Zentella, Ana. Building on strength: language and literacy in Latino families and communities. New York: Covina, 2005.
68 Ana Sánchez-Muñoz
Topics for discussion 1
Using the linguistic maps and information publicly available at The Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/ Survey/), identify a city in modern-day California, such as Los Angeles or San Francisco, and determine what native languages may have been found there when the Spanish missionaries first arrived in that region.
2
Even though Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Hispanic are terms sometimes used interchangeably in the United States, they each have different connotations. a b c
3
Check these terms in a dictionary (such as Oxford, Cambridge, or Merriam-Webster) and compare their definitions. Think about the term most commonly used in your community to refer to the descendants of Spanish-speaking countries. Do you or any of your peers identify with any of these terms? Explain why or why not.
The term ‘borrowing’ refers to words or phrases ‘borrowed’ from one language and incorporated into another. Make a list of at least five words or expressions in English that are borrowed from other languages. Using an etymological dictionary and/or other references, try to answer the following: a b
What is the origin of these words and/or phrases? Have these borrowings changed meaning over time from their original meaning to their usage in present-day English?
4
What is code-switching and how does it manifest in bilingual/bicultural communities? Doing your own field observations of real speakers or examining TV, radio, and/or online media, please provide at least two examples of code-switching between Spanish and English. You may also describe code-switching between English and any other heritage/ minority language in your community.
5
Troca and lonche are two commonly and widely used Chicana words from English. Looking at the definitions of code-switching and borrowing, please explain whether words such as troca and lonche are instances of loanwords (borrowings) or switches into English when produced by Chicana/o speakers in otherwise Spanish discourse.
6
Discuss the effect of restrictive language policies, such as Proposition 227 in California, on the educational attainment of minority children. You can focus on California or on any other state with similar antibilingual language policies (e.g. Arizona, Massachusetts). In your opinion, do restrictive language policies hinder or promote the maintenance of heritage languages in the United States? How?
4
Attitudes and language behavior at the BrazilianUruguayan border Göz Kaufmann
1
Introduction
Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world with regard to both area and population. It is 48 times larger than its southern neighbor Uruguay, and between 1998 and 2001, the period of our data elicitation, the population of Brazil was between 51.6 and 53.9 times larger than the population of Uruguay.1 Brazil’s gross domestic product (GDP) dropped from USD 863.7 billion to USD 559.4 billion over the same period, while Uruguay’s GDP decreased from USD 25.4 to USD 20.9 billion (all information from http://data.worldbank.org). Brazil’s GDP was thus between 34 and 26.8 times higher than Uruguay’s. These factors all highlight the dramatic disequilibrium between the two countries. Due to this disequilibrium, Brazil has always been a somewhat delicate topic for Uruguayans. What makes the situation even more difficult is that there are only a few natural barriers along the 1,044 km border between Uruguay and Brazil; that Uruguay belonged as Provincia Cisplatina, from 1821 until 1828, to the Reino Unido de Portugal, Brasil e Algarves and to the Brazilian Empire; and that many Uruguayans in the northern parts of the country, especially in rural areas, still speak Portuguese varieties as (one of) their native language(s).2 Some Uruguayan politicians have been, and sometimes still are concerned with the presence of the so-called dialectos portugueses del Uruguay, DPU (‘Portuguese dialects of Uruguay’). Barrios (in print; cf. also Carvalho 2007), for example, quotes several linguistic measures adopted during the military dictatorship between 1973 and 1985, one of which was actually titled lucha contra el portugués (‘fight against Portuguese’). In light of the immense power disequilibrium between Uruguay and Brazil, the goal of this chapter is to investigate how such a situation affects people in this border region, in our case high school students. Do the two groups coexist harmoniously, allowing identification with the cultures of both countries and with both languages, or do they experience a competitive contact situation? Comparable questions are mentioned by Dennis, who relates (cultural) hegemony to biculturalism in the following way: Biculturalism represents an unfreezing of cultures and recognition of the cultural validity of another group. The difficulty of establishing its legitimacy
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Obviously, a quantitative study such as the present one can only offer preliminary answers to these questions. Our analyses are based on a data set that was elicited in an attempt to determine correlations between competence in the respective contact language, which in our view forms part of the informants’ macro-linguistic behavior, and attitudes toward this language and its speakers. Between 1998 and 2001, 424 high school students from four Brazilian and four Uruguayan border cities were asked to complete a written questionnaire. All eight cities are twin cities, that is, they directly face the city on the other side of the border. The research locations are Chuí/Chuy, Jaguarão/Rio Branco, Santana do Livramento/Rivera, and Quaraí/Artigas.3 Unlike in a study about Mennonites in Mexico and the USA (cf. Kaufmann 1997), hardly any correlations between attitudes and language competence were found for the Brazilian/Uruguayan border region (cf. Kaufmann 2000, 2010, 2013), that is, the informants’ attitudes toward the respective contact group and language do not directly influence their competence in that language. However, this does not mean that an analysis of the existing variation in these variables is meaningless. The present article will describe the bilingual and bicultural contact situation on the Brazilian/Uruguayan border by means of the variation in language competence and language/group attitudes. The decisive differences to Kaufmann (2013, 2010) are the inclusion of an admittedly somewhat vague concept of biculturalism, the exclusive focus on the Uruguayan/Brazilian border, the inclusion of informants with strong (family) bonds to the other country, and the application of multifactorial regression analyses. The researcher-oriented quantitative perspective does not change, and this obviously entails certain problems. MendozaDenton describes one such problem with regard to a research project in Mexico: One possible interpretation would be that Mexican teenagers are using vowel laxing to index their youthful identity, rejecting older adult norms [. . .]. The problem with this type of explanation [. . .] is that it is in fact not an explanation at all, but a statistically motivated observation-cum-speculativedescription that does not rely on any principled social theory. It is not possible, for instance, to know whether the statistical spike in that age group is due to other factors [. . .] or whether the explanation that we gave is one that is oriented to by speakers of the group in question. (2002: 477) Although we will not offer a principled social theory, most of all because we do not have the type of data to empirically test such a theory, it would be negligent to not take advantage of our data set. Consequently, there will be much speculation, but the reader is obviously welcome to take a sociologically critical stance with respect to our interpretations.4 The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 will deal with competence in the contact language; Sections 3 and 4 will discuss group
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and language attitudes, respectively; and Section 5 will then relate the results of the attitudinal data, of language competence, and of some additional questionnaire items by means of a binational cluster analysis. Unsurprisingly, this analysis will demonstrate that some informants evaluate both groups and languages positively, apparently enjoying the bicultural and bilingual contact situation, some experience strongly negative feelings toward the contact group and language, and some are best characterized as indifferent in these respects. The interesting part of this cluster analysis is obviously which (type of) informant ends up in which cluster.
2
Language competence
As already stated, we see competence in the contact language, that is, Portuguese for informants that live in Uruguay and Spanish for informants that live in Brazil, as part of the informants’ language behavior. This competence is measured by means of a rather simple test that includes the translation of 13 lexical items from the country’s national language into the contact language (e.g. the Portuguese/ Spanish pairs loja/tienda ‘shop,’ vermelho/rojo ‘red,’ morango/frutilla ‘strawberry,’ orvalho/rocío ‘dew’); the translation of nine cognates from the contact language into the country’s national language (e.g. the Portuguese/Spanish false friends vassoura/basura ‘broom/garbage,’ sobrenome/sobrenombre ‘last name/ nickname,’ oficina/oficina ‘repair shop/office’); and the correction of 10 morphological or syntactic errors in 10 sentences in the contact language (1–3 error(s) per sentence; 4 correct sentences as filler items). If these errors occurred in real data, they would most probably be explained by an influence from the contact language. An example for a Portuguese test sentence with the pronoun me in the incorrect ‘Spanish’ position is O meu pai disse que me vem buscar instead of vem me buscar “my father told me that he would pick me up.” An example for a Spanish test sentence with an incorrect ‘Portuguese’ past tense form and an incorrect ‘Portuguese’ gender is Ayer comemos un pastel y tomamos mucho leche instead of comimos and mucha leche “yesterday, we ate a cake and drank a lot of milk.” Due to different levels of difficulty for Portuguese and Spanish speakers, some test items cannot be used when informants from both sides of the border are analyzed together. In this case, only three cognates and seven morphological or syntactic errors are included. One such problem is the higher frequency of Portuguese sobrenome ‘last name’ in comparison to Spanish sobrenombre ‘nickname.’ The frequency of the concept last name makes it easier for speakers of Spanish to realize that the meaning of Portuguese sobrenome is not identical to the meaning of Spanish sobrenombre. Allotting 1 point for a correct vocabulary translation, 1.5 points for a correct translation of a cognate, and 2 points for the correct identification and correction of a morphological or syntactic error, informants could reach a maximum of 31.5 points. The actual range for the 312 informants analyzed in Table 4.1 spans from 0 to 30.5 points with an average of 12.3 points. In order to understand the variation in competence in the contact language, three linear regression analyses will be performed. Informants had to be younger than 21 years old and had to have lived in the respective research location for at least
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five years to be included in these analyses. With these conditions, the original pool of 424 informants is reduced to 362 informants (average age: 16.4 years; average length of stay: 15.2 years). As the information for eight more independent variables also had to be available, Table 4.1 works with 312 informants and applies 10 independent variables: • • • • • • • • • •
Place of residence (1 = Brazilian city / 2 = Uruguayan city) City size (1 = bigger / 2 = smaller) Border type (1 = separating river / 2 = no separating river) Sex (1 = male / 2 = female) Age (13–20 years old) Length of stay in research location (5–20 years) Personal bonds to the people and country on the other side of the border (0–10 points) General contact with people from the other side of the border (1–5 points) Monthly frequency of visits to the city on the other side of the border (0–30 days) Intimate use of the contact language (0–21.5 points)
The first four variables are nominal; the remaining six are either ordinal in nature or interval variables. For these six variables, the maximum range of actually occurring values is provided. City size is a relative variable, that is, it is not the absolute number of inhabitants that is decisive for its coding, but whether the city on the other side of the border has more or fewer inhabitants.5 Border type refers to the type of divide between the countries. Jaguarão/Rio Branco and Quaraí/Artigas are divided by small rivers, whereas crossing a street is all that is required in Chuí/Chuy and Santana/Rivera. The personal bonds scale will be explained with the help of a Brazilian informant. If this informant was born in Brazil, his/her parents were also born in Brazil, (s)he only has Brazilian nationality, only speaks (a variety of) Brazilian Portuguese as his/her mother tongue, and has no girlfriend/boyfriend or a Brazilian girlfriend/boyfriend, (s)he receives zero points. This constellation applies to 292 of the 362 informants (80.7%). Any deviation from this constellation would increase this informant’s scale value in the following, admittedly tentative way: being born in Uruguay would add 1 point, having Uruguayan nationality 2 points, having a Uruguayan girlfriend/boyfriend also 2 points, having a Uruguayan mother or father 3 points, and speaking (a variety of) Uruguayan Spanish as mother tongue 4 points.6 In Kaufmann (2013, 2010), the 70 informants that do not display absolute homogeneity with regard to these points were only included in one analysis. In the present article, they are always included because they are natural candidates for bilingualism and biculturalism. As Dennis points out: Biculturalism among individuals may emerge due to marriage, birth, adoption, migration, because individuals simply choose to move from one cultural group to another, or because two groups live in close proximity and engage in trade and socio-cultural activities. (2008: 16)
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General contact refers to the evaluation of the statement “I have a lot of contact with Uruguayans/Brazilians” (5-point scale). By contrast, language use, another important aspect of language behavior, refers to the informant’s answers to five questions, namely what language(s) (s)he normally uses with his/her parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, and at school. If more than one language was indicated, the assignable 5 points for the respective domain were divided by the number of languages mentioned. Importantly, the variables general contact, frequency, and language use were all evaluated subjectively, that is, there may have occurred some attitudinal skewing. If a Brazilian informant, for example, likes Uruguay, (s)he may overreport the frequency of his/her crossing the border. However, these variables are the only ones which are under the informants’ control. The other variables are either geographic in nature, city size and border type, or they have to be considered as unchangeable personal characteristics such as age, sex, and personal bonds (with the exception of the sub-item girlfriend/boyfriend). At least for young people, the variables place of residence and length of stay also belong to this group. Table 4.1 presents the results for competence in the contact language for 302 informants (among them 153 Brazilians and 149 male informants); no problems with multicollinearity exist between the 10 independent variables. This is true for all regression analyses in this article. The six selected predictor variables of Table 4.1 explain 57.3% of the variation (corrected r2: 0.573). As we do not know anything about the informants’ language learning skills or about other potentially influencing factors, this percentage can be qualified as substantial. By far the strongest predictor is place of residence. On average, a Uruguayan informant speaks Portuguese 8.7 points better than a Brazilian informant speaks Spanish. One may feel tempted to ascribe this dramatic difference to the fact that the inhabitants of the northern parts of Uruguay (used to) speak a Portuguese variety at home. Our Uruguayan informants, however, come from urban areas where this is rarely the case nowadays. In view of this, the necessity of being able to communicate in Portuguese, the language of the huge and powerful country to the north, seems to be the driving force instead. The two geographic factors city size and border type are also selected. Coming from the smaller city increases competence by 3.59 points. Not living on a river adds an
Table 4.1 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for competence in the contact language of 312 Brazilian and Uruguayan informants Predictor variable
Coefficient B
Standard error
Standardized coefficient beta
T
Significance
Place of residence City size Personal bonds Language use Border type General contact
8.7 3.59 1.15 0.47 2.02 0.87
0.56 0.56 0.21 0.1 0.57 0.32
0.58 0.24 0.21 0.19 0.13 0.11
15.55 6.38 5.41 4.82 3.53 2.71
.000*** .000*** .000*** .000*** .000*** .007**
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additional 2.02 points. These results make sense, since the bigger city is sure to offer more attractions for young people. These people will therefore come into closer contact with the country on the other side of the border. Closer contact is also furthered by the lack of a separating river. Aside from these factors, one more point on the personal bonds scale increases language competence by 1.15 points, one more point on the language use scale by 0.47 points, and one more point on the general contact scale by 0.87 points. All these increases are self-explanatory. Even though two of the three variables that can be assumed to be under the informants’ control are selected (language use and general contact), their contribution to the explained variation is rather small. Most of the variation is explained by context factors that cannot be influenced by the informants. The comparably small impact of informant-dependent factors is supported by the fact that neither the attitude toward contact group nor the attitude toward contact language (cf. Sections 3 and 4) are selected if included in the regression model. We will now separate the informants according to the most important predictor variable, the place of residence. For the following country-specific analyses, all items of the competence test can be used. The Spanish competence of the Brazilian informants now oscillates between zero and 37.9 points (average of 8.9 points; 46.5 possible points); the Portuguese competence of the Uruguayan informants varies between 5.3 and 39.7 points (average of 20.8 points; 46.5 possible points). Table 4.2 presents the results for the 153 Brazilian informants, 82 of whom are female. At 56.3% (corrected r2: 0.563), the explained variation in Table 4.2 is comparable to that of Table 4.1. Table 4.2 reaches this high value although it selects only five instead of six variables. Due to the smaller number of selected variables, their individual impact is greater. The highest increases occur with the informantdependent variables language use, which rises by a factor of 1.91 in comparison to Table 4.1 (from an increase of 0.47 points to an increase of 0.9 points), and general contact, which rises by a factor of 1.74 (from 0.87 to 1.51 points). The factors of the other three variables vary between 1.13 for border type and 1.66 for personal bonds.7 We can thus conclude that there is a stronger impact from the informant-dependent variables in the Brazilian data. This suggests that Brazilian informants only learn Spanish if they want to, and judging from the low competence level in Spanish, this does not occur too frequently. Despite the greater
Table 4.2 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for competence in the contact language of 153 Brazilian informants Predictor variable Coefficient B Standard error Standardized T coefficient beta
Significance
Language use City size Personal bonds General contact Border type
.000*** .000*** .000*** .006** .027*
0.9 5.44 1.91 1.51 2.25
0.17 0.93 0.37 0.54 1
0.33 0.32 0.3 0.17 0.13
5.37 5.82 5.18 2.79 2.24
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influence of informant-dependent variables, the Brazilian informants’ attitudes toward Uruguayans and toward Spanish are still not selected when included. The question now is how the 159 Uruguayan informants, 78 of them male, fare with regard to informant-dependent variables. Table 4.3 presents the relevant results: Table 4.3 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for competence in the contact language of 159 Uruguayan informants Predictor variable Coefficient B Standard error Standardized T coefficient beta City size Personal bonds Border type
2.97 0.97 2.49
0.94 0.33 0.93
0.24 0.22 0.2
Significance
3.16 .002** 2.92 .004** 2.67 .008**
Table 4.3 selects neither language use nor general contact. Moreover, the explained variation drops to 13.3% (corrected r2: 0.133). This dramatic reduction is not only due to the non-selection of these two variables, but also to a decreasing impact of two of the remaining three variables. Living in the smaller city increases Portuguese competence by just 2.97 points (from 3.59 points in Table 4.1), and a 1-point gain in personal bonds to Brazil(ians) increases it by just 0.97 points (from 1.15 points in Table 4.1 and 1.91 in Table 4.2). Only the absence of a separating river exhibits a stronger impact of 2.49 points (from 2 points in Table 4.1 and 2.25 points in Table 4.2).8 As before, the two attitude variables are not selected when included. The reduction in explained variation in the Uruguayan data and especially the high competence level in Portuguese leave hardly any room for doubt. If a young Uruguayan lives on the Brazilian border, (s)he will (have to) learn Portuguese. Before we focus on the informants’ attitudes in Sections 3 and 4, the variables that were never selected in this section deserve a brief discussion. Possibly the most unexpected variable in this respect is frequency. While claimed contact with people from the other side (general contact) and the use of the contact language (language use) were selected in two of the three analyses (cf. Tables 4.1 and 4.2), the frequency of crossing the border does not seem to make any difference. For Brazilian informants, this result may be explained by the fact that interethnic conversations will be held in Portuguese most of the time regardless of whether they take place in Brazil or in Uruguay. After all, the Uruguayan informants have a solid knowledge of Portuguese, while real competence in Spanish is rather rare among the Brazilian informants. Aside from this, visiting the other side of the border is not necessarily synonymous with interacting with members of the contact group. So in order to improve one’s Spanish, the Brazilian informants not only have to cross the border, but they have to meet Uruguayans and use Spanish. For Uruguayan informants, the overarching necessity of learning Portuguese may explain why frequency is not selected. The fact that age and length of stay are not selected is less of a surprise. In fact, for the Uruguayan side, these non-selections
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indicate that the pressure on border-dwelling Uruguayans to learn Portuguese is not only strong, but also present early on in life regardless of the length of time on the border. On the Brazilian side, the drive to learn Spanish does not change with time either. Either Brazilians want to learn Spanish, or they do not want to learn Spanish. The absence of sex as predictor variable also requires some explanation. In Kaufmann (2013, 2010), one section was exclusively dedicated to this variable since it proved to be a significant factor in several monofactorial analyses, among them language competence and frequency. As both these variables are not selected in this section, it stands to reason that their monofactorial influence is outrivaled by other factors. Sex will, however, turn up in the explanation of the attitudes toward the contact group and its language.
3 Attitude toward contact group This attitude is measured with the help of a two-step procedure. First, the informants were asked to complete a semantic differential for the contact group (and also for their own group) with regard to 19 semantic pairs (5-point scales) such as friendly/unfriendly, intelligent/not intelligent, industrious/lazy, and clean/dirty. After this, they were asked to name – from 16 of the pairs – the five positive qualities they considered most important in life. Three pairs did not qualify for this selection since it was not clear which of the poles represented the positive side (e.g. conservative/liberal). Importantly, only the values of these five semantic pairs were used to represent the informant’s attitude toward contact group. The informants’ values are thus based on different arrays of semantic pairs. This procedure may be judged as problematic, but the decision to use the individual’s conviction with regard to important qualities as the base for his/her attitude is easily justified. If someone does not think that being industrious is an important quality, his/her opinion about the industriousness of Uruguayans and Brazilians probably does not influence his/her overall opinion too much. The results for the five selected pairs range from 5 to 25 points. For the regression analysis in Table 4.4, these values were divided by five, that is, the final values range from 1 to 5 points. The data of 272 informants (among them 137 Uruguayans and 136 female informants) are available. Again, 10 independent variables enter the model; the only difference from Table 4.1 is the introduction Table 4.4 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact group of 272 Brazilian and Uruguayan informants Predictor variable Coefficient B Standard error Standardized T coefficient beta
Significance
General contact 0.22 Place of residence −0.23 City size −0.22 Sex 0.2
.000*** .014* .019* .039*
0.05 0.09 0.09 0.09
0.26 −0.14 −0.14 0.12
4.57 −2.48 −2.37 2.08
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of attitude toward own group instead of language use. This variable was added because (national) rivalry may be of some importance for adolescents who are forming their (national) identity in a border situation. In spite of the fact that 4 of the 10 independent variables are selected in Table 4.4, the regression analysis only accounts for 11.2% of the variation (corrected r2: 0.112). Attitudes thus seem to be more elusive than language competence. In spite of this, the selection of general contact as the strongest predictor variable could be seen as a promising base for developing biculturalism in this border region. After all, more contact with people from the other side of the border significantly correlates with the informants’ positive attitude toward these people. For every additional point on the general contact scale, the attitude value rises by 0.22 points. Nevertheless, a first indication of the simultaneous existence of a competitive attitude is the fact that Uruguayans have a slightly less positive attitude toward Brazilians (difference of 0.23 points) than Brazilians have toward Uruguayans. The existence of a competitive attitude, this time for both sides, is further stressed by the fact that coming from the smaller and therefore probably less attractive city also decreases the attitude value by 0.22 points. Sex is the last variable selected and may again emphasize competition. The male informants exhibit a value 0.2 points lower than the female informants. Combining these factors, the lowest attitude value is found among the 16 male informants from Rivera, Uruguay (smaller city). On average, these informants only reach 2.53 of 5 points, a value substantially lower than the neutral value of 3 points. Intriguingly, the highest value for any subgroup is found in Rivera’s Brazilian twin, Santana do Livramento (bigger city), where the 21 female informants have an average attitude value of 3.83 points. In order to better comprehend the difference between the two countries and especially between the male informants of the two countries, it is worthwhile to include some of the items where the questionnaire did not provide any answer categories. The informants were, for example, asked what they liked and disliked about Brazil and Uruguay. Just focusing on the results from Rivera and Santana do Livramento, it is a striking fact that 13 of the total of 21 male informants from Rivera (61.9%) wrote that they liked women/girls in Brazil. As only three of them mentioned women/girls in Uruguay, one may feel tempted to relate the frequent mentioning of Brazilian women/girls to infamous, but rather well-known stereotypes about Brazilian women. However, three Uruguayan male informants also commented that they disliked men/boys in Brazil. In Brazil, only 3 of the 18 male informants from Santana mentioned their fondness of Uruguayan women/ girls (16.7%; three also mentioned Brazilian women/girls).9 Intriguingly, none of the Brazilian male informants disliked men/boys in Uruguay, though one claimed to dislike men in Brazil. If we assume that puberty in male-dominated societies such as northern Uruguay or southern Brazil works in comparable ways, these differences suggest a more competitive attitude from Uruguayan male informants. With all due caution, one may imagine that male adolescents on both sides assume that Brazilian boys have more ‘claims’ to Brazilian girls than Uruguayan boys. Challenging these ‘claims’ may then represent an act of male and Uruguayan identity for those informants who struggle with their country’s inferiority with regard
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to size, population, and economic power. Granted, this interpretation looks very much like the kind of speculative explanation that, according to Mendoza-Denton, one should avoid (cf. quote in Section 1). However, the significant difference between Uruguayan and Brazilian male informants with regard to these questionnaire items begs an explanation and we have tried to give one that is in line with the other results in this article. Quite unlike their male compatriots, the female informants on both sides of the border may have strong feelings for the other sex, but do not feel the necessity to express them. One Brazilian female informant from Santana likes men from both sides; one Uruguayan female informant from Rivera likes Brazilian men. No female informant dislikes women/girls. In order to further improve our understanding of this competitive strain, we will now take a closer look at the 137 Uruguayan informants (among them 72 male informants): Table 4.5 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact group of 137 Uruguayan informants Predictor variable Coefficient B Standard error Standardized T coefficient beta General contact Border type City size
0.31 −0.52 −0.29
0.07 0.13 0.13
0.34 −0.3 −0.17
Significance
4.46 .000*** −3.97 .000*** −2.17 .032*
Although only three variables are selected, the explained variation reaches 22.1% (corrected r2: 0.221) and is thus twice as large as in Table 4.4. This is due to the greater impact of general contact (0.31 instead of 0.22 points) and city size (−0.29 instead of −0.22 points). In stark contrast to the positive impact of general contact, the absence of a separating river, a fact one would probably consider contact-furthering, actually decreases the attitude value by 0.52 points. How can this combination of seemingly contradictory facts be explained? Can proximity to a more powerful competitor lead to the exaggeration of negative stereotypes and to a disregard of positive features? Our data suggest that this is indeed possible and this mechanism may be further strengthened by not having real contact with the perceived competitor. In this respect, it is a telling detail that in spite of the non-selection of sex in Table 4.5, 10 of the 11 Uruguayan informants that claim to have little or no contact with Brazilians (1 or 2 points on the general contact scale) are male informants. Therefore, it seems that geographical proximity to Brazilians constitutes too threatening a fact for some Uruguayan male informants to remain more open-minded. Instead, they seem to develop a negative overall attitude toward Brazilians. Six of the 10 male informants with little or no contact with Brazilians come from Rivera and Chuy, where no river separates Uruguay and Brazil, and these six informants have an extremely low attitude value of 2.38 points. Aside from their actual lack of contact with Brazilians, their desire to get to know Brazilians is not very impressive either (3.17 points on a 5-point scale). All this seems to preclude the development of a bicultural environment. However, there is also some hope. Once Uruguayan male informants have contact with
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Brazilians, their attitude changes radically. The 12 informants from Rivera and Chuy, who claim to have a lot of contact with Brazilians (5 points), exhibit a much more positive attitude value with 3.33 points, and their desire to get to know even more Brazilians is very marked indeed (4.75 points). Other differences between the informants of the two countries can be detected in the next table: Table 4.6 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact group of 135 Brazilian informants Predictor variable Coefficient B Standard error Standardized T coefficient beta Border type Attitude toward own group General contact
Significance
0.26 0.18
0.13 0.09
0.18 0.17
2.04 .043* 2.01 .046*
0.12
0.06
0.17
1.92 .057(*)
The explained variation of language competence was markedly higher on the Brazilian side. As for attitude toward contact group, the three selected variables in Table 4.6 only explain 8.9% of the Brazilian variation (corrected r2: 0.089), a much lower share than in the Uruguayan data. Aside from this, the selected variables differ in quality and direction: city size is no longer selected, and border type has the directional impact one would expect. If there is no separating river, Brazilian informants have a more positive attitude toward Uruguayans and not a more negative one. They apparently do not bear a grudge against the Uruguayans, not even the ones who judge them especially critically and who they come into contact with the most. As in Table 4.5, general contact is also a factor in Table 4.6; its impact, however, is much less marked (0.12 instead of 0.31 points). All these factors can be considered a signal of a less competitive and more benevolent mindset. This mindset, however, comes at a rather low expense for the Brazilian informants since they belong to the more powerful group. The third selected variable, attitude toward own group, furthers this assumption. Brazilians who see themselves more positively also see Uruguayans more positively. The impact of this variable is not very strong, but a comparable pattern will occur in Table 4.8. In any case, if we take the existence of a positive attitude toward both groups as an indication for (a developing) biculturalism, this biculturalism seems to be mainly found on the Brazilian side. This Brazilian type of biculturalism is, however, not linked to a high-level of bilingualism, as the following calculation illustrates. If we consider informants as truly bilingual when they reach 20 out of 31.5 points in the reduced competence test design, only 14 Brazilian informants belong to this group (9.2% of the 153 informants). In Uruguay, this share is 23.9% (38 of 159 informants). Moreover, only five of the 14 Brazilian true bilinguals have no personal bonds to Uruguay(ans) (35.7%), while this share is markedly higher in Uruguay (68.4%; 26 of 38 informants). There are thus five times more true bilinguals with no personal bonds on the Uruguayan side of the border (16.4% [26 of 159 informants] vs. 3.3% [5 of 153 informants]).
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Age and length of stay are again not selected. For these two variables, the comments at the end of Section 2 may suffice. Frequency is not selected either. In this case, the repeated non-selection supports the assumption that negative stereotypes on the Uruguayan side and a generally benevolent mindset on the Brazilian side are too strong to be shattered by superficial experiences on the other side of the border. We have already seen that stereotypes only start to vanish among some Uruguayan informants once concrete contacts exist. The most interesting non-selection concerns personal bonds. It is indeed a somewhat surprising fact that the very variable that measures intimate connections to the people and the country on the other side of the border, a crucial aspect of biculturalism, fails to influence the informants’ attitude toward contact group. One explanation for this state of affairs could be that these truly bicultural and mostly bilingual informants are afraid of being considered outsider-outsiders in Dennis’s sense if they evaluate the respective other group too enthusiastically. The status of an insider-insider, which at first glance may sound like an attractive resort for this difficult situation, may also be negatively charged. After all, these informants must have heard many stories about their bicultural Portuguese-speaking Uruguayan ancestors, who were looked down upon and frequently treated rather badly. When describing the problematic status of an insiderinsider, Dennis mentions the particular situation of young people explicitly: In reality, one seldom encounters those who believe themselves to be insiders in both cultures, especially during youth, for it is during these years that biculturalism may be viewed more as ‘oppositional and contradictory.’ Many bicultural individuals seem to arrive at a state of cultural peace [. . .] when they cease to view their bicultural status as a ‘clash of cultures,’ but instead see it as “the dialectic of cultural relationism and cultural interactionism.” (2008: 17)
4 Attitude toward contact language With regard to the attitudes toward Portuguese and Spanish, the informants were asked to evaluate the two languages by means of 10 semantic pairs. No qualifications for the importance of language qualities were elicited. As the pairs beautiful/ugly, correct/incorrect, good/bad, modern/antiquated, and pleasant/unpleasant exhibited the highest internal correlation, their individual values were added up (Cronbach’s alpha for Portuguese: 0.793; for Spanish: 0.781). This means that the same five pairs are used for all informants. As with attitude toward contact/own group, the original scale was divided by five, resulting in a 5-point scale. The following regression analysis includes the 10 independent variables used in Table 4.1 and adds three more factors, namely: • • •
Attitude toward contact group (1–5 points) Attitude toward own language (1.8–5 points) Language competence (0–30.5 points)
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Table 4.7 presents the result for the 246 informants (among them 123 Uruguayans and 124 female informants) for which all necessary information is available. Unlike in the following Tables 4.8 and 4.9, Table 4.7 uses the reduced test design for language competence: Table 4.7 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact language of 246 Brazilian and Uruguayan informants Predictor variable Coefficient B Standard error Standardized T coefficient beta Attitude toward contact group Sex Attitude toward own language General contact
Significance
0.39
0.05
0.44
7.69 .000***
0.19 0.14
0.08 0.06
0.14 0.12
2.51 .013* 2.24 .026*
0.09
0.04
0.11
1.98 .049*
The four selected variables explain 28% of the variation (corrected r2: 0.28). Although we have hardly found any relationship between the attitude data and the competence data in this research project, attitudes do present some mutual influence. The most important predictor variable in Table 4.7, for example, is attitude toward contact group. An increase of one point in this variable leads to an unsurprising increase of 0.39 points in attitude toward contact language. Significant but less decisive impacts are wielded by sex, the female informants are again more positive in their evaluation; general contact, the informants having more contact with the speakers of the contact language like that language more; and attitude toward own language, the informants that like their native language also like the contact language. Table 4.8 discusses the Brazilian data: Table 4.8 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact language of 123 Brazilian informants Predictor variable Coefficient B Standard error Standardized T coefficient beta Attitude toward contact group Attitude toward own language
Significance
0.29
0.08
0.32
3.81 .000***
0.24
0.08
0.25
3.01 .003**
The attitude toward contact group and the attitude toward own language explain 16.6% of the variation (corrected r2: 0.166). The impact of attitude toward contact group is somewhat smaller than in Table 4.7, while the impact of attitude toward own language is stronger. This stronger impact may again be taken as an indicator of the rather untroubled Brazilian mindset. In this respect, the Uruguayan informants differ greatly, as shown in Table 4.9.
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Table 4.9 Linear regression analysis (stepwise) for the attitude toward contact language of 123 Uruguayan informants Predictor variable Coefficient B Standard error Standardized T coefficient beta Attitude toward contact group General contact Language competence
Significance
0.44
0.07
0.52
6.81 .000***
0.17 0.02
0.06 0.01
0.21 0.16
2.74 .007** 2.19 .031*
At 40.9% (corrected r2: 0.409), Table 4.9 explains much more variation than Tables 4.7 and 4.8. While the impact of attitude toward contact group hardly changes in comparison to Table 4.7, the impact of general contact almost doubles. This variable is not even selected in the Brazilian data. This constellation stresses the importance of personal experience for Uruguayan informants. They could be compensating for the lack of individual freedom regarding the necessity of learning Portuguese with a more individual-based attitude structure. In Table 4.9, we also find the only direct relationship between language competence and an attitudinal measure. The impact of this variable, however, is rather restricted. Uruguayan informants with a better command of Portuguese bear a slightly more positive attitude toward this language than Uruguayan informants with a worse command.
5 Who likes whom, and what does this mean? So far, we have studied the informants’ competence in the contact language (cf. Section 2), their attitude toward this language (cf. Section 4), and their attitude toward the speakers of this language (cf. Section 3). In the final section, we will sharpen our focus by forming attitude-based groups of informants. Importantly, the applied cluster analysis is not based on the ‘deictic’ attitudes toward contact/own group and attitudes toward contact/own language, since these attitude dimensions assume the informants’ place of residence as origo. Disregarding place of residence, the “non-deictic” attitudes toward Brazilians, Uruguayans, Portuguese, and Spanish form the analytical basis. This array relates the informants’ evaluations in a more indirect way to concepts such as we-/they-group and we-/they-language; therefore, they should provide a better measure for a possible identification with both groups and their cultures. In our view, relating attitudes to biculturalism in this way is somewhat comparable to Labov’s (1972: 120) definition of a speech community. Labov used shared evaluations of certain language variants, that is, “a set of shared norms,” as defining characteristics for a speech community. Conformity with regard to the actual use of these variants was not required. Following in this vein, we will assume that shared positive/ negative evaluations of the two groups and their languages define an attitudinal community. As in Labov’s case, this community can, but need not, identify with
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both groups, that is, a bicultural orientation is possible, but not guaranteed. Table 4.10 presents the eight clusters from left to right according to the sum of all four attitude values (cf. the row overall attitudinal value): Table 4.10 Attitudinal data of eight clusters of 262 Brazilian and Uruguayan informants Cl 7
Cl 5
Cl 2
Cl 3
n
51
43
55
23
Overall attitudinal value
18
16.5
15.4
3.4 4.3 4.1 4.7
3.9 4.1 3.6 3.8
Attitude toward Brazilians Attitude toward Portuguese Attitude toward Uruguayans Attitude toward Spanish
4.5 4.5 4.4 4.6
Cl 1
Cl 6
Cl 4
Cl 8
8
34
37
11
14.4
14.4
14
13.5
13.4
2.5 4.1 3.4 4.4
4.3 4.9 2.6 2.6
3.4 3.9 2.7 3.7
1.9 2.1 4.6 4.8
2.8 3.2 3.9 4
Strong above-average values are shaded darkly in the rows of Table 4.10, while strong below-average values are shaded lightly. The first cluster on the left side, Cluster 7, reaches a very high overall attitudinal value of 18 points. This represents 90% of the possible maximum of 20 points (individual values range from 16.4 through 20 points). The average values for the four attitude objects lie very close together; they range from 4.4 to 4.6 points. Interestingly, Cluster 7 does not show any clear tendency in the four non-attitudinal variables that exhibit significant differences between the clusters, namely place of residence, border type, general contact, and language competence (cf. Table 4.11). We are thus unable to characterize these informants with regard to any of these dimensions. Their common bond is their extremely favorable evaluation of the two contact groups and the two contact languages. Following our attitude-based approach to possible biculturalism, these informants can be called bicultural. Things, however, turn more dismal when we look at the clusters on the right of Tables 4.10 and 4.11: Table 4.11 Factors showing signifi cant differences with regard to the clusters of Table 4.10 Cl 7 n of clusters in Table 4.10 51
Cl 5 43
Cl 2 55
Cl 3 23
Cl 1 8
Cl 6 34
Cl 4 37
Cl 8 11
Place of residence Brazil 58.8% 37.2% 63.6% 21.7% 87.5% 14.7% 83.8% 9.1% ( p = .000***) 45.1% 44.2% 76.4% 39.1% 37.5% 47.1% 59.5% 27.3% Border type river ( p = .004**) General contact 4.2 4.2 4.1 4.1 4.3 3.6 3.6 3.1 ( p = .001**) Language competence 12.6 14.4 9.6 15.4 10.6 14.8 8.5 17.7 ( p = .000***)
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In the four clusters on the right of Table 4.11, which indicates the significance of the one-way ANOVAs in the first column, more than 80% of the respective informants live either north or south of the border. This means that the attitudinal evaluations shared by these informants do not really transcend to the other side of the border. The high concentration in one country makes the assumption of a bicultural orientation difficult. Furthermore, three of the four clusters show markedly low values for general contact. In view of these distributional facts, we can hardly hope to find generally positive evaluations of both contact groups and contact languages, and this is indeed the case. The 11 informants of Cluster 8, 10 of which reside in Uruguay, only achieve 67% of the 20 points of the overall attitudinal value in Table 4.10. However, the distribution between the single attitude values could not be more unbalanced. These informants reach 94% of the 10 points for the attitudes toward Uruguayans and Spanish, but only 40% for the attitudes toward Brazilians and Portuguese. In spite of this, they exhibit by far the highest competence level in the contact language. Four of them (36.4%) must be classified as true bilinguals according to our definition (at least 20 points in the reduced competence test design). This, however, does definitely not mean that this cluster possesses a bicultural orientation. Even the only cluster member living in Brazil – a female informant from Chuí with very strong ties to Uruguay (born in Uruguay, Uruguayan mother, Uruguayan nationality, Spanish as native language) – shares the extremely negative evaluations of Brazilians and Portuguese and the extremely positive evaluations of Uruguayans and Spanish. The very high competence level of this cluster, therefore, just confirms the assumption that the pressure on Uruguayans to learn Portuguese is so paramount that even strongly negative attitudes will not prevent them from learning it. As we do not have the necessary data, it is hard to say whether their rejection of Brazilians and Portuguese is connected to the widely held negative attitude of Uruguayans toward Portuguese-speaking Uruguayans in Northern Uruguay. One may see a certain indication for such an influence in the fact that 5 of the 11 informants come from Rivera, the most important Uruguayan city on the border. In spite of the fact that Rivera is slightly smaller than its Brazilian twin Santana do Livramento (cf. note 5), its dominance in northern Uruguay is unrivaled and may make it the hub of the anti-Portuguese discourse in this region.10 The comparable Brazilian cluster is Cluster 1. The eight informants in this cluster evaluate Brazilians and Portuguese very positively and Uruguayans and Spanish very negatively. They do not, however, reach the extreme averages of Cluster 8 (92% for Brazilians and Portuguese; 52% for Uruguayans and Spanish). The only Uruguayan in this predominantly Brazilian cluster is a female informant from Artigas, who has only lived in that city for five years. Interestingly, this cluster’s value for general contact is much higher than the value of Cluster 8 (4.3 vs. 3.1 points). Again, the more untroubled Brazilian mindset seems to allow more intergroup contacts. Nevertheless, the two clusters do not only share their segregating tendencies with regard to attitudes and evaluations; they also display the lowest percentages for not being separated from the contact group by a river. It is, therefore, no surprise that 13 of the 19 members in these two clusters would
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find themselves in the same cluster if we had grouped the informants according to attitudes toward contact/own group and attitudes toward contact/own language. No informant of the other six clusters in Table 4.10 would join this group. In any case, the low concentration of informants in Clusters 1 and 8 makes it clear that they represent a marginal group among our informants. This is different for Clusters 4 and 6, which contain 37 and 34 informants, respectively. Cluster 6 could be characterized as a milder version of Cluster 8. Its members also come predominantly from Uruguay (only 5 Brazilians) and they also evaluate Uruguayans and Spanish more positively than Brazilians and Portuguese. They are, however, much more moderate both in acclamation (79% for Uruguayans and Spanish) and in reprehension (60% for Brazilians and Portuguese). Cluster 4 is a Brazilian-dominated cluster (only six Uruguayans) with comparatively low averages for all attitude dimensions. The individual values for overall attitudinal value range between 11.6 and 15.6 points. The average values for the two group attitudes – Brazilians fare slightly better than Uruguayans – are markedly lower than the average values for the two language attitudes. In spite of this, the cluster exhibits – probably due to the high concentration of Brazilians – the lowest language competence of all clusters. Cluster 3 gathers a somewhat comparable group of informants; however, the cluster is more Uruguayan in composition. The attitudes toward both groups are comparatively low (slightly favoring Uruguayans); only the language evaluations are more positive. The similarities between Clusters 3 and 4 can be best demonstrated by the fact that 28 and 24 of the 60 informants, respectively, would be grouped together in two clusters if the cluster analysis were based on the more ‘deictic’ attitude dimensions. The remaining clusters can be compared to Cluster 7, which we analyzed first. Like the members of Cluster 7, the members of Cluster 2 are balanced in their evaluations; they do not share, however, the same enthusiastic outlook (77% instead of 90% of the overall attitudinal value). The main reason for this could be that most of these informants are separated from the other country by a river (cf. Table 4.11). Aside from this, the slight dominance of Brazilian informants causes a rather low language competence. In spite of the similarity to Cluster 7, it is difficult to claim that Cluster 2 has a bicultural orientation since possessing balanced evaluations of both groups and languages is but a necessary precondition for such a characterization. The decisive, and possibly sufficient, condition is having highly positive evaluations. The members of Cluster 5 are – with one notable exception – as enthusiastic as the members of Cluster 7. This exception is their attitude toward Brazilians, which is surprisingly low. Most of the informants are Uruguayans, but just like in Cluster 7, they cannot be characterized by any of the dimensions of Table 4.11. If we return to the question of what the informants like and dislike in Brazil and Uruguay, we can discover further astonishing correlations. Women/girls are mentioned by 26 of the 79 male informants (32.9%) of the clusters with high overall attitudinal values (left side of Table 4.10). This percentage rises to an impressive 64.6% (31 of 48 male informants) for the four clusters with low overall attitudinal values (right side of Table 4.10; χ2(1, n = 127) = 12.1, p = .001**/Phi: 0.31). The
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connection between low attitude values and an explicitly expressed fondness of women/girls becomes even more marked when we concentrate on the two more nationalistic Clusters 1 and 8. Nine of the 11 male members of these clusters mention women/girls (81.8%). As six of the nine women/girls come from the contact group (for all informants, 41 of 57 women/girls), a male infringement on the ‘claims’ of the boys from that group can be maintained. After all, this ‘preference’ stands in striking contrast to the two clusters’ extremely low attitude values for the contact group and language. Disliking men/boys from the other side of the border again does not exhibit a significant difference. Men/boys are mentioned in this context by 4 of the 48 male informants with low overall attitudinal values (8.3%), but also by 4 of the 79 male informants with high overall attitudinal values (5.1%). One of the 11 male informants from Clusters 1 and 8 belongs to this group (9.1%). Highly interestingly though, the few female informants that mention their liking of men/boys also belong predominantly to the clusters with low overall attitudinal values (11.9%; 5 of 42 female informants). In the clusters with high overall attitudinal values, this share is only 3.2% (3 of 93 female informants; χ2(1, n = 135) = 3.9, p = .048*/Phi: 0.17 / 1 cell (25%) with fewer than five expected tokens). Again, the highest share can be found among the eight female informants of Clusters 1 and 8. They mention men/boys twice (25%). The results of Section 5 have made it clear that the eight clusters do not only differ with regard to the base of their grouping, the four attitude measures (cf. Table 4.10), but also with regard to four of the other variables previously discussed (cf. Table 4.11), and perhaps most interestingly, they also differ in the role the other sex plays in the questionnaire answers. Due to this discriminating power, several other questionnaire items were investigated and many of them also exhibit (highly) significant cluster differences. The distribution of five of these items will be presented in Table 4.12. The two statements “Brazilians like Uruguayans” and “Uruguayans like Brazilians” are combined under the label of mutual liking. The third item has already been mentioned; it reads, “I would like to get to know more Brazilians/Uruguayans.” The fourth item in the Uruguayan questionnaire is “I prefer to be with Uruguayans rather than with Brazilians.” Finally, the fifth item quantifies the answers to the question “Would you like to live in Brazil/Uruguay for some time?” This item is also measured on a 5-point scale. Table 4.12 Additional information on the clusters in Table 4.10
n of clusters in Table 4.10 “Mutual liking” ( p = 0***) “Get to know contact group” ( p = .005**) “Prefer to be with own group” ( p = .011*) “Wish to live there for some time” ( p = .008**)
Cl 7
Cl 5
Cl 2
Cl 3
51
43
55
23
Cl 1 8
Cl 6
Cl 4
Cl 8
34
37
11
7.6 4.4
7 4.3
7 4.2
6 4.5
5.8 4.1
5.9 4.1
6.4 4.2
4.9 3.3
3
3.6
3.4
3.7
3.6
3.9
3.3
4.3
4.3
3.8
3.3
3.3
2.4
3.1
3.2
3.2
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Clusters 7 and 8 again constitute the extreme cases. The members of the Uruguayan Cluster 8, the cluster with the lowest attitudes toward the contact group and language, strongly assume that the two ethnic groups do not get along well. The value of 4.9 points is markedly lower than the neutral point of 6 points in this 9-point scale (2–10 points). Their desire to get to know more members from the contact groups or to live in the other country for some time is not very developed either (3.3 and 3.2 of 5 points, respectively). A logical consequence of these reactions is that these 11 informants strongly prefer being with their own group (4.3 of 5 points). These values would be even more extreme if we took out the one Brazil-based informant with strong bonds to Uruguay since she had to judge her preference of being with Brazilians rather than with Uruguayans (1 point) and her disposition to meet more Uruguayans (5 points) and to spend some time in Uruguay (5 points). Without her, the values of the remaining 10 informants for Table 4.12 are, from top to bottom, 4.6, 3.1, 4.6, and 3 points. Therefore, one can say that people with more nationalistic and strongly unbalanced attitudes definitely do not perceive living together with the contact group as harmonious. Likewise, they are not interested in socializing more with members of that group or in spending some time on the other side of the border. The values of the somewhat comparable Brazilian Cluster 1, which also demonstrates a certain tendency to nationalistic and unbalanced attitudes, are much more moderate. There is one exception though. These informants’ desire to live in the other country, mostly Uruguay, is the lowest, with 2.4 points. This result, however, is not necessarily cluster specific; it may rather be connected to the Brazilian dominance in this cluster. For the 357 informants for which we possess this information, the Brazilian value of 3.4 points for this item is significantly lower than the Uruguayan value of 3.8 points (F(1,355) = 5.7; p = .017*). Finally, coming back to the 13 informants from Clusters 1 and 8 that would form one exclusive and extremely self-centered cluster in the more ‘deictic’ attitude scenario yields a further telling result. This cluster contains 10 Uruguayan and three Brazilian informants, displays no personal bonds to the other side whatsoever, and surpasses the members of Cluster 8 in every single value of Table 4.12. It reaches, from top to bottom, 4.6, 3.1, 4.5, and 2.7 points, respectively. The other results of Table 4.12 will be discussed more briefly. Cluster 3 should be noted for the strong desire to meet more people from the contact group. Interestingly, this cluster only showed low attitude values for the two groups. Clusters 7, 5, and 2 again show some similarities, though it is once more Cluster 7 which excels in all of them. The members of this cluster see the mutual liking of Brazilians and Uruguayans as rather positive. Their 7.6 points surpass the value of Cluster 8 by 2.7 points. Their desire to meet people from the other side is also 1.1 points stronger than the desire of the members of Cluster 8, and their disposition to live on the other side of the border for some time beats the disposition of the members of Cluster 1 by an impressive 1.9 points. As positive as all these values are, we derive the most promising prospect from the fact that Cluster 7 does not exhibit any preference whatsoever with regard to staying with people from either group. With regard to the item prefer to be with own group, 3 points indicates the most
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bicultural orientation. The further away an informant’s evaluation is from this value, the more (s)he prefers to stay with people from one of the two groups. In these sad times, in which we witness recurring nationalist tendencies worldwide, the attitudes of the 51 informants of Cluster 7 is indeed promising. Summarizing this article, we would like to stress two things. First, as our sample is not representative, we obviously cannot generalize the results to all adolescents in this border area, let alone to the entire border population. Second, our somewhat unusual approach to biculturalism should be seen as the consequence of the type of data available to us. These data call for a quantitative approach that tackles biculturalism indirectly by analyzing the informants’ attitudes toward both groups and both languages. In order to focus more on the actual identification with two cultures, we would need qualitative data that would better represent the informants’ point of view. In spite of the lack of such data, our analyses offer some intriguing insights into different types of attitudinal and behavioral reactions young people (have to) resort to at the Brazilian/Uruguayan border. Among other things, the type of reaction depends on the side of the border where the informants live (place of residence), the geographic and demographic constellations of this border (border type; city size), the informants’ sex, and their individual contact behavior (general contact, language use). The extent to which individual behavior can influence the informants’ language competence and their attitudinal data bears witness to the different degrees of social pressure these informants experience.
Glossary cluster analysis: a statistical method to group people according to certain characteristics. Here, we used the informants’ attitudes toward Brazilians, Uruguayans, Portuguese, and Spanish as the basis for the cluster analysis. cognates: two words that have a common etymological origin, but do not need to have the same meaning, e.g. English library and Spanish librería ‘bookstore.’ deictic: means ‘pointing’ to something; i.e. adverbs such as today or here, or pronouns like I or you, which change reference depending upon when, where, or by whom they are spoken. For the cluster analysis in Section 5, we use this term in a more abstract manner. If we had used the attitude toward the contact group as the basis for the cluster analysis, we would have mixed the Uruguayans’ attitude toward Brazilians with the Brazilians’ attitude toward Uruguayans. In a sense, this would have been ‘deictic,’ since we would have used a mental pointing concept, in our example the evaluation of the other group, the they-group, by the own group, the we-group. DPUs: Portuguese dialects of Uruguay, Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay, are Portuguese varieties spoken in the northern parts of Uruguay. Other names: dialecto fronterizo ‘border dialect,’ portugués uruguayo ‘Uruguayan Portuguese,’ portugués fronterizo ‘border Portuguese,’ or portuñol “a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish.” Mennonites: Anabaptist group from East Holland, Frisia, Flanders, and presentday Northwest Germany that formed in the 16th century during the time of the Reformation. They are named after one of their leaders, Menno Simons.
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Nowadays, they live in Canada, the USA, Mexico, Belize, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Germany, etc., and many of them still speak a Low German dialect. qualitative approach: or emic approach, tries to assume the informant’s point of view using, for example, participant observation or biographical (narrative) interviews as elicitation tools. These interviews do not apply questions with fixed answer categories as the questionnaire used in the present study, but rather work with only a few open questions. quantitative approach: or etic approach, investigates large numbers of informants, using statistical testing. It is based on the researcher’s point of view, that is, the researcher wants to know whether categories (s)he assumes to be important influence the informant’s behavior. regression analysis: tests which independent variables have a significant effect (non-random effect) on the dependent variable. It indicates how much of the variation in the dependent variable the selected independent variables explain, and specifies the effect strength of each selected variable. semantic differential: analyzes what people associate connotatively with certain objects, events, or concepts. Mostly, participants have to mark one of multiple spaces, which are located in between two opposite poles, for example, good/bad or strong/weak. In linguistics, semantic differentials are often used in matched guise tests, which investigate what people associate with different languages or different varieties of one language (standard and dialect).
Notes 1 Brazil’s population increased from 170.2 to 177.8 million inhabitants during this time; Uruguay’s population remained roughly stable at 3.3 million inhabitants. 2 An important consequence of the existence of these varieties is the fact that the linguistic border between the colloquial varieties of Portuguese and Spanish (not between the standard varieties) does not coincide with the national border (cf. Blaser 1995: 162). 3 High school students were chosen because of easy accessibility and because of the fact that their contact with people from the other country is probably more of a voluntary nature than that of adults who frequently have professional reasons for meeting people from that country. Obviously, this sample is not representative for the border population in general. We, therefore, cannot generalize the results. Aside from these students, 227 high school students from the Argentinian/Brazilian border were interviewed in Uruguaiana/Paso de los Libres and São Borja/Santo Tomé. The analyses of these informants can be found in Kaufmann (2013, 2010). 4 At this point, I would like to thank Kerstin Botsch for important points of criticism. All remaining shortcomings are entirely my fault. 5 The eight cities have between 5,000 (Chui, Brazil) and 85,000 inhabitants (Santana do Livramento, Brazil). In three of the four research locations, the bigger city is roughly twice as big as its smaller twin. The smaller Uruguayan city, Rivera, with its 65,000 inhabitants, differs in this respect since Santana do Livramento is only 1.3 times bigger. 6 Among the 362 informants, 13 were born in the other country, 10 have the nationality of both countries or exclusively of the other country, 31 have a girlfriend/boyfriend from the other country, 36 parents come from the other country, and 4 speak the contact language as (one of) their native language(s). 7 This scenario would not change if the reduced competence test design of Table 4.1 were used. The increases of four of the five variables would, however, not be as marked, while the impact of border type would actually decrease.
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8 Had we used the reduced competence test design of Table 4.1, this factor would also decrease to 1.71 points, while the decrease of the two other variables would be even more marked. 9 The difference in the naming frequency of women/girls from the other side of the border is highly significant (χ2(1, n = 39) = 8.2, p = .004** / Phi: 0.46). The distribution for all eight cities is comparable. Thirty-seven of 86 Uruguayan male informants mention women/girls from Brazil as likeable (43%; only six mention women/girls from Uruguay), while only 14 of 80 Brazilian male informants mention Uruguayan women/ girls (17.5%; 17 mention Brazilian women/girls). This difference is also highly significant (χ2(1, n = 166) = 12.7, p = .000*** / Phi: 0.28). In total, 7 of 84 Uruguayan male informants (8.3%) mention their dislike of Brazilian men/boys, while Brazilian male informants mention Uruguayan men/boys only three times in this respect (3.8%; no significant difference). The 83 Brazilian female informants mention Uruguayan men/ boys as likeable four times (4.8%; Brazilian men/boys are mentioned once). The 99 Uruguayan female informants mention Brazilian men/boys six times (6.1%; no significant difference). No female informant mentions any dislike of other women/girls. 10 Elizaincin (1975: 72; cf. also Carvalho 2007: 84) describes the strong negative attitude of the inhabitants of Rivera towards varieties of Uruguayan Portuguese, which are seen as a backward way of speaking used by the lower class.
References Barrios, Graciela. “Políticas lingüísticas y grupos minoritarios en el Uruguay.” Estudios de Sociolingüística, in print. Blaser, Jutta. Das Spanische in Südbrasilien: Die Zerstörung einer Legende durch mikrodialektologische Feldforschung. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1995. Carvalho, Ana Maria. “Diagnóstico sociolingüístico de comunidades escolares fronterizas en el norte de Uruguay.” In Portugués del Uruguay y educación bilingüe, edited by C. Brovetto, J. Geymonat, and N. Brian, 49–98. Montevideo: Educación Pública, 2007. Dennis, Rutledge M. “Towards a theory of biculturalism.” In Biculturalism, self-identity and societal transformation: towards a theory of biculturalism, edited by R. M. Dennis, 9–29. London: Emerald Group, 2008. Elizaincin, Adolfo. “El bilingüismo de la fronteira Uruguayo-Brasileña.” Letras de Hoje 20 (1975): 65–75. Kaufmann, Göz. Varietätendynamik in Sprachkontaktsituationen: Attitüden und Sprachverhalten rußlanddeutscher Mennoniten in Mexiko und den USA. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997. ———. “Measuring the unmeasurable or how to gauge the competence in non-standard language varieties.” In Avaliação: novas tendências, novos paradigmas, edited by M. Brugali and M. da Graça Gomes Paiva, 151–175. Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto, 2000. ———. “Falar espanhol or hablar portugués: attitudes and linguistic behavior on the Brazilian-Uruguayan and Brazilian-Argentinean border.” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 60 (2010): 276–317. ———. “Group and language contact at the Brazilian-Argentinean and Brazilian-Uruguayan borders.” In Theorizing borders through analyses of power relationships, edited by P. Gilles, H. Koff, C. Maganda, and C. Schulz, 271–313. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013. Labov, William. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Mendoza-Denton, Norma. “Language and identity.” In The handbook of language variation and change, edited by J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, and N. Schilling-Estes, 475–499. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.
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Further readings Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Edwards, John. Language and identity: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gilles, Peter, H. Koff, C. Maganda, and C. Schulz, eds. Theorizing borders through analyses of power relationships. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013. Higgins, Christina, ed. Identity formation in globalizing contexts: language learning in the new millennium. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and nationalism since 1780: program, myth, reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Topics for discussion 1
Investigate why Portuguese varieties are still spoken in the northern parts of Uruguay. Consult information about the Treaty of Tordesillas and the Treaty of Madrid.
2
Create a semantic differential in order to learn more about your group’s evaluation of different groups and languages.
3
Do you agree with our interpretation of the different frequency of mentioning women/girls from the other side of the border as likeable? Why do the female informants not mention men/boys so frequently?
4
Discuss the influence of the presence/absence of a river at the Brazilian/Uruguayan border. Can you give other examples where geographic facts (rivers, mountains) had an impact on the development of languages and/or cultures?
5
Research how the population and the gross domestic product (GDP) of Brazil and Uruguay have changed since the turn of the century.
6
Try to define the power relations between Brazil and its other neighbors. Is Brazil always the dominant country?
7
With regard to the standard varieties (but not with regard to the local Portuguese varieties in Uruguay), the national border between Brazil and Uruguay coincides with the language border between Portuguese and Spanish. Find examples where language borders do or do not coincide with national borders.
8
In Europe, the relationship between Portuguese and Spanish is quite different, but also highly interesting. Will Portuguese people in Europe learn more Spanish or Spanish people more Portuguese? Explore this idea.
Section II
Outcomes and perceptions in situations of language and dialect contact
5
Languages in contact Pidginization and creolization, Spanish in the Caribbean John M. Lipski
1
Introduction
The Caribbean Spanish dialect zone is both immediately identifiable due to shared linguistic traits and highly nuanced at the regional and local level, which is hardly surprising given the fact that this dialect cluster spans a number of non-contiguous geographical areas and represents differing colonial and post-colonial linguistic and demographic histories. For the purposes of the present chapter, Caribbean Spanish is a cover term applied to varieties spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Panama, most of Venezuela, and the northern coastal region of Colombia. Its periphery includes some coastal areas of southeastern Mexico as well as archaic language enclaves on Trinidad (Lipski 1990b; Moodie 1973, 1986, 1987) and arguably southeastern Louisiana (e.g. the Isleño Canary-descended variety of St. Bernard Parish: MacCurdy 1950; Lipski 1990a; Coles 1999). During the colonial period, the territories now included in the Caribbean dialect zone fell under distinct administrative jurisdictions. Modern Mexico and Central America were included in the Virreinato de Nueva España, with the Central American colonies further subdivided by the Capitanía General de Guatemala. Panama – part of Colombia until 1903 – had its own Court or Audiencia, but was part of the larger Virreinato de Nueva Granada, while Venezuela and the three Antillean islands ultimately were subject to the Audiencia de Caracas. Relative importance to Spain as well as arrival of Spanish colonists also varied across time and location. Many of the first expeditions to North and South America were launched from Santo Domingo, which had been visited by Columbus, but once stable trade routes to Central and South America had been established and the flotilla treasure fleets implemented, Santo Domingo became a backwater while Havana, Cartagena de Indias, and Portobelo (Panama) were way stations for nearly all maritime traffic between Spain and Spanish America. At the same time, unofficial traffic between the Canary Islands, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo increased, an effect of being sidelined by Spanish authorities. Given that most of the ships departed from Andalusian ports and all stopped at the Canary Islands for supplies, not to mention communities founded by Canary Islanders as well as post-colonial Canary immigration to Caribbean nations, it is not surprising that Caribbean Spanish varieties bear a strong resemblance to those of southern
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Spain and the Canary Islands. The maritime interconnectedness of these regions is the basis for the español atlántico designation suggested by Catalán (1958) and confirmed throughout Latin America. Although many factors subsequently shaped the regional and social variants of Caribbean Spanish, including relative isolation, shifting trade routes, and changing demographics of arriving colonists, contact with other languages was arguably the most important single factor responsible for the contemporary intrazone diversity of Caribbean Spanish. As in every other Spanish American dialect zone, Caribbean Spanish bears the imprint of historical and contemporary language contact, as well as reflecting the regional and social variants spoken by settlers arriving from Spain and other Spanish American colonies. In many instances, contact environments in Latin American have been well documented and uncontroversial, for example the influence of Quechua and Aymara in the Andean zone, Guaraní-Spanish contacts in Paraguay and neighboring areas, a variety of Native American languages in Mexico and Central America, and Italian in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, among others. In contrast, the contributions of language contact in the otherwise widely studied Spanish Caribbean dialect zone are less well understood and continue to spur debate over the extent of contact as well as the specific languages involved. The present chapter provides an overview of both documented and extrapolated language contact environments past and present that have contributed to the Caribbean Spanish dialect cluster. The presentation centers on four contact situations roughly following the chronological order of Spanish-speaking settlements and involving indigenous languages, African languages, a possible pan-Caribbean Afro-Hispanic pidgin or creole, and other Afro-Caribbean creole languages. Due to space limitations, the more recent influence of (U.S.) English, worthy of a separate study, will not be covered here.
2 The first contacts: indigenous languages in contact with Spanish in the Caribbean The indigenous population in the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean was once considerable, but European diseases, massacres, and unsuccessful attempts to press Native Americans into slavery quickly reduced these groups to the point of disappearing, especially on the island territories. Although over the years there has been occasional speculation as to possible phonetic or grammatical influences of indigenous languages on Caribbean Spanish, only lexical borrowings are unequivocally accepted as the result of colonial language contact. In the insular Caribbean territories, the principal indigenous languages that came into contact with early Spanish settlers belong to the Arawakan family. Taíno (Arawakan) was prominent in Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Cuba, where it was known by the name Siboney. Smaller language groups such as Guanahatabey (western Cuba), Macoris, and Ciguayo (Hispaniola) disappeared rapidly after Spanish arrivals. Arawakan words such as maíz, casabe, hamaca, canoa, huracán, maní, barbacoa, iguana, and many others have made their way into many Latin American dialects and some are used in Spain as well.
Spanish in the Caribbean 97 Carib speakers were fewer in number on the islands and more common on the northern coast of South America, lending words such as colobrí, caníbal, piragua, and caimán to the early colonial Spanish lexicon. On the mainland (Panama, Venezuela, coastal Colombia), Carib, Arawakan, and Macro-Chibcha languages were found at the time of Spanish arrivals, but most contributed little except place-names and occasional lexical items such as chicha (from the Chibcha languages). In the balance, there is no convincing evidence of more substantial influence on Caribbean Spanish, except in those few regions where indigenous languages are still spoken and where Spanish is still acquired as a second language. This includes the Chibchan languages of Costa Rica, such as Guaymí (Ngäbere), Boruca, Cabécar, and Bribri (Constenla Umaña 2011, 2012; Marín 2013; Sánchez Avendaño 2014, 2016), all of which influence local varieties of Spanish, especially when spoken as a second language. In Panama, some Ngäbere and Bribri speakers are found in the western region, while Kuna speakers, native to the San Blas islands, are now found in all major cities, where their second language Spanish can be heard. In the Guajira peninsula shared by Colombia and Venezuela the Arawakan Wayuunaiki language still enjoys considerable vitality, and influences the Spanish of bilingual speakers (Méndez 2014; Oquendo 2000; Ramírez 2009). In all instances, these micro-dialects of Spanish exhibit the usual traits of second language speakers particularly regarding verb and adjective morphology and subject pronoun expression. Since the speech communities in question are generally quite small, there is little effect on more regional and national Spanish varieties, but these contact environments do exemplify the more extensive language contacts that took place during the early colonial period.
3 African languages in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean The Spanish colonies in the Caribbean region participated in the African slave trade just as the remaining areas of Spanish America, but until the beginning of the 19th century the numbers were small in the Antilles and most of coastal South America, and use of African languages was not often maintained past the first generation. Following the early use of Africans in placer gold mining, pearl diving, and agriculture, the importation of Africans dropped drastically in all of these areas, except for the Colombian port of Cartagena de Indias, through which nearly all enslaved Africans destined for the northwestern part of South America passed, and in which a variety of African languages were known to have been spoken (e.g. Sandoval 1956; Granda 1970). Thus, although in some regions the population of African origin was considerable, most Afro descendants had been born in the colonies in close contact with native speakers of Spanish. Only in a few of the largest cities, such as Havana and Cartagena, did even a minimal amount of ghettoization take place, which may have fostered the retention of certain ethnically marked words or pronunciation. In the remaining places, the ratio of African-born workers who learned Spanish as a second language was always small in comparison to the native Spanish-speaking population. Matters changed rapidly following the Haitian revolution, which began in 1791, quickly brought an end to the world’s largest sugar producer (French
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Saint-Domingue), and enticed Cuba, and to a lesser extent Puerto Rico, to ramp up sugarcane growing. This required the immediate importation of hundreds of thousands of additional laborers, the majority of whom came directly from Africa, and later from other established Caribbean colonies. In Cuba, approximately 60,000 Africans had arrived by 1761; in the time period 1762–1780 some 20,000 more were imported, and between 1780 and 1820 more than 310,000 enslaved Africans were added to the Cuban labor force. By 1861, just before the abolition of the African slave trade, some 849,000 Africans had been taken to Cuba, 86% of whom arrived during the first half of the 19th century. Extrapolating to allow for underreporting and clandestine traffic, some historians estimate the total as high as 1.3 million. With the sugar boom, African workers were highly concentrated in sprawling plantations, housed in barracks, and further removed from contact with native speakers of Spanish than in previous times when the demographic ratios were closer. In Puerto Rico, the numbers were proportionally lower: of a total of 75,000 enslaved Africans estimated to have arrived during the colonial period, 60,000 arrived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Venezuela also increased its African-born labor force, mainly to expand the production of cacao. The last wave of Africans arriving in the Spanish Caribbean often contained substantial groups who spoke a single language, due both to the fact that only a few large slave traders remained in business, and to the haste with which the last groups of captives were brought together. It is only in Cuba that any historical or linguistic evidence exists of extensive contact between Spanish and African languages (Valdés Bernal 1978, 1987), although micro-contact zones may have existed in other Caribbean regions in earlier times. Yoruba speakers from southwestern Nigeria (known as lucumíes) represented the largest African linguistic group in Cuba, and provided the linguistic and cultural basis for the Afro-Cuban religion santería, as well as contributing ceremonial words such as orishá ‘deity’ and such deities’ names as Changó, Yemayá, Elegguá, Obatalá, and Ochún to Cuban folklore. In contemporary santería ceremonies some Yoruba words are still used, but there are probably no remaining fluent Yoruba speakers in Cuba. Yoruba-influenced Spanish contact varieties may have existed briefly, and some imitations are found in the writings of Cabrera: (1) Vamo siré. “Let’s play.” (Cabrera 1970) (2) Mañana yo ikú. “Tomorrow I will die.” (Cabrera 1970) (3) Ese otro yo me lo va yéun y a Migué no pasa ná. “I’m going to eat that other one and nothing will happen to Miguel.” (Cabrera 1983) (4) Olofi ya okuó, Olofi ta mirando, ya ikú. “Olofi died, Olofi is watching, he died.” (Cabrera 1983)
Spanish in the Caribbean 99 Igbo- and Efik-speaking carabalíes (from southeastern Nigeria) also arrived in large numbers, and contributed to the secret Afro-Cuban society known as Abakuá (Núñez Cedeño 1982) as well as contributing words such as asere and ecobio ‘friend.’ Fongbe speakers (known as ararás, from modern Benin and Togo) were also found in Cuba, and have influenced regional music and folklore in Cuba (Vinuenza 1989). Groups of Central African Kikongo speakers are represented in the palo monte or palo mayombe Afro-Cuban religion, whose rituals contain large numbers of Kikongo words and expressions, as well as fragments of pidginized Spanish embedded in chants that also contain Kikongo and contemporary Spanish elements. Some vestigial Kikongo speakers remain in Cuba (e.g. García González and Valdés Acosta 1978; Schwegler 2000), but all are native Spanish speakers, and only in the palo mayombe rituals is there some inkling of earlier contact varieties. Demonstrating the direct influence of one or more African languages on Caribbean Spanish, beyond the first generation of African-born speakers and excluding the aforementioned Afro-Cuban religious ceremonies, requires the historical sociolinguistic equivalent to the means-motive-opportunity criteria of jurisprudence. To date, there is little convincing evidence of any such influence, beyond the inevitable lexical borrowings and the presence of African languages in AfroCuban rituals. Some observers (e.g. Álvarez-Nazario 1974; Figueroa Arencibia 2002, 2006, 2009a, 2009b, 2012; Rosario 1956) have claimed direct influence of African languages on Caribbean Spanish phonetics, for example loss of syllablefinal /s/, neutralization of syllable-final /ɾ/ and /l/, and velarization of word-final /n/ (pronunciation as [ŋ]), but these traits are part of the Andalusian-Canary Island heritage of Caribbean Spanish. More realistically, since none of the African languages known to have figured prominently in the Spanish Caribbean colonies exhibits syllable-final /ɾ/, /l/, or /s/ (and many have no final consonants at all), speakers of African languages who acquired Spanish as a second language under duress simply extended variable reduction processes to nearly categorical status. The African and Afro-descendent presence in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean has contributed unquestionably to the cultural tapestry, but a survey of all available linguistic evidence yields the conclusion that no African language substantially altered the grammar and pronunciation of Caribbean Spanish as spoken today, although a considerable number of local and regional lexical items were added (e.g. Megenney 1976, 1979, 1981, 1982, 1983). This is not to say, however, that Caribbean Spanish would be the same had Africans never entered the region, for two other possible vectors of influence remain to be explored: the pidginized Spanish acquired by newly arrived speakers of African languages, and the post-colonial arrival of speakers of Afro-European creole languages from elsewhere in the Caribbean.
4 The possible existence of a pan-Caribbean Afro-Hispanic bozal creole African-born second language speakers of Spanish, often referred to derogatorily as bozales ‘untamed,’ spoke a variety of partial approximations to canonical Spanish, depending upon individual levels of proficiency. In the aggregate, most
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bozal Spanish texts (primarily literary imitations, with some more credible folklore texts) reflect only non-native usage. However, a subset of Afro-Cuban bozal imitations (together with two Puerto Rican texts) has given rise to two controversial proposals. The first is that Afro-Hispanic language in the Caribbean and possibly elsewhere coalesced into a stable creole, extending beyond the reduced confines of slave barracks and maroon communities to a broader geographical area and cross-section of the speech community. A corollary is the claim that this creole had its origins in an even earlier Afro-Portuguese pidgin or creole, formed in West Africa and surviving in the contemporary creoles of Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Annobón, as well as in Papiamentu and Palenquero (Megenney 1984a, 1985a; Granda 1968, 1971; Schwegler 1993, 1999). The second proposal is that this earlier Afro-Hispanic creole may have permanently affected the evolution of all Caribbean Spanish, not only contributing vocabulary items, but also touching syntax and phonology.1 The second proposal is clearly dependent on a demonstration that Afro-Hispanic language coalesced into a stable creole in the Spanish Caribbean, an assertion for which solid evidence is hard to come by. A number of linguistic features appearing in Afro-Cuban and a few Afro-Puerto Rican texts have been variously put forward as evidence of prior creolization, but most can be explained away by the simpler alternative of imperfect second language acquisition under conditions of duress during enslavement.2 These features include apparently exaggerated use of overt subject pronouns (which can often be eliminated in Spanish), elimination of common prepositions, occasional loss of the complementizer que, and (very infrequent) loss of the copula. Other traits at times attributed to prior creolization are in fact regional Caribbean traits not associated with particular ethnic groups: non-inverted questions of the sort ¿Qué tú quieres? “What do you want?” (e.g. Granda 1992), occasional use of the second person subject pronoun vos (still found vestigially in parts of Cuba), and preposed más ‘more’ in the combinations más nada ‘nothing else,’ más nunca ‘never again,’ and más nadie ‘nobody else,’ which reflect a Galician/Canary Island heritage. Among the linguistic features found in Afro-Caribbean Spanish texts of the 19th and early 20th centuries, most of which reflect commonalities found among second language learners of Spanish, two do stand out as possible candidates for a temporarily stable restructured variety: double negation and the preverbal particle ta + invariant verb. 4.1
Double negation in (Afro-)Caribbean Spanish and bozal Spanish
Double negation of the sort Yo no sé no with no pause or inflectional break before the second no, while not usual in non-Caribbean Spanish varieties, is currently found to a greater or lesser extent in two Caribbean dialects characterized by a significant historical presence of African languages: the Dominican Republic3 and in the Chocó region of northwestern Colombia.4 In these dialects double negation is primarily used to contradict previous assertions, much as in Brazilian Portuguese (e.g. Teixeira 2015). Double negation also appears in a few 19th-century
Spanish in the Caribbean 101 Afro-Cuban texts, whose likely veracity for that time period is suggested by correspondence between the Cuban scholar José de la Luz Caballero and the American encyclopedist Francis Lieber (circa 1830): “repiten los negros casi siempre la negativa asi dicen no va á juntar no, no va á salir no” (Clements 2009: 87). Given this distribution, African or Afro-creole influences have been suggested for Caribbean double negation.5 Among African languages known to have made an impact in Spanish America, a possible influence comes from Kikongo, whose presence is documented in colonial Cuba and Colombia. Kikongo shows double negation, typically with ke . . . ko (cf. Bentley 1887: 607). In Cuba, Kikongo speakers formed the palo mayombe cult, which survives to this day with many Kikongo linguistic elements (Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005). In Colombia, the creole language Palenquero has a strong Kikongo component (Schwegler 1996b, 2002, 2011, 2012), although rarely presenting double negation (Dieck 2000; Schwegler 1991b, 2016). A direct African connection is more difficult to postulate for the Dominican Republic, where double negation is more generalized and has never been associated exclusively with Afro-descendent speech communities. Unlike Cuba, Santo Domingo did not receive a massive surge of African labor at the time when Kikongo speakers were arriving in the Caribbean; most Africans arrived in Santo Domingo early in the colonial period (Lipski 2004a), and any African languages were rapidly replaced by Spanish. The major extra-Hispanic influence on 19th-century and early 20th-century Dominican Spanish has been Haitian creole, whose possible influence on Dominican Spanish will be covered in a following section. In general, however, to the extent that double negation in Caribbean varieties has an African connection, it is more plausibly linked to reinforcement found in both learners’ language and – given the imperious tone adopted by overseers and slave owners – in language directed at Africans. 4.2
Particle ta + infinitive in Afro-Caribbean bozal Spanish
The other creole-like linguistic feature appearing in some 19th- and early 20thcentury Afro-Cuban texts (and one Afro-Puerto Rican play) is the use of the invariant combination of ta (presumably a form of estar) plus a verbal root usually equated with the Spanish infinitive minus the final -r, and typified by the song Changó ta vení, ‘Changó is coming,’ immortalized by Celia Cruz (apparently composed by Justi Barreto). Literary examples include: (5) Ya branco ta debaratá cosa. “Now white people are ruining everything.” (Cabrera 1970) (6) Pavo real ta bucá palo. “The peacock is looking for a tree.” (Cabrera 1983) (7) Mi corazó ta sufril mucho. “My heart is really suffering.” (Caballero, La juega de gallos o el negro bozal in Álvarez-Nazario 1974: 388)
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This construction, unlikely to have arisen spontaneously from Africans’ unstructured attempts at speaking Spanish, is also found in Spanish- and Portugueselexified creoles such as Palenquero, Papiamentu, Philippine Creole Spanish, and Portuguese-based creoles in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, India, Sri Lanka, Macau, and Malaysia (Lipski 2004b). Although found in several 19th-century Afro-Cuban texts, the combination ta + verb in infinitive is considerably less frequent than the archetypical bozal pattern of partially or incorrectly conjugated verb forms (Lipski 1986b, 1987, 1991a, 1992, 2007), with the third person singular being particularly prevalent. This fact notwithstanding, the presence of ta constructions has been regarded as evidence of a creolized bozal Caribbean creole.6 There are no indications of ta + invariant verb constructions in other Afro-Caribbean speech communities (e.g. in Panama, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, or coastal Colombia), which suggests that the confinement to Cuba may be the result of specific language contact environments that arose during the sugar plantation boom. This possibility will be explored in a following section. 4.3 Was there once a Spanish-lexified creole in the Caribbean? The presence of creole-like features in texts purporting to represent the speech of Africans and Afro-descendents in Cuba and Puerto Rico has been extrapolated to the conclusion that Spanish once creolized in the Caribbean and perhaps elsewhere in Latin America, at least among the population of African origin, and that this creole gradually percolated up to encompass all local varieties of Spanish. The historical demographic data, however, do not support this conclusion. Conditions favoring the formation of a stable creole never existed in the Spanish Caribbean, except perhaps for at most a single generation in late 19th-century Cuba, and only on the largest sugar-producing estates. Other possible scenarios include maroon communities, (e.g. the emergence of Palenquero in the Afro-Colombian maroon village of San Basilio de Palenque) and possibly in remote mining regions. The total number of speakers of any such (semi-)creolized Spanish would therefore have been quite small, limited to a few geographical regions, and not likely to influence speech elsewhere in Cuba. In other Caribbean Spanish speech communities, there was even less likelihood that a creole-like variety coalesced and subsequently influenced larger segments of the population. Nor were there sufficient concentrations of (African-born) speakers of non-creole bozal Spanish to have permanently affected the linguistic performance of native speakers.
5
Caribbean Spanish in contact with Afro-Atlantic creole languages
The remaining potential African contribution in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean involves the post-slavery arrival (especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico) of contingents of workers speaking already established creole languages, as well as the extended contact between Haitian creole and Dominican Spanish. In the case of Cuba and to a lesser extent Puerto Rico, two interlocking events served
Spanish in the Caribbean 103 as catalysts for the introduction of Caribbean creole languages. The first was the Haitian revolution which began in 1791, destroying the world’s largest source of sugar production, and attracting Cuban and some Puerto Rican planters in response to the skyrocketing price of sugar. The other event was the growth of European anti-slavery movements, with the frequent interception of slaving ships significantly choking off the supply of captive labor. The eventual abolition of African slavery in the second half of the 19th century resulted in a demand for contracted free workers from surrounding islands, nearly all of whom were Afro descendants speaking one or more Caribbean creole languages that share significant structural similarities with one another. Over the past century Cuba has attracted thousands of workers from throughout the Caribbean, who emigrated voluntarily and individually. The largest contingent came from Haiti and settled in eastern Cuba. This immigration began in the latter part of the 19th century, but in the early 20th century the Cuban and Haitian governments entered into accords which guaranteed a steady annual supply of Haitian contract laborers. Another major source of early 20th-century labor for eastern Cuba came from Jamaica, although the Jamaican contingents in Cuba were never as numerous as in the Dominican Republic (Alvarez Estévez 1988; Serviat 1986). Smaller numbers of laborers came from the Virgin Islands and from the lesser Antilles, including Papiamentu speakers from Curaçao. In Puerto Rico, the scarcity of plantation agriculture resulted in fewer postslavery arrivals from other Caribbean islands, but in the 19th century Papiamentuspeaking laborers from Curaçao left their imprint on Puerto Rican folklore and possibly on the few literary attestations of Afro-Hispanic speech on the island (Álvarez-Nazario 1970, 1972). A few speakers of French-lexified creoles from the lesser Antilles were also documented in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as creole English speakers from the neighboring Virgin Islands, but only Papiamentu appears to be registered on the island’s linguistic profile. In contemporary Puerto Rico, the population of creole-speaking West Indians is quite large, especially in Santurce, and many speak second language varieties of Spanish that hark back to the days of African arrivals, but with little or no impact on Puerto Rican Spanish. In Panama, the construction of the Panama Canal brought thousands of West Indian workers to the country (e.g. Conniff 1985; Lewis 1980; Westerman 1951), most speaking English-lexified creoles with smaller numbers speaking French creoles and maintaining creole songs and traditions for more than a generation (Marrero Lobinot 1984). Although there is no evidence suggesting that these languages have affected Panamanian Spanish nationwide, in the Caribbean port of Colón the high concentration of (creole) English-speaking residents, some of whom are still second language speakers of Spanish, may have left subtle traces on local Spanish usage (e.g. Tejeira 1964: 17), perhaps including the traditionally non-Panamanian use of non-inverted questions of the type ¿Qué tú quieres? Creole-speaking laborers in the Spanish Caribbean were in the right place at the right time (beginning in the second half of the 19th century) to interact with the last remaining African second language Spanish speakers, especially in Cuba, and an analysis of key bozal literary imitations provides suggestive examples of possible
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Afro-Caribbean creole contributions. In the absence of demographic and linguistic documentation, the traces of Caribbean creoles in vestigial Afro-Caribbean Spanish are potentially indistinguishable from structures to be expected if the Spanish dialect itself had passed through a creole stage. As for permanent influences on regional varieties of natively spoken Spanish, only in the Dominican Republic can a plausible case be made, given the long-standing interface with Haitian creole spanning at least two centuries. The other creole language that plausibly affected Caribbean Spanish more generally is Papiamentu. The following sections provide more data on these contact environments. 5.1
Haitian creole in the Dominican Republic (and Cuba)
French-lexified kreyòl has been an important source of linguistic material in the Dominican Republic, starting with the Haitian occupation of the future Dominican Republic from 1822 to 1844 and continuing to the present. Dominican literature and folklore provides many examples of the use of Haitian creole in fluid combinations with Spanish (Larrazábal 1975; Lipski 1994, 2004a). These texts suggest a creoloid form of Spanish that in the absence of knowledge of the Haitian contact could be taken for a vestige of an earlier purely Afro-Hispanic creole. Haitian words have become part of the core vocabulary in several Dominican villages (for example, nu for nosotros ‘we’; cf. Rodríguez 1975). The Spanish currently spoken by Haitians along the Dominican-Haitian border has been studied extensively by Díaz (2002); Ortiz López (2010); and Figueroa Arencibia and Ourdy (2004) describe Haitian creole-Spanish contacts in eastern Cuba, where the linguistic results are similar (also Martínez Gordo 1983). In the absence of information that the texts were produced by speakers of Haitian creole, some of the configurations could be interpreted as remnants of an earlier stable and consistent bozal Spanish, although none shows the rather fanciful language mixing found in some literary imitations. These traits include defective subject-verb agreement, gravitating toward the use of third person singular forms for all instances, inconsistent nounadjective agreement, sporadic use of son as invariable copula (tu son gente grande), also found in Afro-Cuban Spanish and the speech of the Negros Congos of Panama (Lipski 2011). Some Dominican-Haitian examples (from Ortiz López 2010): (8) Yo habla en dominicano con ella, alguna vez yo habla en haitiano. “I speak in Dominican (Spanish) with her, sometimes I talk in Haitian (creole).” (9) Si lo do muchachi chiquit etai cría (se crían) con dominicano no va hablá en haitiano. “If the two little kids are raised with Dominicans they won’t speak Haitian.” (10) Sí (el creol) son la lengua de nusutro. “Yes it (creole) is our language.”
Spanish in the Caribbean 105 (11) El valón son teniente (en) La Habana. “The boy is a lieutenant in Havana.” Examples of double negation have also been recorded among elderly Haitians living in rural eastern Cuba by Ortiz López (1998, 1999a, 1999b, 2001); similar constructions may be heard among Haitians living in the Dominican Republic: (12) Cuando yo iba venil acá mi familia no quiere venil acá no. “When I was going to come here my family did not want to come here.” (13) La hija mía no entiende nada lo que yo hablo con él. No entiende no. “My daughter doesn’t understand anything that I say to her. She doesn’t understand.” The Cuban/Haitian data, when combined with the frequent use of double negation in rural regions of the Dominican Republic, suggest that a Haitian influence may be at least partially responsible. Haitian creole is noted for use of a sort of double negation, combining the usual preverbal pa with phrase-final -non (ending affirmative sentences with -wi is an even more common strategy, as is sentence-final affirmative sí in Dominican Spanish (Bullock 2009; Toribio 2002). The jury is still out on long-term Haitian influences on Dominican Spanish, but the circumstantial evidence continues to accumulate. 5.2 Afro-creole influence in Cuba: Papiamentu The other significant Caribbean creole language imprint on 19th-century AfroCuban and Afro-Puerto Rican speech, reflected in literary and folkloric texts, was Papiamentu, the Ibero-Romance-lexified creole spoken on the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba. Bosch (1836) mentioned encountering Papiamentu speakers in Cienfuegos (also Hesseling 1933; Granda 1973). Cubans, who were already accustomed to the second language Spanish of African-born speakers, were less aware of Papiamentu as a distinct language, at times referring to it as español arañado ‘scratched-up Spanish’ (cf. Bachiller 1883: 102). Papiamentu speakers were also found in 19th-century Puerto Rico, and their language is mentioned in some texts. A poem published in Ponce in 1830 and written in what is clearly a partially Hispanized Papiamentu is attributed to the mulatos holandeses que residían en el Sur, “Dutch mulattos living in the south” (Álvarez-Nazario 1970, 1972, 1974). The language of these genti di Corsó was familiar enough to observers in early 19th-century Puerto Rico as to require no translation. Alonso (1849), in the classic work El gíbaro, also referred to the apparently unremarkable presence of criollos de Curazao in 19th-century Puerto Rico. Girón (n.d.) and Vicente Rosalía (1992) also mention Papiamentu speakers. Several 19th-century Afro-Cuban texts reveal words and constructions that are best explained as coming from Papiamentu, and in several of the texts a
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number of Papiamentu-like features cluster, which suggests a more than casual brush with Papiamentu speakers. Features found in Afro-Cuban texts which suggest a Papiamentu contribution appear in examples 15–21. Yijo/a with nonetymological initial [j] appears in Afro-Cuban texts from the 19th century, but is unknown in bozal texts from other areas. It corresponds to Papiamentu genderinvariant yiu. (15) Yo ta compañá to yijo. “I will accompany you, son.” (Cabrera 1970) Agüe and ahuoy ‘today’ appear in Afro-Cuban texts and archaic Afro-Cuban language (Ortiz López 1998), and correspond to Papiamentu awe (awé is also found in the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero). (16) Agüe memo, ñamito. “Right now, master.” (Santa Cruz 1908) Ahuora ‘now’ with intrusive [w] in Afro-Cuban texts corresponds to Papiamentu awor. (17) ¿Y qué yo dicí ahuora, eh? “What should I say now?” (Benítez 1930) In Papiamentu, the first-person singular subject pronoun is (a)mi, with the longer form being emphatic or contrastive. Since the 16th century, no form of bozal Spanish has used (a)mí as subject pronoun (cf. Lipski 1991b, 1996), but this form reappears in a few 19th-century Afro-Cuban texts. (18) Mí no sabe, ñamito . . . Mi no sabe ná. “I don’t know, master; I don’t know anything.” (Santa Cruz 1908) The previously mentioned combinations based on ta + invariant infinitivederived verbal stem and confined to a rather small subset of Afro-Cuban texts may also reflect Papiamentu influence, even if spontaneous phonetic erosion of Spanish estar had already begun. In Papiamentu, ta behaves identically to the Afro-Hispanic bozal examples: mi ta papia “I speak/am speaking.” In many of the Afro-Cuban texts, the verbs that combine with ta would not be used with estar in Spanish, but with which ta might appear in equivalent Papiamentu utterances: (19) ¿Po que tú no ta queré a mí? “Why don’t you like me?” (Caballero 1852, Puerto Rico; Álvarez-Nazario 1974: 288)
Spanish in the Caribbean 107 (20) Siempre ta regalá dinero a mí. “(He) always gives me money.” (Caballero, La juega de gallos o el negro bozal, 1852, Puerto Rico; Álvarez-Nazario 1974: 384) (21) Sí, páe, yo ta robá un gaína jabá. “Yes father, I robbed a speckled hen.” (Cabrera 1976, Cuba) Forms such as yijo, ahuora, agüe, subject pronouns (a)mí and ne and invariant verb constructions based on ta are not attested for any other variety of Spanish, Afro-Caribbean or otherwise. These items appear only in a handful of 19th-century texts from areas where the presence of laborers from Curaçao is independently attested. While not constituting definitive proof of Papiamentu traces in bozal Spanish imitations, the co-occurrence of these items in written texts, the residual presence in contemporary Afro-Cuban Spanish, and known historical demographic facts provide a Papiamentu presence in 19th-century Afro-Caribbean Spanish. 5.3
Other creole-to-Spanish contacts in the Caribbean
Aside from Papiamentu in Cuba and Puerto Rico and Haitian creole in the Dominican Republic, creole English continues to be spoken in the Dominican Republic, a consequence of the importation of workers from the British West Indies, especially Barbados and Jamaica (e.g. Bryan 1980; Martínez 1999). Creole English-speaking West Indians’ approximations to Spanish are essentially the same as the Spanish of Haitians, and may therefore have made subtle inroads into the Dominican linguistic landscape. The pidginized Spanish of West Indians in the Dominican Republic has occasionally been imitated in literature, for example Marrero Aristy (1939): (22) Mi no vuelva. “I’m not coming back.” (23) Aquí yo pielda mi tiempo. Mijol que allá in Barbados no trabaja, pero no mi mata. Yo me vuelva pa no vuelva. “I’m wasting my time here. It was better in Barbados; there were no jobs but I didn’t kill myself. I’m going back and will never return.” Mosco Puello (1975): (24) ¡Mi no comprendi, Chencho! “I don’t understand, Chencho.” Ferreras (1982): (25) Tú no voy a salir del escuelo si no tengo tú necesidad de hacerlo. “I’m not going to leave school if I don’t have to.”
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(26) Estoy coge el caña yo tenga picá pa aumentá el suya, si soy así yo no voy seguí ser compañero suyo, conio. Tú soy muy sabio. “I’m cutting sugarcane I have to cut more to make up for yours, I’m not going to keep on being your friend, damn it; you’re very clever.” Real-life examples confirm the essential veracity of these literary imitations. From the documentary film My footsteps in Baraguá (Rolando 1996) come the following phrases produced by elderly West Indians living in Cuba for many decades: (27) Desde que yo viene de Jamaica, yo me quedó [. . .] en Oriente, ahí [yo] aprendió [. . .] Yo me gutaba má epañol que inglé [. . . mi mamá] me llevá pa Jamaica otra vé. “Since I came from Jamaica, I stayed [. . .] in the east, there I learned [. . .] I like Spanish better than English [. . . my mother] takes me to Jamaica again.” From the author’s recordings of West Indians who had spent most of their lives in Panama come examples like: (28) Yo vive aquí en Panamá. Viene aquí 1936. Yo lo mezcla con los panameños y mis hijas nació aquí como panameño [. . .] yo tiene una yija aquí que trabaja conmigo. “I live here in Panama; I came in 1936; I mixed with Panamanians and my daughters were born here as Panamanians; I have a daughter here who works with me.” (29) Yo tiene muchos años que no fue a Jamaica. “I haven’t been to Jamaica for many years.” (30) Yo trabajá para el canal y mi mamá trabajá pa la familia. “I work for the Canal and my mother takes care of the family.” Similar examples of creole English-influenced second language Spanish were collected by Zimmer (2011) among West Indian descendants along the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, for example: (31) No todos ir a la iglesia, las varones es más duro para ir a iglesia. (2011: 248) “Not everyone goes to church; it’s hard for the men to go to church.” (32) Ahorita yo va morir y de(j)a todo, entonces yo pinte porque yo le gusta ver cosas bonitas. Yo le gusta ver mi casa bien bonita. (2011: 248) “I’m going to die and leave everything, so I painted it because I like to see pretty things, I like to see my house all fixed up.”
Spanish in the Caribbean 109 (33) Dos de la noche cuando ellos terminar cargar [. . .] Cuando ellos dejar y se fue, una mal tiempo viene y lleva el puente. (2011: 253) “They finished loading at two in the morning, when they left a storm came up and washed out the bridge.” Examples of creole English speakers in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands who are heritage speakers of Dominican Spanish are: (34) Que nojotro habla feo. (D’Arpa 2015: 134) “We speak bad.” (35) A vece cuan yo ando co[ŋ] con mi tíos, o y ello ta[ŋ] tien[ɛ]: el hradio. (D’Arpa 2015: 140) “Sometimes when I go with my aunt and uncle and they have the radio on.” Both the real and the literary examples demonstrate the usual traits of second language Spanish, including imperfect subject-verb and adjective-noun agreement, with gravitation to the most unmarked forms in Spanish (third person singular verb forms, only occasionally infinitives, and masculine singular adjectives). Given the ongoing presence of creole English speakers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, further contact-induced micro-variation is not out of the question.
6
Conclusions
Although the Caribbean Spanish dialect cluster most directly bears the imprint of southern Spain and especially the Canary Islands, the many regional and social variants also reflect numerous contact situations past and present. In addition to the ongoing contact with English- and French-lexified creole languages and more recently Chinese immigration (e.g. Figueroa Arencibia 2009a; Orfiris 1998), Caribbean Spanish continues to evolve through internal migratory patterns, which bring together non-contiguous regional dialects with more subtle consequences. The largest demographic shifts resulted from the Cuban exodus beginning after the 1959 revolution, and which transplanted thousands of Cubans to Puerto Rico, Panama, and Venezuela. Currently Dominican migration to Puerto Rico is massive, and the economic collapse of Venezuela and the ensuing political and social turmoil is propelling many Venezuelans to seek opportunities in other Caribbean nations. Finally, migratory oscillations between the Spanish Caribbean and the United States further diversifies the linguistic profile of the region, as returnees bring not only elements of English but also awareness of other Spanish varieties. By all indications, the Spanish language in the Caribbean will continue its contact-nuanced trajectory, expanding local and regional diversity while maintaining a coherent macro-linguistic identity. The future may bring different players and hopefully less painful sociodemographic
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conditions, but the combination of complex and highly penetrable geographic configurations, political, and economic fluctuations, and continued inward and outward migratory trends will maintain the mosaic-in-a-frame pattern of Caribbean Spanish.
Glossary Afro-descendent: a term referring to a person of African heritage, but born outside of Africa. bozal: a term applied to African-born second language speakers of Spanish. This word, originally referring to untamed animals, referred to captive Africans’ intransigence as well as limited linguistic proficiency. creole language: a restructured language formed in a language contact environment in which the normal trans-generational transmission of language was interrupted. Creoles are full languages with native speakers. first-person singular: verb referring to yo ‘I.’ Haitian creole (Kreyòl): a French-lexified creole language spoken by Haitians in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora, including in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the United States. infinitive: the basic dictionary form of a verb; in Spanish infinitives end in -ar, -er, and -ir. non-inverted questions: in Spanish these are questions such as ¿Qué tú quieres? “What do you want?,” in which the subject (tú) is not moved after the verb, as usually occurs in Spanish (¿Qué quieres tú?). Papiamentu: a creole language with approximately equal proportions of Spanish-lexified and Portuguese-lexified elements, spoken on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. pidgin: a reduced contact language spoken non-natively for purposes of immediate communication, typically among individuals who do not share mutually intelligible languages. third-person singular: verb referring to él, ella o usted “he, she, it, formal you.” velarization (of /n/): pronunciation of word-final /n/ as [ŋ], the last sound in English thing, long.
Notes 1 E.g. Álvarez (1991, 1992, 1999); Díaz Campos (2008); Lorenzino (1993); Martínez Gordo (1982); Megenney (1993); Pelly (1985); and Perl (1982, 1985, 1987, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1989c, 1989d). 2 E.g. Lipski (1986a, 1986c, 1993, 1998a, 1998b, 2001, 2005). 3 Benavides (1985); Jiménez Sabater (1975); Megenney (1990); and Schwegler (1996a). 4 Schwegler (1991a); Granda (1977); and Ruíz (2000). 5 Schwegler (1996a); but cf. Sessarego (2017) and the response by Schwegler (forthcoming). 6 E.g. Granda (1968, 1971); Megenney (1984a, 1984b, 1985b, 1986); Naro (1978); Otheguy (1973); Perl (1987, 1989a, 1989b, 1989d); Schwegler (1993); Yacou (1977); and Ziegler (1976).
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———. “Estado de conservación y documentación de las lenguas de América Central pertenecientes a las agrupaciones jicaque, lenca, misumalpa, chibchense y chocó.” Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica 37.1 (2012): 135–195. D’Arpa, Daniel Sebastian. “Dominican Spanish in contact with St. Thomas English creole: a sociolinguistic study of speech variation on St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands.” PhD. diss., Temple University, Philadelphia, 2015. Díaz, Norma. “La diáspora haitiana: desde la periferia hasta la periferia.” In La Romania americana: procesos lingüísticos en situaciones de contacto, edited by N. Díaz, 279–325. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2002. Díaz Campos, Manuel and J. Clancy Clements. “A creole origin for Barlovento Spanish? A linguistic and sociohistorical inquiry.” Language in Society 37 (2008): 351–383. Dieck, Marianne. La negación en palenquero. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2000. Ferreras, Ramón A. Negros (media isla: 4). Santo Domingo: Nordeste, 1982. Figueroa Arencibia, Vicente J. “Tratamiento de /-s/ en el español no estándar de la región suroriental cubana: un rasgo semicriollo.” In Estudios de lingüística hispanoamericana, brasileña y criolla, edited by M. Perl and K. Portl, 97–147. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2002. ———. “La pluralidad nominal en el español no estándar de la región suroriental cubana: influencia africana y haitiana.” Islas 148 (2006): 65–95. ———. “Aproximación al estudio del español chino hablado en Cuba.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 6.1.11 (2008): 185–204. ———. “Los contactos lingüísticos y el español no estándar de Santiago de Cuba.” Onomázein 2.20 (2009a): 87–143. ———. “El español en Cuba: los contactos lingüísticos y la variación geosociolectal de/-ɾ/ y/-1.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 7.2 (2009b): 115–144. ———. “Desambiguadores empleados para indicar la pluralidad nominal en el español no estándar de la región suroriental cubana: influencia africana y haitiana.” Revista de Estudos da Linguagem 12.1 (2012): 53–88. ——— and P. J. Ourdy. “Contacto lingüístico español-kreyol en una comunidad cubanohaitiana de Santiago de Cuba.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 2.4 (2004): 41–55. Fuentes Guerra, Jesús and Armin Schwegler. Lengua y ritos del Palo Monte Mayombe: dioses cubanos y sus fuentes africanas. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2005. García González, Jorge and G. Valdés Acosta. “Restos de lenguas bantúes en la región central de Cuba.” Islas 59 (1978): 3–49. Girón, Socorro. El tema del negro en la literatura puertorriqueña. Unpublished manuscript, Colección Puertorriqueña, University of Puerto Rico Library, Río Piedras, n.d. Granda, Germán de. “La tipología criolla de dos hablas del área lingüística hispánica.” Thesaurus 23 (1968): 193–205. ———. “Un temprano testimonio sobre las hablas ‘criollas‘ en Africa y América.” Thesaurus 25 (1970): 1–11. ———. “Algunos datos sobre la pervivencia del ‘criollo‘ en Cuba.” Boletín de la Real Academia Española 51 (1971): 481–491. ———. “Papiamento en Hispanoamérica (siglos XVII-XIX).” Thesaurus 28 (1973): 1–13. ———. Estudios sobre un área dialectal hispanoamericana de población negra: las tierras bajas occidentales de Colombia. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1977. ———. “Acerca de la génesis de un rasgo sintáctico del español antillano (La no transposición del sujeto pronominal en oraciones interrogativas).” Revista de Filología Española 72.3.4 (1992): 541–554.
Spanish in the Caribbean 113 Hesseling, Dirk C. “Papiamento en Negerhollands.” Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Taalen Letterkunde 52 (1933): 265–288. Jiménez Sabater, Max. Más datos sobre el español en la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: Intec, 1975. Larrazábal Blanco, Carlos. Los negros y la esclavitud en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: Julio Postigo e Hijos, 1975. Lewis, Lancelot. The West Indian in Panama: black labor in Panama 1850–1914. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980. Lipski, John M. “Convergence and divergence in bozal Spanish.” Pidgin and Creole Languages 1 (1986a): 171–203. ———. “Sobre la construcción ta + infinitivo en el español bozal.” Lingüística Española Actual 8 (1986b): 73–92. ———. “The construction ta + infinitive in Caribbean bozal Spanish.” Romance Philology 40 (1987): 431–450. ———. The language of the isleños: vestigial Spanish in Louisiana. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990a. ———. “Trinidad Spanish: implications for Afro-Hispanic language.” Nieuwe WestIndische Gids 62 (1990b): 7–26. ———. “Origen y evolución de la partícula ta en los criollos afrohispánicos.” Papia 1.2 (1991a): 16–41. ———. “On the emergence of (a)mí as subject in Afro-Iberian pidgins and creoles.” In Linguistic studies in medieval Spanish, edited by R. Harris-Northall and T. Cravens, 39–61. Madison: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1991b. ———. “Origin and development of ta in Afro-Hispanic creoles.” In Atlantic meets Pacific: a global view of pidginization and creolization, edited by F. Byrne and J. Holm, 217–231. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992. ———. “On the non-creole basis for Afro-Caribbean Spanish.” Research Paper No. 24, University of New Mexico Latin American Institute, 1993. ———. “A new perspective on Afro-Dominican Spanish: the Haitian contribution.” Research Paper No. 26, University of New Mexico Latin American Institute, 1994. ———. “Contactos de criollos en el Caribe hispánico: contribuciones al español bozal.” América Negra 11 (1996): 31–60. ———. “Latin American Spanish: creolization and the African connection.” Publications of the Afro-Latin American Research Association 2 (1998a): 54–78. ———. “El español bozal.” In América negra: panorámica actual de los estudios lingüísticos sobre variedades criollas y afrohispanas, edited by M. Perl and A. Schwegler, 293–327. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1998b. ———. “From bozal to boricua: implications of Afro Puerto Rican language in literature.” Hispania 82 (2001): 850–859. ———. “Nuevas perspectivas sobre el español afrodominicano.” In Pensamiento lingüístico sobre el Caribe insular hispánica, edited by S. Valdés Bernal, 505–552. Santo Domingo: Academia de Ciencias de la República Dominicana, 2004a. ———. “Lenguas criollas de base hispana.” Lexis 28 (2004b): 461–508. ———. A history of Afro-Hispanic language: five centuries and five continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. “La formación de la partícula ta en los criollos de base afroibérica: nuevas vías de evolución.” In La Romania en interacción: entre historia, contacto y política, edited by J. Morgenthaler and M. Schrader-Kniffki, 443–455. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2007.
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———. El habla de los CONGOS de Panamá en el contexto de la lingüística afrohispánica. Panamá: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 2011. Lorenzino, Gerardo. “Algunos rasgos semicriollos en el español popular dominicano.” Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica 9 (1993): 109–124. MacCurdy, Raymond. The Spanish Dialect of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1950. Marín Esquivel, Rebeca. “Un acercamiento al español escrito por un guaymí costarricense.” In IV Congreso Internacional de Lingüística Aplicada. Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, 2013. www.literatura.una.ac.cr/doc-phoca/category/38-ponencias?download= 87:marin-un acercamiento-al-espanol-escrito Marrero Aristy, Ramón. Over. Ciudad Trujillo: La Opinión, 1939. Marrero Lobinot, Francisco. Nuestros ancestros de las Antillas francesas: interpretaciones históricas y sociológicas de una minoría étnica nacional. Panamá: n.p., 1984. Martínez, Samuel. “From hidden hand to heavy hand: sugar, the state, and migrant labor in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” Latin American Research Review 34 (1999): 57–84. Martínez Gordo, Isabel. “Lengua bozal como lengua criolla: un problema lingüístico.” Santiago 46 (1982): 47–53. ———. “Sobre la hipótesis de un patois cubano.” Anuario L/L 14 (1983): 160–169. Megenney, William. “El elemento subsahárico en el léxico costeño de Colombia.” Revista Española de Lingüística 6 (1976): 405–451. ———. “El elemento subsahárico en el léxico venezolano.” Revista Española de Lingüística 9 (1979): 405–451. ———. “Sub-Saharan influences in the lexicon of Puerto Rico.” Orbis 30 (1981): 214–260. ———. “Elementos subsaháricos en el español dominicano.” In El español del Caribe, edited by O. Alba, 183–201. Santiago de los Caballeros: U. Católica Madre y Maestra, 1982. ———. “Common words of African origin used in Latin America.” Hispania 66 (1983): 1–10. ———. “Traces of Portuguese in three Caribbean creoles: evidence in support of the monogenetic theory.” Hispanic Linguistics 1 (1984a): 177–189. ———. “El habla bozal cubana ¿lenguaje criollo o adquisición imperfecta?” La Torre 33.123 (1984b): 109–139. ———. “Rasgos criollos en algunos villancicos negroides de Puebla, México.” Anuario de Letras 23 (1985a): 161–202. ———. “La influencia criollo-portuguesa en el español caribeño.” Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica 1 (1985b): 157–180. ———. El palenquero: un lenguaje post-criollo colombiano. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1986. ———. Africa en Santo Domingo: la herencia lingüística. Santo Domingo: Museo Hombre Dominicano, 1990. ———. “Elementos criollo-portugueses en el español dominicano.” Montalbán 25 (1993): 149–171. Méndez Rivera, Nelson J. “La expresión del pronombre personal sujeto en español de wayuunaikihablantes: frecuencia y factores condicionantes.” In Comunicación, Cognición, Cibernétic@: Actas 31 Congreso de AESLA, edited by A. Díaz Galán, et al., 348–358. Madrid: Elsevier, 2014. Moodie, Sylvia. “The Spanish language as spoken in Trinidad.” Caribbean Studies 13.1 (1973): 88–94.
Spanish in the Caribbean 115 ———. “El español de Trinidad: variabilidad y desgaste articulatorio.” Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica 2 (1986): 177–196. ———. “Morphophonemic illformedness in an obsolescent dialect: a case study of Trinidad Spanish.” Orbis 34 (1987): 215–230. Moscoso Puello, Francisco. Cañas y bueyes. Santo Domingo: Asociación Serie 23, 1975. Naro, Anthony. “A study on the origins of pidginization.” Language 45 (1978): 314–347. Núñez Cedeño, Rafael, Rolando Alum, and Roberto Nopal. “The Afro-Hispanic Abakuá: a study of linguistic pidginization.” Orbis 31 (1982): 263–284. Oquendo, Luis. “La pragmática del code-switching: guajiro-español.” Lingua Americana 4.7 (2000): 25–51. Orfiris, Cruz and Neira Mejía. “Estudio sociolingüístico del español que hablan los chinos en Panamá.” PhD diss., Universidad de Panamá, Panama City, 1998. Ortiz López, Luis. Huellas etno-sociolingüísticas bozales y afrocubanas. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1998. ———. “El español haitiano en Cuba y su relación con el habla bozal.” In Lenguas criollos de base lexical española y portuguesa, edited by K. Zimmermann, 177–203. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1999a. ———. “La variante hispánica haitianizada en Cuba: otro rostro del contacto lingüístico en el Caribe.” In Estudios de lingüística hispánica: homenaje a María Vaquera, edited by A. Morales, 428–456. Río Piedras: Universidad Puerto Rico, 1999b. ———. “El sistema verbal del español haitiano en Cuba: implicaciones para las lenguas en contacto en el Caribe.” Southwest Journal of Linguistics 20.2 (2001): 175–192. ———. El español y el criollo haitiano: contacto lingüístico y adquisición de segunda lengua. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2010. Otheguy, Ricardo. “The Spanish Caribbean: a creole perspective.” In New ways of analyzing variation in English, edited by C. J. Bailey and R. Shuy, 323–339. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1973. Pelly Medina, María E. “Acerca de los estudios sobre un criollo cubano.” Anuario L/L 16 (1985): 326–333. Perl, Matthias. “Creole morphosyntax in the Cuban habla bozal.” Studii şi Cercetări Lingvistice 5 (1982): 424–433. ———. “El fenómeno de descriollización del habla bozal y el lenguaje coloquial de la variante cubana del español.” Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica 1 (1985): 191–202. ———. “Habla bozal, eine spanisch-basierte Kreolsprache?” In Beiträge zur Afrolusitanistik und Kreolistik, edited by M. Perl, 1–17. Berlin: Akademie der Wisschschaften der DDR, 1987. ———. “Rasgos poscriollos léxicos en el lenguaje coloquial cubano.” Thesaurus 43 (1988): 47–64. ———. “El habla bozal ¿una lengua criolla de base española?” Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica 5 (1989a): 205–220. ———. “Algunos resultados de la comparación de fenómenos morfosintácticos del habla bozal, de la linguagem dos musseques, del palenquero, y de lenguas criollas de base portuguesa.” In Estudios sobre español de América y lingüística afroamericana, 368– 380. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1989b. ———. “Zur Präsenz des kreolisierten Portugiesisch in der Karibik-ein Beitrag zur Dialektologie des karibischen Spanisch.” Beiträge zur romanischen Philologie 28 (1989c): 131–148.
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———. “Zur Morphosyntax der Habla Bozal.” In Vielfalt der Kontakte: Beiträge zum 5. Essener Kolloquium übe Grammatikalisierung: Natürlichkeit und Systemökonomie, edited by N. Boretzky, et al., 81–94. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer, 1989d. Ramírez Cruz, Héctor. “Genre and number discordance in the contact between languages.” Forma y Función 22.2 (2009): 165–195. Rodríguez Demorizi, Emilio. Lengua y folklore de Santo Domingo. Santiago de los Caballeros: Universidad Católica, 1975. Rolando, Gloria and C. King. My footsteps in Baraguá/Hijos de Baraguá. La Habana: Mundo Latino, 1996. Rosario, Rubén del. La lengua de Puerto Rico. San Juan: Biblioteca Autores Puertorriqueños, 1956. Ruíz García, Marta. “El español popular del Chocó: evidencia de una reestructuración parcial.” PhD diss., University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2000. Sánchez Avendaño, Carlos. “Ticos auténticos que no hablan español. Ideologías sobre las lenguas minoritarias y la diversidad lingüística de Costa Rica.” Revista de Filología y Lingüística de la Universidad de Costa Rica 39.2 (2014): 191–218. ———. “El español hablado por los Malecus: Caracterización general y reconocimiento como variedad particular.” Káñina 40.1 (2016): 103–125. Sandoval, Alonso de. De instauranda aethiopum salute; el mundo de la esclavitud negra en América. Bogotá: Impresa Nacional de Publicaciones, facsimile edition of 1627 text, 1956. Santa Cruz, María de. Historias campesinas. Havana: Imprenta y Librería de M. Ricoy, 1908. Schwegler, Armin. “El español del Chocó.” América Negra 2 (1991a): 85–119. ———. “Negation in Palenquero: synchrony.” Pidgin and Creole Languages 6 (1991b): 165–214. ———. “Rasgos (afro-) portuguese en el criollo del palenque de San Basilio (Colombia).” In A José Pérez Vidal, edited by C. Díaz Alayón, 667–696. La Laguna: Litografía A. Romero, 1993. ———. “La doble negación dominicana y la génesis del español caribeño.” Hispanic Linguistics 8 (1996a): 247–315. ———. Chi ma nkongo: lengua y rito ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia). Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1996b. ———. “Monogenesis revisited: the Spanish perspective.” In Creole genesis, attitudes and discourse, edited by J. Rickford and S. Romaine, 235–262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999. ———. “On the (sensational) survival of Kikongo in 20th-century Cuba.” Pidgin and Creole Languages 15.1 (2000): 159–164. ———. “On the (African) origins of Palenquero subject pronouns.” Diachronica 19.2 (2002): 273–332. ———. “Palenque(ro): the search for its African substrate.” In Creoles, their substrates, and language typology, edited by C. Lefebvre, 225–249. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. ———. “Sobre el origen africano de la lengua criolla de Palenque (Colombia).” In Palenque Colombia: oralidad, identidad y resistencia, Palenque Colombia: oralidad, identidad y resistencia, edited by G. Maglia and A. Schwegler, 107–179. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2012.
Spanish in the Caribbean 117 ———. “Truth reset: pragmatics in Palenquero negation.” In The Iberian challenge: creole languages beyond the plantation setting, edited by A. Schwegler, J. McWhorter, and L. Ströbel, 231–268. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2016. ———. “On the controversial origins of Spanish and Portuguese postverbal negation: case closed?” Lingua (forthcoming). Serviat, Pedro. El problema negro en Cuba y su solución definitiva. Havana: Política, 1986. Sessarego, Sandro. “Chocó Spanish double negation and the genesis of the Afro-Hispanic dialects of the Americas.” Diachronica 34.2 (2017): 219–252. Teixeira de Sousa, Lílian. “Three types of negation in Brazilian Portuguese.” Lingua 159 (2015): 27–46. Tejeira, Gil Blas. El habla del panameño. Panamá: Ministerio de Educación, Dirección Nacional de Cultura, 1964. Toribio, A. Jacqueline. “Focus on clefts in Dominican Spanish.” In Structure, meaning, and acquisition in Spanish, edited by J. Lee, K. Geeslin, and J. C. Clements, 130–146. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 2002. Valdés Bernal, Sergio. “Las lenguas africanas y el español coloquial de Cuba.” Santiago 31 (1978): 81–107. ———. Las lenguas del Africa subsaharana y el español de Cuba. La Habana: Academia, 1987. Vicente Rosalía, René. “La represión de expresiones culturales afrocurazoleñas a través de la ley y por la Iglesia Católica durante y después de la esclavitud.” Encuentro 1 (1992): 48–42. Vinuenza, María Elena. Presencia arará en la música folclórica de Matanzas. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1989. Westerman, George. The West Indian worker on the Canal Zone. Panama: n.p., 1951. Yacou, Alain. “A propos du parler bossal, langue créole de Cuba.” Espace Créole 2 (1977): 73–92. Ziegler, Douglas V. “A preliminary study of Afro-Cuban creole.” MA thesis, University of Rochester, New York, 1976. Zimmer, Tanja. El español hablado por los afrocostarricenses: estudio lingüístico sociolingüístico. Kassel: Kassel University Press, 2011.
Further readings Clements, Joseph C. The linguistic legacy of Spanish and Portuguese: colonial expansion and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Holm, John. An introduction to pidgins and creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hualde, Jose Ignacio, Antxón Olarrea, and E. O’Rourke, eds. Handbook of Hispanic linguistics. New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. Lipski, John. Latin American Spanish. London: Longmans, 1996. McWhorter, John. The missing Spanish creoles: recovering the birth of plantation contact languages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Penny, Ralph. Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Stewart, Miranda. The Spanish language today. London: Routledge, 1999.
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Topics for discussion 1
The English language in large U.S. coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles has and continues to be shaped by immigration. Investigate the similarities and differences between the evolution of U.S. English in these cities and Spanish in the Caribbean region.
2
In U.S. cities such as New York and Miami, speakers of different Caribbean Spanish dialects (Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan, coastal Colombian) interact with one another. Search for patterns of accommodation or dialect mixing, for example in advertising, newspapers, local radio and television programs, and social media.
3
The English-lexified creole language Gullah is spoken in coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, and many examples of Gullah culture and language (sometimes referred to as Geechee) are available on the Internet. Investigate the relationship between Gullah and varieties of U.S. English, including African American vernacular English, and compare these findings with the proposed creole language contacts in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.
4
The only Spanish-derived creole language in the Americas is spoken in the Afro-Colombian village of San Basilio de Palenque. This language, known as Palenquero (or lengua palenquera) is spoken alongside Spanish. Using the key words lengua palenquera and Palenquero language with Internet resources, investigate the characteristics of the Palenquero language and its relationship to Spanish.
5
Using the key words palo mayombe, Afro-Cuban, and santería with Internet resources, study the words and expressions associated with Afro-Cuban and other Afro-Caribbean religious practices, and the extent to which they are known and used in non-ceremonial contexts.
6
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola Historical and sociolinguistic perspectives Luis A. Ortiz López
On the Dominican-Haitian border, Spanish is in contact with Haitian creole. This chapter presents an account of the sociohistorical context of contact on the Dominican-Haitian border to introduce the reader to the main linguistic and sociolinguistic factors that define this long-standing contact. This chapter is divided into four sections: the first offers a sociohistorical account of the DominicanHaitian contact; the second describes some of the linguistic consequences of the contact; the third reviews the attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes generated by the contact, and the fourth presents some understudied conclusions about this ethnosociolinguistic scenario.
1
Introduction
Linguistic contact between groups of different ethnic origins can lead to contrasting psycho-sociolinguistic behaviors that are conditioned by internal, social, and psycholinguistic factors (Hickey 2013; Thomason 2015). Universal principles, the typology and genetic classification of the languages, and the acquisition process on the one hand, and the intensity and frequency of the contact, the level of prestige, and other historical and sociodemographic factors on the other, determine the output or linguistic performance of the members of these communities. Therefore, language contact can lead to a multitude of diverse and complex phenomena, such as societies with varying degrees of bilingualism or multilingualism and even the creation of new languages known as pidgins and creoles (Holm 2004, 2013; Hymes 1971; Romaine 1988; Thomason 1988). Such varieties include Haitian creole, Papiamento, and Palenquero, as well as semi-creole or partially restructured varieties characterized by the presence of creole features mixed in with the non-creole features of the language of the dominant class (Holm 2004), such as the “Portuguese popular do Brasil,” Afro-Caribbean Spanish, and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) (Green 1997; Holm 2004; De Mello et al. 1999; Ortiz López 1998, 1999a, 1999b). Regarding the Hispanic world, the study of language contact has focused either on the encounter between Spanish and indigenous languages or between Spanish and English. Afro-Hispanic contact has been overlooked. Nevertheless, the pioneering studies of Álvarez Nazario (1972) and Granda (1994) have awoken
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interest in studying Afro-Hispanic contact around the world, mainly in the Americas and within the Caribbean (Lipski 2005; Megenney 1999; Ortiz López 1998; Schwegler 1996, 2017; Sessarego 2014). The Caribbean has been the scene of a wide range of linguistic contact between communities of varying degrees of bilingualism due to the constant movement of migrants and transmigrants of different nationalities and ethnicities (Mintz 1996). It is a multilingual landscape where English, French, and Haitian creole are spoken in addition to Spanish, and ethnicity, race, nationalism, and, more recently, transnationalism are intertwined (Duany 2011). This linguistic multiplicity, as well as the factors that have provoked it, are still controversial issues that await objective answers. The presence of creole varieties in the Caribbean has led to various theoretical positions about the genesis of the Hispanic dialects spoken in the area such as those from the Dominican-Haitian border (Ortiz López 2014).
2
Dominican-Haitian contact: making the invisible visible
The Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic and the French creole-speaking Haiti share the same island, Hispaniola (see Map 6.1), whose geographical limits have been demarcated somewhat arbitrarily by those who have possessed political and military control of the island at one time or another. These two nations have lived culturally and linguistically intertwined as the result of the events that have shaped their history, population, and social, economic, cultural, and ideological development (Castor 1987: 15). On the border, or la Raya as it is known to the locals, two nations coexist, with two distinct cultures and typologically different languages. On the eastern side of the border, one can hear Dominican Spanish, and on the western side, Haitian creole. Dominican Spanish is considered an Afro-Caribbean variety of Latin American Spanish. It is regarded as a particularly innovative variety of Spanish because of the following characteristics: word/syllable-final consonant loss (/s/, /r/, /n/, and /d/), SVO word order, redundant subject pronouns, impersonal pronouns, explicit pronouns when referencing inanimate objects, questions without the inversion of the SV structure, infinitive verbs used with patent subjects, and double negation, among many other linguistic features (Ortiz López 2010). Haitian creole, on the other hand, is a language that shares official status with the French language and is the native language or L1 of almost the entire population of Haiti. It is a radical creole (Bickerton 1984) of French lexical base with a strong African substratum from the Nigerian-Congolese languages, especially Bantu and the Kwa (both Gbe and Akan) language families (Singler 1996). The coexistence between these languages began with the French occupation of Haiti in 1659 and the change from an economy based on tobacco and cotton to one based on sugar plantations, which prompted the importation of African slaves, the ancestors of today’s Haitians, to work in the fields and sugar mills. According to Singler (1996: 215), this scenario was characterized in its beginnings by a fundamentally multilingual and mutually unintelligible society with limited access to the language of the superstratum or dominant class (French), which is a very favorable condition
Adapted from public geography map
Map 6.1 Map of Hispaniola
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for the emergence of a lingua franca, a new pidgin (Hymes 1971; Foley 1988). Between the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, that pidgin would become a creole, the L1 of the next generation of Haitians. As all creole languages, it is the result of the ethnic and linguistic hybridization of a multilingual community (Whinnom 1971) in which speakers of different languages are forced to communicate with each other and with a smaller class of speakers that rule over them (Thomason 1988). The Haitian creole is isolated, like other creole languages (Mufwene 1986, 1990). The history of the Dominican-Haitian border began in the early 17th century. Competing claims and settlements by the French led to the western portion of the island being ceded to France, which named it Saint-Domingue, through two border treaties: Ryswick (1697) and the Treaty of Aranjuez (1777) (Moya 1992: 18). The border limits underwent various changes during the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), and as a result, the government of Jean-Pierre Boyer reestablished the border that had been originally demarcated in the Treaty of Aranjuez (1777). By this time, Hispaniola was a territory composed of two nations with profound historical and sociological differences. However, after the Haitian revolution (1804), the French set out to conquer the east side of the island and took over the capital, establishing one single French nation in Hispaniola. After the signing of the Treaty of Paris (1814), the eastern part of the island was ceded to the Spanish government once more. That lasted until 1822, when the then president of Haiti, Jean-Pierre Boyer, reconquered the eastern part of the island and ruled over it for 22 years. During this time, the Haitian militia led by Boyer subjected the Dominican Republic to a series of political and cultural measures that the Dominican population resisted (Moya 1978). Together with other political and sociocultural conflicts, these measures contributed to the growth of an anti-Haitian sentiment. In 1844, a group of Dominican separatists led by Juan Pablo Duarte, known as the father of the Dominican Independence, rebelled against the Haitian rule, and proclaimed the independence of the eastern part of the island by converting the Dominican territory into a free and independent state. With the emergence of the new republic, the demarcation of the border limits once again began to be a source of hostilities and armed conflicts. The new authorities of the Dominican Republic did not recognize the border established in the Treaty of Aranjuez in their constitution, and they demanded the return of the lands that had been occupied by the Haitians. With a desire to still maintain control over the island, as stated in the First Article of the Haitian Constitution, the Haitian army invaded the Dominican Republic in 1849. Nevertheless, this invasion was unsuccessful at unifying the island. There were subsequent attempts to take possession of the eastern territory in 1851, 1855, and 1856, but all were unsuccessful. By 1858, the Dominican Republic had recovered some of the occupied lands, among them San Rafael, San Miguel, Hincha, and Las Cahobas (Ghasmann 1998: 27). During these territorial disputes, most of the border region was deserted by the Dominican population due to the constant confrontations. Haitians moved to these unpopulated areas known
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 123 collectively as la Raya, strengthening their cultural and commercial ties to the territory and bringing with them the voodoo religion and their creole language. 2.1
Migration in Hispaniola
From 1952 to 1985, only Haitian laborers who worked in the cutting of sugarcane, and whose labor was essential for the development of the local economy, were allowed to enter the Dominican Republic through an official permit. This measure resulted in the isolation of the Haitian population for more than three decades. After the fall of Rafael Trujillo’s regime (1961), the migration of Haitians to the border region intensified and maintains a steady flow to this day. It is enough to approach urban and rural areas near the border, such as Pedernales, Independencia, Elías Piña, and Dajabón, to confirm the continuous migration of Haitians to the Dominican Republic (Silié 2002). Agricultural and domestic workers, small merchants, men, women, and children arrive to the Dominican territory in search of a life that allows them to survive and send money to their relatives. Haitian immigration to the Dominican Republic has been a historical phenomenon that has taken place since the establishment of both nations (Dore Cabral 1995: 126). Such immigration has been associated with the workers in the sugar plantations and, more recently, with construction work and other agricultural tasks. However, border migration, in addition to preceding the immigration of braceros and agricultural workers, is characterized by its diversity, as it brings migrants who enter and leave daily, immigrants who live legally, immigrants who live illegally during the agricultural seasons, and even immigrants who remain in the Dominican Republic until the government legalizes their stay or until the authorities extradite them back to Haiti, only to return a few days later. In recent decades, the continuous flow of immigrants in this region has increased in only one direction: Haitians migrating to the Dominican Republic, mainly driven by the prolonged political and economic crisis in Haiti (Wooding and Moseley-Williams 2004: 14). As consequence, these immigrants and their descendants are immersed in a process of radical change, since the transformation and redefinition of their identity is an inevitable phenomenon, which often comes accompanied by multiple sociocultural frictions. There are no precise statistics on Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic due to the difficulty of surveying a population that is constantly moving. In general, Haitians migrate because of their socioeconomic status. Unemployment, poverty, and illiteracy characterize these immigrants. By the mid-1980s, the Haitian population available to work in the Dominican Republic was around 250,000 (Yunén 1985), a figure that might have excluded undocumented immigrants. The lack of reliable information has led some to propose that there are as many as 400,000 Haitian immigrants in the Dominican Republic (Vega 1993: 35). However, the exact number of Haitian immigrants will never be known due to the economic necessity of a porous border. In addition to la Raya, the bateyes and urban areas are also places of great Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic. This study is strictly focused on the Dominican-Haitian border.1 However, it recognizes that the Dominican-Haitian contact in the Dominican Republic is
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very diverse. Within this context, there are those that present greater geographic and social stability, called topostatic by Thun and Elizaincín (2000: 82). They are located in the border region, in the Dominican bateyes of sugarcane plantations, and in other areas of agricultural production, places where Haitians and their descendants have established certain socioeconomic links with the land. To some extent, Dominicans recognize their presence and stability. Nevertheless, throughout la Raya, the migratory flow is continuous. Several generations of Haitians born in the Dominican Republic also move back to the land of their ancestors and have to face the standard language of the region. Other immigrants have greater mobility or topodynamics, as is the case for urban immigrants who move geographically and socially, but who are not homogenous either (Díaz 2002: 286). Within this group there are domestic employees, art sellers, merchants, and so forth.
3
Haitianized Spanish
In la Raya, two languages are in constant contact with one another: Dominican Spanish and Haitian creole. Generally, the newcomers – in this case, the newly arrived Haitians – are forced to learn the language of the dominant class due to the lack of bilingualism among the Dominican population and their rejection of immigrants and their language. Lexical loans, linguistic transfer, and convergence tend to take place in these types of situations (Klee and Lynch 2009; Matras 2010, 2013; Thomason 1988, 2013; Winford 2003, 2010), although the more typologically different the languages are from one another, the less likely transfers are to occur. Since the two languages are typologically distant, the result of the creole-Spanish contact does not encompass radical transfers (Ortiz López 2010). Dominican Spanish is a marked dialect of Caribbean Spanish (Ortiz López 2014; Toribio 2001). Haitian creole, although it shares an official status with the French language in Haiti, is the native language or L1 of almost the entire Haitian population.2 Mixed varieties like the Haitianized Spanish and the Dominicanized creole began to develop from the historic contact between these two ethnolinguistic groups.3 Haitianized Spanish is a legitimate language variety that appears in literary works and folkloric texts (Jansen 2015). These works of literature capture not only the linguistic features of the language, but also the ideologies that highlight the ethno-racial differences between Haitians and Dominicans. This variety of Spanish incorporates many of the features of a fossilized interlanguage (Selinker 1972) or an incomplete acquisition of the L2, and is spoken mainly among those who have been marginalized due to the ethnic rejection they have faced upon arrival. Many Haitians arrive as adults, establish themselves in rural areas populated mostly by fellow Haitians, and preserve a linguistic loyalty toward their native language. The linguistic contact between Dominican Spanish and Haitian creole is evidenced mainly at the phonetic and morphosyntactic level. At the phonetic level, Haitianized Spanish shows many features of popular Dominican Spanish such as the elision of /s/, the resyllabification processes (e.g. depué, ditinto, poka casa, lo sijo, lo sombre, lo sojo), the lateralization of /r/ in coda position (e.g. hasel, trabajal, semblal), the lateralization of /r/ and /R/ in initial position (e.g. lopa,
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 125 balato, pelehil), the conversion of /r/ to /d/ (e.g. nara, kara, pelacito), the semivocalization of /r/ under the influence of Cibeño Dominican Spanish (e.g. taide, kaita, aima), among other phenomena (Bullock and Toribio 2006). Many of these phonetic processes respond both to the influence of Spanish as the L2 and of Haitian creole as the L1, as documented in the Haitianized Spanish of Eastern Cuba (Figueroa Arencibia 1999; Ortiz López 1999a, 2010) and Cuban bozal speech (Álvarez Nazario 1974; Lipski 2005; Ortiz López 1998). Regarding the morphosyntactic level, Haitian speech is characterized by the absence of gender and number agreement (e.g. el mano, la idioma, la muchacho), the reduction of the verbal system with verb forms in the infinitive (see examples 1–4) and gerund, unmarked third person and conjugated verbs that do not respond to regular verbal inflection, explicit pronouns, null clitics, and by the unmarked third person clitic (lo). As both languages construct their verbal paradigms differently, processes of reduction, overgeneralization, markedness reduction, and even linguistic convergence that produce outcomes that differ from the target language are to be expected. In the following examples, informants are identified as M/F (male/female), with age in years and origin. (1) Cómo tú preguntar (preguntas) cualquier cosa que tú te venga a la mente. (M19, Haitian) “How do you ask anything that comes to mind.” (2) Aquí no ha(y) vida, no vale uno bucal (que busque uno) trabajo. (M36, Haitian) “There is no life here, it is not worth looking for work.” (3) Y para (por) un vehículo así, ¿(en) cuánto uno alquilal? (lo alquila) (F15, Arrayan, bilingual) “And for a vehicle like that, how much does one rent it for?” (4) Sembrar (siembro) lah habichuera y trabajo en sembra (de) guineo y café. Y sube (subo) aquí cada rato; no sube (subo) todo, todo el tiempo. (M30, Dominican-Haitian) “I plant the beans and work in the sowing of bananas and coffee. And I go up here every now and then; I do not go up all, all the time.” The infinitive tends to replace a conjugated verb, particularly in simple clauses. These uses of the infinitive (examples 1–4) have been documented in the bozal speech reproduced in works of literature which were intended to represent the Spanish spoken by Africans (Lipski 1999, 2005; Ortiz López 1998), as well as L2 speakers of Spanish (Ortiz López 2001a, 2001b, 2010). In Haitianized Spanish, a preference toward simplified constructions is also documented with the use of -ndo, with and without the auxiliary verb, as in examples 5–6.
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(5) E: ¿Y [habla] en créole o en español? “And do you speak in creole or Spanish?” I: Hablar créol, y tonse yo Ø hablando con el otro en ehpañol. (M55, Haitian) “I speak in creole, and so/then I speak with the other in Spanish.” (6) E: ¿Hay una pelea allí, verdad? “There is a fight over there, right?” I: Sí, una pelea. “Yes, a fight.” I: ¿Por qué [pelean]? “Why do they fight?” E: Doh mujeres Ø peleando. (M30, Haitian) “Two women fighting.” These constructions in -ndo are overgeneralized toward the context of the present (+habitual/+continuous), as in examples 7–17, and even in contexts of +unreality. (7) E: ¿Y cómo se vive? “And how is life?” I: Yo mira, yo jallando la manera cómo ilme de aquí pa’ Puelto Rico. (M, Arrayan) “Look, I am searching for a way to get out of here and get to Puerto Rico.” (8) E: ¿Y hay dominicanos? “Are there any Dominicans?” I: Sí, vendiendo y comprando. (M, Haitian) “Yes, selling and buying.” (9) E: ¿Quiéneh son toda la gente? “Who are all these people?” I: Eh . . . loh haitianoh comprando poquito a poquito. (M, DominicanHaitian) “The Haitians buying little by little.” (10) I: Yo viviendo en Haití, comprando como cosas y . . . (M25, Haitian) “I live in Haiti, buying things.” (11) I: Yo andando todos los días. Yo andando el lunes, el martes, el sábado. Todos los días, todos los días andando, andando para buscarme la vida. (M, Haitian) “Trying to get by every day. Always moving, on Monday, Tuesday, Saturday. Every day, every day coping, trying to survive in life.” (12) E: ¿Qué se hace aquí en la frontera? “What is there to do here at the border?” I: Aquí trabajando [+imperfective (habitual present)]. (M25, Haitian) “Here working.”
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 127 (13) E: Pero, ¿qué hacen loh haitianoh acá, al lado de acá? ¿A qué se dedican? “But what do Haitians do here, on this side? What do they do for a living?” I: Trabajando. “Working.” E: ¿En que (trabajan)? “In what?” I: Bueno, ello se dedican trabajando la agricultura, eh . . . y haciendo cosa también en trabajando en la casas que ehtán haciendo. (M21, Dominican-Haitian) “Well, they work, the agriculture, doing things at work, in the houses that they are building.” (14) E: ¿Y quiéneh compran? “And who buys?” I: Eh . . . Loh haitianoh comprando poquito a poquito. “The Haitians buying little by little.” (15) E: ¿Y qué hacen los jóvenes más grandes? “And what do the young people who are older do?” I: ¿Jóvenes como yo? Yo lo que paso en mi familia tener dinero así pero no eh para mí. Yo viviendo en Haití, comprando como cosas y andar vendiendo y consigue dinero para comprar ropa. (M40, Haitian) “Young people like me? I, what happened is that my family has money but it is not for me. I live in Haiti, buying things and selling them to get money to buy clothes.” (16) E: ¿En el mercado? “In the market?” I: Vendiendo teni porque tiene cuatro hijo para mantener los hijo. (M40, Haitian) “I sell shoes because I have four sons to maintain.” (17) E: Y . . . ¿No hay gente mala por el camino? “And . . . Aren’t there bad people along the way?” I: Ay sí, matan a gente también . . . Los hombres andando con un machete a sí. (F39, Haitian) “Oh yes, they kill people too . . . The men walking with a machete.” This notion of the progressive tense in Haitianized Spanish seems to correspond to a non-perfective aspectual meaning in Haitian creole and to an incomplete acquisition of the temporal morphosyntax of Spanish. These speakers tend to give greater importance to aspectual notions during the acquisition process, as seen in Caribbean Spanish and in most of the creole languages. In this way, the -ndo form becomes the universal way to mark the L2 acquisition of the +imperfective aspect in dynamic verbs (and in some cases of stative verbs).
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In Haitianized Spanish, the progressive tense has extended its use to the habitual present, by means of periphrastic forms with an auxiliary verb (preferably with estar) + -ndo to mark the notion of +habitual/+continuous/+progressive, to express an activity that is performed habitually or that is in development, as has been observed in other bilingual and even monolingual scenarios (Torres Cacoullos 2000). This tendency toward the generalization of analytical structures (Thomason 1988; SilvaCorvalán 1994, 2017) seems to be expanding to other tenses (including the future, and even the conditional) encompassing in the progressive tense a value of aspectuality (+unreal/+neutral). These speakers of Haitianized Spanish acquire the functional semantic parameter of the morpheme -ndo before the formal marker. Although it tends to be present in contact situations and in the speech of L2 speakers, Caribbean Spanish shows a preference toward the progressive tense and the infinitive in subordinate clauses (Aponte Alequín and Ortiz López 2008; Cortés 2005; González Rivera 2005). Intensified contact with L1 Spanish speakers on the part of later generations, Dominican-Haitians and Arayanos (those born in the Dominican territory), generates a greater tendency toward the use of the unmarked third person, instead of the conjugated verb, as in examples 18–21. (18) Yo habla en dominicano con ella, alguna vez yo habla en haitiano. Si lo do muchachi chiquit etai cría (se crían) con dominicano no va hablá en haitiano. (M60, Haitian) “I speak in Dominican with her, sometimes I speak in Haitian. If the two young children are raised with Dominicans they will not speak in Haitian.” (19) Tiene (tengo) trentisei año. (M36, Haitian) “I am 36 years old.” (20) Yo no sabe poque se me quemó el nacimiento (el acta de nacimiento). No tengo otro poque ya cuando que yo, ya que yo lo hace señorito yo me coge pa Santo Domingo con mi esposo y cuando viene me jaya mi mamá y mi papá se mueren. (F55, Haitian) “I do not know why my birth certificate was burned. I do not have another one because when I moved to Santo Domingo with my husband, my mom and dad died.” (21) Yo casi no come carne. (F55, Haitian) “I almost don’t eat meat.” A drastic case of lack of verbal agreement is represented by the use of the 3rd person plural copula for singular entities: (22) Ete son familia mía. (M60, Haitian) “They are family.”
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 129 (23) La libra son a die peso. (M45, Haitian) “The pound costs 10 pesos.” These constructions are similar to those observed in the Haitianized Spanish of Cuba: (24) Sí (el creol) son la lengua de nusutro. (Ortiz López 2001b: 181) “Yes, creole is our language.” (25) El valón son teniente (en) La Habana. (Ortiz López 2001b: 182) “The man is a lieutenant in Havana.” For Lipski (2005), this feature has its origin in the sã, são variant, a consequence of Afrolusitane contact. In the case of the Haitian population, both in Cuba and on the Dominican-Haitian border, this trait is more than a vestige of a pidgin or creole of Afrolusitane origin; it represents an extended generalization of the third person that has been, in many cases, already grammaticalized among those who have only learned an interlanguage. The generalization of the third person to other verbal persons is distinct, in our opinion, from the phonological reduction of /s/ and /n/ that produces the simplification of verb structures corresponding to the second and third person in the nonstandard Dominican and Caribbean variety, and which also characterizes Haitianized Spanish and Cuban Spanish, as in examples 26–29: (26) A vece no echa uno (nos echan a uno) y no jaya ni la comía poque a vece viene lo dueño no que mañana te pago, que pasa’o, y así se va (el tiempo). (M36, Haitian) “Sometimes they throw us out and one can’t find anything, even food, because sometimes the owners goes like ‘no, tomorrow I will pay you,’ ‘no, the day after tomorrow’ and so the time goes by.” (27) En Haití hay las habicheras ehtá barata. (M30, Haitian) “In Haiti there are less expensive beans.” (28) Lo único que tiene ello que son medio baratero. (M36, Haitian) “The only thing they have going for them is that they are kind of less expensive.” (29) Después llega cuarto y se lo paga. (F45, Haitian) “Then s/he comes and s/he pays it.” These less marked features are present during the L2 acquisition process, and the pidginization and creolization of languages (Muysken 1984; Thomason 2015). They have been documented in varying degrees in the Afro-Hispanic and bozal
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literature (Lipski 2005; Ortiz López 1998), in the Haitianized Spanish of Cuba (Ortiz López 2001a, 2001b), and in other contexts of contact with Spanish as the L2 (Niño-Murcia 1995; Ortiz López 1999a, 2000; Díaz 2002; Clements 2003; Domínguez 2003; Escobar 2011). In the case of Haitianized Spanish, these features represent a reduction of the functional categories and a preference toward the less marked structures. The semantic categories are imposed on the formal particles. It is important to recognize that the verbal parameter of Haitian creole, lacking morphology, could be contributing to the fossilization of the acquisition of the infinitive, the gerund, and the third person, as in example 30: (30) Pou non rive nan fèt la nou bezwen you bon tan. “For us to get to the party, we need enough time.” These processes of flexional reduction are reinforced by the linguistic typology of the L1 (that has a fixed SVO order, invariable infinitive structure, and no verbal inflection), by linguistic variables like the semantics of the verb, and certain syntactic resources such as adverbial phrases and the non-pro-drop parameter. The presence of lexical and pronominal subjects favors the less marked verbal structures. Haitianized Spanish follows the fixed SV(O) order with pronouns or explicit subjects in simple, subordinate, and interrogative sentences, independent of the type of reference and pronominal class: (31) Yo gasta (gasté) tres mil pesos de seguro. Yo estaba enferma. Yo asta (gasté) tres mil pesos de seguro . . . Cuando él llegando (él llegó), él no dale (no me dio) ni un chelito a mí, ni un chelito. “I spent 3,000 pesos on health insurance. I was sick. I even spent 3,000 pesos on insurance . . . When he arrived, he did not give me a penny, not a penny.” The Haitianized Spanish speakers more frequently use full pronouns – regardless of the type of reference and of the pronominal class – instead of null pronouns (as in examples 32–33). (32) Ni un chele (dinero), él dale (me dio) a mí. Él viene (vino) de Puerto Rico sí . . . y él no da (me dio) ni un chelito. “Not a penny, he gave me. He came from Puerto Rico, yes . . . and he did not give me a penny.” (33) Yo fui allá a la casa de él. Él estaba preguntando a mí: “¿Cómo tú estás?” “I went there to his house. He was asking me: ‘How are you?’” The syntactic and pragmatic distance between Haitian creole, a non-pro-drop language with a fixed SVO order, and Dominican Spanish, a semi-pro-drop dialect
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 131 with a fairly fixed SVO order (Ortiz López 2009), conditions the handling of subject pronouns in Haitianized Spanish. The pronominal and lexical subjects tend to appear before the verb in the main, subordinate, relative, and interrogative clauses. Finally, Haitianized Spanish follows the pattern of marking the verb with a direct object, mainly a lexical or pronominal atonic (clitic), very similar to Spanish monolingual Dominicans (Ortiz López 2010), although there are traces of null objects and less marked direct objects, like lo, as in examples 34–35. (34) E: Y ¿cómo llega hasta aquí, por burro? “And how does (the merchandise) get here, by donkey?” I: Ø traemos en burro y Ø traemos en vehículo también. Hacemos un viaje. Eso son los únicos trabajos que uno hace. “We bring it by donkey and we bring it by vehicle also. We make a trip. These are the only jobs that one does.” (35) E: ¿Y leh quitan lah cosah? “And they take the things away?” I: Noh Ø quitan. “They take (them) from us.” Haitianized Spanish has correctly acquired the semantic features of the referents that affect the omission or presence of the direct object, despite the typological differences between the two languages. The semantic features of the referents and not the external factors (domain and degree of bilingualism and other social variables) determine the use of the direct or null objects (Ortiz López and Guijarro-Fuentes 2006; Guijarro-Fuentes and Ortiz López 2008), contrary to the results from other language contact scenarios (Yépez 1986; Palacios Alcaine 2000; Paredes 1996). The next section examines micro-sociolinguistic factors on the DominicanHaitian border, looking at speakers as community members and considering their interactions and social networks, both familial and non-familial.
4
Micro-sociolinguistic factors: negotiating identities
On la Raya, as in many other scenarios of ethnolinguistic contact, prejudice, and stereotypes have historically persecuted minority groups. These migrants have been forced to resort to various negotiation strategies to hide the features that identify them as Haitians. In addition to physical characteristics, that are difficult to erase, cultural aspects such as language, religion, eating habits, health status, sexuality, type of clothing, among others, become traits that differentiate Haitians from the majority group, the Dominicans. At the same time, they are very vulnerable traits in the negotiations that take place in transnational scenarios (Mendoza 2014; Zentella 2000). These minority groups are pressured to negotiate their identities, to transform them and even spoil them; ‘spoiled identities’ as Goffman (1963) would say. However, there are few Haitians who break completely from their roots and national identity, as is the case with Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans,
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and Central Americans in the United States; Africans in Spain; and Dominicans and Cubans in Puerto Rico, among others. On the Dominican-Haitian border, the construction of identities and ethnic groups are strongly associated with language and race, as stated by Irvine (1989, 2000) and Urciuoli (1996), among others. Previous studies have only hinted at the sociolinguistic, literary, and political aspects of Dominican-Haitian discourse from the viewpoint of linguistic, racial, and cultural representations (Ortiz López 2015; Jansen 2009, 2015; Valdez 2012, 2015a). The subsequent generations of Haitian diasporas maintain diverse links with their country of origin through individual and collective negotiation strategies that transgress the national borders (Duany 2011: 18). These groups build and reconstruct their multiple identities – often hybrid and bifocal – and imagine their communities across the border, as part of a more continuous, globalized, hybrid, and multilingual world. The continuous practices of exchange and circulation of cultural products (language, music, religion, celebrations, food, clothing, haircuts), social functions, the role that women play in the maintenance of ancestral values and the types of work opportunities that are available, political or cultural activism, academic, and sports activities, the exchange of goods (sending of currency, clothing, food, and articles of all kinds), travel, calls, and frequent connections through new technological channels, directly or indirectly, among many other practices, connect Haitian diasporas with their roots. On the border, Haitians and their descendants are seen as distant strangers instead of migrants or close neighbors (Báez 2001). Hostility and persecution characterize the coexistence between both groups, and there are many testimonies that allude to attempts to ‘de-Haitianize’ the population (36). (36) I: Cuando hay mucha gente coge para, para el monte a fichar gente. “When there are a lot of people, they go to the forest to catch people.” E: ¡Ay Jesús! ¿Los matan? “Jesus! Do they kill them?” I: ¡Ay sí! “Oh yes!” E: ¿A los haitianos? “The Haitians?” I: A los haitianos, sí. “The Haitians, yes.” E: ¿No diga? “You don’t say.” I: Son verdad. Si pregúntale a la gente de aquí. Cuando camino, no camino sola no. (F39, Haitian) “It’s true. Go ask the people from here. When I go out for a walk, I don’t go alone, no.” (37) El tío tuyo, Otilio, andaba en Dajabón recogiendo a los haitianos, para la inmigración. Entonces, el camión ya estaba lleno, en camino para Haití para llevarlos, y cuando iban para la frontera, había un morenito, sentado
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 133 en el parque. Otilio dijo: “déjame ver, déjame chequear a este morenito, a ver.” Se desmontó Otilio y le dijo, “¡ven acá! ¿tú eres dominicano?” Y dice el haitiano: “sí.” Dice Otilio: “Si tú eres dominicano, tú vas a repetir lo que yo te diga.” Dice el haitiano: “tá bien.” Dice Otilio: “repíteme ahí: el Generalísimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, benefactor de la patria nueva, nació en San Cristóbal, el pueblo del perejil.” Dice el haitiano: “mejor dime que me suba a la camioneta.” (Toribio 2001) Your uncle, Otilio, was in Dajabón picking up the Haitians, for immigration. The truck was already full, on the way to take them to Haiti, and when they went to the border there was a morenito [in reference to the Haitian], sitting in the park. Otilio said: “let me see, let me check this morenito, let’s see.” Otilio got down and said: “come here! Are you Dominican?” And the Haitian says: “yes.” Otilio responds: “if you are a Dominican, you will repeat what I tell you.” The Haitian agrees: “ok.” Otilio requests: “repeat: the Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, benefactor of the new nation, was born in San Cristóbal, the town of parsley.” The Haitian says: “better tell me to get on the truck.” (Bullock and Toribio 2006) These people must live their life as outsiders because the state denies them citizenship and access to basic government services such as health and formal education, and essentially keeps them trapped in their illegal status. The Haitian is seen as a racially inferior and disgusting entity. The racialization of the Haitian has served to keep them separate from the Dominican population. In this way, the identity of the Dominican has been constructed in opposition to that of the Haitian, who is seen as an enemy of the Dominican state. This characterization is represented by Balaguer in his work La isla al revés: Haití y el destino dominicano4 (1983). This racial opposition has had sociological effects on the Dominican people. Among Dominicans, a fear of a racial invasion has been generated, and as a reaction, they have internalized the rejection toward the Haitian population (Onè Respe 1994: 17). This opposition between the Dominicans and the Haitians has been encouraged in all domains of their society. It extends to how they perceive language, Spanish versus Haitian creole and Haitianized Spanish (Ortiz López 2010); their judgment of physical features, the mulatismo aindiado or the ‘whiteness’ of the Dominican against the blackness of the Haitian; their treatment of religion, Catholicism versus voodoo; and their worldview, Dominican ‘civilization’ versus Haitian barbarism or savagery (Valdez 2015a, 2015b). Haitians and other immigrants have been in constant negotiation with the Dominicans. They have negotiated a coexistence with the host community as evidenced by their use of language and their cultural identity. As an ethnic group, Haitians and their descendants share and assume a common history, based on their own traits and values; which are reinforced by the constant migration from and toward Haiti.
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(38) I: Son doh razah diferenteh. ¿Uhtéh ve? Porque mire loh morenoh se conocen en lah cejah y en el pelo porque son diferente cabello. Mire el cabello de él y de un dominicano que no son igualeh. Mire ahí hay una diferencia. Si él va [a cruzar] de seguro que le van a pedir su documento. (F16, Arayan) “They are different races, you see? Because look at the dark ones. They are known by their eyebrows and by their hair because they have different hair. Look at his hair and that of a Dominican, they are not the same. Look, there is a difference. If he is going to cross, for sure they will ask for his documents.” (39) E: ¿Y por qué tú crees que ocurre eso, Fuazle? “And why do you think that happens?” I: No sé, porque tai [tal] vez son haitianoh que son negroh, porque son negroh, pero los dominicanoh son negroh también. (M12, Haitian) “I do not know, because maybe they are Haitians who are black, because they are black, but the Dominicans are black too.” The physiological features are the main distinction of this ethnic group. The color of their complexion, their hair, and the shape of their eyebrows make them stand out. Also, their way of dressing and walking, diet, religious beliefs, and, of course, language, be it creole or Haitianized Spanish. These characteristics have become widespread in the Dominican Republic. Many Dominicans, and also Haitians, are convinced that these practices separate them racially and culturally from one another (Derby 1994: 521). See example 40: (40) I: Pero a ella no parece haitiana na’ [refiriéndose a su mamá]. “But, she doesn’t look Haitian.” E: ¿No habla haitiano, tu mamá? “Doesn’t she speak Haitian, your mom?” I: Pero ella eh haitiana, pero no parece haitiana, pero tiene el colol de dominicana. (F13, Haitian) “But she is Haitian, but she doesn’t look Haitian, but she has the color of a Dominican woman.” Among Haitians, there is a widespread self-affirmation of their creole identity, a resistance to assimilation and acculturation, and a refusal to lose their identity and language. In this way, Haitian creole fulfills the social function of ethnic unity among the Haitians and of ethnic separation from the Dominicans (Gumperz 1982). This unity (and separation) is strengthened by both the so-called viejos ‘old,’ migrants who have lived in the Dominican territory for a considerable time, maintaining strong ties with Haiti and resisting cultural and linguistic assimilation, and the congos, newcomers, who barely speak Spanish. The viejos and congos, along with the continuous migration on both sides of la Raya, contribute significantly to the maintenance of Haitian creole and the strength of their ethnic identity. However, Haitians learn Spanish and communicate with others in Haitianized
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 135 Spanish, which represents a subsistence instrument. Many writers have parodied and exaggerated it in their folkloric texts (Jansen 2015). (41) Polque si uno ehtá aquí, obligatolamente hay que sabel el dominicano, polque sino ¿cómo tú, cómo tú puedeh buhcal tu comida? Y si una pelsona te necesita un favol de ti, tú no entiende nada, como quiera obligatolamente hay que hablal. (M25, Haitian) “Because if one is here, you must know Dominican Spanish, because otherwise, how do you, how can you look for food? And if a person needs a favor from you, you do not understand anything, it is necessary that you speak Dominican Spanish.” (42) Cuando una, una persona dominicano quiere compral, yo hablal [hablo] dominicano con él. Y por eso sabe más. Hablo más, oíhte . . . Sí viene mucha gente que vende aquí y sabe hablal, (yo) no sabe hablal bien, pero (sé) un chin. (M19, Haitian). “When a Dominican wants to buy, I speak Dominican Spanish with him. And that’s why I know more. I speak more . . . There are many people who sell here and can speak (Dominican Spanish), (I) cannot speak well, but (I know) a little.” (43) Pero si yo voy a quedal aquí, viviendo en la frontera debo aprendel lah dos (lenguas). (F50+, Haitian) “But if I am going to stay here, living on the border I must learn the two (languages).” The Dominicans of Haitian descent, born in the Dominican Republic, and the Arayanos, show mixed attitudes and identities. These speakers could be thought of as transnational, because they communicate to varying degrees in both languages and live between the two cultures. See examples 44–45: (44) Bueno, me considero arayano, dominico-haitiano polque sé loh doh idiomah. Y que ya dehpuéh que uno ta (está), que uno ehtá en eso, ya no se puede negal. No puede sacal la cabeza. (M19, Arayan) “Well, I consider myself Arayano, Dominican-Haitian, because I know both languages. And that after one is, that one is in that, you cannot deny it. You can’t get it out of your head.” (45) Polque hay palabrah que yo no la sé contehtal ni lah sé pronuncial . . . O sea yo no puedo hablar con una pelsona de allá [Haití] . . . Porque él me va decil máh cosah que yo no lah voy a entendel. Pero con mi mamá máh o menoh yo puedo hablal porque ella me dice eso, y yo le digo mami y qué eh eso. Ella me va a decil eso eh en dominicano. Ahí yo voy a sabel. (F16, Arayan)
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Among Haitians, Dominican-Haitians and Arayanos there is, on the one hand, a strong ethnic identity (Royce 1982: 18) as a result of the values, symbols, and common history that identifies them as a different group; and, on the other, transnationalization due to the hybridity of many of its members. It is a hybrid area of contact in which Haitians, Dominicans, and their descendants are constantly moving, living bifocal lives, building bridges between the two nations, the two cultures, and the two languages. See examples 46–48: (46) Yo soy arayana. A mí no me piden documentos pa subil (fuera de la frontera), pero a mi mamá sí, polque yo soy descendencia de ella, o sea, yo peltenehco aquí como peltenehco allá. (F16, Arayan) “I am arayana. They do not ask me for documents to cross the border, but my mother yes, because I am her descendant, that is, I belong to here as a I belong to there.” (47) Bueno mi papá hablaba con mi mamá, yo lo oía a elloh (en criollo) cuando era chiquitito y ahí ehtabamoh siempre, cosah personaleh, y yo tampoco lo quería hablal haitiano, pero mi papá me obligó y mi mamá también. (M21, Dominican-Haitian) “Well, my dad talked to my mom, I heard him (in Haitian creole) when I was little and there we always were, personal things, I did not want to speak Haitian, but my dad forced me and my mom too.” (48) Poque inclusive yo voy allá (a Haití) y muchoh de elloh me oye hablando como muy diferente al lenguaje de elloh, que yo hablo muy, como mah enredado, y muchah veceh (se han) ha querido confundir conmigo; cree que yo soy eh dominicano y no yo siempre lo digo, no, yo soy haitiano, lo que pasa (es) que yo me crié en el dominicano, y que me pasó. Polque yo tenía el viejo ese, el que me ehtaba criando que cuando venía pol lo menoh un haitianoh o dominicano a mi casa el prohibía que hablara el criollo conmigo, sí. ¿Uhté me entiende? Entonceh eso (era) lo que me hacían casimente (casi siempre) yo tenía que olvidar. Yo vine a comenzó (comenzar) a aprendelo de nuevo, dehpué que ya yo era hombre ya. (M25, Haitian) “Because even I go there (to Haiti) and many of them hear me talking very differently from their language, which I speak much, much more tangled, and many times they mistake me; they believe that I am Dominican and no, I always say it, no, I am Haitian, what happens is that I grew up in the Dominican Republic, and it happened to me. Because I had the old man,
Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 137 the one who was raising me, that when at least one Haitian or Dominican came to my house he forbade them to speak the creole with me, yes. Do you understand me? That (was) what they did to me, I had to forget it. I came to start to learn it again after I was already a grown man.” These speakers put into practice various identity negotiation strategies, among them, the maintenance of the Haitian creole as their L1 and the learning of Haitianized Spanish, which is closer to the creole language in the case of Haitians (but different from the Dominican representations, in which the speech of these groups is exaggerated and parodied; Jansen 2015) and closer to Dominican Spanish in the case of Dominican-Haitians and Arayanos. These linguistic acts become, in turn, acts of identity (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). In this way, these varieties acquire significant value as a group identifier. These speakers assume such linguistic identities as ‘survival strategies’ that operate individually and in-group, many of which respond to the hybrid sociocultural situations that these and other migrants face daily (García 1995; Lisocka 2003).
5
Conclusions
The Haitians and their descendants in the Dominican Republic, especially those on the Dominican border, have historically participated in transnational processes through which they have built and reconstructed their identities and have had to negotiate their languages: Haitian creole, Haitianized Spanish, and Dominican Spanish. In this scenario, where the struggle over the national border still prevails, characterized by the expulsion of the Haitians and their descendants by the authorities and the constant confrontations that are based on the dichotomies that supposedly separate both groups, the identities of the transnationals are largely constructed in a hybrid continuum of ethnic and linguistic features. In the continuous transit between both sides of the border, a bifocal perspective is produced that points out the Haitian with his Haitianized Spanish, his Dominican-Haitian descendants, and those living in la Raya. In short, this language community, with its diverse linguistic components and nuances, encompasses two well-defined ethnic groups due to its historical past, with its close geographical relationship, on the one hand, and the marked rejection and distancing on the part of dominant group, on the other. Between these two extremes, the Dominican-Haitian and the Arayanos demonstrate the sociolinguistic hybridity of these contexts. They live between two cultures that are unequal in power, status, and prestige. They travel and negotiate in two languages: Haitian creole and Haitianized Spanish, in two codes that mark them ethnically and give them their cultural ‘belongingness’ as Fishman (1987) would say. As transnational beings, there is a double loyalty and many shared values. These people continue to speak creole as their group language and defend their culture and traditions. Like any other border context, it brings together a community that allows itself to go beyond the polarities and counter-discourses that have been established by the national state. The Dominican-Haitian border represents a historical transnational context, where the
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ethno-sociolinguistic representations have resulted in the constant development of new linguistic, racial, and cultural identities that are often neglected and rejected by conservative Dominican leaders (Basile 2012; Valdez 2012, 2015a).
Glossary arayanos (or rayanos): from the Raya. They are border inhabitants of mixed Haitian and Dominican ancestry, born in the Dominican Republic and almost always bilingual and bicultural. bateyes: Haitian laborers on the sugar plantations. braceros: migrant agricultural workers in the Caribbean, especially in the sugar plantations. Haitianized Spanish: the Spanish spoken by the fronterizos, Dominicans living along the Haitian border. It has recognizable creoloid features; however, it is distinguished from Haitian creole and Dominican Spanish. Hispaniola: Caribbean island that is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic. la Raya: borderland region between Haiti and Dominican Republic. It is home to various emigrant communities. semi-creole language: a language variety that never fully creolized. topodynamic: term proposed by Thun and Elizaincín to describe linguistic atlas informants with “a recently changed domicile” (2000: 82). topostatic: term proposed by Thun to describe linguistic atlas informants with “constant domicile” (2000: 82). viejos: migrants who have lived in the Dominican Republic for a long time but who have retained strong links with Haiti and have resisted cultural and linguistic assimilation.
Notes 1 Further research is needed to analyze the Dominican bateyes where Haitians and their descendants cohabitate with Dominicans. 2 See Lefebvre (1999) and DeGraff (1999) for more information on Haitian creole. 3 There is very little data available regarding the influence of Spanish on Haitian creole on the Dominican border and in the Dominican bateyes. See Ourdy Pierre (2009). 4 See Onè Respe (1994), San Miguel (1997) and Valdez (2015b).
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Dominican-Haitian contact in Hispaniola 143 Urciuoli, Bonnie. Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race, and class. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996. Valdez, Juan R. “Lengua-frontera: la imagen lingüística de Haití en la República Dominicana.” Katatay 8.10 (2012): 126–131. ———. “Introduction.” Sociology of Language (2015a): 1–14. ———. “Transnacionalidad e identidades lingüísticas en la frontera dominico-haitiana.” Sociology of Language 233 (2015b): 15–39. Vega, Bernardo. “Etnicidad y el futuro de las relaciones domínico-haitianas.” In Estudios Sociales. Santo Domingo: Centro de Estudio Sociales, 1993. Whinnom, Keith. “Linguistic hybridization and the ‘special case’ of pidgins and creoles.” In Pidginization and creolization of languages, edited by D. Hymes, 91–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Winford, Donald. An introduction to contact linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. ———. “Contact and borrowing.” Handbook of language contact, edited by R. Hickey, 170–187. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2010. Wooding, Bridge and Richard Moseley-Williams. Inmigrantes haitianos y dominicanos de ascendencia haitiana en la República Dominicana. Santo Domingo: CID, 2004. Yépez, M. “Direct object clitics in Quiteño Spanish.” MA diss., Cornell University, 1986. Yunén, Rafael E. La Isla como es: hipótesis para su comprobación. Santo Domingo: Amigo del Hogar, 1985. Zentella, Ana. “Puerto Ricans in the US: confronting the linguistic repercussions of colonialism.” In New immigrants in the United States: readings for second language acquisition, edited by S. McKay and S. Wong, 137–164. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Further readings Cohen, Robin and Paola Toninato. The creolization reader. London: Routledge, 2009. Farquharson, Joseph and Bettina Migge, eds. Pidgins and creoles. London: Routledge, 2017. Mufwene, Salikoko. The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ortiz López, Luis A. “Spanish as L2 on the Dominican/Haitian border.” In Globalization and language in the Spanish speaking world, edited by C. Mar Molinero and M. Stuart, 114–135. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Schumann, John. The pidgnization process. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1978.
Topics for discussion 1
What sociocultural demographics characterize the contact situation on the Dominican Republic and Haiti border?
2
What is Haitianized Spanish?
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3
What are the main phonetic and morpho-syntactic features of Haitianized Spanish?
4
How do you explain the morpho-syntactic features of Haitianized Spanish? Through transfers, convergence, cross-linguistic influence, or other processes?
5
What is the value of Spanish, Haitianized Spanish, and Haitian creole on the Dominican Republic/Haiti border?
6
What are the sociolinguistic attitudes and perceptions of Dominicans, Dominican-Haitians, and Haitians on the border?
7
Do the attitudes and perceptions change according to the person’s place on the continuum between Spanish, Haitianized Spanish and Haitian creole?
8
How does this border compare with other contact situations in LatinAmerica, the United States, Europe, Canada, and elsewhere?
7
Languages in contact The case of Colombia Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa
This chapter offers a global overview of language contact in Colombia. Section 1 presents the extent of Colombia’s multilingualism (and concomitant multiculturalism) by concentrating on the peculiar geolinguistic distribution of its almost 65 ethnic languages, the vast majority of which are spoken by indigenous Amerindian people in remote areas of the country. The same section examines how geography, language ecology, social upheaval, and attitudes toward linguistic diversity condition the ways in which these languages interact with Spanish. This overview then culminates in an overarching conclusion, namely that in spite of abundant linguistic diversity and a constitution that now explicitly protects ethnic languages, Colombia continues to be a nation in which Spanish (along with its Hispanic culture) is in essence still a monolith. Functionally, Colombia can thus be said to be a mostly monolingual society within a markedly multilingual country. Section 2 then discusses the unique case of language contact in Palenque, a small bilingual creole/Spanish community near Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Attention will be given to why this Afro-Hispanic enclave suffered from extraordinarily heavy stigmatization for centuries, which led to the endangerment of its language by the second half of the 20th century. The study then recounts how profound societal changes both in and outside of Palenque around the turn of the millennium set in motion a series of unexpected attitudinal shifts that triggered a fervent revitalization of the creole and led UNESCO to declare Palenque a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” in 2005.
1
1.1
Languages in contact in Colombia: multilingualism, multiculturalism, and the dominance of ‘standard’ Spanish Colombia viewed from afar
The world generally views Colombia as a monolingual Spanish-speaking society. This is in spite of the fact that Colombia is home to almost 65 additional languages, including two creoles, Romani, and over 50 Amerindian tongues belonging to a dozen distinct genetic families (10 are language isolates; they have no known relatives). Contrary to the situation in several other Latin American countries
146 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa (e.g. Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru) where Quechua, Aymara, or Guarani are widespread and used daily by millions of speakers (Adelaar and Muysken 2004), Colombia’s ethnic languages are uniformly characterized by low numbers of speakers and small areal distribution. According to Aguirre Light, only three Amerindian languages in Colombia – Wayunaiki, Nasayuwe, and Embera – have more than 50,000 speakers, and none has more than 150,000. The same author notes that while these three languages are not threatened by extinction, they are disadvantaged “by the constant bombardment by Spanish” (2005: 231), which manifests itself in subconscious and very extensive code-switching in daily discourse. Other sources offer somewhat different figures with one recent publication suggesting that Amerindian languages are still used by perhaps 850,000 people in Colombia (cf. Uribe-Jongbloed and Anderson 2014: 218, based on information published by the Ministerio de Cultura 2010b).1 While the national population by time of publication must reach 50 million people (cf. the 2016 census with 48.8 million2), the indigenous population amounts to a mere 5% (DANE 2007: 64). The largest cohesive Amerindian language community, the Wayuu, speakers of the aforementioned Wayunaiki (estimated by Girón 2010 to have 236,590 speakers), at best accounts for 0.5% of the nation’s population. The remainder of Colombia’s indigenous ethnic languages all have very small numbers of speakers. Most of these small groups live in the Orinoquía and Amazonian regions in the eastern portion of the country (for an overview of these and other endangered languages, see Ministerio de Cultura 2010a, 2010b). In the Amazonian Vaupés region alone there are 23 small communities, each with its own local language. These external factors naturally condition the ways in which Colombia’s ethnic languages interact with Spanish, thus making language contact a far more marginal and decidedly less public phenomenon than in some other Hispanic countries. A direct result of this situation can be seen in any major metropolitan area of the country, where billboards and advertisements are universally in Spanish, with some also featuring text in English as a sign of Colombia’s growing integration into global cultural and economic markets. One can further appreciate Colombia’s special position as a country with only very limited language contact situations by noting that in all major metropolitan areas ethnic languages are kept from public view, so much so that international visitors to Colombian cities may well conclude that Spanish monolingualism is ubiquitous, and multiculturalism limited at best. 1.2
Colombia viewed from within
Within Colombia, the public view differs substantially from the aforementioned more global appraisal of Colombia as a monolingual country. Today, Colombians are very much aware that their nation harbors an extensive assortment of ethnic languages. However, this public awareness is rather qualitatively inconsequential in that the vast majority of the country’s citizens have no significant understanding of the nature and ecology of Colombia’s linguistic diversity. None of Colombia’s ethnic languages reaches in any substantial way into the
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daily lives of the monolingual Spanish population, which contributes to a public psyche that generally views them as an integral yet ‘exotic,’ ‘curious,’ and little understood part of their so-called patrimonio inmaterial colombiano ‘national intangible heritage.’ As explained below, the aforementioned state of affairs has its roots in at least three rather different circumstances, one geographic, one historical-attitudinal, and one educational. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt that today the vast majority of Colombians live in a world where monolingualism is the norm, and interaction with languages other than English (the L2 favored by younger generations) is the rare exception – a circumstance to which the main media sources (TV, radio, and more recently, the Internet) contribute significantly (cf. Arango et al. 2009).3 In short, while Colombia is unquestionably a multilingual country, it is also a markedly monolingual society, one in which almost everyone has native command of Spanish, and said language functions as the sole public and official national voice. Not surprisingly, Colombia’s urban society is also less multicultural than might be expected from a country with so many native languages within its borders. 1.3
Geography, language ecology, social upheaval, and attitudes toward linguistic diversity
As shown by Map 7.1, Colombia is traversed on the north-south axis by three high mountain ranges that have historically limited travels and population movement. This, in tandem with other factors, contributed to the isolation and fragmentation of Colombian Spanish into various dialects (Flórez 1961; Montes Giraldo 1982, 1985, 2000). Then, as now, a bus journey from Bogotá to Cartagena de Indias (located on the northern Caribbean coast) typically took some 24 hours at best. This circumstance, along with deep-seated sociocultural attitudes, explains why even just a few decades ago the vast majority of Costeños rarely visited – and much less settled – in what was then perceived “the cold and far-off capital in the Andes.” A notable feature of Colombia is that its population is not evenly distributed across its vast territory. As Maps 7.2 and 7.3b illustrate, most of Colombia’s inhabitants live in the mountainous highlands in or near the capital city of Bogotá, or on the northern coastline where Cartagena and Barranquilla are situated (the similarly large cities of Cali and Medellin are located more than 400 km to the east of Bogotá, in between the Cordillera Oriental and the Cordillera Central). This distribution of population centers in or around the mountainous regions in the center and northern coastal plains contrasts sharply with that of the western and very large eastern sections of the country – the fringe areas – where most of Colombia’s ethnic languages are spoken. As shown in Map 7.1, the southern and eastern portion occupies about half of Colombia’s overall territory, and forms part of the Amazonian Basin. It features sparsely inhabited tropical rainforest, and inland tropical plains inhabited by more than half of Colombia’s indigenous tribes (Map 7.3a). Finally, the westernmost coastal
Map 7.1 Colombia with its three mountain ranges and wide llanos ‘plains’ to the east Public geography map of Colombia
Map 7.2 Colombia’s population density in 2000 Public geography map
Map 7.3a Linguistic diversity of Colombia Adapted from public geography map
Map 7.3a was produced by the Centro Colombiano de Estudios de Lenguas Aborígenes – CCELA, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. The map is reproduced in Aguirrre Light (2005: 230–231). To help readers contextualize the map, the location of Bogotá has been added here. Readers will note that, as explained in the main body of this article, ethnic groups mostly inhabit the fringe areas to the east (Amazonian Basin) or west (Pacific Lowlands), and along Colombia’s southern border with Ecuador and Peru, where no major urban centers are located within several hundred kilometers (see Map 7.3b).
Map 7.3b Major urban centers Adapted from public geography map
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areas and their immediately adjacent inland vicinity (from Panama down to Ecuador) contains the Pacific Lowlands, a region characterized by unusually dense rain forests. Geographically isolated, this region also contains several Amerindian ethnic groups (Map 7.3a), as well as black and mulatto populations that, even when living in close proximity with each other, have historically avoided mixing socially (personal observation, fieldtrip by Schwegler in 1990 and co-author’s fieldwork between 2006 and 2015; see also Schwegler 1991; Sharp 1976; Whitten 1974; Whittington 1972). To fully appreciate Colombia’s current situation of language contact and the contemporary attitudes toward it, one must keep in mind that this observed geographic isolationism persisted until relatively recently, that is, well into the second half of the 20th century, when more regular air travel eventually began to interconnect geographically marginal areas with Bogotá and other major urban centers. At the same time, Colombia’s internal drug-related Violencia ‘armed conflict’ triggered significant population movements from economically disadvantaged fringe areas such as the Pacific Lowlands and the Amazonian Basin, which forced an estimated five million people from their homes between 1985 and 2012. In some localities, these events altered the language ecology rather drastically. Thus, Bogotá’s white/mestizo population began to witness the massive arrival of Afro-Colombians (mostly from the Pacific Lowlands) into the Andean Highlands, thereby bringing them into direct contact with ethnic groups and their rural Spanish dialects with which they previously had no such mutual exposure. A comparison of Map 7.2 (population density) with Map 7.3a (linguistic diversity) will reveal the geographically marginal existence of most ethnic languages within the national boundaries, away from urban centers, and away from the capital. 1.4
Colombia’s language diversity and attitudes toward it
As explained earlier, Colombia has over 65 ethnic languages. This impressive mosaic of mostly Amerindian languages has, however, not led to a situation of intensive interethnic contact among the various languages, as most exist either in isolation from each other or are in contact with Colombian communities that are monolingual (Spanish). Also, until most recently, many of the indigenous Amerindian groups were simply unaware of each other’s existence. This is especially true, for instance, of groups living in isolated pockets of rain forests in the Pacific Lowlands, which, as shown by our earlier geolinguistic comments, are separated from the Amazonian tribes of eastern Colombia by a wide swath of Spanish monolingualism extending from the Cordillera Oriental all the way into the Andean highlands. The situation for Colombia’s two creole languages is somewhat different: the Spanish-based Palenquero creole has historically been spoken in a single village of about 4,000 people – that is, in San Basilio de Palenque (also known as simply ‘Palenque,’ shown in Map 7.4) – where Spanish-Palenquero bilingualism has
152 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa
Map 7.4 Location of Palenque Adapted from public geography map
reigned for over 300 years. As such, Palenque is a mini-island of sorts, one that until the turn of this millennium was rarely visited by outsiders (Palenqueros did, however, always entertain extensive contacts with the outside world by visiting Cartagena de Indias or nearby outlying communities).
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The second creole too is an ‘island language,’ albeit literally so: spoken by around 10,000 people, San Andrés-Providencia creole (Bartens 2013) is native to the islands of San Andrés and Providencia (owned by Colombia since 1928). It is the lexically English-based language of the Raizal ethnic group, and is very similar to the creoles spoken in Belize and on the nearby Miskito Coast of eastern Nicaragua. There it exists in direct contact with English and Spanish. Although one of the most isolated regions in the Caribbean, the two islands are characterized by rather intense contact with the Spanish language, as San Andrés in particular has been a primary tourist destination for Colombians, especially those seeking all-inclusive budget vacations or tax-free deals on certain merchandise (San Andrés is a tax-free zone). Simplifying somewhat, one may thus view Colombia’s language contact situation as essentially one-dimensional in that the sole point of contact for natively spoken ethnic languages tends to be Spanish. Lateral (cross-ethnic) language contact among Colombia’s ethnic groups is the exception, and in terms of power relations, Spanish is always viewed as a dominant, more prestigious, and more ‘modern’ code. Spanish has thus progressively threatened the indigenous languages that it surrounds, even in the face of official interventions by the state that have aimed to counteract the historical trend. It is to this recent attempt at sociolinguistic engineering that we shall now briefly turn our attention. In 2010, Colombia adopted Law 1381, which develops and regulates certain provisions of both the ‘new’ political constitution and 1991’s Law 21. This new constitution had explicitly embraced Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries: Law 1381 thus regulates the recognition, promotion, protection, use, preservation, and strengthening of the languages of ethnic groups in Colombia and the linguistic rights of those who speak these languages. The Law now also specifically identifies languages utilized by Afro-descendant communities, whose modes of speaking had been particularly stigmatized in prior generations, and as a result had never been the object of serious linguistic inquiry prior to the 1980s. While the new laws highlight the rich cultural and ethnic variety of Colombia and may be viewed as a genuine reflection of the intellectual and political elites’ greater recognition of multiculturalism, it is also true that by and large the country’s monolingual Spanish-speaking population continues to view itself as belonging to a predominantly monolingual (Spanish-speaking) land. It is this general attitude, in conjunction with the aforementioned power differential between Spanish and ethnic local languages that helps explain, for example, why Colombians at large still commonly refer to their Amerindian languages with disparaging terms such as dialectos ‘dialects.’ Pejorative attitudes toward the vernaculars in question are still widespread, including the notion that these ethnic tongues are ultimately spoken by gente atrasada ‘backwards people’ who have yet to progresar ‘progress’ to the level of the rest of Colombia’s ‘modern’ society. In the minds of these individuals, Colombia speaks only one
154 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa real language, Spanish, the others being something of a lesser kind of discourse (i.e. dialectos). 1.5
Historical-attitudinal circumstances and language contact in Colombia
We mentioned earlier that historical-attitudinal circumstances have been a major contributing factor to why the vast majority of today’s Colombians live in a world where monolingualism is the norm. The following paragraphs examine this question in some detail, as it is fundamental to any assessment of how multilingualism and the corresponding reactions to language contact are viewed within Colombia. As we shall see, much of this discussion centers on the overarching acceptance of educated Bogotá Spanish representing the best speech modality. To that end, we must begin by examining the intellectual history of Colombia in the second half of the 19th century, which unquestionably laid the groundwork for a deep-seated sociocultural psyche that uncritically embraced the perceived superiority and prestige of Highlander Colombian Spanish as spoken in Bogotá. As Patiño points out, the period between 1850 and 1900 laid the foundation for much of what today is considered Colombia’s national culture (2004: 3). This includes the tendency among the upper echelons of society and leading educational institutions to (1) embrace formalities (educated formal Spanish included), (2) exhibit a strong interest in Cultural matters (the capital letter in ‘Cultural’ is intentional, meaning ‘high euro-centric culture’), (3) favor writing over orality as the “highest and deepest form of expression,” and (4) stress the importance of a heightened sensibility to language use. Philology played an especially important role in the formation of these historically prevailing attitudes within Colombia. Three philologists in particular contributed to the notion that purity of language is essential to good nation building and the betterment of society. The first of these philologists was the Venezuelan Andrés Bello, who published his famous Gramática de la lengua castellana in 1847 in an attempt to help preserve the unity of the Spanish language in the context of Latin America’s breakaway from colonial Spain. Conceived as a pedagogical tool, Bello’s grammar was widely used in Latin America’s secondary schools, but nowhere perhaps was it welcomed in a more dogmatic and enthusiastic fashion than in Colombia. There, two Colombian philologists, Cuervo and Caro, continued Bello’s line of linguistic nation building by publishing important philological works that remained essential references well beyond the middle of the 20th century. Caro eventually became Colombia’s vice president from 1892 to 1898, thus bringing prescriptivist attitudes into the very top of Colombia’s society. Cuervo explicitly proclaimed that grammarians have the right to “condone and reject” ways of speaking Spanish, a view to which Caro in essence also subscribed, all as part of an effort to safeguard and guarantee national linguistic unity and purity of language (see Patiño Roselli 2004 for further details on this point).
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Even though Caro and Cuervo’s philological writings were centered on the Spanish language, the consequences for other languages spoken in Colombia were more profound than one might suspect at first. Two distinct factors contributed to this state of affairs. First, Caro’s unabashed fervor for high Hispanic culture (and Spanish literature in particular) and his concomitant obsession with national language unity led him to view other cultures and modes of speaking with disdain. As a result, he held all the indigenous languages of Colombia, as well as popular and/or dialectal ways of speaking Spanish, in low esteem. True patriotism, in his view, and in that of many of his Highland peers, ultimately rested on proper Spanish language use, one that needed adequate filters and controls in the form of pedagogical grammars. Colombian philologists of that epoch opined that these norms would ultimately safeguard vigorous cultural and linguistic standards for their emerging nation. The second reason why Caro and Cuervo’s writings were so influential is a direct consequence of the first one. It has often been noted, and the pioneering Atlas Lingüístico y Etnográfico de Colombia (ALEC ) (Instituto Caro y Cuervo 1981–1983) makes it amply clear, that Colombia stands out within South America as having more than the usual number of dialect zones, all a product to some extent of the aforementioned geographic divisions of the country. However, it is equally true that within this vast linguistic expanse, one of its speech varieties is the universally acknowledged yardstick against which all other types of Colombian Spanish are measured: Bogotá Spanish. In his acclaimed Latin American Spanish, Lipski accurately describes this situation as follows: In Colombia, the sociolinguistic prestige of the capital dialect is immense, and although coastal residents are rarely able to effect even a distant approximation of the speech of Bogotá, this mode of speaking is constantly held up as the goal of all educated Colombians. (1994: 207) To this day, the educated Spanish of Bogotá – along with the Spanish of Mexico City and San José, Costa Rica – is held in the highest esteem throughout Latin America, similar to the ways in which Parisian French is given a preeminent role in the Francophone world. This is partly a reflection of the close and long-standing correspondence between Highland Spanish phonetic patterns and orthographic practices, as well as the fact that, in 1718, Nueva Granada had become a viceroyalty. This led to the creation of a university and religious centers in Bogotá, which elevated Colombia’s capital linguistically and kept it in close communication with Spain’s clerics, academics, and administrators (Lipski 1994: 205), a perceived luxury not afforded to other urban centers in the region. This heightened sense among intellectuals of the linguistic superiority of the Bogotá speech variety eventually radiated outwards within the nation to the point where it eventually became universally accepted wisdom, so much
156 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa so that it blinded even the best Colombian linguists to the dialectal realities before their eyes, leaving it at times to outsiders to uncover what really lay within the nation’s borders. Two examples shall illustrate this point: around 1960, the ALEC team under the guidance of Colombian dialectologist Montes Giraldo visited Palenque for several days, but overlooked that it harbored a language sui generis (i.e. Palenquero creole) rather than just a rural Spanish dialect. Spanish linguist Granda later identified this language in 1969 as a ‘creole’ (Bickerton and Escalante (1970) also reached the same conclusion almost at the same time). Patiño wrote that regional articulatory differences within the country, however numerous, hardly affect the uniformity of the phonemic system (2004: 8). However, as Schwegler and Morton (2003) shows, and as others have corroborated since (e.g. Nieves Oviedo 2002), the reality of Colombia’s Spanish phonemic panorama is rather different, especially among the lowest social strata. For instance, the formation in some coastal dialects of geminates (e.g. /laɾɡo/ > /láɡɡo/ ‘long’ vs. /láɡo/ ‘lake’) yields a phonemic inventory that boasts more than half a dozen additional phonemic contrasts, which within the context of a total of 18 consonantal phonemes in standard Latin American Spanish represents considerably more than just a ‘minor divergence.’ 1.6
The third factor: ethnic languages in Colombia’s educational system
The rapid and ubiquitous spread in the second half of the 20th century of radio and television and the subsequent arrival of the Internet throughout Latin America in the 21st century have begun to drastically alter the conformist view that Colombians have traditionally held with regards to what constitutes ‘good language’ and ‘proper ways of speaking.’ Nevertheless, for outside observers with a keen interest in Colombian languages and culture, it is also easy to perceive how old habits continue to persist, therefore conditioning the ways in which languages do (or do not) interact within their country. In light of the aforementioned new political constitution of 1991, one could think, for instance, that the state, and along with it the public and private schools within it, would pay closer attention to linguistic diversity. Although paying considerable lip service to the importance of indigenous (Amerindian) groups and their languages, Colombia’s political leaders, major academic institutions, large corporations – that is, the entities that in the 20th century and beyond have held power in Colombia – essentially still embrace and openly promote an image of a nation in which Spanish is the only language that, realistically, has a useful future. Put simply, in Colombia, Spanish is still effectively viewed as a monolith. No one would deny, of course, that what has been happening to ethnic languages in Colombia can only partially be blamed on the State and its associated institutions. Societal apathy of the 20th and 21st centuries surely has played a significant role in how and why minority languages have become disconnected
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from the image of Colombia as a nation. But this apathy, we submit, ultimately has its root in the state and its institutions. One must, therefore, place the current state of affairs within Colombia’s deeper historical context, in which colonial and national authorities had formerly placed all matters of education in the hands of the Catholic Church, a practice that began with the 16th-century conquest. By the 19th century, the Church had an explicit contract with the state “that included the promulgation of Spanish at the expense of indigenous languages as a goal, either explicitly or implicitly” (Uribe-Jongbloed and Anderson 2014: 222). It was not until the 1991 constitution that these practices ceased by removing the educational monopoly of the Catholic Church, when Article 7 about the obligation of the state not only accorded ‘official’ status to all the country’s minority languages within the territories where they are spoken, but also modified national educational policy, newly committing the government to linguistically, ethnically, and culturally responsible education (Liddicoat and Curnow 2007; Mejía 2013; Rodriguez and El Gazi 2007; Ross 2007; Uribe 2014). As already mentioned, ethnic languages are now officially promoted as part of Colombia’s national heritage, and State funding has been allocated to ‘preserve’ endangered languages by means of programas de etno-educación, ‘ethno-educational programs.’ But this attention to linguistic heritage remains limited in several ways, three of which shall be mentioned here. First, the funding seeks to halt the loss of indigenous languages by promoting multilingualism only among the groups directly affected by the loss: that is, monolingual Spanish-speaking communities that surround said ethnic groups are rarely if ever given the opportunity or incentive to acquire the language(s) and culture(s) of the indigenous populations. Language contact thus remains mostly unidirectional, typically involving small ethnic groups that maintain contacts with the outside Spanish-speaking world. Second, some indigenous groups view ethno-education as a project developed by outsiders that is not in agreement with local conceptions of education, that is, traditional schooling and curriculum developments are not always in tune with views held by young(er) generations of Amerindians ( Echeverri 2008 ). For them, it is contradictory that institutions and national authorities insist on the revitalization of their native languages after decades of violence and stigmatization of ancestral linguistic and other cultural practices. Third, students in primary and secondary schools located away from ethnic groups (e.g. those in urban centers such as Bogotá) are not introduced to anything substantial about Colombia’s ethnic languages. For this and other reasons, Colombia’s population at large remains unfamiliar with the nature of these languages, the way they differ from Spanish (e.g. structurally, phonetically, and otherwise), and the opportunities they and their accompanying cultures can provide to reconstruct important aspects of Colombia’s social, artistic, cultural, and even genetic (DNA) roots. This unidirectionality in cultural exchange and superficiality in the promotion of language contact is clearly illustrated by the case of Palenque, to which we shall now turn our attention. But before doing so, let us quote Uribe (2014), who sum up the precarious circumstances in which
158 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa Colombia’s minority communities and their languages find themselves today within the framework of the nation: Thus, although idealistically phrased legal provisions have indeed been put in place, and administrative responsibility has been transferred from contracted missionaries to government agencies, it seems clear that ethnoeducation is still understood as something other than ‘real’ education (however poorly the latter may be being implemented). One could be forgiven for detecting an implicit understanding that education in respect to minority language communities remains effectively ‘somebody else’s problem’ for the Colombian state – that the degree of autonomy that has been devolved to the communities effectively absolves the state from further action. At the very least, the good intentions that helped bring about the admittedly unprecedented legislative support for minority languages in Colombia is not matched by an equal amount of political will to implement them. (Uribe 2014: 226) Comments to figures 7.1.–7.6 All photos are from Schwegler (2017), where over 60 additional photographs from Palenque are given. A beautiful collection of photos from the 1970s can be found in Friedemann and Cross (1979), which portrays Palenque before it began to attract outside visitors. Figure 7.1. Palenquera lady. La Doña shows her own portrait, published in 1983 by Friedemann and Patiño Roselli (1983: 128) (Photo taken by Correa in 2009). Figure 7.2. Palenquera mother and her daughter: Relaxing on the porch of their home on a warm Sunday morning (Photo by Schwegler 2016a). Figure 7.3. Palenque’s newly designed Main Plaza (Photo taken by Schwegler in 2015). The new look reveals a modernity not previously seen in Palenque. At night, the plaza is now well lit and regularly frequented, especially by the younger generations. Figure 7.4. Palenquero kids being cool (Photo taken by Schwegler in 2015). Used to frequent visits by national and international tourists, Palenquero children now love to pose for the cameras. Decades ago, this open behavior toward outsiders was rarely seen in town, nor were the stylish T-shirts, shoes, shorts, and pants worn by today’s Palenquero youth. Figure 7.5. Setting up shop: Selling Palenquero culture to tourists, in creole and Spanish (Photo taken by Schwegler in 2015). The blue text reads (in creole): MINI A CHITO RI PALENGE, “Come and see a piece of Palenque,” thus inviting tourists to purchase locally made t-shirts CAMISETAS, drums TAMBORES, and CD’s MUSICA [sic]. Figure 7.6. Ma hende ri tiela mi (Palenquero creole), “People from my (home)land” (Photo taken by Schwegler in 2010).
Figure 7.1 Palenquera lady Author’s picture
Figure 7.2 Palenquera mother and her daughter Author’s picture
Figure 7.3 Palenque’s newly designed Main Plaza Author’s picture
Figure 7.4 Palenquero kids Author’s picture
Figure 7.5 Setting up shop Author’s picture
Figure 7.6 Ma hende ri tiela mi ‘People from my (home)land.’ Palenqueros Author’s picture
162 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa
2 2.1
Palenque Palenque in the 20th century: bilingualism and generational language abandonment
One of the authors of this study, Schwegler, first engaged in extensive fieldwork in Palenque in 1985, several years before the climate of change in the 1990s and beyond, with Colombia’s new constitution, found expression in new ways of thinking about minority languages in Colombia. Then, as now, Palenque was a small rural village of some 4,000 inhabitants, located 60 km from Cartagena de Indias, once Latin America’s major transatlantic slave trade hub from where maroons (escaped slaves) successfully ran away to eventually found San Basilio de Palenque around the middle of the 17th century.4 Since the 1980s, Schwegler has returned to the community on many occasions, become a fluent speaker of its creole, and witnessed the gradual social transformation that eventually gave local traditions (bilingualism included) a new and entirely unexpected lifeline. For some 350 years, Palenqueros had been bilingual, speaking an Afro-Hispanic creole as well as Spanish. Like other ethnic enclaves of Colombia, Palenque too lived in a world where the monolith of normative Spanish (and the sociocultural prejudice that accompanied it) cast a long and lasting shadow. To be sure, Palenqueros had never heard of Rufino Cuervo, Caro, or Bello, but the arrival to their village of school teachers trained afar (prior to the close of the millennium, locals never rose to the rank of educator) as well as increasingly deeper contacts with the outside world eventually led to a situation in which, by the middle of the 20th century, Palenque too began to embrace country-wide notions tied to Hispanic prestige culture, including the idea that Highland Spanish was ‘naturally’ superior, and popular or dialectal ways of speaking therefore decidedly inferior. This new outside influence was not ignored, and – consciously or subconsciously – for about half a century or more served in subtle yet powerful ways as a benchmark to restructure their modes of speaking, multiculturalism, and life at large in a manner more consistent with national norms. Palenque’s bilingualism traditionally involved frequent and intensive codeswitching, a practice that local ethno-education instructors now discourage in their classrooms in an attempt to keep the creole maximally free of interference from Spanish (Lipski 2012; Schwegler 2016b, 258). In spite of a largely shared vocabulary and very similar phonological systems (Friedemann and Patiño Roselli 1983: 89; Schwegler 1996: 264, 2011: 454), local Spanish and Palenquero are surprisingly airtight as regards possible lexical or phonological transfers. By this we mean that the separation of codes is absolute in certain lexical or grammatical sets: for instance, in Pal. Lelo ‘finger’ vs. Span. dedo ‘finger’ there never occurs any ‘cross bleeding’ into the other language. Put differently, Palenqueros always know when they speak Spanish or Lengua (lit. ‘tongue,’ local name for Palenquero). Similarly, surprising perhaps, especially from a comparative pan-creole perspective, is the fact that the prolonged exposure of Palenquero to the socially dominant Spanish has not caused decreolization or restructuring (Schwegler 2001).
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Due in part to their centuries-long isolation from the rest of Colombian society until the end of the 1980s, Palenqueros had managed to maintain a set of unique cultural traditions with deep African roots (Schwegler 1996, 2006, 2007). This includes their creole, which suffered from very heavy social stigmatization. So protracted and overwhelming were the effects of this stigmatization that, starting in the early 1970s, a wholesale generational language shift occurred, thus leading to the eventual abandonment of Lengua by about half of Palenque’s population by the mid-1980s. The underlying cause for this behavioral change was simple: Palenqueros, the younger ones especially, felt that embracing Spanish monolingualism would facilitate their integration into the modern world, and at the same time free them of the sense of shame they typically felt when speaking creole in the presence of outsiders. As is usually the case when momentous social changes begin to take shape in a community, the progressive drift toward monolingualism was not without complicating factors and conflicts that even the most forward-thinking inhabitants of Palenque ended up experiencing, often subconsciously so. For instance, the new social and linguistic dynamics of change inevitably resulted in the following paradoxical situation. Lengua simultaneously became both a symbol of degeneracy (it represented ‘backwardness,’ ignorance due to lack of education, etc.) and local power, especially for those – the minority – who subscribed to the idea that the low-status creole was still a symbol of truth, a genuine expression of local reality, and something that in certain local cultural contexts had a high affective value, and thus deserved to be rescued. The same was also true of their kateyano (Palenque’s local Spanish variety) in the context of Colombian Spanish. Although more subtly and less visibly so than their creole, Palenqueros’ strictly local Spanish register (which coexists in the community with a second variety of Spanish that is essentially the default, group-neutral español costeño spoken on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast) also symbolically manifested their ethnicity, local values, and rural roots, and as such was similarly subject to ridicule and social critique. As a result, this less prestigious kateyano variety also came to be shunned, so much so that some of Palenque’s residents never seemed to use it while others did do so only very sparingly (for instance, to insert stylistically ‘marked’ asides that may have humorous or ironic overtones). As the foregoing comments suggest, during the period from 1975 to the mid1990s, Palenque experienced a sociocultural tug-of-war in which language – be that their creole or local kateyano Spanish – played a central role. As others have reported on similar sociolinguistic situations, “the positive attitudes are not always as visible on the surface as the negative ones, and are certainly reported less often in the literature” (Rickford and Traugott 1985: 252). This situation certainly applied to Palenque, where critical community voices far outnumbered those who dared to express favorable sentiments about their ethnic modes of expression. To properly assess the precarious nature of 20th-century language abandonment in Palenque, one must also place Palenquero traditions within their wider societal context to understand just how hopeless the situation seemed to (especially) older Palenqueros at the time: during that period, there still reigned virtually complete
164 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa disinterest and apathy in Colombian society and academia regarding the recognition of black culture. In and around Cartagena, ignorance and often unacknowledged racial prejudice jointly contributed to the widespread opinion that black culture deserved neither promotion nor study, and that there was, therefore, no reason to venture to Palenque to inquire ‘what was really there.’ In light of these sociolinguistic dynamics within Palenque, one thing seemed patently clear to its residents and the handful of outsiders who in the 1980s had the fortune to live among them: their local multilingualism seemed doomed, and in the not-too-distant future Spanish monolingualism appeared to be all but guaranteed. Friedemann and Patiño, for instance, made the following sobering statement about the diminished vitality of the creole: There can be no doubt that the vitality of the Palenque’s creole has become reduced considerably during the last decade due to ever-growing adstratal pressure from Spanish. Interactions among Palenqueros tend to be more and more in Spanish. [. . .] In general, older people use the creole a lot more than the young or children. At present, group interactions among children and adolescents take place almost exclusively in Spanish. As is logical, this is a grave indicator for the future of the vernacular. (1983: 187) Being visibly blacker than the rest of the population in the area and living in abject poverty and away from modern amenities such as running water, regular access to electricity, public transportation, or a good public education, Palenqueros had always been viewed by their neighboring communities (that of Cartagena included) as socially and culturally inferior. Arguably more than any group in coastal Colombia, they carried with themselves the stigma of “ignorant, crude, ordinary, uneducated, backward, and peasant-like,” so much so that no academic or politician in the area could have imagined that UNESCO as well as their own country would someday celebrate Palenque as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Not surprisingly, under such stigmatization, the language contact that took place in Palenque between creole and Spanish remained hidden to Colombians and the rest of the world for centuries, until outsiders, Granda (1970, 1976) and Bickerton and Escalante (1970), working independently, first revealed around 1970 the special typology of the Palenquero creole (prior to that, it was simply considered ‘poor Spanish’). Today, after three decades of ever deepening scholarly investigations into Lengua, Palenque commands an extraordinary position within Latin American social and linguistic history. It does so for several reasons. First, as recent DNA studies have revealed (Noguera 2013; Ansari-Pour 2011, 2016; Schwegler 2016a), the Palenqueros are Latin America’s phenotypically blackest ethnic group (admixture from Amerindians and whites has historically been insignificant). Second, Palenque is the only community in the entire South American mainland to feature a Spanish-based creole, a fact that has baffled creolists for years (McWhorter 2000, 2016) Third, due in part to the aforementioned prolonged isolation from the
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Map 7.5 Mayombe region (shaded), principal African origin of the Palenqueros (Schwegler 2012) Adapted from public geography map
rest of Colombian society, Palenqueros have managed to maintain a set of unique cultural traditions with deep African roots (Schwegler 1996, 2006, 2007).1 Fourth, Palenque is the first Afro-Hispanic group whose roots have been linked to a highly specific location in sub-Saharan Africa: the Mayombe, a Kikongo-speaking area on the western coast of Central Africa. Fifth, and perhaps most importantly within the context of this study, recent societal changes in and outside of Palenque have set in motion a series of unexpected attitudinal shifts that have led to a fervent revitalization not only of creole/Spanish bilingualism but also of African (or Africanized) traditions preserved within Palenque. When, how, and why this truly astonishing transformation took place will be briefly examined in the next section. 2.2
Palenque within view of the 21st century: winds of change
The unanimity with which the death of Palenquero creole was predicted has since been replaced by a universal acknowledgment, inside as well as outside of the
166 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa community, that saving this unique language is both a worthwhile and necessary endeavor. As explained in greater detail in Schwegler (2011), first steps in that direction began in the late 1970s and 1980s with the subsequent arrival on the scene of linguists Patiño, Schwegler, Morton, and Moñino. They were the first to introduce the idea that they may wish to re-evaluate their negative self-assessment of their creole, and to question the profoundly negative attitudes that the outside world had cast upon them for so long.5 Working independently, these linguists in unison felt that their task was to document the creole rather than engage in local language politics, thus leaving it up to the Palenqueros themselves as to how to best shape the future of their community. In the end, this passive approach by linguists was more crucial for Lengua’s revitalization than we realized at the time, as it fostered within Palenqueros the deep sense of self-empowerment that one finds throughout their community today. At the time, linguists’ fieldwork took place in a context in which some Palenqueros actively promoted the use of Spanish by forbidding their children to speak Lengua in the home. Others took the more indirect measure of simply removing their (adolescent) children from the natural environment in which Lengua was spoken by placing them with relatives in nearby Cartagena or Barranquilla, where economic and educational opportunities were more abundant. However, by the mid-1990s, two significant events had taken place that began to reverse deepseated local language attitudes: first, numerous conference papers and scholarly publications by the aforementioned linguists had begun to attract attention in international academic circles. This resulted in a relatively steady stream of (mostly academic) visitors in the village. Their insertion into the community had the effect of opening a world to the Palenqueros that they had not seen in their lifetime. In this new world, their creole met with acceptance and appreciation. While the consequences of this fresh state of affairs were not immediate, their eventual effect could not go unnoticed: some Palenqueros – even young ones – had begun to openly express their adoration for the creole, and when they did so, they were no longer automatically censored by fellow villagers. The momentum in language attitudes had definitely begun to shift, and visibly so. No longer living in complete obscurity, a few adolescent Palenqueros in the late 1980s and 1990s took a further step that led to the second significant event that reshaped the linguistic landscape of Palenque: with the help of the aforementioned linguists, they devised an orthography (mostly based on Spanish writing practices) for their creole, and for the first time in the history of their village, began to write their language, timidly so at first and mostly in the form of word lists. This had a deep psychological effect on the community, for in Palenqueros’ eyes it elevated and formalized their ethnic language in ways never witnessed before, gradually putting it on par with Spanish. Their Lengua could now not only be heard more widely but also be seen publicly on the outside walls of their homes and buildings (see Figure 7.5). Also gone were the days when villagers systematically suspended speaking creole when an outsider came into view. Even more astounding to Palenqueros was this: national and international visitors now came to the village, often from afar, to witness the use of Lengua in
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person, and some even offered modest payments for it – something unimaginable in decades prior. The effects of gradual sociolinguistic transformation thus manifested themselves slowly but surely, to a moment in time when Sebastián Salgado and Bernardino Pérez – two Palenquero youngsters who at the time acquired writing skills in the creole from linguists – successfully completed their degrees in secondary education. With pioneering enthusiasm and able leadership, they instituted weekly Lengua lessons at the local school, and also sought to elevate the ethnolinguistic awareness of Palenquero youth. Over time, the lessons increased in frequency, as did the number of modest educational texts and other resources in Lengua that they helped elaborate. Today, Lengua teaching in Palenque’s school has evolved into a community-wide effort, emanating most strongly from locally born teachers and middle-aged community leaders. Some of these individuals have been instrumental in creating didactic Lengua materials that are currently used in Palenque’s schools, which have received modest financial support for ethno-education from the state. There still persists a situation, however, in which curriculum development is by and large left to a handful of activists in the community who can rarely count on firm financial commitment or other support from state institutions. In spite of this lack of consistent support, attitudes in Palenque have changed sufficiently to halt or even reverse the rapid language shift to Spanish. Palenqueros presently value their creole for the benefits that are seen to flow from it. Some of these benefits are economic; others are tied to their strong sense of group identity and ethnic pride. No one familiar with life in Palenque today would deny that ‘all things local’ (Lengua included) are currently in vogue. This occurs in a context of modernity where cell phones and similar symbols of modern technology coexist in an atmosphere where Palenquero youths find it cool to embrace and promote their local black identity, maroon past, and local language. As long as these new benefits outweigh the costs, Palenqueros will continue to value their Lengua for more than its own sake, and preserve it as a symbol of their deep history and culture. This does not mean, of course, that the survival of bilingualism in Palenque is guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination. At present, the number of speakers with native-like fluency in the creole probably does not exceed 2,000; most if not all adolescents and adults in the community do, however, understand the spoken vernacular. Yet, in-group settings (for instance in the daily evening gatherings at the Central Plaza, Figure 7.3) youngsters presently almost always converse in Spanish. But as observed recently, there are also signs of a newfound prosperity in Lengua: youngsters in Palenque now routinely send each other text messages couched in creole (or in Spanish code-switched with creole). They do so even though most of today’s pupils have grown up in homes where parents no longer converse in Palenquero (Spanish is favored instead). As a result, the acquisition of Lengua occurs primarily in school settings where ‘correct ways of speaking’ the creole are enforced with a fair amount of dogma. Schwegler studies the nature and origin of this prescriptivism in some detail, emphasizing that local grammar books (written in Palenquero and/or Spanish) insist on purist or (overly) simplified rules that diverge from traditional colloquial Palenquero, thus resulting in
168 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa what Lipski (2012) aptly terms ‘the new Palenquero.’ One domain in which such didactic oversimplifications betray the true nature of Lengua is predicate negation patterns, studied in Schwegler (2016a, 2016b). It remains to be seen whether the aforementioned preference by youngsters for Spanish rather than Lengua in group settings is as alarming for the future of Palenque’s bilingualism as might meet the eye. Strange as it may seem, for over half a century the acquisition of native fluency in Palenquero creole has always taken place during the mid- to late teenage years rather than in childhood (until recently, this was especially true among females). For sociocultural reasons outlined in Schwegler (2007), this comparatively late acquisition routinely took place at the local creek rather than in the home, and mostly in a setting of ‘vociferation’ (verbal play similar to “sounding, snapping, or the game playing the dozens” of African Americans in the United States). Recent changes to Palenque’s infrastructure, which among other things includes the installation of running water in most homes, have now profoundly altered this age-old tradition, as the creek no longer commands the community function it once held. It thus remains to be seen whether Palenqueros manage to successfully transfer the former site of language acquisition to other, more contemporary contexts where Lengua is meaningfully employed. Before concluding this section, a caveat is in order: in explaining the root causes of Palenque’s language revitalization we have stressed the role played by linguists – all non-Colombians except for Patiño – who arrived in Palenque between the 1970s to the 1990s, that is, at a time when Colombia and its academic institutions ignored Afro-Latino cultures, concentrating instead on Amerindian and, above all, European traditions. We wish to make clear, however, that, as explained in Schwegler (2011) in extenso, there were multiple other factors that, starting in the 1990s, substantially contributed to reshaping the sociolinguistic landscape in Palenque. These factors include Latin America’s growing movement of negritud (‘black awareness’), the fresh thinking introduced by the aforementioned 1991 constitution, the infusion of significant amounts of public funding into the Palenquero community (which among other things made possible the construction of a Centro Cultural that regularly receives large tourist groups), and the increased pace with which newspaper articles, magazine, and scholarly publications gave additional visibility to Palenque’s Lengua. Similarly, significant was a generational turnover in Palenque itself, which injected novel ideas on how to interact with an ever more globalized world. This last point cannot be overestimated, as it is Palenqueros’ strident penchant for self-determination and independence that will eventually decide the future of their Lengua and their special place within the Afro-Colombian identity at large. This attitude can be expected to continue challenging regional norms imposed by a predominantly white upper class. As Palenqueros have witnessed over the past two decades, this kind of ‘fighting’ for the survival of local culture (language included) empowers them with a sense of freedom, triumph, and cultural autonomy. Simultaneously, it offers Palenqueros an alternative reality and an escape from a rapidly encroaching modern world in which the move from bilingualism to Spanish monoligualism threatens to bleach
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local culture, potentially rendering them indistinguishable from that of coastal Colombian society. In assessing Colombian society’s post-1991 appreciation for and interaction with ethnic communities such as Palenque, one must also take care to avoid overinterpreting the contemporary evidence. One might conclude, for instance, that the by now regular presence in Palenque of academic tourists from many corners of Colombia is an obvious and positive indication that its citizens are becoming more informed about matters related to their country’s linguistic and cultural diversity. As we have witnessed on multiple occasions in Palenque, this obvious evidence is, however, potentially misleading. Group visits (e.g. by high school students and their teachers in particular) tend to be superficial at best, and often limited to touristy dance and music performances, typically held at the Casa de Cultura. In the process, few visitors acquire a genuine, or even basic understanding of Palenque’s deeper relevance to Colombia’s history (slave trade, African roots, creolization, maroonage, etc.). As a result, many visitors leave town, for instance, with the mistaken impression that Palenqueros speak “a strange African tongue,” thereby echoing misconceptions about Palenque that Schwegler had already heard in Cartagena in the 1980s. Irrespective of the foregoing caveat, Palenque’s Lengua has unquestionably gained a new lifeline, and Palenquero culture has been elevated to a level of prestige not seen before. At the same time, the creole is also undergoing languageinternal changes in response to the new reality in which young Palenqueros now formally learn their creole in a school setting (on this point, see Lipski 2012) rather than at the creek. We interpret this and similar adaptations as an outward sign of the extraordinary linguistic and cultural vitality that we have witnessed in Palenque for three decades. Within the larger picture of Colombia as a nation, Palenquero is, of course, still little more than a speck on the map, afloat in the large ocean of monolithic Colombian Spanish. But as the case of Palenque illustrates, when it comes to language, size is not everything, and the most heartfelt sense of identity is at times most deeply rooted in local bilingualism.
3
Conclusion
This study has sought to contextualize Colombia’s complex internal situation of languages in contact, and explain why for the most part its ethnic languages are precariously perched on linguistic islets, mostly distributed along the nation’s geographic borders. As such, Colombia’s multilingualism is far removed, literally and figuratively speaking, from the cosmopolitan centers that constitute the vast bulk of its population. As Uribe writes, Colombia has seen tremendous positive advances with regard to legislation and policy in support of minority languages during the last several decades, but although these achievements should not be belittled, they should also not blind us to the fact that there has been a disappointing lack of action or real change accompanying them. (2014: 230)
170 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa To help us better understand these recent dynamics, this study first presented a general overview of the situation within the country at large, and placed it within a historical sociopolitical context that since colonial times has greatly favored the hegemony of Spanish over ethnic languages. Section 1 also sought to explain how geography, language ecology, social upheaval, and attitudes toward linguistic diversity condition the ways in which these languages interact with Spanish. We examined the historical causes – including a long-standing pact between state and church – that sidelined ethnic languages to the point where bilingualism disappeared from the fabric of Colombian life in most urban areas, and in the process in many ways relegated speakers of ethnic languages to the status of second-class citizens. This situation prevailed until the 1991 constitution finally marked the first significant step forward to grant minority languages greater rights, visibility, and consideration in policy development. This led to a general commitment to etno-educación, ‘ethno-education,’ whose measures contributed to improving somewhat the image and, at least in a few instances, vitality of national minority languages. But as Uribe recently commented in a paragraph titled ‘Current Assessment,’ “very little has since been done beyond the general commitment to ethno-education and some particular initiatives” (2014: 226). The study then turned its attention to Palenque itself in an attempt to recount how a series of profound societal changes in the village and beyond around the turn of the millennium set in motion attitudinal shifts that led to the revitalization of the creole and 2005’s declaration of Palenque as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. We hope to have made clear that in a non-trivial way the recent history of Palenque’s bilingualism is a story of success, one that ought to give language planners ample encouragement. With expert help, communities like Palenque can affect positive change and safeguard their local identity and ethnic language(s). As the case of Palenque proves, making personal commitments to integrative change and self-reliance has to be a cornerstone of any linguistically challenged community. But Palenque is more than just a model to follow: it also serves as stark reminder that, in the Colombian context, the monolith Spanish will always lurk in the background, ready to pounce and overtake that which is not carefully guarded and cultivated.
Glossary decreolization: the loss of creole features in an original creole language as the result of (usually intense) contact with an adstrate language that typically has greater prestige. ethno-education: in Colombia, ethno-education was put into law in 1976 (Law 088m with ensuing decree No 1142, 1978) in an effort to restructure and decentralize the country’s educational system. This law gives indigenous groups the right to participate in curriculum development, and it helps promote literacy in their native languages.
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gemination: a sequence of two consonants with the same place and manner of articulation, for example, Italian nonno /nɔnno/ ‘grandfather’ and pappa /páppa/ ‘porridge.’ revitalization: pedagogical strategies, projects, and initiatives carried out by institutions, academics, and community members to promote the documentation, preservation, and use of endangered languages. vociferation, sounding, or snapping: a ritualized speech event that consists of an exchange of insults directed to an opponent’s mother or another relative, but it can also include personal insults. These insults are used to establish social distance and social rank.
Notes 1 Speaker estimates for Amerindian languages are notoriously subjective, in part because, as Uribe-Jongbloed and Anderson rightly point out, “the data on linguistic/ communicative competences [. . .] amongst Colombian minority communities is scattered and incomplete” (2014: 218). The exact number of Amerindian languages that is generally given in the recent literature is 58. Landaburu (2004: 4) provides figures similar to what is given in this article, and also conveniently summarizes other aspects useful for a more complete overview of Colombia’s Amerindian languages than can be offered here. Landaburu’s and Uribe-Jongbloed and Anderson’s figures differ substantially from those given by the Ethnologue (2017), which claims that there are 78 indigenous and four non-indigenous languages currently alive in Colombia. 2 Trading Economics: Colombia Population 1960–2018 . Accessed June 8, 2017. 3 To fully appreciate the precarious nature of Colombia’s ethnic languages, it is also important to note the following: while some of the larger indigenous groups still maintain their ancestral languages, others do not. This is the case with one of Colombia’s largest ethnic groups, the Pastos/Quillasingas, who by now are all Spanish monolinguals (Pineda Camacho 2000: 119). 4 Works by Navarrete (2008); Maglia and Moñino (2015); Schwegler (2016b, 2017); and Moñino and Schwegler (2002) provide ample information for further study of Palenque’s history. 5 In the 1970s and 1980s and just prior, linguist Lewis and anthropologist Friedemann also carried out fieldwork in Palenque (see Friedemann and Patiño Roselli 1983). The latter, in particular, had a significant impact on how Palenqueros ultimately came to view their Afro-Hispanic culture in a more positive light. Megenney (1986) also carried out fieldwork on Palenquero, but visited Palenque only occasionally, as he obtained most of his data from Palenquero informants residing in Barranquilla.
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McWhorter, John. The missing Spanish creoles: recovering the birth of plantation contact languages. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. ———. “The missing Spanish creoles are still missing: revisiting Afrogenesis and its implications for a coherent theory of creole genesis.” In The Iberian challenge: creole languages beyond the plantation setting, edited by A. Swchegler, J. McWhorter, and L. Ströbel, 39–66. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2016. Megenney, William W. El palenquero. Un lenguaje post-criollo de Colombia. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1986. Mejía, Anne-Marie, de. “Bilingual education in Colombia: the teaching and learning of Languages and academic content area knowledge.” In Bilingual and multilingual education in the 21st century: building on experience, edited by C. Abello-Contesse, et al., 42–57. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2013. Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia. “Caracterizaciones de los pueblos indígenas en riesgo.” Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia, 2010a. Accessed June 8, 2017. www. mincultura.gov.co/areas/poblaciones/pueblos-indigenas/Documents/Compilado de Caracterizaciones Pueblos en Riesgo.pdf Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia. “Compendio de políticas culturales.” Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura de Colombia, 2010b. Accessed June 8, 2017. www.mincultura.gov.co/ ministerio/politicas-culturales/compendio-politicas-culturales/Paginas/default.aspx Moñino, Yves and Armin Schwegler, eds. Palenque, Cartagena y Afro-Caribe: historia y lengua. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002. Montes Giraldo, José Joaquín de. “El español de Colombia. Propuesta para una clasificación dialectal.” Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 37 (1982): 23–92. ———. Estudios sobre el español de Colombia. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1985. ———. Otros estudios sobre el español de Colombia. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 2000. Navarrete, María Cristina. San Basilio de Palenque: Memoria y tradición. Cali: Universidad del Valle, 2008. Nieves Oviedo, Rocío. “Sobre la asimilación de consonantes en algunas áreas de la Costa atlántica colombiana (Córdoba, Sucre, Bolívar).” In Palenque, Cartagena y Afro-Caribe: historia y lengua, edited by Y. Moñino and A. Schwegler, 257–266. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002. Noguera, María Claudia, Armin Schwegler, et al. “Colombia’s population crucible: Y chromosome evidence from six admixed communities in the Department of Bolivar.” Annals of Human Biology 41.5 (2013): 453–459. Patiño Roselli, Carlos. “Aspectos del lenguaje en Colombia.” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Sociales 4 (2004): 3–13. Pineda Camacho, Roberto. El derecho a la lengua: una historia de la política lingüística en Colombia. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2000. Rickford, John R. and Elizabeth Traugott. “Symbol of powerlessness and degeneracy, or symbol of solidarity and truth? Paradoxical attitudes toward pidgins and creoles.” In The English language today, edited by S. Greenbaum, 252–261. Oxford: Pergamon, 1985. Rodriguez, Clemencia and Jeanine El Gazi. “The poetics of indigenous radio in Colombia.” Media, Culture and Society 29 (2007): 449–468. Ross, James. “Routes for roots: entering the 21st century in San Andrés Island, Colombia.” Caribbean Studies 35 (2007): 3–33. Accessed June 8, 2017. http://redalyc.uaemex.mx/ pdf/392/39211831001.pdf Schwegler, Armin. “El habla cotidiana del Chocó (Colombia).” América Negra 2 (1991): 85–119.
174 Armin Schwegler and José Alejandro Correa ———. Chi ma nkongo: lengua y rito ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia). Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1996. ———. “The myth of decreolization: the anomalous case of Palenquero.” In Degrees of restructuring in creole languages, edited by I. Neumann-Holzschuh and E. Schneider, 409–436. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. ———. “Bantu elements in Palenque (Colombia): anthropological, archeological and linguistic evidence.” In African re-genesis: confronting social issues in the diaspora, edited by J. Haviser and K. C. MacDonald, 204–222. London: University College London Press, 2006. ———. “Black ritual insulting in the Americas: on the art of ‘vociferar’ (Colombia), ‘vacilar’ (Ecuador) and ‘snapping’, ‘sounding’ or ‘playing the dozens’ (USA).” Indiana 24 (2007): 105–155. Accessed June 8, 2017. www.iai.spk-berlin.de/publikationen/indiana/ bisherige-ausgaben/indiana-24.html ———. “On the extraordinary revival of a creole: Palenquero (Colombia).” In Endangered languages: voices and images, edited by M. Haboud and N. Ostler, 153–165. Bath, UK: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 2011. ———. “Sobre el origen africano de la lengua criolla de Palenque (Colombia).” In Palenque (Colombia): oralidad, identidad y resistencia. Un enfoque interdisciplinario, edited by G. Maglia and A. Schwegler, 107–179. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo/ Universidad Javeriana, 2012. ———. “Combining population genetics (DNA) with historical linguistics: on the African origins of Latin America’s black and mulatto populations.” In Spanish language and sociolinguistic analysis, edited by S. Sessarego and F. Tejedo, 33–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016a. ———. “Truth reset: pragmatics in Palenquero negation.” In The Iberian challenge: creole languages beyond the plantation setting, edited by J. McWhorter and L. Ströbel, 231–267. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2016b. ———. “On the African origin(s) of Palenquero.” In Orality, identity, and resistance in Palenque (Colombia): an interdisciplinary approach, edited by B. Kirschen and G. Maglia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. ———. “Negation in Palenquero: syntax, pragmatics, and change in progress.” In Negation and negative concord in creole languages, edited by V. Deprez and F. Henri. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, forthcoming. ——— and Thomas Morton. “Vernacular Spanish in a microcosm: Kateyano in El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia).” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 1 (2003): 97–159. Sharp, William Frederick. Slavery on the Spanish frontier: the Colombian Chocó, 1680– 1810. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1976. Uribe-Jongbloed, Enrique and Edlund Anderson. “Indigenous and minority languages in Colombia: the current situation.” Zeszyty Łużyckie 48 (2014): 217–242. Accessed July 8, 2017. www.academia.edu/11343721/Indigenous_and_minority_languages_in_ Colombia_The_current_situation Uribe-Jongbloed, Enrique and Abiodun Salawu. “Minority languages, cultural policy and minority language media.” In The Routledge handbook of global cultural policy, edited by V. Durrer et al. NY: Routledge, 2017. Whitten, Norman E., Jr. Black frontiersmen: a South American case. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman, 1974. Whittington, James, Jr. “Kinship, mating and family in the Chocó of Colombia: an AfroAmerican adaptation.” PhD diss., Tulane University, New Orleans, 1972.
The case of Colombia
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Further readings Dittman, Marcia. El criollo sanandresano, lengua y cultura. Cali: Universidad del Valle, 1992. Echeverri, Juan Alvaro. “The people of the center of the world: a study in culture, history and orality in the Colombian Amazon.” PhD diss., New School for Social Research, New York, 1997. Accessed July 8, 2017. www.bdigital.unal.edu.co/1600/ Lipski, John. A history of Afro-Hispanic language: five centuries, five continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Rodríguez, María Luisa, ed. Estado actual de la clasificación de las lenguas indígenas de Colombia. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1983. Schwegler, Armin. “Palenque, Colombia: multilingualism in an extraordinary social and historical context.” In The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics, edited by M. DíazCampos, 446–472. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2011.
Topics for discussion 1
Keeping in mind that Colombia is essentially a monolingual society within a multicultural territory, briefly discuss what strategies could be used to promote the learning and/or use of vernacular languages by Spanish-speaking communities (e.g. that of Palenque).
2
Since the turn of the millennium, several members of Colombia’s indigenous groups have enthusiastically embraced modern technology, including the Internet and mobile devices. Discuss what IT (information technology) strategies you would promote to further the documentation, preservation, and/or use of indigenous languages.
3
The contact between African languages and Spanish gave origin to fascinating linguistic varieties in different regions of Latin America (Cuba, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia). Investigate one of these vernaculars and describe its history by using recent sources (you may combine these sources with standard reference works on the speech area you will be investigating).
4
Compile a list of 10 phonetic and grammatical features of Palenquero creole (a minimum of three should be phonetic). List at least four features that can be ascribed to African influence.
5
Palenquero is changing rapidly due to grammatical and lexical innovations introduced by younger speakers. On this topic, read one (or more) of Lipski’s publications, and summarize in your own words what he has uncovered in his fieldwork (provide some examples).
Section III
Contact and alternation Social boundaries of language switching
8
Have monolingualism and monoculturalism been overcome in Mexico? Mariadelaluz Matus-Mendoza
When visiting Mexico, one thinks of its beautiful beaches, breathtaking landscapes, and colorful celebrations where performers wearing typical indigenous outfits dance to the rhythm of pre-Hispanic music. This prompts visitors to admire the rich and diverse culture brought together by different roots, different groups, and different languages that blended together to form the bronze-skinned citizens that populate the country from its western edge at the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico in the east, from the northern border with the United States to Guatemala and Belize in the south. This chapter seeks to show how the multiculturalism and multilingualism that gave birth to this nation have been forced into an institutional monolingualism and monoculturalism through language policies that have created inequalities in interactions between mainstream society and indigenous groups. Recent changes in linguistic policies attempt to rescue these groups and their culture from extinction; it is contended here, however, that policies are not enough to revert centuries of denial and disrespect toward Mexican roots and ancestry; for mainstream society to eliminate the discriminatory social practices that are aimed toward these groups and to foster the rebirth of those cultures it must first acknowledge those policies. A sociolinguistic perspective will be used to portray these conflicting relationships. Mexico currently has an estimated population of 121,005,816, of which 6,913,362 belong to indigenous groups (INEGI 2010); according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC 2017), Mexico, considering its indigenous population, ranks fourth in the Western Hemisphere. Mexico’s multilingualism, its geographical distribution, and sociolinguistic circumstances have created asymmetrical relationships between speakers of indigenous languages and Spanish speakers since the nation’s birth. It has been a dynamic process that has evolved according to the ruling parties’ economic, social, and political priorities. For this reason, it is necessary to frame the asymmetrical relationships between mainstream society and indigenous groups within their historical context. These issues will be addressed as follows: the first section briefly describes Mexican history. The second section gives an account of language policies, their effect on education programs, and the bilingualism that has taken place in the country. The third section displays a snapshot of sociolinguistic studies that have been done on the most spoken indigenous languages. The fourth and final section
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elaborates on whether or not Mexico can overcome its monolingualism and monoculturalism to become a bilingual and intercultural society, in which the main culture does not discriminate against indigenous groups, but understands and respects them as a part of society.
1
Mexican history
At the time of Hernán Cortés’s arrival in the New World, two main cultures dominated the territory currently occupied by Mexico: Aztecs and Mayans. The Aztecs built a highly educated, intellectual, and imperial society that conquered and exerted its dominance from the Mexican plateau to Costa Rica. They shared tribute and administration with four other Nahuatl-speaking groups: the Acohuaque, Tepaneca, Chalca, and Xochimilca, while treating the conquered groups with disdain, denying them any administrative decisions. The Mayan civilization covered a territory in the south of Mexico that included the states of Yucatan and Chiapas and extended south to Honduras in Central America. After Hernán Cortés conquered Tenochtitlán in 1521, the Viceroyalty of New Spain was created in 1537, attracting Spaniards who came in search of wealth. Four mendicant orders came to the colony to be in charge of the spiritual conquest: Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits (Smith Stark 2010). Spanish colonizers brought new diseases that, along with their exploitation of indigenous groups, drastically dwindled the native population: from 25 million to fewer than two million at the end of Colonial regime (Parodi 2010). After three centuries of colonization, criollos, Spaniards born in the New World, fought for their separation from the motherland in pursuit of control over power and resources. The movement was led by two clergymen, Hidalgo and Morelos. After 11 years of war, independence from Spain was achieved. Inspired by liberalism, the criollos wanted to form a nation where a new, free, and practical man would work for his material welfare in pursue of happiness. Their idea was stated in the constitutions of 1814 and 1824, where the political structure was based upon citizens’ participation, establishing that the sovereignty resided in the people and the law represented the expression of the common will, and citizens’ happiness consisted of having equality, security, property, and freedom (Villavicencio 2010). By the middle of the century, positivism overtook liberalism, which emphasized progress as humanity’s ultimate goal; positivism strived to discover through reason and observation laws that governed the world. Thus, only men using reason would be able to mold a progressive nation. As a consequence, members of society were classified as superior or inferior based upon economic prosperity. In this context, the white race occupied the highest status, and the indigenous and black, the lowest. Against this backdrop, the erasure of the Indian’s physical and cultural presence became necessary to achieve the progressive nation (Villavicencio 2010). The elimination of the word ‘Indian’ from public usage was proposed, stating that the goal was to extend all benefits of society to every citizen: “the distinction between Indians and non-Indians was not recognized in the acts of government. Instead the terms poor and rich substituted them” (Heath 1972: 63). Conservatives who didn’t
Monolingualism and monoculturalism in Mexico 181 share the liberal philosophy decided to offer Mexico’s government to Maximilian, Archduke of Hapsburg, which led to the short-lived French intervention in the second half of the century. After the French intervention ended, the new theoretically egalitarian society continued its development and enacted a distribution of labor and power that continued favoring the numerically smaller members of society; Europeans and their descendants exerted all the power in all aspects of society. Mestizos, the mix of European and Indian, who occupied second place, enjoyed more social mobility and worked in cities and rural areas as tradesmen or soldiers in the army, while indigenous groups, the largest group in society, lived in rural areas serving the Europeans and their descendants. Mexico was predominantly a rural country; most of the population lived in isolated communities with fewer than 500 inhabitants (Cifuentes 1992). The War of Independence and Revolutionary War and economic development in the country displaced the Indians, both voluntarily and forcibly. They willingly joined the military upheavals or unwillingly were enlisted in the official army by means of la leva, which consisted in the army selecting the strongest men in the fields and taking them to the closest recruitment site (Cifuentes 1989; Villavicencio 2010). The Yaquis from Sonora in the north of Mexico can be mentioned as an example of forcible displacement. Because of continuous insurrections, the oligarchic state and President Porfirio Díaz moved them first to different parts of the state, but they were later sent to Yucatan after their children were distributed among oligarchic families with the purpose of suppressing any possible future rebellion. The redistribution of indigenous communal lands among the Europeans and their descendants forced the indigenous populations to leave their traditional collective work economy. They had to work either on the hacienda, the railroad, or in mines. By the end of the century, important cities grew in population and new cities developed around railroads and ports. These attracted indigenous men and women who had grown tired of being exploited on the haciendas and decided to work as vendors, masons, or any other manual trade. These inequalities prevailed at the eve of the Revolutionary War. In sharp contrast with the reality that the Indian population faced, the oligarchy and most of the intellectuals embraced the idealized Indian and sponsored archeological Table 8.1 Historical demographics of Mexico Year
Total
European
%
Indigenous
%
Mestizo
%
1518 1570 1646 1742 1793 1810 1910
25,000,000 3,380,000 1,712,600 2,477,200 3,799,500 6,122,300 15,160,300
0 6,644 1,378 9,814 7,904 15,000 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.8 0.2 0.2 0
25,000,000 3,366,800 1,269,600 1,540,200 2,319,700 3,476,200 1,960,300
100 98 74 62 61 60 13
0 0 429,200 946,200 1,487,700 2,461,100 13,143,300
0 0 25 38 39 40 87
Adapted from Parodi (2010: 332)
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explorations to uncover the glorious past of their ancestors; majestic monuments celebrating fallen Aztec heroes, like Cuauhtémoc, were built and allocated prominent locations in Mexico City (Lara and Vázquez Laslop 2015). The percentage of indigenous groups drastically decreased from a population of 60% in 1810 to 13% in 1910. During that same period of time, the mestizo population increased to 87% of the total population according to the census. After the 10-year war, the country tried to rebuild its identity and chose to create the mestizo state where mestizo embodied a Mexican identity that comprised the best qualities of all the races, according to Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica. However, Indians and Afro-descendants were eliminated from the national discourse; the 1917 constitution established the protection and promotion of indigenous languages, but it failed to include an article that acknowledged the existence of indigenous languages when referring to language use in official contexts. The 1930s are considered the turning point in the country’s political and social architecture. President Cárdenas initiated the formation of the political machinery that would guarantee the ruling group, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), remained in power for decades to come. He created different unions, formed and represented by all productive sectors of society, including factory workers and oil workers, who would support the official candidate. He also started the redistribution of land to communal organizations named ejidos which resulted in a decrease in the nation’s production of cotton and henequen. In the following 30 years, from 1940 to 1970, Mexico experienced what has been called an economic miracle: 120% growth in the industrial sector and a 100% increase in agricultural production. Public projects became the cornerstone of the economic model; dams were constructed along the nation’s major river systems. The government began construction on a new campus for the UNAM, the National University of Mexico City. The national government also continued ensuring that the PRI machinery would prevail by creating the Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC) to gather all peasants in the country and incorporate them into the political machinery to give the appearance of legality to the PRI candidates. However, the CNC didn’t have autonomy and was subordinate to the government’s decisions, which suggests the de facto abandonment of indigenous Mexicans. From this economic miracle, Mexico transitioned into the lost decade of the 1980s when it borrowed from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the country’s dependency on international loans forced the government to impose severe economic cuts that mainly affected the most disenfranchised groups in society. Constant devaluations of the currency continued through the last two decades of the 20th century, which caused a surge in unemployment; more than 800,000 Mexicans lost their jobs by the mid-1990s (Kirkwood 2000). These economic strains and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) affected the indigenous population and Afro-descendants. More than 20 million small agriculture producers who could not compete with the United States and Canada prompted the peasants’ uprising in the state of Chiapas in 1991; Commander Marcos headed the Zapatista Army of National
Monolingualism and monoculturalism in Mexico 183 Liberation (EZLN). The movement brought to the forefront the discriminatory policies against indigenous groups. Years later, international attention to the movement prompted the Mexican government to negotiate a peace agreement; the San Andres Larrainzar Agreement, Acuerdos de San Andres Larrainzar, was signed in 1996 (Duarte 2005: 192). It granted indigenous groups the right to selfdetermination regarding their cultures and languages. The uprising, alongside failing economic decisions, is credited with the triumph of another political party other than the PRI for the first time in 70 years. A failing economy and the country’s rampant drug war have been the defining characteristics of the first decade of the 21st century.
2 2.1
Language policies and their effect on education programs and on bilingualism Pre-Columbian times
Scholars do not agree on the number of groups and languages that existed at the time of Cortés’s arrival in 1519. The reason for this is the unreliability of the historical sources and their passing references to the indigenous languages (Heath 1972). However, the general consensus is that there were more than 100 groups who spoke more than 124 languages (Heath 1972; Máynez 2010; Villavicencio 2010). Valiñas (2010) offers a detailed description of the main indigenous language families in the territory currently occupied by Mexico. Nahuatl was the language of politics and finance that Aztecs spoke and imposed upon their subject nations. The Aztecs’ language policy included assigning derogatory names for speakers of other languages such as Chontal ‘foreigner,’ Popoloca ‘unintelligible tongue,’ Totonac ‘rustic,’ Otomitl ‘barbarian’ (Heath 1972: 3); they also used Cohuixca ‘lizard’ or Pipil ‘girlie speech’ when referring to Nahuatl speakers in the Balsas region, the current state of Guerrero, and to those of modern El Salvador, respectively (Flores Farfán 2010: 37). Thus, Nahuatl was a widespread lingua franca and the most prestigious language of the time which created a diglossic language situation that extended from the states of Aguascalientes, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit, and Zacatecas in the northwest (Parodi 2010), along the Pacific coast of Central America, to as far as Costa Rica (Lipski 1994). Maya in Yucatan, Puerepecha in the state of Michoacán, west of Mexico City, Mixtec in Guerrero and Oaxaca, in the southwest of Mexico, and Zapotec in Oaxaca are reported as being the other lingua francas (Darkin 2010; Flores 2010; Parodi 2010). 2.2
Colonial times: from tolerance to extermination
The Spanish Crown issued contradictory decrees regarding the language used to catechize the Indians, which delayed their languages’ disappearance. At the outset of colonial times, the clergy’s controlling power, and the Spanish Crown’s indifference, unintentionally promoted the continuance of Nahuatl as the lingua franca in
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spite of the Laws of Burgos in 1512 that gave the encomenderos the task of changing the Indians’ culture with respect to social, religious, and linguistic practices (Heath 1972; Máynez 2010; Valencia Zamudio 2015). However, the encomenderos decided against catechizing and instructing the indigenous groups. Their refusal to catechize the Indians, and Friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s complaints about their abuses against the Indians, prompted King Charles V to assign the task of instructing and catechizing them in their native languages to the clergy, who gained more control of those groups when they were ordered to gather in missions. By the end of the 16th century, King Charles V ordered the catechism of Indians to be conducted in Castilian. However, the clergy continued their instruction in native languages and especially Nahuatl. In 1619, Philip III brought back the decree that his father had issued in 1565 indicating that no clergyman would be allowed to preach if he did not know the language spoken by the groups living in the region (Mendoza Guerrero 2010). Phillip IV ordered the university in Mexico City to teach the most widely spoken indigenous languages. The linguistic consequences of these decisions were that the missionaries selected the most prevalent language to use in the missions, and that local indigenous languages were strengthened by delaying language shift to Castilian (Mendoza Guerrero 2010). Third, bilingualism between Europeans and Nahautl speakers was fostered; Parodi (2010) quotes Hernán Cortés’s son, Juan Suárez de Peralta, indicating that Indians communicated many things in their language because the Spaniards knew it, “[los indios] nos comunican muchas cosas y más como sabemos la lengua es gran conformidad para ellos y amistad” (333). Moreover, two European-style higher education institutions were created: Colegio de Tlatelolco in Mexico City and Colegio de San Nicolas Obispo in Michoacán. Students learned Latin as well as Nahuatl; after three years of instruction, they went to their place of origin to catechize. Tolerance turned into eradication and the imposition of Spanish as the colonial language through King Charles III’s decree in 1770. He aimed to end the need for interpreters, to create uniform educational opportunities, and to allow the Spanish Crown to govern all possessions with more convenience. Valencia Zamudio (2015) indicates that speaking the same language between a colony and its monarch was seen as the easiest and fairest way of governing. The decree states that speaking the same language as the king generates affection and goodwill toward and among his people, and that it generates a certain closeness which does not occur among people who do not share a language, like indigenous people. Further, it says that indigenous people do not have the right to maintain their own language, that this right only belongs to the king, as it serves in governing easily and uniformly (55–56). In spite of this decree, reality in New Spain did not change due to the self-interests of the clergy and Viceroy. The former wanted to keep using native languages to secure their own possessions in the communities and to prevent priests who only spoke Castilian from entering those communities, while the Viceroy wished to keep the status quo where indigenous groups were exploited and denied education. The Viceroy justified not carrying out the decree by claiming a lack of funds to pay teachers (Heath 1972).
Monolingualism and monoculturalism in Mexico 185 2.3
Modern times: from eradication to revival
The 19th century and part of the 20th century saw language policies that called for the eradication of the indigenous languages and cultures. Interestingly, during the War of Independence that took place at the beginning of the 19th century, diglossic communication happened among bilingual leaders and monolingual Indians in the battlefield. The leaders Hidalgo and Morelos harangued their mainly indigenous troops in their native languages while interacting in Spanish with the army leaders (Parodi 2010). Nevertheless, once independence was achieved, prevailing language policies were imposed. These were aimed at eradicating indigenous languages and cultural practices that were seen as obstacles to achieving unity and development in the new born nation. The indigenous groups represented 60% of the population and most of them were monolingual (Aguirre Beltrán 1983; Cifuentes 1989). A controversy arose between a small group that proposed bilingual education for indigenous children in their native languages and the majority who rejected it. Ironically, during the short-lived French Intervention a decree establishing bilingual education in Nahuatl and Spanish was signed by Maximilian, Archduke of Hapsburg, but it never took effect. Once the French Intervention was suppressed, positivism continued, simultaneously embracing the ideal ancestral Indian as the symbol of national identity and denying the contemporary indigenous population the right to their culture and language. This idea of the new society and changes in the economy caused a process of subtractive bilingualism and indigenous language shift. The language shift took place because the indigenous population left their community; indigenous languages were reserved for private environments while some knowledge of Spanish was acquired to interact with the rest of society in working environments. Unfortunately, the degree of bilingualism is not well documented (Villavicencio 2010; Cifuentes 1992). The 20th century continued with an eradication approach to indigenous languages. They were seen as an obstacle to the new nation; Sierra stated: “the multilingualism in [Mexico] is an obstacle to the spread of culture and the formation of national consciousness” (Lara 2015: 26).1 Although the 1917 constitution established their protection and promotion, they were not included in articles that referred to the official language, Spanish. There were a few voices that wanted to incorporate indigenous groups into the project of the nation by teaching them using their mother languages; the opposing voices, instead, imposed the Direct Method that prohibited the use of their languages and forced Spanish as the language of instruction; this was institutionalized by the Secretary of Public Instruction from 1911 to 1930 (Lastra 1992; Lara 2015). The effects of previous policies can be seen in the population profile change: indigenous groups drastically decreased from 60% in 1810 to 13% in 1910 at the same time the mestizo population increased to 87%, according to the census. Years later, the mestizo state was born, where mestizo embodied a Mexican identity comprised the most important qualities of all the races, according to Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica. However, contrary to this claim,
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two races that contributed to create the Mestizo, Indians and Afro descendants, were eliminated from the national discourse. The treatment of the indigenous cultures and languages was revisited in the 1930s; the term ‘indianist’ was substituted by the term ‘indigenist.’ The first referred to the recreation of Indian nations; the second referred to the protection and development of indigenous Mexicans, emphasizing that there was a problem of cultural differences that separated and isolated the indigenous population from mainstream society (Heath 1972). A continuous and collective interest in indigenous Mexicans and linguistic studies started; Cárdenas’s government made inroads in linguistic studies and bilingual education by creating different institutions to study them and initiating three projects: the Tarascan Project in Michoacán under the supervision of the linguist Swadesh, the research in all fields of indigenous life headed by the Institute of Linguistic Studies (UNAM), and the writing of grammars, dictionaries, and vocabulary lists of Maya, Mazatec, Mixtec, Totonac, Otomi, and Tarahumara by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The Tarascan project consisted of transcribing spoken Tarascan into an alphabet and the preparation of texts and materials to instruct adults and children in their own language. The Institute of Linguistic Studies studied Nahuatl, Otomi, Tarascan, and Maya. The Summer Institute of Linguistics transcribed and instructed teachers in bilingual education techniques to teach indigenous groups in their language and Spanish. The First Assembly of Philologists and Linguists that gathered North American and Mexican anthropologists and linguists concluded that the Direct Method had not benefited indigenous Mexicans and proposed the use of bilingual education to integrate them into society. In spite of those projects and the rejection of the Direct Method, it continued being used in rural areas by the National Indigenist Institute and other institutions until the 1960s (for example, Indigenous Patrimony of Mezquital Valley in 1951 and General Direction of Indigenous Education in 1978). Their purpose was to implement bilingual and bicultural education in rural areas to incorporate indigenous groups into mainstream society. In 1978, the General Management of Indigenous Education within the Ministry of Education proposed a curriculum that addressed indigenous Mexicans within the national context. By 1985, the educational policy focused on the development of local cultures and languages; bilingual education was implemented in rural areas. However, this led to subtractive bilingualism and the ultimate goal was to teach in the official language. Lastra (1992) summarizes the failure of these attempts as follows: Linguists who have studied education close-up in an indigenous community all come to the conclusion that bilingual and bicultural education is a myth, that it is only bilingual and bicultural inasmuch as the children learn Spanish at school and enter into contact with a cultural not their own.2 (100) The Mexican government responded to criticisms that language policies had been drafted to homogenize and control indigenous communities by amending
Monolingualism and monoculturalism in Mexico 187 the constitution in 1993. A General Law of Education was passed without acknowledging the bilingual education failure, and proposed to teach indigenous children four hours in their native language and to treat Spanish as an L2. However, due to the lack of coordination to implement the law, it wasn’t successful (Terborg et al. 2007). In this context, the most beneficial change in legislation for indigenous groups and languages took place when the Acuerdos de San Andres Larrainzar, ‘the San Andres Larrainzar Agreement,’ was signed between the Mexican government and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994. The government agreed to guarantee indigenous people received just and fair treatment which included political, judicial, social, economic, and cultural aspects that were incorporated in the constitution through several amendments. This meant to respect the indigenous population’s Human Rights contemplated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Resolution (1948) guaranteeing equal treatment without discrimination and access to economic, social, and cultural rights indispensable for their realization as individuals. Amendments to the constitution took place years later; one of those gave origin, in 2003, to the Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas (2003) ‘General Law for the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous People.’ For the first time in Mexico’s history, indigenous languages were given equal status with Spanish. The law comprises four sections, indicating indigenous peoples’ rights, the distribution of land, their right to organize politically, and their right to promote the National Institute of Indigenous Languages (INALI 2008). Its objectives are to study the preservation, knowledge, and appreciation of indigenous languages; to promote the production of grammars; to standardize the written forms, and promote reading and writing in indigenous languages; to extend the domain of national indigenous languages and access to learning opportunities; and to establish programs to certify bilingual professionals and technicians. With that purpose, the INALI works on several projects: cataloging the languages currently spoken, designing teaching materials in different languages, and translating popular music into different languages (Plan Nacional de Desarrollo Gobierno de la República 2013–2018 2014). The catalog records the existing language families, the states with the largest number of speakers, and the most spoken languages in the country. Eleven language families with 68 languages and 364 variants are accounted for: Algica, Yuto-Nahua, Cochimi-Yumana, Seri, Otomanguean, Maya, Totonac-Tepehua, Tarascan, Mixe-Zoque, Chontal from Oaxaca, and Huave. Chiapas, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Puebla, Yucatán, Guerrero, Quintana Roo, Hidalgo, Campeche, and San Luis Potosí are the states with the largest number of speakers of Nahuatl, Maya, Mixtec, Tzeltal, Zapotec, Tzotzil, Otomi, Totonac, and Mazatec (Ley General de Derechos). It has also created didactic materials to teach 108 language variants; Spanish is taught as a second language while students learn how to read and write in their first language. Currently the Mexican Constitution has been translated into 13 languages of the existing 68. Eleven Intercultural Indigenous Universities located across the country have been created in Chiapas, Tabasco, Veracruz, Michoacán, Estado de Mexico, Puebla, Quintana Roo, and Sinaloa for speakers of Otomi, Maya-Quiche, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, Nahuatl, Popoloca, Popoluca, and
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Purepecha (Valencia Zamudio 2015; Coordinación General de Educación 2015). Considering the aforementioned legislation and decisions, the future survival of the indigenous languages seems hopeful; this will be addressed in Section 4 after the following overview of sociolinguistic research on indigenous languages.
3 A snapshot of sociolinguistic studies on indigenous languages Sociolinguists in Mexico have taken two main approaches: studying the official language or concentrating on indigenous languages. The last group has mainly studied the most spoken languages in the country; some examples are listed in order of number of speakers according to the 2010 Census, starting with more than one million and followed by fewer than one million: Nahuatl (Hill and Hill 1986; Flores Farfán 2003; Zantwijk 2011), Maya (Briceño Chel 2002; Cunill 2008), Zapotec (Munro 2015) and Otomi (Lastra 2004). El Colegio de México has created a database listing the linguistic bibliography in Mexico called Lingmex (Barriga 2017), where some articles are available for free download. Another important line of sociolinguistic research in Mexico pertains to the influence of Amerindian languages in Mexican Spanish, most notably studied in relation to Nahautl and Maya. Lope Blanch’s seminal work that documents the Nahuatl substrate (1972) has been revisited to verify its current vitality. Lozanova (2000) tests the use of lexicon related to everyday life. Her findings confirm an undergoing attrition process of this lexicon among the youngest generation. The most advanced attrition is occurring with words that refer to objects, events, and social relationships that relate to the indigenous worldview, for example, chimal ‘shield,’ camichín ‘weeping fig,’ macegual ‘low-class Indian,’ topil ‘stubborn,’ chomite ‘skirt,’ and totomoxcle ‘corn husk.’ Some gastronomic items persist, for instance cocol ‘a type of bread,’ ejote ‘green bean,’ and atole ‘drink made from corn flour.’ Butragueño (2010) recapitulates the most recent studies in assibilation, which has also been attributed to a Nahautl substrate, and finds that it is currently undergoing a retraction process; the older generation uses it more than younger informants, contrary to the findings of earlier research. Zimmermann (2000) revisits the possessive duplication which has been debated as belonging to the same subtract as seen in these sentences: (1) Al niño le rompieron su lápiz. They broke his pencil (belonging to the child). (2) Al niño le rompieron el lápiz. They broke the child’s pencil. The duplication occurs in sentence 1 by marking possession both with a possessive adjective (su) and the use of possession by indirect object (le), which is not standard in Mexican Spanish. Sentence 2, in standard Mexican Spanish, only marks possession by using the indirect object. Her findings corroborate the influence of the Nahuatl substrate in the construction. Twelve children participated in the study, with social class and contact with Nahuatl being the most relevant variables. Its presence in Mexican toponymy has also been studied extensively; Almaguer Cervantes provides one of
Monolingualism and monoculturalism in Mexico 189 the most recent studies done in Mexico City (the center of Nahuatl civilization) and writes: “after five centuries, Spanish has won the linguistic battle without having any opposition. However, Nahuatl traces can still be seen on the streets in Mexico City” (2009: 8). This causes us to pause and consider whether Spanish has won the battle over indigenous languages, whether the most recent legislative and governmental actions might stop their attrition, whether bilingualism can be sustained in those communities, and whether the indigenous groups, and their culture, might be incorporated as equals in the fabric of contemporary Mexican society.
4
Overcoming monolingualism and monoculturalism
Socioeconomic and political factors have determined the dominant culture and language in Mexico, starting from three centuries of colonial ruling to current times. Changes in the economy along with power struggles have removed multiple indigenous groups from their places of origin either by joining the Independence and Revolutionary wars, being forced to move to haciendas, mines, or urban areas in search of survival. The cultural and linguistic consequences have been devastating for them; most of the time causing a subtractive bilingualism that has led to language attrition and shift. Throughout the centuries, some degree of bilingualism has taken place and sometimes it has been mandated without success. The Spanish Crown unconsciously allowed a degree of bilingualism among the indigenous groups when they decided to teach them Spanish to catechize their peers. Colonizers and criollos, Spaniards born in the New World, were also bilingual because of socioeconomic and political circumstances; the first were motivated by exploration and the second, clergymen, were fighting along with them to seize power and control of New Spain. Ironically, in the 19th century, bilingualism was decreed by Maximilian Archduke of Hapsburg, an invader government, but it never took effect. Indians also used a degree of bilingualism necessary to interact in the new working market when they left their communities (Parodi 2010). The 20th and 21st centuries witnessed several attempts to establish bilingual education among the indigenous population, starting with the government of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s and continuing in the 1980s and the 2000s. The common denominator has been to design an educational policy focused on local cultural and linguistic development. However, this does not promote exchanges between the majority and minority members of society in order to understand and develop respect toward the indigenous groups that have been deprived of “the economic, social, and cultural rights indispensable for [their] dignity and the free development of [their] personality” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights). In other words, the approach to these communities is treating them as “the other diverging from the home-culture norm” (Knutson 2006: 592). They are not the idealized Indians that are revered in monuments and museums. The ideology that has forged the bronzed mestizo has not overcome treating indigenous people as in colonial times, subjecting them to a process of othering which makes them fair game for discrimination as seen in discriminatory statements like “improving the race” to describe the conscious
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desire to avoid marrying or having children with indigenous descendants; “this is part of everyday language that no Mestizo hesitates to utter when expressing his conception of beauty” (Castellanos 2009: 233). Hence, despite the new legislation issued in 2003, and the creation of different entities to study and to promote indigenous languages and cultures (such as the Dirección General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe (DGEIB), Intercultural Indigenous Universities, and the INALI), the future of indigenous languages in Mexico seems bleak. There are several reasons for this assertion. First, the number of indigenous monolinguals continues to decrease throughout the country while bilinguals increase (INEGI 2010), which threatens indigenous languages’ survival. Figure 8.1 illustrates the increase of bilinguals in densely populated states with indigenous groups which suggests a language shift as time passes. Second, there are not enough available spaces to use indigenous languages to promote their learning; in Zimmerman’s words “the use of [only] Spanish in administration and education environments works in detriment of indigenous languages” (2012: 208). Third, the most populated states with the largest number of speakers of endangered languages exhibit the largest degrees of poverty levels in the country. The states of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca show 75%, 70%, and 62%, respectively, of poverty levels (INEGI 2010); they are speakers of Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tlapaneco, Chatino, and Chol. Considering the speakers’ socioeconomic situation, maintaining an indigenous language seems related to living in extreme poverty, which might be a deterrent to its maintenance; ECLAC’s report confirms that “poverty, stigmatization, and exclusion have become structural for indigenous and black peoples in the Hemisphere” (2017). Fourth, the governmental entities in charge of disseminating
Figure 8.1 Bilingualism growth in densely populated states Author’s creation
Monolingualism and monoculturalism in Mexico 191 and studying indigenous cultures and languages have been criticized for making unilateral decisions with a predominance of governmental representatives over few indigenous ones (Duarte 2005; Terborg 2007; Quesada Nieto 2016). This leaves indigenous people without a voice in the decision making that affects their future, which can be interpreted as a paternalistic treatment by the power holders in society: it is the notion that administrators and academics know better about their cultural future than they do. Fifth, the mission of the Dirección General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe entails establishing intercultural education for all Mexicans and intercultural bilingual education for the culturally and linguistically diverse populations. The mainstream population does not contemplate learning an indigenous language. It seems that indigenous language maintenance belongs to their speakers and the academics that are interested in studying and rescuing them from extinction. Bilingualism for the mainstream culture means learning a foreign language. This is rooted in the challenges faced by the country in the globalized world, but it might also be based on the unbalanced treatment toward indigenous languages and their speakers; learning Nahuatl or Otomi, for example, does not seem to be linked to social mobility as is learning English. Government programs like Proyecta (Joint USMexico Statement 2015) are being created to promote foreign language learning, contrasting with no program to promote indigenous language learning.
5
Moving forward
After revisiting some language policies and administrative decisions in Mexico, it has been shown how a multicultural and multilingual society has chosen to be monocultural and monolingual up to recent times. Even though efforts have been made to change this, the battle against asymmetrical relationships between the majority and the minority groups is destined to fail unless the indigenous groups are given a voice in decision-making actions and there is a strong effort to foster intercultural education. Institutions and decisions taken to preserve and to foster indigenous language bilingualism seem to target the groups that have struggled to preserve and defend their cultural and linguistic heritage throughout the years. Society at large must recognize, and treat as equals, disenfranchised members of society. Social equality must reach those states where indigenous groups live their everyday lives immersed in their own culture and language; they have that right as members of society, as well as the right to conserve their way of living without having to abandon their cultural and linguistic heritage to obtain an acceptable standard of living.
Glossary assibilation: the realization of /r/ as a voiceless fricative [ř] in word-final position, especially before pause, e.g. amo[ř] ‘love,’ vivi[ř] ‘to live.’ bilingual education: using two languages in instruction leads to bilingual education. The language of lower status, or use, should initially be used extensively
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as the medium of instruction, regardless of whether students are of the language minority or majority. The language of higher status, or higher use, should also be used as a medium of instruction. This can be done by allocating a specific language to a certain time of the day or certain day, a certain subject or specific physical location such as different classrooms. bilingualism (additive): teaching students a second language without threatening their first language or mother tongue. bilingualism (subtractive): instructing students in both their L1 and L2. However, instruction in L1 ceases when the L2 becomes the main language of instruction. intercultural education: recognizes and pays attention to cultural and linguistic diversity and promotes respect for difference by fostering tolerance of and respect for cultural difference and promoting interest in the unfamiliar. language attrition: the gradual loss of a language, whether it be L1, L2, in an individual or in a community. language shift: the gradual or sudden move to use one language instead of another. substrate or substratum: a language that has influenced the structure or use of a more dominant language within a community. For example, the Nahuatl lexicon influenced Mexican Spanish: mecate ‘rope’ comes from the Nahuatl mecatl; in standard Spanish ‘rope’ is cuerda. The opposite is superstratum.
Notes 1 “La poliglosia de nuestro país es un obstáculo a la propagación de la cultura y la formación plena de la conciencia de la patria.” 2 “Todo lingüista que ha estudiado de cerca la educación en alguna comunidad indígena llega a la conclusión de que la educación bilingüe y bicultural es un mito, que solo es bilingüe y bicultural en la medida en que los niños aprenden en español en la escuela y entran en contacto con otra cultura diferente de la suya.”
References Aguirre Beltrán, Gonzalo. Problemas de población indígena de la Cuenca del Tepalcatepec. México, DF: Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1983. Almaguer Cervantes, Blanca Isabel. “Topónimos de origen náhuatl en el Distrito Federal, el descubrimiento de nuestro legado léxico.” BA Thesis, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México, 2009. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://lingmex.colmex.mx/ Barriga Villanueva, Rebeca, coord. Lingmex: bibliografía lingüística de México desde 1970, 2017. http://lingmex.colmex.mx/ Briceño Chel, Fidencio. “Topicalización, enfoque, énfasis y adelantamiento en el maya yukateco.” In La organización social entre los mayas prehispánicos, coloniales y modernos: memoria de la Tercera Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by V. Tiesler Blos and R. Cobos, 373–387. México, DF: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2002. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://lingmex.colmex.mx/
Monolingualism and monoculturalism in Mexico 193 Butragueño, Pedro Martín. “El proceso de urbanización: consecuencias lingüísticas.” In Historia sociolingüística de México, vol 2 México prehispánico y colonial, edited by R. Barriga Villanueva and P. Martín Butragueño, 999–1093. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2010. Castellanos Guerrero, Jorge Gómez Izquierdo, and Francisco Pineda. “Racist discourse in Mexico.” In Racism and discourse in Latin America, edited by T. A. Van Dijk, 217–258. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Cifuentes, Bárbara. “Language policy in Mexico.” Sociology of Language 96 (1992): 9–17. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.1992.96.9 ——— and Dora Pellicer. “Ideology, politics and national language: a study in the creation of a national language in the 19th century Mexico.” Sociolinguistics 1 (1989): 7–17. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://search.proquest.com/docview/55155671 Coordinación General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe. México, DF: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 2015. Accessed May 1, 2017. Cunill, Caroline. “La alfabetización de los mayas yucatecos y sus consecuencias sociales, 1545–1580.” Estudios de Cultura Maya 31 (2008): 163–192. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://lingmex.colmex.mx/ Darkin, Karen. “Lenguas francas y lenguas locales en la época prehispánica.” In Historia sociolingüística de México, edited by R. Barriga Villanueva and P. Martín Butragueño, 161–183. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2010. Duarte, Pablo. “Bilingual education and bilingual integration in Mexico: shifting the target.” In Context, contact and constraints, edited by G. Ernrst, A. Hurley, and K. Sutton, 185–203. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2005. ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean). “ECLAC study identifies poverty, exclusion and stigmatization.” Santiago de Chile: United Nations Publications, 2017. Flores Farfán, José Antonio. “Nahuatl purism between language innovation, maintenance and shift.” In Purism in minor languages, endangered languages, regional languages, mixed languages, edited by J. Brincat, et al., 281–313. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 2003. ———. “Sociolinguistics in Mexico: defining new agendas.” In The Routledge handbook of sociolinguistics around the world, edited by M. J. Ball, 34–41. New York: Routledge, 2010. Heath, Shirley Brice. Telling tongues: linguistic policy in Mexico. New York: Teachers College, 1972. Hill, Jane and Kenneth Hill. Speaking Mexicano: dynamics of syncretic language in central Mexico. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1986. INALI (Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Indígenas). México: Diario Oficial de la Federación, 2008. INEGI. Censo de Población y Vivienda 2010. Aguascalientes, México: INEGI, 2010. “Joint US-Mexico statement on the US-Mexico bilateral forum on higher education, innovation, and the research: connecting tomorrows’ leaders today.” Asia News Monitor, January 28, 2015. Kirkwood, Burton. The history of Mexico. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Knutson, Elizabeth M. “Cross-cultural awareness for second/foreign language learners.” The Canadian Modern Language Review 62 (2006): 591–610. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://search.proquest.com/docview/85652299 Lara, Luis Fernando and María Eugenia Vázquez Laslop. Estudio de las lenguas en México: avatares de dos siglos. México, DF: Colegio Nacional, 2015. Lastra, Yolanda. “La situación lingüística en América, México.” Sociolingüística para hispanoamericanos, una introducción, 85–100. México, DF: Colegio de México, 1992.
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———. “Apuntes sobre la dialectología del otomí.” In Cambio lingüístico: métodos y problemas, edited by P. Martín Butragueño, 33–52. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2004. Ley Generalde Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas. México: Diario Oficial de la Federación, 2003. Accessed May 1, 2017. www.gob.mx Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Mexico.” In Latin American Spanish, 274–286. London: Longmans, 1994. Lope Blanch, Juan M. Estudios sobre el español de México. México: UNAM, 1972. Lozanova, Elena. “Notas sobre la vitalidad del léxico indígena en el español contemporáneo de la ciudad de México.” In Estructuras en contexto, estudios de variación lingüística, edited by P. Martín Butragueño, 6–79. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2000. Máynez, Pilar. “La codificación de las lenguas indígenas durante la colonia.” In Historia sociolingüística de México. México prehispánico y colonial, edited by R. Barriga Villanueva and P. Martín Butragueño, 403–449. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2010. Mendoza Guerrero, Everardo. “Conflicto lingüístico y expansión del español.” In Historia sociolingüística de México, edited by R. Barriga Villanueva and P. Martín Butragueño, 483–544. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2010. Munro, Pamela. “Valence alternations in the Tlacolula Valley Zapotec lexicon.” In Valence changes in Zapotec: synchrony, diachrony, typology, edited by N. Operstein and A. Huey Sonnenschein, 55–78. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Accessed May 1, 2017. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1075/tsl.110.04mun Parodi, Claudia. “Tensión lingüística en la colonia: diglosia y bilingüismo.” In Historia sociolingüística de México, edited by R. Barriga Villanueva and P. Martín Butragueño, 287–347. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2010. Plan Nacionalde Desarrollo Gobierno de la República 2013–2018 Programa de Alfabetización y Abatimiento del Rezago educativo logros 2014. México: Gobierno de la República, 2014. Accessed May 1, 2017. www.gob.mx/sep Quesada Nieto, Luis B. “Particularizar la educación dirigida a las minorías favorece un aislamiento no deseado, la separación indígena-no indígena y una brecha sociocultural que debe borrarse: entrevista con Dora Pellicer.” LL Journal 11 (2016): 1–8. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://lljournal.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ Smith Stark, Thomas. “La trilogía catequística: artes, vocabulario y doctrinas en la Nueva España como instrumento de una política lingüística de normalización.” In Historia sociolingüística de México, edited by R. Barriga Villanueva and P. Martín Butragueño, 451–471. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2010. Terborg, Roland, Laura García Landa, and Pauline Moore. “The language situation in Mexico.” In Language planning and policy: language planning and policy in Latin America: Ecuador, Mexico and Paraguay, edited by R. Baldauf and R. B. Kaplan, 115–217. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007. United Nations. Universal declaration of human rights resolution. Paris: NGO Committee on Education, 1948. Valencia Zamudio, Valeria. “Consequences of language hierarchization: languages ideologies among Purepecha (heritage) Speakers in the US implications for language maintenance and learning.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015. Valiñas, Leopoldo. “Historia lingüística: migraciones y asentamientos. Relaciones entre pueblos y lenguas.” In Historia sociolingüística de México, edited by R. Barriga Villanueva and P. Martín Butragueño, 97–160. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2010. Villavicencio, Frida. “Entre una realidad plurilingüe y un anhelo de nación. Apuntes para un estudio sociolingüístico del siglo XIX.” In Historia sociolingüística de México, edited
Monolingualism and monoculturalism in Mexico 195 by R. Barriga Villanueva and P. Martín Butragueño, 713–793. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2010. Zantwijk, Rudolf van. “El futuro de la lengua Náhuatl.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 42 (2011): 259–265. Accessed May 1, 2017. http://lingmex.colmex.mx/ Zimmermann, Karina Hess. “Me rompí mi brazo vs. me rompí el brazo. La influencia del Náhuatl sobre el español de niños mexicanos.” In Estructuras en contexto, estudios de variación lingüística, edited by P. Martín Butragueño, 103–114. México, DF: Colegio de México, 2000. ———. “Periodización de la historia lingüística de México.” Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 2 (2012): 193–209. Accessed May 1, 2017. www.jstor.org/ stable/23722479
Further readings Francis, Nortbert. “Prospects for indigenous language bilingualism in Mexico.” Language Problems and Language Planning 40 (2016): 269–286. Harrison, David. When languages die: the extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Heath, Shirley B. Telling tongues: linguistic policy in Mexico. New York: Teachers College, 1972. Hidalgo, Margarita, ed. Mexican indigenous languages at the dawn of the twentieth-first century. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. Lund, Joshua. “The mestizo state: colonization and indianization in liberal Mexico.” PMLA 123 (2008): 1418–1433. Seyer, Peter. “More and earlier: neoliberalism and primary English education in Mexican public schools.” L2 Journal 7 (2015): 40–56.
Topics for discussion 1 Discuss the mendicant orders’ role in indigenous language maintenance and loss. 2 Find five words in Spanish that have an indigenous substrate. 3 Consider the Yaqui’s displacement and find out how it impacted their language. Compare it with the Trail of Tears of the Native Americans in the United States and find out the linguistic consequences of that action. 4 Comment on the decisions taken to form the bronzed mestizo state and elaborate on how that has impacted indigenous groups. 5 Consider the Direct Method imposed in bilingual instruction in Mexico and find out whether there is similar legislation in the United States. Elaborate on the impact on society.
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Mariadelaluz Matus-Mendoza 6 Select one of the Mexican states which has a large indigenous population and find out which languages are in contact and which of them are endangered and why. 7 Visit the website of the Coordinación General de Educación Intercultural Bilingüe (CGEIB). Look up its programs and determine if they develop intercultural education. If they do, justify your conclusions; if they do not, think of possible suggestions to improve them. 8 Examine the socioeconomic situation of the poorest states in Mexico. How can their standard of living be improved while respecting their indigenous languages and cultures? 9 Elaborate on whether indigenous groups should be in charge of maintaining their first language or whether the population at large should strive to maintain indigenous languages. Find and describe strategies to motivate the mainstream culture to learn indigenous languages.
10 What are the different conceptions of bilingualism in Mexico? Do the mainstream population and the indigenous groups share the same concept? 11 Consider the indigenous languages in the United States; research bilingual programs that address their maintenance and compare their success with the program that has recently been proposed by the INALI in Mexico. 12 Discuss Yolanda Lastra’s evaluation on bilingual programs. 13 ECLAC (2017) has classified Bolivia, Guatemala, and Peru as the countries with the highest percentage of indigenous population in Latin America with 62%, 41%, and 24%, respectively. Select one of them and find out whether there is legislation that protects their languages. 14 Research the role that the first indigenous President in Bolivia, Evo Morales, has had in indigenous language maintenance and shift.
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Language contact in Paraguay Cultural fusion in a unique sociolinguistic situation Haralambos Symeonidis
1
Language policies of the Guaranitic area
The linguistic and cultural situation in Paraguay is unique in Latin America. In this country, Guarani is used as a means of communication by the majority and not, as is the case in many other regions across the Americas, the minority of the population. According to official numbers from 2002, 3,729,111 out of 4,584,303 Paraguayans (older than four years old) speak Guarani; this number corresponds to 81% of the Paraguayan population. A total of 2,409,334 Paraguayans speak both Spanish and Guarani, 53% of the total population. On the other hand, only 10% of the Paraguayan population are monolingual speakers, which includes people who speak Spanish or another European language (Portuguese, German, and English), according to the Dirección General de Estadística, Encuestas y Censos 2002. The special situation of Guarani in Paraguay is due to historical, social, and geographical factors which go back to the time of the colonization of the region. First of all, the number of Spanish and European settlers in this area was very limited, so the colonization was carried out in close co-operation with the native population, in contrast to the conquests organized by the Spaniards alone against the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas in different parts of Latin America. As a result, the majority of the native Guarani tribes were able to preserve their language (ALGR-L 2009). In the early period of the settlement, there was a large number of mixed marriages between Spaniards and indigenous women since hardly any Spanish women came to colonize as the area was considered too ‘wild’ (Rubin 1974: 18). Since the Spanish conquerors were in the minority, they were forced to learn Guarani from their native wives. The children who were born from these marriages learned Guarani from their mothers and later also Spanish from their fathers; this means that the dominant mother tongue of the children born in this region was Guarani and not Spanish. Another factor contributing to the preservation of Guarani was the isolation of the region from the rest of the world throughout the colonial period. Paraguay did not have any important communication routes or natural resources that could attract a large settler population. Due to these factors, there was no Spanish upper class, which usually lived isolated from the entire autochthonous population, as was the case in other regions of Latin America (as in Peru or Mexico). Therefore, there was diglossia during this time, with Guarani used in family and private
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situations and Spanish predominantly in formal contexts, trade, government, or education (Rubin 1974: 20). An important factor for the preservation of Guarani was the establishment of so-called reducciones ‘reductions’ by the Jesuits in the 17th and 18th century that served to evangelize remote communities. The autonomous regime of the reductions within the Spanish colony contributed to the preservation of Guarani, since this language was used as the only means of communication in the reductions. Although the reductions were founded by the Jesuits, they were in the minority among the large number of locals who spoke very similar dialects of Guarani. The contemporary linguistic situation in Paraguay cannot be explained without the contribution of the Jesuits, who helped to link the colonial society of the region with Guarani, although other factors must also be considered. The Jesuits who learned Guarani created a uniform language form based on several Guarani dialects, adapting them to European cultural patterns and Christian ways of thinking (Meliá 1969, 2003; Thun 2008). After the independence of Paraguay in 1811, Guarani was also used by the Paraguayan upper class; private matters were predominantly discussed in Guarani (Rubin 1974: 22). During the dictatorship of Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1814–1840), Paraguay was completely isolated from the rest of the world. The school system was reduced, the publication of newspapers and magazines was abandoned, and its access from abroad was interrupted. Due to limited contact with the rest of the Spanish-speaking world and the lack of education and publications in Spanish, Guarani became dominant and maintained itself even among the upper class (Palacios Alcaine 2009: 154). In 1862 a war broke out against the so-called Triple Alianza: Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. Guarani quickly became a symbol of Paraguayan national unity against the external enemy (Rubin 1974: 24). However, Paraguay lost this war, which was one of the bloodiest clashes in Latin America, reducing its population to a third. Many of the exiled Paraguayans, especially in Argentina, later returned to Paraguay. The cultural influence in the neighboring country, in which negative perceptions toward autochthonous languages prevailed, influenced those Paraguayans to view indigenous languages very negatively. This sentiment led to the point that the use of Guarani was finally banned in Congress and schools and replaced by Spanish. Guarani was declared the great enemy of cultural progress in Paraguay (Cardozo 1959: 82). On the other hand, during the Chaco War against Bolivia between 1932 and 1935, the use of Spanish in the war field was forbidden by the government because the Guarani language was again associated with the national unity of Paraguay. After the war, however, Spanish again became the dominant language in politics and education. In the 1950s, the Asociación de Autores Guaraníes ‘Guarani Writers’ Association’ was founded, giving Guarani greater national prestige. In 1967, Guarani became a national language, and in 1992, it was declared co-official alongside Spanish. If we look at the historical events of Paraguay from the arrival of the first Spaniards to the end of the 20th century, we can determine a number of different factors
Language contact in Paraguay 199 which led to this unique sociolinguistic situation in Latin America (Solé 2001). These factors can be summarized as follows: 1 2 3 4 5 6
The complete absence of Spanish women during colonization. The great contribution of the Jesuits to the normalization of the use of Guarani. The non-existence of mineral resources in Paraguay and the related disinterest of the settlers in this area. The geographic and economic isolation of the whole region and the subsequent sociopolitical isolation during the dictatorship (1814–1840). The restricted communication system both inside and outside Paraguay and the related isolation of the country from other Latin American countries. The positive connection between Guarani and the Paraguayan national identity as a result of the war of the Triple Alianza.
These factors led to a diglossia in which Guarani is mostly used in family and informal situations and in rural regions, while the use of Spanish is reserved exclusively for official and formal contexts and urban areas. In general, Spanish is associated with formality and prestige, while Guarani is associated with family and tradition (Zajícová 2005). Although Guarani is still a very important identity factor in Paraguay, it is often associated with a regression (Rubin 1974; Gynan 1998a, 1998b; Solé 2001; Choi 2003). A comparison of census data from 1950 to 2002 shows that the number of speakers of Guarani, Spanish, or both does not diminish with time. They remain very stable over the years, and the use of the native language does not decrease, as is the case in other Latin American countries with indigenous languages (see Table 9.1). However, data from the year 2002 show that Guarani is losing ground to Spanish. According to Gynan (2007: 294), it is due to the following three factors: 1 2 3
The internal migration, which led to an increase in bilingualism in the countryside and a reduction in bilingualism in the cities where monolingual speakers of Spanish predominantly live. The low birth rate of the Guarani speakers compared to the bilingual and Spanish-speaking population. The passing of Spanish, but not Guarani, from one generation to another.
The new results of the in-depth investigation of ALGR-S also confirm that there is a constant decline in Guarani monolingualism. Nevertheless, this decline is not due to distancing Guarani from domestic use but to a balanced bilingualism with Spanish, at least in the countryside (Thun 2002: 346). According to Zajícová, the remoteness of the countryside in Paraguay, which for many years was an important factor in the preservation of the Guarani, was changed fundamentally in the 1990s by the construction of new roads and the introduction of electricity and television in many remote areas (2005: 11). Access to new technologies and the flood of information from the media jeopardized for the
1,328,452 1,110,812 414,032 633,151 48,474 15,155
Adapted from Gynan (2007: 286)
Total population 5 y. old + Only Guarani Guarani-Spanish Only Spanish Other languages
Speakers
1950
100.0 37.3 57.0 4.4 1.4
%
1962
1,819,103 1,504,756 648,884 761,137 61,570 33,165
Speakers
Table 9.1 Bilingualism in Paraguay from 1950 to 2002
100.0 43.1 50.6 4.1 2.2
% 3,029,830 2,565,850 1,029,786 1,247,742 166,441 121,881
Speakers
1982
100.0 40.1 48.6 6.5 4.8
%
4,152,588 3,503,650 1,345,513 1,736,342 227,204 194,591
Speakers
1992
100.0 38.4 49.6 6.5 5.6
%
5,183,080 4,584,303 1,319,777 2,409,334 458,732 396,453
Speakers
2002
100.0 28.8 52.6 10.0 8.6
%
Language contact in Paraguay 201 first time the geographic area of Guarani, which is mainly associated with rural life. Spanish seems to be gaining ground, especially through education; the young population sees the Spanish language as an opportunity for advancement in society. Since the Guarani language is not internationally appreciated, Solé (1991) thinks that Guarani will turn into a reliquia folclórica ‘folkloric relic’ within a few decades.
2
Sociolinguistic aspects and language contact
Due to the long history of bilingualism in Paraguay, Spanish, and Guarani have influenced each other over the years. This influence is very strong in both languages at the level of the lexicon, but only rudimentary at the level of phonetics, phonology, and morphosyntax (Meliá 1974, 1992; Palacios Alcaine 1999). The range of variations in Guarani moves between two idealized extremes. On the one hand, there is the more or less ‘pure’ Guarani, which according to the investigations of the ALGR is spoken by the indigenous speakers of the tribes of Mbyá, Ava-Guaraní (also called Chiripá or Ñandeva), Kaiwá, (or Caiová), and Guarayu (or Chiriguano). This Guarani shows only a small influence from Spanish. On the other hand, there is the so-called Guarani criollo or Jopará, which means ‘mixture’ in Guarani. Jopará is an appropriate name since this variety is more or less mixed with Spanish. It is frequently found in the Guaranitic area, and is the result of the partial acquisition of the two languages. In the eyes of the bilingual speakers, the ‘pure’ Guarani (the Guaraniete) enjoys high esteem, for it is a variety that they do not master. Because the Guarani they speak is sufficient only for discussing traditional topics, they do not know much of modern Guarani vocabulary. Also, the Spanish of the region is located between two extremes: the standard Spanish spoken in the Río de la Plata area (Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay) and the variety with influence from Guarani. The standard variety is spoken mainly by speakers from the urban educated class, while the second is used by less educated speakers (ALGR-L 2009). The context and the conversation partners are the factors which lead the speaker to choose which variety to use. Jopará is neither a mixed language nor a sociolect, it is not a creole language nor a new language system apart from Guarani. Rather, it is a spoken variety characterized by frequent code-switching between Spanish and Guarani, without any loss of the fundamental morphosyntactic structures of the two languages.1 Jopará is a typical phenomenon in spoken language and has developed into a complex discursive tradition in the Guaranitic area. This language usage has also been categorized by other scientists as guarañol or tercera lengua (Meliá 1974, 1992; Palacios Alcaine 1999), a view that has not been confirmed in the ALGR. Nevertheless, a convergence of the systems of Spanish and Guarani can be observed in Jopará. It is not only the unique diglossic situation with a native language spoken throughout the country (see above) that makes the linguistic situation in Paraguay special, but also the strong mutual interaction between the two languages.
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Linguistic characteristics
Many scientists have dealt with the influence of Guarani on the morphosyntax of the Spanish of the Guaranitic contact zone (Usher 1976; Quant and Irigoyen 1980; Krivoshein 1987; Granda 1988). These studies do not, however, distinguish between the bilingual speakers who have acquired Spanish as their first language and those who have learned it as a second language. 3.1
Phonetics and phonology
There are a number of phonetic peculiarities in the Spanish of the Guaranitic contact zone which can be traced back to Guarani influence. For the most part, these properties have been studied by Granda (1982, 1988). 1
2
3
4
The nasalization of vowels is particularly striking, especially when the vowel appears in contact with a nasal consonant. This general nasalization occurs particularly frequently among speakers of the socially low classes, especially in the countryside, which makes Guarani influence more likely since Guarani has nasal vowels as phonemes. In many Spanish words the so-called sixth vowel of Guarani [ɨ] is used instead of [u] or [i]. This is a ‘dull’ i, formed with the tongue lying far back in the mouth. This sound, written as , is a vowel between [i] and [u], (also in Polish, Russian, and Turkish). Thus, e.g. puerta is pronounced as [pɨerta] (Granda 1980, 1982; Krivoshein de Canese and Corvalán 1987). Another tendency is the introduction of the voiceless glottal plosive between two vowels in the Spanish of the Guaranitic area, e.g. alcohol [alkoɁol]. This is mainly observed among speakers of the less educated class. Granda (1982: 159) explains that there are similar tendencies in Guarani, where the voiceless glottal plosive has phonemic status. Other scientists have also observed the same phenomenon in the Spanish of the Argentine contact zone (Thon 1989). The realization of the and the is different because the second is realized as a voiced labiodental [v]. According to Granda, this practice is widely extended, occurring in almost 80% of utterances, among speakers from urban and rural areas, illiterate people, and in general, among all speakers without distinction of age and social class (1988: 119). Granda observes that the labiodental realization of the coincides with the corresponding labiodental phoneme of the Guarani, which he uses as evidence of Guarani influence. This sound occurs much more frequently in Spanish in the countryside, where the influence of Guarani is considerably greater than in the cities. It was only after the 17th century that this distinction was abandoned in favor of the voiced bilabial plosive [b], as in standard Spanish. Other scientists, such as Cassano (1972), mention the appearance of the voiced bilabial fricative [β] in absolute initial positions and attribute this to Guarani influence. At first, this sound [β] was borrowed from Spanish into
Language contact in Paraguay 203
5
Guarani, in order to be used in an absolute initial position. Although Lipski speaks of this assumption (1996: 330), it must be confirmed by further investigations Granda also introduces the realization of the /n/ as [m] in implosive position, e.g. melón ‘cantaloupe’ pronounced [melóm], but this is not often the case (1982, 2001). A parallel realization of the alveolar nasal as a bilabial nasal in implosive position can also be found in the Spanish of the Yucatan (Lope 1980; Granda 1982). This is attributed to an internal development in Spanish, which was additionally reinforced by the indigenous languages. In contrast to maintaining this phenomenon as a symbol of identity in the Spanish of the Yucatan, the realization of the alveolar nasal in Paraguay is not very common.
Granda observes other properties in the Spanish of Paraguay, such as the realization of the [m] as [mb] in initial position or the use of the simple [r] instead of the strongly trilled vibrant, which he attributes to the influence of Guarani. However, these are not very widespread tendencies in the Spanish of the Guarani contact zone, which mainly occur among speakers of lower social strata in the countryside and infrequently in the cities. Other characteristics, which were originally attributed to the influence of the Guarani on Spanish, could not be confirmed by other linguists. Malmberg (1947) attributed the alveolar realization of the phonemes /t/ and /d/ to the influence of Guarani, which was adopted by Granda but later rejected; Granda (1988) argues that the alveolar realization of the dental sound is very limited, especially before [e] and [i] in the immediate vicinity of [r], e.g. in tres ‘three.’ Alonso (1931) and Malmberg (1947) attribute the preservation of the palatal lateral /ʎ/ in the Spanish of Paraguay to the influence of the Guarani language, which seems very unlikely because the lateral palatal is among the first borrowings from Spanish into Guarani, transcribed as [j] (Morínigo 1931). Granda attributes the retention of this sound in the Spanish of Paraguay to other sociohistorical factors: 1 2
3
The isolation of Paraguay during the colonial period and, additionally, during its independence. The inevitable differentiation within the Guaranitic contact zone and the formation of a community distinct from rest of the Rio de la Plata area, especially Buenos Aires, and the consequent rejection of the žeismo/ʒeísmo coming from Buenos Aires. The geographical origin of most of the settlers, mainly from the north of Castilla la Vieja ‘Old Castile’ and the Basque country. According to Granda, the palatal lateral /ʎ/ has developed into a national symbol in Paraguay versus the žeismo from Buenos Aires, although he observes a weak yeísmo among the young speakers of the high stratum. This observation, however, could not be confirmed by the investigations of the ALGR.
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3.2
Morphosyntax
Many aspects of the morphosyntactic structure of Spanish in the Guaranitic contact zone have been influenced by Guarani, such as leísmo, elision of pronouns, double negation, the use of the indefinite article and the preposition en with motion verbs. 3.2.1
Leísmo
Granda was one of the first to discover the phenomenon of leísmo in all of Paraguay and in all socioeconomic strata, including speakers of the urban upper class: “le/s is the only form for the direct object (and the indirect object) in Paraguayan Spanish for all syntactic possibilities, independently of the gender, number, and the semantic reference of the noun in question” (1988: 215). However, he did not contribute quantitative data in this study which could have supported his description of leísmo. Choi (1998) carried out similar research in the capital of Paraguay, Asunción, which is unable to support Granda’s thesis. Choi has taken into account the data of 24 interviews with residents of Asuncion. She has divided the informants into four groups: (1) bilingual speakers with 3–4 years of formal education; (2) bilingual speakers with 9–12 years of formal education; (3) bilingual speakers with more than 12 years of schooling; and (4) monolingual speakers of Spanish. Choi came to the conclusion that the leísmo occurred 100% of the time in all groups when the object was ‘animated.’ If the object was not ‘animated,’ then leísmo did not occur. On the contrary, the speakers went even further, omitting the unstressed forms of personal pronouns, which is also the case in Ecuador and the Basque country (Palacios Alcaine 2009: 161). Palacios has noted that the use of leísmo has been generalized among speakers in all sociolects of Paraguay. She also asserts that in the countryside the phenomenon of loísmo occurs, but she could not support this thesis with any data. Her research does not provide quantitative data. Nevertheless, the ALGR data are based on extensive interviews where, for the first time, phenomena are documented not only in Paraguay but in the entire Guaranitic contact zone. The research carried out up to that time had mostly concentrated on certain areas of Paraguay, and no data had been provided on the speakers outside Paraguay. The ALGR project has tried to fill these gaps, grouping together new updated data from systematic interviews throughout the Guaranitic contact zone. Granda (1988) and Choi (1998) confirm that leísmo in Paraguay is due to a number of different factors. First, the influence of Guarani on Spanish in Paraguay and the Guarani form ‘ichupe’ is the main factor; this form is used as a third person pronoun for the direct and indirect object, resulting in the possible use of only one pronominal form, namely le (Usher 1976). A further factor for the leísmo in Paraguay is the origin of the first settlers, which came mainly from Northern Spain, where this phenomenon is also very common. Paraguay’s geographic and political isolation during the colonial period and later during independence must have also contributed to the preservation of leísmo in this area. A final factor is the tendency to simplify the synthetic clitic system in Spanish, especially among speakers who acquire Spanish as a second language (Palacios Alcaine 2009: 161).
Language contact in Paraguay 205 We must therefore consider a whole series of factors in order to understand and explain the specific situation of leísmo in Paraguay. Another phenomenon associated with leísmo is the use of the form le for the plural form les in Paraguayan Spanish. According to Granda (1988), this has to do with a morphological economy both in Spanish in Paraguay and in Guarani. It is observed that the weakening of the final -s in Paraguayan Spanish is a widespread phenomenon, which leads to the use of the form le in all positions. According to Choi (1998), the weakening of the final -s is not as common in Paraguayan Spanish as leísmo itself. According to her investigation, the elision of the final -s occurs in only 35% of the monolingual and between 25% and 44% of the bilingual speakers. Choi assumes several factors for this phenomenon: (1) the morphological economy in the Spanish language; (2) the general tendency to weaken the final -s in Paraguayan Spanish; and (3) the influence of Guarani, in which a similar tendency to morphological simplification can be observed, e.g. ichupe kuera (les) > ichupe (le). 3.2.2
Elision of the unstressed personal pronoun
This phenomenon occurs like leísmo in all social strata, as observed by Choi (1998, 2000) and Symeonidis (2005a). In addition, it is a characteristic used by both Spanish monolinguals and bilingual speakers in the Guaranic contact zone. Choi (1998, 2000) notes that 90% of monolingual speakers, and between 90% and 98% of bilingual speakers, omit the personal pronouns when the referent is an inanimate object The ALGR has also carried out the same research, but only with bilingual speakers. The final results have not yet been published, but the same tendency is observed. Here are some examples from the corpus of the ALGR: (1) En frente de mi casa hay dos árboles. No quiero cortar porque son muy lindos. No quiero cortarlos porque son muy lindos. (SS) “In front of my house, there are two trees. I do not want to cut (them) because they are pretty.” (2) Se me rompió la silla. ¿Podés arreglar? ¿Puedes arreglarla? (SS) “My chair broke. Could you repair (it)?” There are many reasons for this phenomenon. Without a doubt, the influence of Guarani is a very important factor. In Guaraní, personal pronouns can only be used when referring to people or animals (Krivoshein 1987: 39). Granda (1996) and Palacios Alcaine (1998) speak of a language convergence between Spanish and Guarani. Choi (1998: 125) recognizes the influence of the Guarani on Spanish as an important reason, but she also speaks of a general internal tendency toward simplification in Spanish. Symeonidis (2005a), also sees, besides the influence of Guarani, a general tendency in the history of the Romance languages to omit
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personal pronouns (as in 19th-century Brazilian Portuguese). We deal here with an already existing tendency in the system of Spanish, which has been expanded by the language contact with the Guaraní in the contact zone. 3.2.3
The double negation
In Paraguayan Spanish, as well as in the Guarani contact zone, there are constructions with double negation, as in the following examples: (3) Nada no dije, nunca no descansó mientras vivió. (Usher 1976: 10) No dije nada, nunca descansó mientras vivió. (SS) “I did not say nothing, he did not never rest while he lived.” “I did not say anything, he never rested while he lived.” In Guarani, there is a similar construction as we can see in the following example from the corpus of the ALGR: (4) mba´eve ndaéi Nada no dije. No dije nada. (SS) “I did not say nothing.” “I did not say anything.” Granda (1991) and Choi (1998) note that the negative adverbs used before verbs in Old Spanish, such as nunca, required the use of the adverb no. In the 16th century, the use of these forms was extended without the particle no (Keniston 1937), although this did not preclude the use of double negation in certain colonial territories. Granda claims that in the 16th century two competing structures existed: the new one with the elated no and the older one with the preserved no (1991: 52). Granda also sees linguistic convergence in this phenomenon, since Spanish, which was brought to Paraguay, already contained the tendency of double negation, and convergence with the Guarani double negative would have generalized the structure. This parallels Symeonidis’s explanation of the elision of personal pronouns. According to Choi, double negation by bilingual speakers is much more accepted than by monolingual speakers (1998: 136). According to the previous studies of the ALGR, we can ascertain that there is a diastratic difference between the bilingual speakers. Speakers with a higher education level tend to avoid the double negation compared to the ones with a lower education level. However, the research of the ALGR has so far shown that this difference is very small. 3.2.4
The indefinite article or pronoun
Krivonshein and Corvalán note that the redundant use of the indefinite article or pronoun un/una/uno occurs when a possessive adjective, e.g. mi, tu, su, precedes
Language contact in Paraguay 207 a noun. Both scholars assume that this use in Paraguayan Spanish is related to the influence of Guarani, in which a single noun can be proceeded by several determiners (1987: 42): (5) Petei che ryvy oiko Areguápe. Uno mi hermano vive en Aregua. Mi hermano vive en Aregua. (SS) “One my brother lives in Aregua.” “My brother lives in Aregua.” This use is also observed in other Spanish-speaking regions (Palacios Alcaine 2009: 163). However, as was already observed in the Spanish of the Yucatán, it is a pre-existing characteristic in Spanish which has spread through language contact with other languages – in this case with Guarani (Palacios Alcaine 2005: 163). Other scholars have also pointed out this tendency in Old Spanish (Usher 1976; Granda 1996; Choi 1998). 3.2.5
The use of preposition ‘en’ with motion verbs
In the Guarani contact zone, the preposition en ‘in’ is systematically used with motion verbs, as seen in the corpus of the ALGR: voy en Asunción “I go to/in Asuncion.” This phenomenon has already been documented by linguists (Granda 1991; Choi 1998, 2004). Symeonidis (2005b) notes that this phenomenon also occurs in the Guarani contact zone in Argentina, but not as strongly as in Paraguay, due to the fact that Spanish is the dominant language in those regions of Argentina. Granda (1991) and Choi (1998, 2004) assume an already existing use in Old Spanish. In the 16th century, a predominant use of this preposition with motion verbs can be observed. Symeonidis (2005b) goes back to Latin in his study to determine that such a use of the Latin preposition in existed with motion verbs. It is a tendency already anchored in the system of Romance languages, which was expanded under the influence of Guarani. At first, colonial Spanish used both a and en with motion verbs; due to language contact, it was later simplified to favor en, as Guarani already had a similar tendency. In Guarani, the suffix -pe expresses both ‘staying’ and ‘moving’ to a place. However, the preposition a with motion verbs has not completely disappeared from the system, so that today two equivalent structures are simultaneously considered as correct: voy a/en Asunción. According to the research of the ALGR, a diastratic difference has arisen in the use of prepositions with movement verbs. This means that the use of en is preferred by less educated speakers. 3.3
Lexicon
Many Guarani lexical elements are also known outside of Paraguay, such as ñandú, urubú, and yopará (Lipski 1996: 335). There are also a number of words that are
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used only in Paraguay or in the Guarani contact zone. These words have to do with the flora and fauna of the region, with local culinary specialties, with garments, or to express an affective character, e.g. mita’i ‘child,’ kaigüe ‘lazy,’ poguasú ‘important person,’ yaguá ‘traitor’ (Palacios Alcaine 2009: 158). Apart from the names for flora and fauna, there are borrowings that are used metaphorically in colloquial Spanish. Outside the Guarani contact zone, borrowing into the regional Spanish of the Río de la Plata region is rather limited. Examples from the flora and fauna of the region are: yaguareté ‘jaguar,’ maracayá ‘wildcat,’ yacaré ‘caiman,’ mandioca ‘manioc,’ avatí ‘corn,’ mandiyú ‘cotton,’ and so forth (Dietrich 1998: 487). From the area of local culinary specialties the following guaranisms are used in the Spanish of the region: chipá, chipa ‘cheese-flavored rolls,’ chipásoó ‘rolls stuffed with meat,’ mbeyú ‘a cake with corn, milk, eggs, and cheese,’ tereré ‘cold yerba mate infusion’ (Dietrich 1998: 488). Many guaranisms have their own affective character, e.g. mita’i ‘child,’ kaigue ‘be listless, have no desire, lazy, run down,’ poguasu ‘fat, obese, important person,’ yaguá ‘dog, traitor,’ so’o ‘meat, boring, stupid,’ ka ‘u ‘drunk,’ opáma ‘it’s done, end, that’s enough’ (Palacios Alcaine 2009: 158; Dietrich 1998: 488). It is important to mention that many loanwords from the Tupi-Guarani languages found their way into the European languages via French. These include ananás, tapir, and yaguar (Dietrich 1998: 486). The influence of Guaraní in the region is also very noticeable in toponymy. While the capital and some other important towns carry Spanish names (Asunción, Ciudad del Este, Encarnación, etc.), the majority of toponyms for villages have Guaranitic origin: Caacupé from ka’akupé ‘the other side of the yerba mate tree,’ Itacurubí ‘gravel,’ Paraná from paranã ‘sea-like river.’ The name of the country itself, Paraguay, is from paraguá’y ‘colored feather bearers at the river.’ 3.4 Other morphosyntactic phenomena Many linguists have studied the influence of Guarani on Spanish.2 All these studies focus on bilingual speakers, with the exception of Choi (1998). There are still no studies dealing with the linguistic behavior of the monolingual Spanish speakers in order to determine the extent to which the influence of Guarani has transferred to the Paraguayan Spanish of these speakers. In any case, it can be assumed that the linguistic characteristics of Paraguayan Spanish presented here also occur in the Spanish of the monolingual speakers, but not as strongly as in the bilingual ones. In the following examples from Granda (1979), some morphosyntactic properties of Paraguayan Spanish are illustrated. 3.4.1
The construction ‘para’ + noun
(6) Voy a comprar (From Guarani Voy a comprar “I am going to
‘para’ mi vestido. (1979: 271) aorã, ao “clothing,” -rã “owning in the future.”) el que será mi vestido. (SS) buy my dress, still not mine.”
Language contact in Paraguay 209 This is a transfer from Guarani to Spanish of the suffix -rã, which is attached to a noun and means existence in the future. Granda explains that there are similar structures in Spanish as vengo para trabajar ‘I come to work,’ llega para arreglar la mesa ‘s/he comes to set up the table’; but he assumes a Guarani influence in the particular future meaning of the aforementioned construction (1979: 272). 3.4.2
The use of ‘todo’ with the perfective meaning of Guaraní -pa
(7) Ya llegamos ‘todo’ a Asunción. (1979: 273) Hemos llegado a Asunción. (SS) “We have arrived in Asuncion.” Sometimes this construction can be supported with the use of ya, as for example: (8) Ya trabajé todo ‘ya.’ Ya terminé de trabajar. (SS) “I already finished work (already).” 3.4.3
The use of ‘un poco’ (‘a bit’) after a verb to underline the desire
See in the following examples: (9) Préstame ‘un poco’ esa revista. (1979: 274) “Let me borrow that magazine (a little bit).” (10) Me aplazaron en la prueba. No sé qué voy a hacer ‘un poco.’ (1979: 274) “They failed me in the test. I do not know what I am going to do (a bit).” (11) No sé ‘un poco’ lo que quiere decirme, patrón. (1979: 274) “I do not know (a bit) what you want to tell me, boss.” 3.4.4
Simplification of modes
The Guaraní does not have a subjunctive mode; therefore, the indicative is used where the subjunctive is required. (12) No creo que ‘llegó’ mi amigo. (1979: 275) No creo que llegara mi amigo. (SS) “I do not think my friend arrived.” However, the general use of the indicative has also been observed among bilingual speakers of Spanish in the United States (Ocampo 1990; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Lynch 1999). According to Granda, the subjunctive use in Paraguayan Spanish
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is often expressed by the use of para + infinitive, which represents a transfer of Guarani constructions with haguã, para, ‘for.’ (13) El patrón nos dijo ‘para venir’ hoy. (1979: 275) El patrón nos dijo que viniéramos hoy. (SS) “The boss told us to come today.” 3.4.5
The elision of the copula according to the Guarani structure, especially when the nominal predicate is a relative clause
(14) ¿Qué lo que te trae tan tarde a casa? (1979: 277) ¿Qué es lo que te trae tan tarde a casa? (SS) “What is it that brings you home so late?” 3.4.6
Elision of the particle ‘tan’ in comparative constructions according to the syntactic schema of Guarani
(15) Mi hermano es alto como el de Juan. (1979: 277) Mi hermano es tan alto como el de Juan. (SS) “My brother is as tall as Juan’s brother.” 3.4.7
The use of ‘de’ + deprived personal pronoun instead of the ethical dative
(16) Se rompió ‘de’ mí mi silla. (ALGR) Se rompió mi silla. (SS) “My chair broke.” (17) Se murió ‘de’ mí mi perrito. (1979: 278) Se murió mi perrito. (SS) “My dog died.” According to Granda, this is transfer to Spanish of the Guarani postposition -gui, which corresponds to the Spanish preposition de.
4
Conclusion
Situations of intense linguistic contact enhance processes of variation and linguistic change that affect both the lexicon and the grammar of both languages. The influence of Guarani on Spanish, directly or indirectly, affects features as diverse as phonetic realization, complete subordinate clauses, and the pronominal system, to mention only a few. When we deal with this kind of contact situation, we must differentiate the type of contact that occurs, delimit the interference mechanisms that operate,
Language contact in Paraguay 211 and make explicit the resulting linguistic effects. Among these mechanisms, linguistic borrowing (lexical, phonetic, or morphosyntactic) and linguistic convergence should be highlighted for their productivity. We have observed here how two languages in contact can influence each other, even though they belong to very different linguistic typologies. Spanish is an inflectional language, while Guarani is agglutinating. Still, their different grammatical subsystems can be mutually influenced. These processes are frequently observed in contact situations. Examples from the case presented here are linguistic simplification (Spanish pronominal system) and the addition of linguistic material (loan of modality markers from Guarani). There are, however, many changes to be investigated, especially those that do not import Guarani material, which are the most difficult to detect. Due to the lack of previous systematic and rigorous sociolinguistic fieldwork, ALGR has sought to fill this gap in the research on the Guaranitic area with investigations that go beyond mere description. ALGR results contribute to better outline the theoretical framework of contact linguistics, answering questions related to contact-induced changes such as what elements can be transferred? How are paradigms restructured, and what are the cognitive results of that restructuring? The situation of linguistic contact reviewed in this chapter makes it possible to observe structural changes in the colloquial variety of Paraguayan Spanish that point to the influence of underlying linguistic and cognitive structures in the languages in contact. These changes are due to communicative strategies that the speakers create, making better use of the resources of the two languages; changes that, in some cases, entail reorganizations of the linguistic material or reinterpretations of its semantic or pragmatic value.
Glossary ALGR, Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico: this atlas gives answers to a series of linguistic questions concerning the Guaranitic area: Paraguay, Northeast Argentina, and parts of Brazil on the borders of Paraguay. It deals with how linguistic knowledge and behavior are distributed in these geographic areas, and distinguishes regional varieties of Guarani and Spanish, depending on speakers’ social class, gender, and age. Guarani: a language from the Tupí-Guaraní group, spoken in Paraguay and some areas of Bolivia and northern Argentina (especially in Corrientes). Jopará: a colloquial form of Guarani spoken in Paraguay which uses large numbers of Spanish loanwords. Its name means ‘mixture’ in Guarani. This variety is the result of the partial acquisition of both Spanish and Guarani. leísmo: the use of the indirect object pronoun le/les for the direct object pronouns lo/s and la/s, e.g. le veo (a Juan) por lo veo (a Juan) “I see him (John).” loísmo: the use of the direct object pronoun lo/s, la/s for the indirect object pronouns le/s, e.g. lo dije (a Juan) por le dije (a Juan) “I told him (John).”
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ʒeísmo/ʃeísmo: the pronunciation of letters ‘ll’ and ‘y’ as a fricative voiced sibilant [ʒ]. In Buenos Aires, the sound [ʒ] has recently been devoiced to [ʃ] (sheísmo) among younger speakers. It is characteristic of Argentina and Uruguay.
Notes 1 This Guarani variety is also documented and represented diatopically, diastratically, diaphasically and in two generations in ALGR (ALGR-L 2009, iv). 2 Usher de Herreros (1976); Quant and Irigoyen (1980); Krivoshein de Canese and Corvalán (1987); Granda (1988); Dietrich (1995, 1996, 1998, 2001); and Symeonidis (2004, 2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2007a, 2007b).
References ALGR-L (Átlas lingüístico guaraní-románico: Léxico, Cuerpo Humano Tomo 1), edited by W. Dietrich, H. Symeonidis, et al. Kiel: Westensee Verlag, 2009. Alonso, Amado. Hispanismos en el guaraní. Buenos Aires: Talleres Casa J. Peuser, 1931. Cardozo, Efraím. Historiografía paraguaya. México, DF: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia, 1959. Cassano, Paul V. “La [b] del español del Paraguay en posición inicial.” Revue Romane 7 (1972): 186–188. Choi, Jinny K. Language in contact: a morphosyntactic analysis of Paraguayan Spanish from the historical and sociolinguistic perspective. PhD diss., Georgetown University, 1998. ———. “Person direct object drop: the genetic cause of a syntactic feature in Paraguayan Spanish.” Hispania 83 (2000): 531–543. ———. “Language attitudes and the future of bilingualism: the case of Paraguay.” Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 6 (2003): 81–94. ———. “La planificación lingüística y la revaloración del guaraní en el Paraguay: Comparación, evaluación e implicación.” Language Problems and Language Planning 28 (2004): 241–259. Dietrich, Wolf. “El español del Paraguay en contacto con el guaraní. Ejemplos seleccionados de nuevas grabaciones lingüísticas.” In Lenguas en contacto en Hispanoamérica. Nuevos enfoques, edited by K. Zimmermann, 203–216. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1995. ———. “Guaraní und Spanisch in Paraguay. Interferenzphänomene beim Kontakt zwischen indianischen und europäischen Sprachen.” In Die anderen Indianer in Lateinamerika, edited by H. Schlüter, 393–413. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1996. ———. “Amerikanische Sprachen und Romanisch.” In Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, edited by G. Holtus, M. Metzeltin, and C. Schmitt, 428–499. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998. ———. “Zum historischen Sprachkontakt in Paraguay: Spanische Einflüsse im Guaraní, Guaraní-Einflüsse im regionalen Spanisch.” In Sprachkontakt und Sprachvergleich, edited by G. Haßler, 53–73. Münster: Nodus, 2001. Granda, Germán de. “Calcos sintácticos en el español del Paraguay.” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 28 (1979): 267–286. ———. “Algunos rasgos fonéticos del español paraguayo atribuibles a interferencia guaraní.” Revista española de lingüística 10 (1980): 339–349.
Language contact in Paraguay 213 ———. “Observaciones sobre la fonética del español en el Paraguay.” Anuario de Letras 20 (1982): 145–194. ———. Sociedad, historia y lengua en el Paraguay. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1988. ———. El español en tres mundos: retenciones y contactos lingüísticos en América y África. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1991. ———. “Interferencia y convergencia sintáctica e isogramatismo amplio en el español paraguayo.” Sociology of Language 117 (1996): 63–80. ———. “Procesos de estandarización revertida en la configuración histórica del español americano: el caso del espacio surandino.” Sociology of Language 149 (2001): 95–118. Gynan, Shaw N. “Attitudinal dimensions of Guaraní-Spanish bilingualism in Paraguay.” Southwest Journal of Linguistics 17 (1998a): 35–59. ———. “Migration patterns and language maintenance in Paraguay.” Sociolinguistics 2 (1998b): 259–270. ———. “The language situation in Paraguay: an update.” In Language planning and policy in Latin America: Ecuador, Mexico, and Paraguay, edited by Baldauf, Jr. and R. B. Kaplan, 284–301. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2007. Keniston, Hayward. The syntax of Castilian prose: the 16th century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937. Krivoshein de Canese, Natalia and Graziella Corvalán. El español del Paraguay: en contacto con el guaraní. Asunción: Centro Paraguayo de Estudios Sociológicos, 1987. Lipski, John M. El español de América. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1996. Lope, Blanch. “La interferencia lingüística: un ejemplo del español yucateco.” Thesaurus 35 (1980): 80–97. Lynch, Andrew. The subjunctive in Miami Cuban Spanish: bilingualism, contact, and language variability. PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1999. Malmberg, Bertil. Notas sobre la fonética del español en el Paraguay. Lund: Gleerup, 1947. Mar-Molinero, Clare. The politics of language in the Spanish-speaking world. London: Routldege, 2000. Meliá, Bartomeu. La création d’un langage chrétien dans les réductions des guarani au Paraguay. PhD diss., Université de Strasbourg, 1969. ———. “Hacia una tercera lengua en el Paraguay.” Estudios paraguayos 2.2 (1974): 31–71. ———. La lengua guaraní del Paraguay. Madrid: Mapfre, 1992. ———. La lengua guaraní en el Paraguay colonial, versión castellana, corregida y actualizada. Asunción: CEPAG, 2003. Morínigo, Marcos A. Hispanismos en el guaraní. Buenos Aires: Talleres Casa J. Peuser, 1931. Ocampo, Francisco. “El subjuntivo en tres generaciones de hablantes bilingües.” In Spanish in the United States: sociolinguistic issues, edited by J. Bergen, 39–48. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. Palacios Alcaine, Azucena. “Variación sintáctica en el sistema pronominal del español paraguayo: la elisión de pronombres objeto.” Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica 14 (1998): 431–454. ———. Introducción a la lengua y cultura guaraníes. Valencia: Instituto Valenciano de Lenguas y Culturas Amerindias, 1999. ———. “El contacto de lenguas en Paraguay.” In El español en contacto con otras lenguas, edited by C. Klee and A. Lynch, 153–168. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009. Quant, Inés and Jose M. Irigoyen. Interferencia guaraní en la morfosintaxis y léxico del español substandard de Resistencia. Resistencia, Argentina: Universidad Nordeste, 1980.
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Rubin, Joan. Bilingüismo nacional en el Paraguay. Mexico, DF: Instituto Indigenista Interamericano, 1974. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. “The gradual loss of mood distinctions in Los Angeles Spanish.” Language Variation and Change 6 (1994): 255–272. Solé, Yolanda. “The Guaraní-Spanish situation.” The Georgetown Journal of Languages and Linguistics 2 (1991): 297–348. ———. Valores comunicativos y emblemáticos del español y del guaraní. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 2001. Symeonidis, Haralambos. “Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico: el uso o no-uso del pronombre personal de la tercera persona como complemento directo en las provincias de Corrientes, Chaco y Formosa en la Argentina.” In Actas del XIII Congreso Internacional de la ALFAL, edited by A. Valencia. San Jose: Universidad de Costa Rica, 2004. ———. “Aspectos sintácticos en el habla popular románico de la zona guaranítica.” In El español en América. Aspectos teóricos, particularidades, contactos, edited by I. Neumann-Holzschuh, V. Noll, and K. Zimmermann, 235–248. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2005a. ———. “El uso de las preposiciones con los verbos de movimiento en el castellano de la zona guaranítica.” In Sprache in Iberoamerika. Zum 65, edited by V. Noll and H. Symeonidis, 243–259. Hamburg: Buske, 2005b. ———. “Influencias sintácticas del guaraní en el castellano paraguayo, según los materiales del Átlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico.” In Guaraní y Mawetí-Tupí-Guaraní. Estudios históricos y descriptivos sobre una familia lingüística de América del Sur, edited by W. Dietrich and H. Symeonidis, 433–450. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2006. ———. “Tres culturas en el área guaranítica: guaraní, español y portugués.” Signo y Seña (2007a): 41–55. ———. “Procesos de transferencia en el léxico del castellano paraguayo.” In Actes du XXIVe Congrès International de Linguistique et de Philologie Romanes, edited by D. Trotter, 565–576. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2007b. Thon, Sonia. “The glottal stop in the Spanish spoken in Corrientes, Argentina.” Hispanic Linguistics 3 (1989): 199–218. Thun, Harald. Átlas lingüístico guaraní-románico: Sociología. 2. Maps. Kiel: Westensee Verlag, 2002. ———. “La hispanización del guaraní jesuítico en ‘lo espiritual’ y en ‘lo temporal’. Segunda parte: los procedimientos.” In Geschichte und Aktualität der deutschsprachigen Guaraní-Philologie, edited by W. Dietrich and H. Symeonidis, 141–169. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2008. Usher de Herreros, Beatriz. “Castellano paraguayo. Notas para una gramática contrastiva castellano-guaraní.” Suplemento Antropológico 11.1.2 (1976): 29–123. Zajícová, Lenca. “Las variables sociales y las perspectivas del guaraní en el contacto con el castellano.” In Actas XIV Congreso Internacional ALFAL, edited by A. Valencia. Monterrey, México: ALFAL, 2005.
Further readings Dietrich, Wolf, Harald Thun, Almidio Aquino, and Haralambos Symeonidis, eds. Átlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico Tomo II, Léxico del parentesco. Kiel: Westensee Verlag, 2015. Palacios, Azucena, ed. El español de América. Contactos lingüísticos en Hispanoamérica. Madrid: Ariel, 2008.
Language contact in Paraguay 215 Symeonidis, Haralambos. “Análisis sociolingüístico del leísmo paraguayo.” Revista Internacional d’Humanitats (2013): 55–68. ———. “The development of kinship terms as an indicator of the Romanization of the Guaranitic area.” In Estudios y homenajes hispanoamericanos III, edited by E. PandisPavlakis, H. Symeonidis, et al., 269–285. Madrid: Orto, 2015.
Topics for discussion 1
Why is the linguistic situation in Paraguay considered to be unique in Latin America? Do you find other similar situations like the one in Paraguay in other parts of Latin America?
2
What is Jopará? What are its characteristics?
3
Do you think there is diglossia in Paraguay? If yes, what is the social distribution of the two languages?
4
Why was the number of European settlers in colonial Paraguay so small compared to other colonial regions?
5
What is leísmo? What are the differences between leísmo, loísmo, and laísmo? Where do we geographically observe ʒeísmo/ʃeísmo?
6
What do you believe are the reasons for the maintenance of Guarani? What are the main problems indigenous languages face across Latin America?
7
Read the following quotes and comment on them. a
b
“The indigenous communities of Latin America are poor, underprivileged, and marginalized sectors of their state’s society. With the partial exception of Paraguay, the middle classes are entirely monolingual in Spanish. This situation has inevitably produced a one-way road toward the assimilation of the indigenous communities to the economically and socially more advantageous Spanishspeaking way of life” (Mar-Molinero 2000: 51). “The case of Guarani is a fascinating example of the exception to the rule. Whereas, as we have noted, in all the former Spanish empire of Latin America indigenous languages and cultures have been marginalized, and in some cases, have become extinct, Guarani in Paraguay has survived, and is an official language alongside Spanish [. . .] Why has this situation arisen in Paraguay and not in any other former Spanish colony?” (Mar-Molinero 2000: 57).
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“La variación dentro del guaraní paraguayo se sitúa entre dos extremos ideales, el guaraní más o menos ‘puro,’ poco influenciado por el castellano, el guaranieté o ‘guaraní por antonomasia’ y el guaraní criollo o yopará (guar. jopara ‘mezcla’), que es un guaraní más o menos mezclado con el castellano. Este tipo de ‘mezcla’ se define por el uso paralelo y suplementario de las dos lenguas sólo parcialmente adquiridas. Para los bilingües el guaraní puro (guaranieté) es un ideal que muchos no dominan, y el guaraní que alcanzan es una lengua suficiente y hasta rica para temas tradicionales, pero insuficiente para muchos conceptos de la vida moderna. La variación que existe dentro de cada guaraní indígena es ciertamente diferente, menos orientada hacia el castellano y más marcada por los estilos del habla sagrada y mítica que se distingue de diferentes registros de habla cotidiana.” (ALGR-L 2009: iv).
10 Language contact and the indigenous languages of Uruguay Yliana V. Rodríguez
Present-day Uruguay has been inhabited for about 12,000 years. The Spanish and the Portuguese arrived five centuries ago, marking the beginning of relentless interactions with the several ethnic groups that inhabited the region. The events of the last five centuries have been partially recorded through colonial documents. However, accessing the history that preceded colonization requires archeological work, given that the original peoples were preliterate. Although in some places contact between Spanish and the languages spoken in America continues, in Uruguay, no indigenous language has survived. The absence of native language manifestations leaves us with no option but to resort to written testimonies and official records of the time. But anyone who intends to study Uruguay’s autochthonous languages will soon realize with dismay that there are just a few sources available. Unfortunately, these sources do not constitute grammars or thorough vocabularies, making it impossible to reconstruct the languages.1 National historiography has reasserted the idea that Uruguay is a European country imbedded in America, where the nation’s history begins with the arrival of the first Europeans in the 16th century. This narrative presents the Indians as marginal characters in the process of national identity and ignores the fact that some of them, mainly the Guarani Indians of missionary origin and their ancestors, comprised the creole population of Uruguay (Pi Hugarte 1993). Guarani was the language that left the most indelible footprint on the Spanish spoken in Uruguay, a claim supported by the fact that between 1770 and 1780, about half of the population of Uruguay consisted of Guarani Indians who had been born in the Jesuit missions. This chapter discusses the impact of indigenous languages on Uruguayan Spanish. Section 1 presents the original peoples of present-day Uruguay, what we know about the tongues they spoke, and the possible reasons for the extinction of their languages. Section 2 describes the impact of Guarani on Uruguayan Spanish, and Section 3 displays a snapshot of sociolinguistic studies on the vitality of some Guarani loanwords.
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1 The original peoples of present-day Uruguay and their languages Language diversity in the Americas at the time of the first European arrivals was tremendously rich (Martinell 1992), and the River Plate region was no exception. Even though Uruguay is the only country in South America with no current indigenous population, many indigenous communities occupied the area when the Europeans arrived in the region. Some depended on agricultural practices, while others relied on hunting, gathering, and fishing. These groups had been largely interacting among themselves, but the European invasion introduced three more parties to the stage: the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Jesuits. Spain used to refer to the area composed of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay as Virreinato del Río de la Plata “Viceroyalty of River Plate.” In the colonial period, present-day Uruguay was known as the Banda Oriental ‘East Bank,’ because of its location east of the estuary. Uruguay would later take its name from the river to its west, Río Uruguay ‘River Uruguay.’ In fact, the complete name of Uruguay is República Oriental del Uruguay, which literally translates to “Eastern Republic of Uruguay” (Uruguay being a Guarani word). In the present work, I will use the term Uruguay even though the interaction between the Indigenous peoples and Europeans took place while Uruguay’s territory was still part of the Banda Oriental and its modern borders do not correspond to the geographic landscape that these peoples inhabited. Besides, it should be noted that these borders lacked significance during the period in which the original groups inhabited this area. We cannot be certain about the number of groups inhabiting the area by the time of the European arrival, due to the shortage of sources from the 16th century (in which there is no mention of the interior of the country) (Bracco 2004). Through documents from the explorer Félix de Azara, we learn that there were at least six indigenous groups in the region: the Charrúas, the Yaros, the Bohanes, the Chanás, the Guenoas, and the Guarani, each of them with their own language (Bertolotti and Coll 2014). During the inauguration of the first public library in Montevideo in 1816, Larrañaga, a Montevidean priest, gave a speech that predicted the imminent death of those peoples’ native languages: This small enclosure has more than six different languages: these are Minuan, Charrúa, Chaná, Boane, Guenoa, Guarani [. . .] in a short time there will be no trace of them; and it is our duty to preserve them. (1951: 33)2 In the following three sections, I will present the most salient characteristics of the Chaná, the Charrúas, and the Guenoas, that is, some cultural features, the areas they are believed to have occupied, and the available data for the study of their languages. These are the only languages for which we have documented records. Even though the three languages are not well known, the coincidences regarding pronouns, numbers, and some words have caused researchers to conclude that they
Language contact in Uruguay 219 belong to the same language family (Loukotka 1968; Kaufman 1994; Campbell 2012).3 The fourth section will provide a description of the Guarani and their interactions with other indigenous groups, namely Spaniards and criollos. Finally, the fifth section will discuss the possible reasons for the language loss. 1.1
Chanás
By the time of the invasions, the Chanás occupied the zone comprising the north of Buenos Aires, part of Santa Fe and Entre Ríos, and the opposing bank of the River Plate, in today’s Uruguay. As nomads, they moved along the river using canoes and lived mainly by hunting, fishing, and gathering. They were also good ceramists. The last document that mentions them is a poem from 1872 written by Hilario Ascasubí, in which there is a character nicknamed el chaná. With regards to their language, in 1813, Father Larrañaga wrote some facts about Chaná during a single day trip to Soriano, based on a conversation with three of the oldest Indians who lived there (1923). These notes include remarks about their pronunciation, some grammatical features, and about 70 words and phrases, which include pronouns, adverbs, and nouns. Said documents used to represent the only sources available for linguistic research on Chaná. However, by the end of 2004, a semispeaker of Chaná from Entre Ríos decided to share his secret with the intention of finding other speakers (Fiorotto 2005). Unfortunately, Blas W. Omar Jaime seems to be the only Chaná speaker. His family managed to keep the language alive in the domestic domain, covertly passing it from generation to generation. Many experts have shown interest in this peculiar case, and many works have referred to him and the data he has provided (Dietrich 2002–2012; Bourlot 2008; Moseley 2010; Adelaar 2010; Ottalango 2010). The linguist Viegas is the scholar who has devoted the most time to the detailed study of Chaná in collaboration with the last of its speakers. He has been able to collect an inventory of 250 words and expressions, which he confirmed with those of Larrañaga’s notes. Here are some of the many words he has been able to confirm as Chaná: amptí ‘we, us,’ dioí ‘sun,’ huamá ‘friend.’ According to Viegas Barros and Blas (2013), Larrañaga’s data are enough to conclude that Chaná is related to at least two other languages on which we have data, Guenoa (Minuán) and Charrúa. There may be more, but we lack any information on them. 1.2
Charrúas
The Spanish settled in Charruan territory, which stretched from Montevideo to the bank of the River Uruguay. Therefore, Europeans interacted more with them than with the Guenoas, who occupied land further inland. The Charrúas were nomads, and with the incorporation of the horse, became part of the equestrian cultural complex of the region. They did not practice agriculture nor make ceramics. Their economy was based on the exploitation of big game such as the ñandú (rhea). Most of what we know about the Charruan language comes from two small vocabularies composed by Vilardebó at the beginning of the 19th century.
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Compelled by his concern about its imminent extinction, the Uruguayan naturalist recorded a few Charruan words (nouns of different semantic fields and numerals) which Sargent Benito Silva and an indigenous woman from Manuel Arias dictated to him in 1842. Years later, Gómez Haedo (1937) would publish them in the article “An unknown Charruan vocabulary.” There are also three others supposedly Charruan words in the works of the missionary Paucke (Viegas 2013) and in a text collected in the north of Uruguay at the end of the 19th century (Martínez 1901). There is a list of allegedly Charruan terms in André Thevet’s La cosmographie Vniverselle (Universal Cosmography), from 1575, published by Lehmann-Niersche in 1938 (Barrios Pintos 2008). Rona (1964) also documented some proper names of Charruan origin from mission registers. Regrettably, those in contact with Charrúas during the 18th and 19th centuries only give subjective opinions about their language. Azara (1998), for instance, mentioned that their tongue was so different from all the rest, and so guttural, that the Spanish alphabet would not be able to represent their sounds. Other sources about the Charruan language seem to have been lost. In 1964, Rona and Petit Muñoz contacted a Charrúa speaker in Villaguay (Entre Ríos), bringing back with them a series of photographs and audio that they were studying with the intention of preparing a publication (Martínez Barbosa 1996). Unfortunately, apart from the publication of a couple of photographs in a local newspaper, no publications have yet been made. By the end of the colonial period, some Charrúas had probably learned to speak Guarani and Guenoa, given that they had been coexisting for a long time (Barrios Pintos 2008). 1.3
Guenoas
The Guenoas inhabited the area between Montevideo, San Borja, and Rio Grande do Sul. Nonetheless, during the first half of the colonial period, Uruguay’s interior did not interest Europeans. In fact, the colonizers used rivers as their transport routes and only went inland when there was no alternative. Consequently, those lands went unexplored for many years, and the Guenoa remained hidden from the Spanish settlements, behind the barrier that the Charrúas had constructed along the bank of the River Uruguay. Behind this curtain, there was a populous group with a hierarchical political organization. Their territory received attention by the mid-17th century, when cattle attracted commercial, political, and military interest. The Jesuits were particularly keen on converting them since that would have granted the missionaries free access to the enormous amount of livestock on their lands. Bracco (1998) presents documents that show how often the Guenoas negotiated with the Spanish and the Portuguese, according to the occasional interests. It is through these encounters that they seem to have kept the missionaries’ hopes of conversion alive, using their missions as occasional shelter, which some of them would choose as their permanent residences.
Language contact in Uruguay 221 According to Bracco, the Guenoas and Charrúas seem to have been in a constant state of war. Even though they were probably originally part of the Charruan group, they were no longer related to them. In fact, they were generally enemies, except for the last years of the colonial period, when they joined forces with other groups. Due to the almost non-existent interactions with the Guenoas, there are very few sources from the 16th century. Documents regarding their language are even more scarce. The only one we know of is a catechism written by Father Camaño and published by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1787) in his Saggio pratico delle lingue. However, these bilingual catechisms were not literal translations of the prayers. They consisted instead of more functional translations, making it hard for linguists to establish correspondences between the two languages, especially with such limited data.4 1.4
Guarani
There is enough archeological evidence to prove that there were pre-Hispanic Guarani groups in the territory that we now call Uruguay. Remains of their pottery have been found along the interior course of the River Uruguay, as well as in the east of the country, indicating two routes of infiltration (Pi Hugarte 1993). Nevertheless, there is no evidence in the Uruguayan territory of villages composed of collective huts surrounded by protective fences, as was usual of the Guarani peoples. They might not have been settled in the region, but they definitely visited the mouth of River Santa Lucia frequently. Archeologists have studied numerous ceramic artifact that show the dispersion of these societies in the Uruguayan territory (Curbelo 2013). Ceramics with Guarani attributes have been identified in the basin area of both the Merín Lagoon and the River Uruguay; also from the River Negro to the mouth of the River Tacuarembó; and from the River Plate to the mouth of the River Santa Lucía. Everything seems to indicate that, at the time of the conquest, the Guarani indigenous ethnic group inhabited the Uruguayan territory. Other Guarani would later have a strong influence on the formation and culture of the rural population of Uruguay, that is, those Guarani of missionary origin who would leave the Jesuit towns to settle in present-day Uruguay. More than 100,000 Guarani Indians are thought to have lived in the Jesuit reductions. These towns had the objective of reducing the hitherto dispersed bands of Indians into structured settlements with the intention of evangelizing them and creating a writing system for their language while also creating systematic grammatical descriptions and written ecclesiastical materials (Muysken 2012). In the 1620s, the Jesuits began to set up reductions in the north of Uruguay. They would later use the River Plate to carry goods across the Virreinato. The Guarani were already skilled canoeists, and with the arrival of the horse, they became excellent riders who would periodically herd cows toward the reductions, interacting with the Guenoas. Map 10.1 illustrates where the Jesuits towns were located and the areas to which Jesuits had access.
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Map 10.1 Missionary towns and land belonging to the Jesuit order in the middle of the 18th century Adapted from Curbelo (2014)
During those contacts, some Guarani would stay with the Guenoas, and some Genoas would go to live in the Jesuit towns. The reductions were habitually attacked by bandeirantes, who wanted to kidnap and enslave them. On occasion, they were also harmed by the European authorities who were uneasy with the Jesuits’ success, which lasted until 1767, when Spain finally expelled the Order from America. The dismissal of the Jesuit order from America was preceded by a series of events, one of which was the Tratado de Permuta ‘Exchange Treaty’ in 1750, which precipitated the Guaranitic war. With the signing of this treaty, Spain and Portugal exchanged disputed territories by realigning the borders of their American empires. Colonia del Sacramento became Spanish while seven Jesuit reductions east of the River Uruguay passed over to Portugal. The Guarani living on the eastern banks of the river were fearful about this decision, given that
Language contact in Uruguay 223 the Portuguese bandeirantes had repeatedly raided their towns. The Guarani resisted the treaty and turned to the independence forces of local caudillos – first to those of Artigas and later to those of Rivera. These conflicts boosted the desertion of the towns, making the Indians turn to settling in Uruguayan land (Pi Hugarte 1993). They established themselves in lands that belonged to other ethnic groups, such as the Charrúas and Guenoas. The latter, leaving aside their differences, joined them to go to war against a combined army of the Spanish and Portuguese. Some years later, the treaty was annulled, and even though the priests did not directly participate in the Guaranitic war, they were accused of aiding the Indians. In 1767, the Spanish crown would finally decide to expel the Jesuit congregation Compañía de Jesus from the New World. Accordingly, many Guarani emigrated and settled in present-day Uruguay. By the 19th century, the predominant language in inland Uruguay was Guarani, mainly in the lands disputed by Spain and Portugal. 1.5
The disappearance of the native languages
In the light of the historical legacy presented above, the existence of long-lasting language contact, both among the indigenous populations and between natives and Europeans, cannot be ignored, particularly in an area that appears to have had much intercommunication (see Bracco 2004 for documents demonstrating the strong interaction among the native societies of the region). However, the autochthonous peoples would eventually stop using their languages. The process through which the indigenous populations replaced their native tongues with Spanish has been addressed by Bertolotti and Coll (2013). Their work is the only one to analyze the possible reasons for this outcome, proposing sociodemographic, ethnolinguistic, historical, cultural, and technological circumstances that could have favored the disappearance of the aforementioned languages. Considering their cultural history, it could also be hypothesized that learning foreign languages was a natural practice for the Indians. Therefore, the adoption of Spanish could have been a new phase in an already established custom. There were cases of indigenous peoples learning another indigenous language, like the case of Lucía, a Guenoa woman who was a captive of a Charruan chief and had learned his language (an official document records this fact in Lopez Mazz and Bracco 2010). The same authors also offer testimonial proof of Guenoas speaking Guarani and even one that spoke Spanish, Guarani, Charrúa, and Guenoa. These linguists also hypothesize that the intelligibility among Guarani and Charrúa could have fostered the adoption of Spanish. Both the acquisition of Guarani and Spanish eventually resulted in the extinction of the other languages.
2
Indigenous footprints on Uruguayan Spanish
Spanish contact with the indigenous American languages is 500 years old. Consequently, the history of Spanish in the New World forms part of the history of the Spanish language. Rivarola (2004) argues that the introduction of Spanish
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to the Americas was more than just a geographic transplant; it fundamentally altered the history of the language, giving rise to a new mental space within which the signs of a new language identity were slowly developing. Palacios (1997) clarifies that while in colonial times the indigenous settlers outnumbered the Spaniards, the characteristics of their colonization did not always result in the indigenous languages influencing Spanish. She explains this with the case of the Antilles, where the indigenous population disappeared in a short period of time and linguistic influence is limited to the lexical field. She points out that we find the same situation in other regions, and provides as an example the case of Uruguay, where most of the indigenous communities were isolated, exterminated, or quickly Hispanicized. Although the linguistic relations between Spanish and the indigenous languages of America respond to the most diverse modalities that may arise in language contact situations (Lapesa 1980), contact linguistics studies have been more interested in the areas where there are several speakers of indigenous languages, and consequently, where the linguistic sequels of the contact are more evident. This is not the case in Uruguay, given that there are no contemporary indigenous language speakers, and therefore, the linguistic influence is confined to the lexicon. Nevertheless, this phenomenon also deserves scientific attention by linguists and anthropologists, since the lexicon of a language can reflect social and cultural traits of a community (Sapir 1912). Spanish borrowed words from Amerindian languages and vice versa, but the phenomenon of lexical borrowing between indigenous languages was also a common practice. Some words have been adapted in parallel or in a chain from generally more dominant or prestigious languages (Muysken 2012). Adelaar and Musyken point out the example of the Quechua word for ‘chicken,’ atawalypa, that spread through 35 pre-Andean Amazonian languages. It is highly unlikely, as the authors point out, that all these languages borrowed this word from Quechua one by one (2004: 500). It is very probable that the word spread in a chain. As we will see in Section 2.2, we also find Quechua loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish. 2.1
The Spanish spoken in Uruguay
Except for its lexicon, the Spanish spoken in Uruguay does not have exclusive features. It has a combination of traits that are also found in other modalities of Spanish. Uruguayan Spanish is the product of Peninsular Spanish dialects in contact with African languages, other European languages, and autochthonous languages. Bertolotti and Coll (2014) classify the linguistic history of Uruguay in three stages: (1) the exclusive presence of indigenous languages; (2) Portuguese and Spanish contact with indigenous and African languages; and (3) the introduction of European immigrants (English, French, Italian, Galician, among others) and enslaved Africans while Spanish, Portuguese, and some indigenous languages remained in use, albeit the latter only briefly.
Language contact in Uruguay 225 The common denominator of all the stages are the native languages, even though none ultimately survived. Guarani was the language that left the most durable footprint. At present, the linguistic contribution of the indigenous populations to the Spanish spoken in Uruguay can be observed mainly in place-names and loanwords. 2.2
Place-names and loanwords
Contact with the Guarani was much more frequent and intense than with the other indigenous languages spoken in Uruguay before the arrival of the conquerors. Large numbers of Guarani Indians from the Missions (from all the Jesuit areas including Misiones, Corrientes, and Paraguay) arrived in the River Plate region during the existence of the Jesuit Republic and in even greater numbers after the expulsion of the Jesuits. In personal investigations carried out in the parochial archives of several Uruguayan cities, Rona concluded that approximately half of the population of Uruguay between 1770 and 1780 consisted of Guarani Indians born in the Missions, proving that the contact had been permanent and intense (1963: 98). The Guarani were integrated into the society of the time and contributed to populating the uninhabited territories of the Banda Oriental, preferring to settle in the rural areas, which can be explained by their skill in livestock and agricultural activities (González and Rodríguez 1990). There were many tasks that neither the criollos nor the Spaniards were willing to perform, for example, masonry, blacksmithing, carpentry, saddlery, and raising of defenses, skills which naturally fell into the domain of Guarani expertise. An example of the latter is the fact that a large contingent of missionary Guarani raised the walls of Montevideo in 1790. At this stage, Spanish and Guarani worked as vehicular languages for interethnic communication (Bertolotti 2014). During the second stage of the linguistic history of Uruguay, there were Europeans and Indians who learned the other group’s language(s) to serve as intergroup mediators (Bertolotti and Coll 2013). There are records of this mediation since the late 18th and 19th centuries (Bértola and Fernández 2011; Bertolotti and Coll 2014). Not surprisingly, because of this strong bilingual contact situation, we find evidence of Guarani in Uruguayan Spanish, mainly as place-names and loanwords. Regarding place-names, historians and archeologists consider that this toponymy is empirical evidence of the Guarani presence in Uruguayan territory, since place-names have a function like that of fossils in the biological sciences, revealing what language was spoken at a certain place and time ( Jordan 2014 ). According to Pi Hugarte (1993 ), Uruguay’s Guarani placenames do not have a pre-Hispanic origin. Instead, they were established during the early arrival of Guarani baqueanos to the interior. Subsequently, the application of Guarani names to the geographical barriers was amplified by the increasing penetration of Guarani Indians coming from the missions
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looking for cattle, in herds directed by the Jesuit fathers and other agents. The expulsion of the Compañía de Jesús and the subsequent dissolution of the towns increased the number of the Guarani that settled down in the Banda Oriental. Guarani place-names are most evident in the northern part of the country, that is, north of Río Negro, a river that divides Uruguay in two. This is a non-exhaustive list of the place-names with Guarani origin: Aceguá Aiguá Arapey Arequita Arerunguá Bacacay Batoví
Caraguatá Carapé Casupá Chapicuy Chuí Cuareim Cuñapirú
Guaviyú Iporá Itacumbú Itapebí Kiyú Mandiyú Merím
Ñangapiré Ñaquiñá Queguay Sarandí Tacuarembó Tacuarí Tupambaé
Uruguay Yaguarí Yaguarón Yí
There are very few place-names with other indigenous origins, for instance, Marmarajá, which is thought to be Charruan. Apart from place-names, we also find a considerable amount of native flora and fauna of Guarani origin (i.e. loanwords). Loanwords are a particular case among the studies of languages in contact. One of the first definitions was provided by Haugen, who defined a loanword as “the attempted reproduction in one language of patterns previously found in another” (1950: 212). Loanwords are always words (i.e. lexemes) in the narrow sense, not lexical phrases, and they are generally unanalyzable units in the recipient language (Haspelmath 2009). The term ‘borrowing,’ however, has been used in two different senses: (1) As a general term for all kinds of transfer or copying processes (e.g. native speakers adopting elements from another language, non-native speakers imposing properties of their mother tongue onto a recipient language). (2) “To refer to the incorporation of foreign elements into the speaker’s native language” (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 21). The Guarani loanwords present in Uruguayan Spanish (e.g. tatú, yacaré, mangangá, jacarandá, ñandubay, ombú) are for the most part cultural borrowings. That is, they designate a concept that did not previously exist in the recipient language (Myers-Scotton 2002). These words can be motivated by convenience since it is often easier to incorporate a foreign term than to coin a new one (Field 2002). When many speakers know a concept by one particular word, and not by another, it is more efficient to use the best-known word even if it belongs to a foreign language. The more a donor language is known, the more chances a new concept has of being expressed in that language, whereas when only a few speakers know it, neologisms tend to be created (Haspelmath 2009).
Language contact in Uruguay 227 Examples of Guarani loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish from the Uruguayan Spanish Dictionary are: Aguaí aguará aguaribay ají ananá apereá arazá atí bacaray batarás batitú
biguá burucuyá caburé cambará camoatí caracú caraguatá caranday cipó cuatí curupay
curupí cururú envira guabiyú guaycurú hocó ibirapitá ingá isaú isipó jacarandá
macá mambí mandioca ñacundá ñacurutú ñandú ñandutí ñangapiré ñapindá ombú pindó
pitanga pororó quillapí sarandí tacuara tacuaruzú tapera tarumá tayuyá tembetá tembetarí
timbó tipoy vacaray viraró yacaré yaguané yarará yatay yuá
A fascinating loanword is the interjection che, which also has a Guarani origin, according to linguists Rona (1963) and Bertolotti (2010). The other American language to have loaned words to Uruguayan Spanish is Quechua. In the Uruguayan Spanish Dictionary, we find several loanwords from this Andean language: ¡Achalay! achira achura cacharpas cancha catanga chacra charque
charqui chasque chasqui chaura chinchulín chino china choclo
chorito chúcaro chúcara chucho chuño chuzo chuza guacho
guacha guasca gurí mate molle morocho nana ojota
opa palta paspar payana pitar pucho pupo quincha
quinoa tala tambo totora vincha yapa yuyo zapallo
Currently, there are no studies addressing the case of these Quechua loanwords. However, it should be noted that Bracco (2004) asserts through the careful analysis of 16th-century documents that the indigenous peoples had active relations with the Andean regions.
3
Guarani loanword vitality: phonological adaptation, availability, and assimilation
Guarani and Spanish are typologically different languages. Guarani is part of the Tupi language family, more specifically of the Tupi-Guarani branch, named after the two most common language groups at the time of colonization in Brazil, Tupinamba and Guarani (Jensen 1999). Spanish, on the other hand, is part of the Indo-European family of languages, among which Spanish can be further classified as a Romance language. Guarani is agglutinative, meaning that complex
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words are formed by stringing together morphemes. The indigenous languages of lowland South America are generally classified as polysynthetic (Payne 1990), and Guarani is no exception. In contrast, Spanish is an inflectional language; its verbs are conjugated while adjectives and nouns carry gender and number information. It could then be hypothesized that these differences will affect the transference of one system to the other. But how much do these typological differences affect the permeability of loanwords? According to Thomason (2006), social factors easily override linguistic factors. She explains that typological distance between the source language and the receiving language affects the likelihood that the structure will be borrowed. The more similar the systems are, the easier it is for a feature to diffuse from one to the other. However, with sufficiently intense contact, any feature can be transferred from any language to any other, in spite of their typological differences. Since Spanish and Guarani are very different languages in terms of their structure, the borrowing process is probably a consequence of strong interaction in a context of direct contact. Nowadays, Guarani loanwords present high vitality in Uruguayan Spanish, that is, these words are still part of the linguistic conventions of the speech community. In other words, they have been adapted to the phonotactic rules of the recipient language, can be easily retrieved from the speakers’ mental lexicon, and are considered part of the language. 3.1
Phonological adaptation
A source word (i.e. the word that serves as a model for the loanword) has phonological properties in its original language that may not fit into the recipient language’s system. Therefore, loanwords suffer adaptations to fit into the recipient language. These adaptations, i.e. the transformations that apply to words when they are borrowed from a foreign language (Peperkamp 2005), are generally a requisite for integration to take place. There are six vowels in Guarani. Table 10.1 shows how each of them exists in both a nasal and an oral series (Lustig 1996), while there are no nasalized vowels in Spanish. With regards to the consonant system, some of the most noteworthy differences from the Romance language (and the most relevant for the present study) are the alveolar /ᵈj/ and glottal stop /Ɂ/, called puso. With respects to its prosody, Clopper and Tonhauser (2011) explain that the stress in Guarani most frequently falls on the last
Table 10.1 Guarani vowel system Oral
close mid open
Nasal
Front
Central
Back
Front
i e
ɨ
u o
ĩ ẽ
a
Central ̃ ã
Back ũ õ
Language contact in Uruguay 229 Table 10.2 Guarani and Uruguayan Spanish pronunciations Guarani jata’i jakare jaguarete jarara
Uruguayan Spanish /ᵈ[djataɁɨ] /ᵈ[djaka’ɾe] /ᵈ[djawaɾe’te] /ᵈ[djara’ɾa]
yataí/yatay yacaré yaguareté yarará
[ʃa’tai] [ʃaka’ɾe] [ʃawaɾe’te] [ʃaɾa’ɾa]
syllable of a word, whereas stress in Spanish usually occurs on the penultimate syllable (Lleo 2003). Guarani loanwords in Spanish present a simplified pronunciation, which lacks typical Guarani features like the prevocalic and intervocalic glottal stops and the nasalized vowels. Words have been fully adapted to Uruguayan Spanish phonology. It should be noted that the age of loanwords can be decisive in determining the degree of adaptation. In particular, this involves the use of the voiceless palatal continuant, which is characteristic of the pronunciation of Río de la Plata Spanish. Consequently, words like yatay, yacaré, yaguareté, and yarará present that sound [ʃ] in an initial position, instead of [ᵈj], as depicted in Table 10.2. Moreover, most loanwords appear to have kept the prototypical Guarani stress on the last syllable. In Guaraní, /d/ and /b/ only exist in the group /mb/ and /nd/ followed by a vowel at the beginning of a word (Guasch 1983). An example of this is the Guarani word mburukuja. Although it can appear in literary texts with mb- (mburucuyá), in orality and in Spanish dictionaries it appears without the initial (i.e. burucuyá). Interestingly, during the fieldwork that I will discuss in the following section, many informants over the age of 60 pointed out that the correct pronunciation was mburucuyá, accentuating the initial . 3.2 Availability Languages have a great number of words with very concrete semantic content, whose frequency in a corpus is not always representative of their vitality. López Morales (1996) explains that our mental lexicon has a series of terms that are not used unless one needs to communicate very specific information. Hence, to analyze those words, it is necessary to resort to other techniques, such as studying speakers’ lexical availability. The lexical availability of 28 Guarani loanwords was measured by conducting interviews with 72 Uruguayan Spanish native speakers (36 females) (see Rodríguez 2017 for partial results). Since age stratification of linguistic variables is considered the primary correlate of real-time language change (Chambers 2002; Eckert 1997), informants from a wide range of ages were recruited to see signs of real time language change (18 to 84 years old). All regions were represented with a minimum of two informants, following geolinguistic methodology. These parameters were set because using a combination of both static (i.e. gender and origin) and dynamic variables (age) might help to expand the study of loanwords.
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During the interview, informants were presented with pictures of the loanwords’ referents (e.g. a photograph of the animal tatú) and were asked to name what they saw. The visual and oral stimuli were identical for all informants. A protocol was established in case informants reported not remembering or not knowing the signifier of the referent; namely, the interviewer pronounced the first syllable of the word meant to work as a cue. Table 10.3 shows three levels of availability which were set given that the words that come first to our memory – as the result of a reaction to a stimulus – are those that are most available (López Morales 1996). The words with the highest degree of availability (i.e. non-assisted utterance of the loanword by the informant) were ananá and ñandú, as showed in Figure 10.1. Table 10.3 Availability levels Availability level
Informants’ answers
High Low
The Guarani word. Another word in Spanish, but when asked if they know another word, they give the Guarani word. Or Report not knowing the word/another word, but when they listen to the first syllable, they say the Guarani word. Report not knowing the Guarani word.
Null or passive
Figure 10.1 Loanword availability Author’s creation
Language contact in Uruguay 231 The rest of the terms showed low lexical availability levels, but no words had an average of null availability. Regarding age, we noticed that the youngest age group (< 32) was the one who performed most poorly, followed by the oldest (> 62). In the case of the latter, the slight reduction in performance could be because, for healthy aging people, naming difficulty is situated at the label retrieval stage (Nicholas 1985), and that aging impacts cognitive function, including speed of processing, working memory, long-term memory, and inhibition or cognitive control (Park and Reuter-Lorenz 2009). However, the more significant poor performance of the youngest age group needs a different explanation. Some might argue that these words are beginning to lose their vitality. On the other hand, it could also be the case that, since these words present a low frequency in their use, this group of speakers has not yet had the opportunity to encode them. 3.3 Assimilation Poplack, Sankoff and Miller (1988) point out that there are two facets when it comes to the assimilation of a loanword into a recipient language: linguistic integration and the sociological process of acceptance. Haspelmath defines integration as “the degree to which a word is felt to be a full member of the recipient language system” (2009: 43). Grosjean (2010) defines a loanword as the integration of one language into another. Acceptance, on the other hand, only exists when “native speakers judge a donor-language word to be an appropriate designation whether or not they are aware of its etymological origins” (Poplack and Sankoff 1984: 104). In fact, German distinguishes Fremdwörter ‘foreign word’ from Lehnwörter “adapted, integrated, established borrowing” (Haspelmath 2009). Both may be adapted to the syntactic, morphological, and phonological rules of the recipient language, but the former neither feel nor are considered part of the language lexicon. Therefore, the distinction between Fremdwörter and Lehnwörter depends not only on the degree of adaptation but also on the degree of assimilation – integration and acceptance. Hasselmo (1969) observes that the manifestation of a foreign form with a high degree of social integration – for him, acceptance and use by the speech community – can be interpreted as a loanword. When a foreign word presents a low degree of social integration, it is likely to be code-switching. The assimilation of loanwords is a diachronic process, and it should ideally be studied over time. However, when there are no historical data available, one can study intergenerational differences among living speakers. In order to study Guarani loanword assimilation, the same group of informants were asked to explain what all the words they had been uttering had in common. The data obtained were organized in the following categories: (1) Uruguayan words, (2) words from the countryside, (3) other, and (4) no answer. A considerable number of informants seem to consider the words as typical of the Spanish spoken in Uruguay, as portrayed in Figure 10.2. These data show that the words are well assimilated since most informants consider the words to be theirs, from Uruguay, or from the countryside. Surprisingly, only one informant
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Figure 10.2 Loanword assimilation Author’s creation
responded that they were all indigenous words (her answer was computed in category 3, together with responses such as “words that are used a lot” and “words of the region”). The fact that only one informant noticed that they were words originally from another language makes it clear that they are well integrated into the recipient language.
4
Concluding remarks
The bibliography and documents reviewed indicate numerous historical facts that evidence native contact with Europeans and criollos through explorations, military actions, reductions, religious conversions, commercial exchanges, wars, struggles, and treaties among each other and with the Europeans. The success of the Spanish takeover, to the detriment of the native languages of the region, seems to be the result of forced immersion in colonial society. Although no indigenous language is spoken in the territory we now call Uruguay, the contact with indigenous languages in another historical stage is evident, not only in extant sources but also in abundant place-names and loanwords that we find in Uruguayan Spanish. The presence of Guarani loanwords is the linguistic imprint of cultural contact between Americans and Europeans. These loanwords still show vitality. In fact, if we follow the taxonomy of Haugen (1950), who
Language contact in Uruguay 233 distinguishes two processes in the dynamics of the loan (i.e. the importation and the substitution), we could state that this is a case of substitution, since all the words inadequately reproduce their model (the word source), respecting the phonological patterns of the receiving language. The fact that the loanwords’ phonological adaptation is consolidated is probably because they have been part of the Spanish spoken in the region for more than 100 years. In addition, even though speakers can retrieve the words from their mental lexicon, the loanwords are so assimilated into the recipient language that they are not perceived as foreignisms. Spanish contact with American languages offers a plethora of different language contact scenarios, constituting a unique opportunity to study the exchanges between languages of different typologies. Future studies on contact linguistics in America, and in other parts of the world, should shed more light on language phenomena allowing us to learn more about human cultural interactions.
Glossary bandeirantes: slave-catchers and fortune hunters composed of 17th-century Portuguese settlers in Brazil who frequently raided reductions searching for Indian slaves. The name comes from the designation of their expeditions, which were called bandeiras (Portuguese for ‘flags’). baqueanos: a person with extensive knowledge of the geography of a territory, its geographical features, and the language and customs of its population. caudillos: a leader wielding military and political power, with great influence over an important number of people. In the history of Latin America, caudillos are associated with the independence movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. criollos: American-born descendants of the European settlers of Latin America. geolinguistics: the study of the geographical distribution and structure of languages either in isolation, contact, and/or conflict with one another. lexical availability: the words that spring to mind in response to a certain prompt. loanword: a word that was transferred from a donor language to a recipient language. phonotactic rules: restrictions on the permissible combinations of phonemes in a language. preliterate: a preliterate society is one which lacks a written language. reductions: settlements or towns in what in the 1600s was a no-man’s-land, in order to sedentarize, evangelize, and assimilate the Indigenous peoples. semispeaker: a person with limited understanding of a language. The last speakers of a language are often ‘semispeakers,’ given that they are incomplete language learners or have lost knowledge of the language (language attrition) after cessation of daily use. toponymy: the place-names of a region or the etymological study of them. vitality: linguistic vitality is demonstrated by the extent to which a certain language or words are used as a means of communication. Languages or words with high vitality are used extensively in different circumstances and by all generations.
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Notes 1 Da Rosa (2013) reviews all past work on the Indigenous languages of Uruguay’s region. He concludes that specific knowledge of the different languages only allows for lexicological studies or phylogenetic discussions; however, it is not enough to make progress unless more data becomes available. 2 “Este pequeño recinto cuenta con más de seis idiomas diferentes: tales son el minúan, el charrúa, el chaná, el boane, el goanoa, el guaraní [. . .] en poco tiempo no quedará vestigio alguno de ellos; y así es honor nuestro el conservarlos.” 3 For many years, the native Indians of Uruguay were thought to have a Guarani filiation. Pi Hugarte (1993) proposes three reasons for such a mistake: (1) to consider that the Guarani names assigned to the different groups were the designations of the societies themselves; (2) to believe that the abundant Guarani place-names in the north of Uruguay had a preHispanic origin; and (3) to misinterpret sources that mention Charrúas speaking Guarani, assuming it was their mother tongue. 4 The Guenoas appear in documents from the 17th to the 19th century as Guanoás, Güenoas, Guinoas, Güinoas, Guinoanes, Guayantiranes, Huenoas, Guenoas, Guenoanes, Gyunoanes, Guynoanes, Binuanes, Binoanes, Guinuanes, Guinoas, Minoas, Minoanes, or Minuanes, among others. See Bracco (1998) and Barrios Pintos (2008). It is evident from the sources that the name Guenoa and Minuano refer to the same group.
References Adelaar, Willem F. H. “South America.” In Atlas of the languages in danger, edited by J. Ahmed Bhutto, 68–94. Paris: UNESCO (Colección Memoria de los Pueblos), 2010. ——— and Pieter C. Muysken. The languages of the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Aitchinson, John and Harold Carter. Language, economy and society: the changing fortunes of the Welsh language in the twentieth century. Cardiff: University of Wales, 2000. Azara, Félix de. Viajes por la América Meridional. Buenos Aires: Elefante Blanco, 1998. Barrios Pintos, Aníbal. Historia de los pueblos orientales. Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 2008. Bértola, Cecilia and Amparo Fernández. “Notas para el estudio de las voces intérprete, ladino y lenguaraz en territorio oriental (siglos XVII a XIX).” Paper presented at V Seminar of Spanish and Portuguese lexicology, Montevideo, Uruguay, October 13, 2011. Bertolotti, Virginia. “Notas sobre el che.” Lexis 34.1 (2010): 57–93. ——— and Magdalena Coll. “Contacto y pérdida: el español y las lenguas indígenas en el Río de la Plata entre los siglos XVI y XIX.” Boletín de Filología 48.2 (2013): 11–30. ——— and Magdalena Coll. Retrato Lingüístico del Uruguay. Un enfoque histórico sobre las lenguas. Montevideo: Universitarias, 2014. Bourlot, Tirso. Guerreros, máscaras y narices deoradas. Culturas nativas del litoral entrerriano y la colección arqueológica Manuel Almeida. Gualeguaychú: Museo Manuel Almeida, 2008. Bracco, Diego. Guenoas. Montevideo: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, 1998. ———. Charrúas, guenoas y guaraníes. Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2004. Campbell, Lyle. “Classification of the indigenous languages of South America.” In The indigenous languages of South America: a comprehensive guide, edited by L. Campbell and V. Grondona, 259–330. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012.
Language contact in Uruguay 235 Chambers, J. K. “Patterns of variation including change.” In The handbook of language variation and change, edited by J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, and N. Schilling-Estes. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2002. Clopper, Cynthia and Judith Tonhauser. “On the prosodic coding of focus in Paraguayan Guaraní.” In 28th West Coast conference on formal linguistics, 249–257. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 2011. Crystal, David. Language death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Curbelo, Carmen. “Avañe’ẽ, la lengua de los hombres. La relación del guaraní con el territorio uruguayo.” In Aportes sobre la diversidad lingüística del Uruguay, edited by L. E. Behares and J. M. Fustes, 95–107. Montevideo: Facultad de Humanidades, 2013. ———. Uruguay in Guaraní indigenous missionary presence. Montevideo: Museo de Arte Precolombino e Indígena, 2014. Da Rosa, Juan Justino. “Historiografía lingüística del Río de la Plata: las lenguas indígenas.” Boletín de Filología 48.2 (2013): 131–171. Dietrich, Wolf. “Lingüística amerindia sudamericana. Las lenguas indígenas de América. Listado y ensayo de clasificación de las lenguas indígenas de las Amréricas.” 2002–2012. www.unimuenster.de/Romanistik/Organisation/Lehrende/Dietrich/LingAmerSud.html Eckert, Penelope. “Age as a sociolinguistic variable.” In The handbook of sociolinguistics, edited by F. Coulmas, 151–167. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 1997. Field, Frederic. Linguistic borrowing in bilingual contexts. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Fiorotto, Tirso. “El chaná que atesora su idioma.” Diario Uno, February 27, 2005. Gómez Haedo, J. C. “Un vocabulario charrúa desconocido.” Boletín de Filología 1.4–5 (1937): 323–350. González, Luis Rodolfo and Susana Rodríguez. Guaraníes y paisanos. Montevideo: Nuestras Raíces, 1990. Grosjean, François. Bilingual: life and reality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. Guasch, Antonio. El idioma guaraní. Gramática y antología de prosa y verso. Asunción: Loyola, 1983. Haspelmath, Martin. “Lexical borrowing: concepts and issues.” In Loanwords in the world’s languages: a comparative handbook, edited by M. Haspelmath and U. Tadmor, 35–54. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. Hasselmo, Nils. “On diveristy in American Swedish.” Svenska Landsmäl och Svenskt Folkliv 92 (1969): 53–72. Haugen, Einar. “The analysis of linguistic borrowing.” Language 26 (1950): 210–231. Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo. “Saggio Pratico delle Lingue. XXI.” 1787. https://archive.org/ details/ Jensen, Cheryl. “Tupí-Guraní.” In The Amazonian languages, edited by R.M.W. Dixon and A. Y. Aikhenvald, 125–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Jordan, Peter. “Thoughts on a concept of language geography.” Geographical Timisiensis 11.21–22 (2014): 33–46. Kaufman, Terrence. “Atlas of the world’s languages.” In The native languages of South America, edited by C. Mosley and R. E. Asher, 46–76. London: Routledge, 1994. Krauss, Michael. “The world’s languages in crisis.” Language 68.4–10 (1992). Lapesa, Rafael. Historia de la lengua española. Madrid: Gredos, 1980. Larrañaga, Dámaso Antonio. “Compendio del idioma de la nación Chaná.” In Escritos de Don Dámaso Antonio Larrañaga, 163–174. Montevideo: Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay, 1923.
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———. Descripción de las fiestas cívicas celebradas en Montevideo. Colección de Impresos Raros Americanos. Montevideo: Universidad de la República, 1951. Lleo, Conxita. “Prosodic licensing of codas in the acquisition of Spanish.” Probus 15.2 (2003): 257–281. Lopez Mazz, José and Diego Bracco. Minuanos: apuntes y notas para la historia y la arqueología del territorio Guenoa-Minuan (Indígenas del Uruguay, Argentina y Brasil). Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2010. López Morales, Humberto. “Los estudios de disponiblidad léxica: pasado y presente.” Boletín de Filología de la Universidad de Chile 35 (1996): 245–259. Loukotka, Čestmír. Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: Latin American Studies Center, 1968. Lustig, Wolf. “Mba’éichapa oiko la guarani? Guaraní y jopara en el Paraguay.” Papia 4.2 (1996): 19–45. Martinell, Emma. “El papel de los intérpretes.” In La ocmunicación entre españoles e indios: palabras y gestos, edited by Emma Martinell Gifre, 151–205. Madrid: Mapfre, 1992. Martínez Barbosa, Rodolfo. El último de los charrúas. De Salsipuedes a la actualidad. Montevideo: Rosebud, 1996. Martínez, Benigno T. “Etnografía del Río de la Plata. Chanáes, yaróes, bohanes y güenoas.” Revista Nacional 31 (1901): 82–121. McMahon, A.M.S. Understanding language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Moseley, Christopher, ed. Atlas de las lenguas del mundo en peligro. París: UNESCO, 2010. www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/es/atlasmap.html Muysken, Pieter. “Contacts between indigenous languages in South America.” In The indigenpus languages of South America: a comprehensive guide, edited by L. Campbell and V. Grondona, 235–258. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012. Myers-Scotton, Carol. Contact linguistics: bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Nicholas, M., L. Obler, M. Albert, and H. Goodglass. “Lexical retrieval in healthy aging.” Cortex 21.4 (1985): 595–606. Ortiz Rescaniere, Alejandro. El quechua y el aymara. Madrid: Mapfre, 1992. Ottalango, Flavia and María Milagros Colobig. “Concepciones de aves y felinos e los relatos de un informante chaná: entrevista a Blas Jaime.” Revista de la Escuela de Antropología 16 (2010): 91–102. Palacios, Azucena. “Situaciones de contacto lingüístico en Hispanoamérica: español y lenguas amerindias.” Paper presented at Simposio Internacional sobre o bilingüismo, Vigo, October 21–25, 1997. Park, Denise and Patricia Reuter-Lorenz. “The adaptive brain: aging and neurocognitive scaffolding.” Annual Review of Psychology 60 (2009): 173–196. Payne, Doris. Amazonian linguistics: studies in lowland South American. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Peperkamp, Sharon. “A psycholinguistic theory of loanword adaptations.” In Proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Berkeley linguistics society, edited by N. Fleischer, et al., 341–352. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2005. Pi Hugarte, Renzo. Los indios del Uruguay. Montevideo: Mapfre, 1993. Poplack, Shana and David Sankoff. “Borrowing: the synchrony of integration.” Linguistics 22 (1984): 99–135. ———, and Chris Miller. “The social correlates and linguistic processes of lexical borrowing and assimilation.” Linguistics 26.9 (1988): 47–104.
Language contact in Uruguay 237 Rivarola, José Luis. “La difusión del español en el Nuevo Mundo.” In Historia de la lengua española, edited by R. Cano. Barcelona: Ariel, 2004. Rodríguez, Yliana. “Vestiges of an Amerindian-European language contact: Guarani loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish.” In 18th Rencontres Jeunes Chercheurs. Paris: Université Sorbonne, 2017. Rona, José Pedro. “Sobre algunas etimologías rioplatenses.” Anuario de Letras 3 (1963): 87–106. ———. Nuevos elementos acerca de la lengua charrúa. Montevideo: Universidad de la República, 1964. Sapir, Edward. “Language and environment.” American Anthropologist 14 (1912): 226–242. Thomason, Sarah. “Language change and language contact.” In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, edited by K. Brown, 339–346. Oxford: Elsevier, 2006. ——— and Terrence Kaufman. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Viegas Barros, Pedro and Blas W. O. Jaime. La lengua chaná. Entre Ríos: Entre Ríos, 2013.
Further readings Bracco, Diego and José López Mazz. La insurrección de 1686. Charrúas, pampas y serranos, chandes y guaraníes. Montevideo: Linardi y Risso, 2006. Brown, Cecil H. Lexical acculturation in Native American languages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Dorian, Nancy. “The problem of the semi-speaker in language death.” Sociology of Language 12 (1977): 23–32. Ganson, Barbara. The Guaraní under Spanish rule in the Río de la Plata. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Myers-Scotton, C. Duelling languages: grammatical structure in codeswitching. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Tsunoda, Tasaku. Language endangerment and language revitalization: an introduction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005.
Topics for discussion 1
The contact between Amerindian languages and Spanish gave origin to many varieties of Spanish in different regions of Latin America. Investigate and describe one of these varieties.
2
Make a list of six Amerindian loanwords in a non-Amerindian language. For example, American English or Brazilian Portuguese.
3
Go to the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger website and find out which other languages, like Chaná, have only one speaker left.
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4
Elaborate on whether loanwords should keep their original form or whether they should adapt to the recipient language. Find speakers’ arguments for each of the cases.
5
Uruguayan Spanish has few indigenous imprints. However, other American Spanish varieties have received more influence. Find examples.
6
Some people think language death is a natural, inevitable process, while others think all languages should be preserved. Argue for or against these positions.
7
Consider other cases of indigenous languages being replaced by Spanish; research the circumstances that led to their replacement and compare them to the case of Uruguay.
8
Suggest solutions to how languages can survive the imposition of another language.
9
Comment on the following statements. a b c d
e f
Language death is a process that takes place at a considerably faster rate than language evolution (McMahon 1994). Language death usually involves language shift to a new dominant language (McMahon 1994). Languages ultimately die with their last speaker (Crystal 2000). Language birth and death are natural, ongoing processes worldwide. However, in recent times, language extinction processes have accelerated, in part due to improved communications and globalization (Aitchinson and Carter 2000; Ortiz Rescaniere 1992). Currently, about 4% of languages are spoken by 96% of the world’s population, whereas 25% of the languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers (Crystal 2000). Unless current trends change, linguists estimate that 90% of the about 6,000 languages currently spoken may become extinct, or greatly endangered, by the end of this century (Krauss 1992).
11 Languages in contact Grammaticalization and complexification in northern Andean gerundianismo Kathleen S. Guerra
Language change is produced through a dynamic process of geographic, social, and morphosyntactic movements. Situations of sustained language contact tend to generate a relatively high velocity of changes to lexical and grammatical systems. Over time, this linguistic convergence of two (or more) systems often complexifies grammatical structures, reflecting and conforming to the social needs of multilingual speakers (Heine 1993; Navarro Gala 2010; Nichols 1992; Trudgill 2011). While no single theoretical model can fully describe the conditions and outcomes of language contact,1 examples of direct and indirect linguistic convergence can be observed and understood by examining the socially motivated environments inherent to each situation of contact. In the Andean region of South America, Spanish and Quechua have existed in a state of extensive societal bilingualism for more than 500 years. One widespread example of socio-grammatical complexification between Quichua, the variety of Quechua spoken in Ecuador and southern Colombia,2 and northern Andean Spanish (NAS) is observed in the use of the gerund within conversational phrases such as: dame pasando “pass it to me,” nos mandó sacando “(s)he kicked us out,” te paso viendo “I will pick you up.” This northern Andean dialectal construction, henceforth referred to as gerundianismo, a term originally coined by Cornejo (1967), is most often used to express a polite, indirect request or action by placing distance between the requester and the performer, thus deemphasizing the immediacy of the favor (Bustamante-López and Niño-Murcia 1995; Haboud 1998; Hurley 1995b). For example, instead of the standard informal command: ¡cierra la puerta! “close the door!” NAS speakers might prefer to say: dame cerrando la puerta, por favor, “give me closing the door, please.” Gerundianismo is best understood as an additive borrowing feature of grammatical complexification, a natural sociolinguistic-typological product of sustained language contact. In other words, this feature emerged in northern Andean Spanish in addition to existing constructions in both Spanish and Quechua that express requests or favors. This chapter surveys existing literature on the origins and use of gerundianismo in the sociolinguistic context of grammatical complexification through language contact. Specifically, it will examine the boundaries of the structure, transfer, and convergence of the Quechua benefactive case marker -pa, and the spectrum of metaphoric extension in auxiliary verbs: dar ‘give’ and mandar ‘send/order.’
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Language contact in the northern Andes
Grammatical complexification, additive borrowing, and transfer are observable products of language contact, but what motivates these changes? Two (or more) distinct grammatical language systems operating within the same geographical or social context do not necessarily drive linguistic convergence (Brown 1999; Thomason 2001; Trudgill 2011). In the Andean region, a great diversity of indigenous languages, including Quechua, coexisted for centuries before the Spanish conquest in 1532. Spanish conquistadors and missionaries took advantage of the widespread use of Quechua by imposing it as the lingua franca alongside Spanish in the northern and southern Andean region. Hence, past and present political, cultural, linguistic, and commercial ties within the northern Andes have motivated the spread, convergence, and maintenance of Ecuadorian and southern Colombian Quichua and Spanish (Haboud 1998; Niño-Murcia 1995). Quechua is not a single language, but rather a cluster of closely related languages spoken in more than six countries in South America. Therefore, the convergence of Quechua and Spanish is not uniform across regions or countries (Muysken 2013). In addition, these languages do not share an equal status in social and professional realms. Spanish was, and continues to be, the dominant, prestige language in the region. This uneven power dynamic has been to the detriment both of Quechua and of other indigenous languages throughout the Andes and resulted in extensive Spanish influence on Quechua. The substratum influence of Quechua is predominately observed through lexical borrowing, changes in word order, and the adoption of socio-pragmatic forms in Andean Spanish (Haboud 1998; Muysken 1984, 2013). It is not my intention to simplify the sociohistorical complexity of language contact between Spanish and Quechua in South America, nor ignore recent movements of language revitalization. The purpose of this chapter is to specifically discuss processes of grammaticalization and linguistic complexification that result from socially motivated contact between northern Andean Quichua and Spanish. For more information about the history of language contact in the Andean region see Haboud (2004), Hornberger and Coronel-Molina (2004), Mannheim (1991), and Torre and Striffler (2008).
2 The gerund in Spanish and Quechua The gerund is a common feature of both Spanish and Quechua, so it is logical that linguistic convergence could select it as a marked characteristic of northern Andean Spanish after centuries of language contact. However, the constraints of the gerund in both languages differ.3 Quechua has three different gerund markers used in distinct contexts. The gerund of identity: -s(h)pa (1a) expresses a perfect, an adverbial subordinate, or a situation dependent on the subject. The gerund affix -shca (1b) expresses the result of action already realized, while the gerund of other,
Northern Andean gerundianismo 241 -cpi (1c),4 is used to mark an adverbial subordinate in a situation independent of the subject: (1a) Miku-shpa-mi shamu-ni comer-GER (Adv)-evidential venir-1p eat-GER (Adv)-evidential come-1p Vengo después de haber comido “I’ll come after I have eaten (after I eat)” (1b) Machiti aisa-shca rirca machete-DO tener-GER irse-3p PRET machete-DO have-GER leave-3p PRET Se fue teniendo el machete en la mano “(S)he left with the machete in hand” (1c) Ñuka Kitu-man
chaya-cpi
(Haboud 1998: 200)
(Niño-Murcia 1995: 94)
-mi
rijsi riku-wa -rka (Catta Quelen 1985: 183) yo-1p Quito a-DIR llegar-PRET GER mi-POS amigo ver-me – 3p PRET PRO I-1p Quito to-DIR arrive-PRET GER my-POS friend see me – 3p PRET PRO Cuando llegué a Quito, mi amigo me vio “When I arrived to Quito, my friend saw me”
In Spanish, the gerund is formed by attaching the suffix -ando or -iendo to the stem of the infinitive -AR and -ER/-IR verbs, respectively. The Spanish gerund encodes progression (2) in periphrastic constructions when accompanied by certain auxiliary verbs of motion or location including: estar ‘be,’ ir ‘go,’ venir ‘come,’ andar ‘go,’ llevar ‘carry’ and seguir ‘continue’: (2)
Estoy comiendo ahora estar-1p PRES comer-GER ahora-Adv be-1p PRES eat-GER right now-Adv “I am eating right now”
Outside of this periphrastic construction, the Spanish gerund can be used to express an adverbial manner (3a), or the background description of an action (3b): (3a) Me lo dijo riéndose Me-PRO lo-DO decir 3p PRET reírse-GER Me-PRO it-DO say 3p PRET laugh-GER “(S)he told me laughing” (3b) Hablando así, nunca logras nada Hablar-GER así-Adv, nunca-Adv lograr-2p PRES nada-PRO Talk-GER this way-Adv, never-Adv accomplish-2p PRES nothing-PRO “Talking like that, you will never accomplish anything”
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In (3a) and (3b), the gerund does not have an explicit argument of its own. Therefore, it can be omitted without affecting the grammaticality of the utterance: (3a) Me lo dijo and (3b) Nunca logras nada. Additionally, this type of gerund can be substituted by another verbal construction, such as a coordinate or relative clause or a prepositional phrase with an infinitive: (3a) Me lo dijo mientras se reía and (3b) Al hablar así, nunca logras nada. •
Me lo dijo mientras se reía Me-PRO lo-DO decir-3p PRET mientras-Adv reírse-3p IMP Me-PRO it-DO say-3p PRET while-Adv laugh-3p IMP “(S)he told me while (s)he laughed”
•
Al hablar así, nunca logras nada Al-PREP hablar-INF así-Adv, nunca-Adv lograr-2p PRES nada-PRO By-PREP talk-INF this way-Adv, never-Adv accomplish-2p PRES nothing-PRO “By talking like that, you will never accomplish anything”
In summary, the Spanish gerund has relatively restricted use in comparison to Quechua. The Spanish gerund expresses progression when accompanied by an auxiliary verb, or functions as a description in a subordinate clause. Subject and aspect are expressed through the principle clause or auxiliary verb. In Quechua, gerund affixes are used in distinct contexts; they can encode situations dependent and independent of the subject, a perfect, a result and/or an adverbial subordinate. These distinct affixes attach to an infinitive or finite verb and accompany a range of transitive finite forms. For an in-depth discussion on the origins and uses of the Andean gerund, see Lipski (2013). Given the existence of the gerund in both Spanish and Quechua, and the prolific use of the Quechua gerund in a variety of contexts, it is not surprising to find examples of convergence between the two languages by bilingual speakers. Initial transfer was observed as early as 1615 as many indigenous people became ‘hispanized’ and used a mixture of Spanish and Quechua in transactions and other social interactions. This early contact phenomenon is evidenced in the following excerpt from the chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala (emphasis in original as cited in Niño-Murcia 1995: 88). (4) Obeja chincando, pacat tuta buscando, mana tarnchos, uira cocha Perdiendo la oveja, buscando día y noche, dice que no lo encontró, señor Sheep losing, day and night looking, says he did not find it, sir “Losing a sheep, looking day and night, he says he didn’t find it, sir” The use of the gerund in (4) illustrates early stages of emergent bilingualism in the 17th-century Andean region. The speaker attaches the Spanish gerund marker -ndo to the Quechua verb chinca ‘lose’ to convey the temporal meaning of loss to another bilingual speaker while showing deference, as illustrated by ‘sir.’ The
Northern Andean gerundianismo 243 speaker neutralizes other Spanish finite forms through the gerunds perdiendo ‘losing’ and buscando ‘looking for’ to refer to the past action of looking for the lost sheep during the day and night. Obeja ‘sheep,’ the only other Spanish word used in the utterance, occupies the object-initial position before the verb, consistent with the SOV order of Quechua. In contemporary NAS, Muysken observes the continued preference of Quichuadominant bilingual speakers to neutralize Spanish finite forms with the gerund in the following example from the Salcedo corpus (2005: 46). (5) Todo indo a Machachi yo sólo quedando cocinando comemos no más Todos se fueron a Machachi yo sólo quedé y cociné, comimos no más (SS) “When everyone had gone to Machachi and I stayed and cooked and we just ate” In (5), the speaker uses the regularized form of the Spanish verb ir: indo ‘go’ (SS: yendo), along with quedando ‘staying’ and cocinando ‘cooking’ in place of the finite forms: se fueron, quedé, and cociné, respectively. The subject of the first gerund, indo, is todo (SS: todos ‘everyone’), whereas the first-person singular, yo, is the subject of the two other gerund forms: quedando and cocinando. Apart from the pronouns to mark a change in reference, there is no conjugated auxiliary verb to specify the subject or tense. While perfectly intelligible, this utterance would not be grammatical in standard Spanish and we must use context clues to determine tense and subject. Examples (4) and (5) illustrate a tendency of Quichua-dominant speakers to use gerund constructions to neutralize a range of finite forms and mask overt subject changes (Olbertz 2008). While different Quechua gerund markers can affix to finite forms, encode subordination, a perfect, or a situation dependent or independent of the subject (as illustrated in (1)), the Spanish gerund alone does not mark subject, subordination or tense. Therefore, we can easily predict that the high frequency of the gerund in these contexts is due in part to the substratum interference of Quechua. Through examples like (4) and (5), Niño-Murcia (1995) concludes that the presence of the gerund in northern Andean Spanish reflects linguistic simplification through the generalization of form, supported by Silva-Corvalán’s corresponding definition of the reduction and elimination of alternative constructions (1995: 6). These definitions are illustrated quite nicely in (4) and (5) where the gerund replaces finite verb forms in Spanish. However, it does not explain how simplification afforded by the gerund developed into modern periphrastic gerundianismo and metaphorical extension of auxiliary verbs. I contend that while gerund use in northern Andean Spanish was a simplifying feature during early stages of language contact and continues to be among Quichua-dominant bilingual speakers (Muysken 1984), gerundianismo is a unique example of linguistic convergence and complexification. In the following sections, I will outline the boundaries of gerundianismo and address evidence of grammatical complexification.
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Gerundianismo
The most common gerundianismo construction in northern Andean Spanish includes the verb dar ‘give,’ the gerund of a transitive verb and a direct complement: dame firmando los documentos, “sign the documents for me,” dame llamando al médico “call the doctor for me.” In Spanish, dar alone conveys the meaning of someone giving a concrete entity to somebody . In the case of gerundianismo, dar has been metaphorically extended to the giving of acts or actions. Dar conveys the request and indicates for whom the action, as described through the gerund, is being carried out. Therefore, as a grammaticalized auxiliary dar is a light-verb, working in conjunction with the gerund and semantically modifying what is being expressed by the predicate. In this way, the grammaticalized auxiliary and the predicate share the same argument (Olbertz 2008). The importance of the auxiliary-predicate relationship is further supported by omitting the gerund in the previous examples: dame firmando los documentos and dame llamando al médico. While dame los documentos “give me the documents,” as found in the standard Spanish imperative, is still grammatical, the requested act of ‘signing’ is lost with the omission of firmando. Conversely, dame al médico “give me the doctor” is relatively incomprehensible without llamando. Therefore, dar does not have a patient argument of its own, rather the patient, los documentos or al médico, is shared by both auxiliary and the gerund predicate (Olbertz 2008). By extension, substitutions of another nonfinite form are ungrammatical: *Dame firmar los documentos or *Dame llamado al médico. As a grammaticalized auxiliary, the original meaning of dar has been dramatically reduced: dar can combine with transitive verbs, including dar (6a), be used intransitively (6b), and create metaphorical extensions (6c) without becoming ungrammatical or redundant: (6a) Dame dándole la carta al cartero, por favor5 Give me giving him the letter to the mailman, please “Give the letter to the mailman for me, please” (6b) ¡Oye papi, pero dame pagando! Hey my dear, but give me paying! “Please pay for me!” (6c) No tengo más lágrimas. ¡Dame llorando! I do not have more tears. Give me crying! “I don’t have any more tears. Please cry for me!”
(Haboud 1998: 217)
The examples in (6) evidence the grammaticalization of dar as an auxiliary verb that has been metaphorically extended to the giving of acts. Each speaker requests that an act, as described through the gerund, be performed on their behalf. In (6a), the speaker employs two different forms of the same verb dar,
Northern Andean gerundianismo 245 along with direct and indirect complements to specify the details of giving the letter to the mailman. In (6b), the speakers were in a store getting ready to pay the bill. Therefore, pagar is used intransitively and complements are omitted due to context clues. The speaker in (6c) requests someone else cry on her behalf because she is out of tears, thus metaphorically extending the form with an intransitive verb. Gerundianismo is not limited to the imperative mood; requests and descriptions are expressed in a variety of tenses and contexts. As a question, it communicates a perhaps more polite and indirect request, in comparison to the imperative form. The speaker creates greater distance between themselves and the hearer by framing the request with modal verbs and/or in question form, thus acknowledging varying responses of the interlocutor: (7a) ¿Me dio averiguando [sobre la funda]? Did you give me finding out [about the bag]? “Did you ask about the bag for me?” (7b) ¿Puedes darme poniendo el queso crema al pan? Can you give me putting cream cheese on the bread? “Can you put some cream cheese on the bread for me?” In (7a), the speaker was trying to locate a misplaced bag and inquires if the interlocutor asked someone else about it on his behalf. Hence, the speaker uses the past tense and a question to create distance between the request and the performer of the action. In (7b), the speaker uses the modal puedes from the verb poder ‘be able,’ a strategy aligned with standard Spanish request forms ( Hurley 1995a ), to politely request the participant put cream cheese on her bread. Variations of gerundianismo are often used to express a favor, or that something be done on someone’s behalf, as shown in (7a). In standard Spanish, this type of request could be articulated through a preposition phrase with por ‘for’: (8a) Tráeme la ropita y yo te doy planchando Tráeme la ropita y yo la plancho por ti (SS) Bring me the clothes and I give you ironing “Bring me the clothes and I will iron them for you” (8b) Tranquila, siga no más y le doy conversando Tranquila, siga no más y converso con él por usted (SS) Relax, go ahead and I give him conversing “Relax, go ahead and I will talk to him (on your behalf)” (8c) Es que al gato le gusta cazar, no que le dé cazando Es que al gato le gusta cazar, no que caces por él (SS) It’s that the cat likes to hunt, not that you give him hunting “The cat likes to hunt, not that you hunt for him”
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Examples (8a) and (8b) illustrate variations of request forms within a single utterance. The speaker addresses the interlocutor directly in (8a) through the informal imperative tráeme ‘bring me’ and offers to iron the clothes for them. The informal imperative and the direct address of te ‘for you’ implies a high-level of confidence between the two speakers. Conversely, (8b) demonstrates greater formality by employing the formal imperative phrase siga no más ‘go ahead.’ The speaker encourages the interlocutor to finish what they were doing and offers to converse with a third person (not present) while they wait. While gerundianismo is often classified as a polite request form, these two examples reveal co-variation of dar + gerund with standard imperative forms. Here, the standard form expresses the command, while gerundianismo is used to offer a favor. Gerundianismo could easily substitute the standard imperative without affecting the meaning of the utterance, such as (8a) dame trayendo la ropita y yo te doy planchando “bring me the clothes and I will iron them for you.” Neither variation should be considered more correct or polite, rather they reflect the choice of the speaker and their relationship with the interlocutor. The classification of gerundianismo as a polite, preferred manner to express a request or favor is consistent with a general preference for the complex request form over the simple imperative. For example, “would you mind bringing me the clothes?” is often perceived as politer than “bring me the clothes!” Nevertheless, the choice of the speaker to employ one form over the other is based on their own intuitions of norms and appropriateness in their social environment. Further investigation is needed to define perceptions and boundaries of gerundianismo use in a range of social and professional contexts. The example (8c) sheds light on other uses of gerundianismo employed through narration and with non-human agents. In this example, the speaker explains how their cat prefers to hunt for food himself, not that this act is done on his behalf. Gerundianismo is used in a subordinate clause with the present subjunctive: que le dé cazando (“that one hunts for him”) to describe the habits and preferences of the speaker’s cat. All three examples in (8) reveal how gerundianismo has permeated a variety of contexts and speech acts in northern Andean Spanish to request and describe how an action is performed to the benefit of someone (or something) else.
4
Benefactive clitic and clitic climbing
In all forms of requests, there is always a beneficiary who is either identified or implied through context. Gerundianismo is considered a polite form in part because the act is framed through the benefit of another. Therefore, a critical feature of gerundianismo is the dative clitic. In examples included thus far, the dative pronoun falls before the conjugated verb or is attached to the auxiliary dar, such as (8a) Tráeme la ropita y yo te doy planchando, (6b) Oye papi, pero dame pagando, (7b) ¿Puedes darme poniendo el queso crema al pan? The syntax in examples like (6b) are consistent with clitic placement in the standard Spanish affirmative imperative form where the clitic attaches to the end of the finite verb: dame la galleta “give me the cookie.” However, the standard imperative is not often, if
Northern Andean gerundianismo 247 ever, accompanied by a verbal predicate. In other moods in standard Spanish, the dative clitic falls either before the finite verb or at the end of the predicate: ¿me puedes dar la galleta? or ¿puedes darme la galleta? “Can you give me the cookie?” In this example, puedes functions as the auxiliary and dar is the verbal predicate. Clitic placement in gerundianismo varies from the standard norms. The clitic in the first position tends to attach to the grammaticalized auxiliary dar, over other standard Spanish auxiliaries, such as poder, or a predicate. As evidenced in (7b) ¿Puedes darme poniendo el queso crema al pan?, the clitic me attaches to the end of the auxiliary dar, rather than the modal auxiliary poder or the predicate poniendo. It is rare and considered less natural to place the clitic at the end of the predicate: *¿Puedes dar poniéndome el queso crema al pan? In the case of two clitics, standard Spanish prescribes that the indirect and direct object pronouns occupy the first and second positions, either before the finite verb or attached to the predicate. In this way, ¿puedes darme la galleta? could be rewritten as ¿me la puedes dar? or ¿puedes dármela? Both clitics would climb together within the sentence; splitting the clitics is uncommon and considered ungrammatical: *¿me puedes darla? or *¿puedes me darla? Gerundianismo, however, prefers to separate clitics: the first dative clitic, the beneficiary of the action, tends to fall before or attach to the grammaticalized auxiliary; the other clitics, indicating the patient and recipient, affix to the predicate. Up until this point, clitic placement in gerundianismo could simply seem like a difference of regional preference. However, standard clitic climbing is observed in NAS in other contexts outside of gerundianismo. Some examples of clitic climbing with a modal in gerundianismo are considered acceptable, but not preferred: (9a) ¿Me lo puede dar poniendo? (9b) ¿Puede darme poniéndolo? (9c) */? ¿Puede dármelo poniendo? Can you give it to me putting on? “Can you put it on for me?” Additionally, we encounter a problem in the case of (6a) Dame dándole la carta al cartero, por favor in that there appears to be two indirect objects as represented by me ‘me’ and le ‘him’ in a single clause. The first clitic, me, attaches to the auxiliary, da, and the second, le, to the predicate dando. (6a) could be simplified through object pronouns to: dame dándosela, por favor, thus maintaining the split clitic placement. This is the preferred division and is observed as well in other examples with two complements: me dio cuidándola “she watched her for me,” deme calentándolo “please warm it up for me.” The split of clitics and the admission of a beneficiary and a recipient in a single utterance has led Haboud (1998) and Olbertz (2008) to conclude that the first clitic, attached to the auxiliary verb, is a benefactive case marker; the second, attached to the predicate, indicates the recipient of the action. If these were standard Spanish clitics, they would need to conform to the rules of clitic climbing as described
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previously. Therefore, alternative forms (10a) and (10b) should be grammatical, but they are not: (10a) *Da dándomele la carta al cartero, por favor. (10b) *Da dándomesela al cartero, por favor.6 Furthermore, if la carta were to be expressed through the object pronoun, la, the sentence would be highly ungrammatical in standard Spanish and northern Andean Spanish, as shown in (10b). This system of clitic classification simply does not correspond to gerundianismo, thus reaffirming the conclusion that the clitic that occupies the first position is the beneficiary specifying in whose favor the action is to be carried out, and the additional clitics designate the recipient and/or the patient. Since Spanish does not permit two dative or indirect object pronouns in a single clause, nor does it prescribe split clitics, we must examine Quechua cases and grammar to identify a possible source of this benefactive meaning.
5
Grammatical complexification and Quechua benefactive case markers
One explanation for the origin of gerundianismo as a periphrastic construction to convey a polite request is that it is a syntactic calque from Quichua with a switched word order to conform to the SVO Spanish typology, as illustrated in: (11) T’anta-ta apa-mu-sha cu-wa-y (Niño-Murcia 1995: 90) pan-DO traer-GER darme-BEN IMPER bread-DO bring-GER give to me-BEN IMPER Dame trayendo el pan “Bring the bread to me” In this example, the informal imperative form of the verb ‘give’ with the attached first-person clitic ‘me’ (Qu: cuwai; Sp: dame) is used in conjunction with the gerund of the verb ‘bring’ (Qu: apamushpa; Sp: trayendo) to express that the speaker would like the participant to bring them the bread (Qu: tandata; Sp: pan). In standard Spanish, this would simply be expressed through the informal imperative form of the verb traer ‘bring’ with the corresponding complements attached in a posterior position: tráeme el pan “bring me the bread.” Therefore, the additive feature of the gerund works in conjunction with the imperative to create a more complex manner to express a request in NAS. Despite differences in word order, the meaning and structure of the Quechua gerund form connected with the verb ‘give’ clearly conform to their Spanish counterparts. However, socio-pragmatic studies suggest that this construction would only be given as a solicited response, not in spontaneous speech, by bilingual speakers in certain (not all) Quichua-speaking regions of the northern Andes. Hurley (1995b:
Northern Andean gerundianismo 249 248) provides the additional example overheard in the bilingual context in the famous Quichua market town of Otavalo, Ecuador: (12) Papa-gu-ta randi-shpa cara-wa-y Papa-DIM comprar-GER darme-BEN IMPER Potato-DIM buy-GER give me-BEN IMPER Dame comprando la papita “Buy some potatoes for me, please!” Haboud confirms that one Quechua strategy to soften a command is to add the first-person morpheme (singular or plural) – wa with the verb “to give” (cuna: cu/cana-imperative) as shown in (11) and (12). However, she observes that many predominantly Quichua speakers prefer to use the honorific and benefactive case morpheme -pa (13) when expressing an informal, respectful request, not the -wa or -shpa produced in a solicited response (1998: 218). This form is more aligned with the standard Spanish imperative pásame el pan “pass me the bread.” (13) T’anta-ta pasa-chi-pa-y Pan-DO pasar-HON IMPER Bread-DO pass-HON IMPER Pasa el pan, por favor “Pass the bread, please” While examples (11) and (12) clearly corresponds to the northern Andean Spanish gerundianismo, Haboud (2003) contends that it is not widely used or understood by all Quichua and Quechua speakers in the northern and southern Andes. This observation implies that it cannot be a syntactic calque from Quichua. Haboud posits that gerundianismo is a complex combination of indirect transfer and convergence from the grammaticalized benefactive Quechua case markers -pa (-pu, -p) (13), which converged with another first-person benefactive object marker -wa in Quichua only. These markers transferred socio-pragmatic meaning to the existing Spanish clitic system when used in constructions of gerundianismo. However, Olbertz argues that the grammaticalization of the benefactive case derived from -pa only, not -wa. This is attributed to the pre-existing system for benefactive expression in standard Spanish through dative clitics and the prepositions para and a ‘to/for.’ In addition, since both language systems distinguish between nouns and verbs, the most likely origin of an innovative verbal expression would be a verbal benefactive case marker -pa, not a nominal one, -wa. Therefore, native intuitions regarding the basic distinction between the two categories would easily converge. This theory is supported further by bilingual speakers who intuitively associate and substitute gerundianismo and -pa in both Quichua and Spanish (Olbertz 2008: 99). Even though the benefactive case morpheme -pa has converged and transferred socio-pragmatic meaning to the existing clitic system in Spanish, it should still
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be considered a case of grammatical complexification due to the unique behavior of the clitic in this construction. The benefactive clitic disobeys standard rules of clitic climbing and classification, as described in the previous section, and performs a distinct sociopragmatic role in northern Andean Spanish. It operates in conjunction with the auxiliary-predicate relationship, thus permitting an additional clitic to indicate a recipient, as shown in (6a). Therefore, the behavior of the clitic supports Nichols (1992) and Trudgill’s (2011) partial definition of grammatical complexification as the acquisition of new features in the dominant language. In addition, Trudgill defines grammatical complexification as an increase in syntagmatic redundancy, or the repetition of information.7 The metaphoric extension of the auxiliary, dar, allows for redundancy in the expression of the request. In other words, gerundianismo constructions with dar are emphasizing that an act is given or performed on someone’s behalf, a meaning already conveyed through the standard imperative. For example, dame firmando los documentos “give me signing the documents” could be reduced with the standard imperative form of the predicate, firma los documentos “sign the documents.” The metaphoric extension of dar and other grammaticalized auxiliaries demonstrate a reduction in the original semantic meaning of the verb. This reduction produces light-verb constructions that require a predicate, compounding the dependency of the auxiliary-predicate relationship. Therefore, gerundianismo permits repetition of the lexical meaning of dar and other auxiliaries when used in the predicate. As seen in (6a) dame dándole la carta al cartero, the speaker asks the listener to give them the act of giving the letter to the mailman. This repetition could be simplified by using the standard form: dale la carta al cartero “give the letter to the mailman.” Although these standard forms, firma los documentos and dale la carta al cartero, request the same act as their NAS equivalents, the specific socio-pragmatic meaning of gerundianismo is absent with the omission of the gerund and dative clitic. While the high frequency of the gerund in NAS was initially understood as a simplifying feature employed to neutralize finite Spanish forms (Niño-Murcia 1995), gerund use in gerundianismo does not follow this pattern. Instead, the gerund functions as a predicate operating in conjunction with the auxiliary and clitic. In his theory of efficiency, Hawkins outlines several problems in defining grammatical complexity. In part, seemingly simple surface features, such as the gerund or a dative clitic, form grammatically complex sociopragmatic meaning when combined in this context. Therefore, simplicity in one part of the grammar is matched by complexity in another (2009: 252). This idea of ‘trade-offs’ in assessing complexity helps to define modern variations of gerundianismo as a function of competing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features.
6
Conceptual shifts in standard Spanish and northern Andean Spanish
We have established that grammaticalization of auxiliary verbs and the benefactive case marker, along with direct and indirect transfer from Quechua in a situation of extensive language contact account for the use of the gerund and the
Northern Andean gerundianismo 251 benefactive clitic in this structure. However, how did these verbs become auxiliaries? And why dar? As discussed earlier, the lexical meaning of dar as giving a concrete entity to a recipient is metaphorically extended to include acts and actions. This same metaphoric extension is present in the corresponding Quechua verb apamu ‘give,’ as shown in (15). However, the conceptual shift of a lexical meaning to a metaphoric one is not unique to just Quichua or Spanish. This shift occurs across many languages, and is well supported in other periphrastic forms in standard Spanish. Olbertz cites several examples such as (14a) and (14b) (2008: 104). (14a) Voy a abrir la maleta I go to open: “I am going to open the suitcase” Movement in space > ‘movement’ in time (14b) Tengo abierta la maleta I have open: “I have the suitcase open” Possession of object > ‘possession’ of a result (14c) Te doy abriendo la maleta I give you opening: “I open the suitcase for you” Giving of an object > ‘giving’ of an action Therefore, the conceptual shift from giving a concrete entity to giving an act is relatively easy to accept. However, Olbertz does not address the level of grammaticalization in other auxiliary forms of gerundianismo, such as dejar, pasar, venir, poner, botar, and mandar. Clearly more investigation is needed on this topic. However, I propose that the same idea of a conceptual, metaphorical shift could be applied easily to the transitive meanings of: dejar (15a) and pasar (15b):8 (15a) Le dejé cambiando de lugar y todo [la botella] I left it changing places: “I moved [the bottle] for her” Leaving an object > ‘leaving’ the result of an action9 (15b) Tengo que pasar viendo gasolina I have to pass seeing gasoline: “I have to stop by and get some gas (on the way)” Passing an object > ‘passing’ an action Mandar ‘order/send’ can vary in meaning depending on the context. As a grammaticalized auxiliary, the lexical meaning of ‘send/ order’ is metaphorically extended to being sent away, often in a brusque manner: (16a) Me mandó volando (S)he sent me flying: “(S)he kicked me out (in a hurry)”
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(16b) Me manda hablando (S)he sends me talking: “(S)he yells at me” (16c) Nos mandó sacando (S)he sent/ordered us taking out: “(S)he kicked us out” (16d) Me mandó pegando (Niño-Murcia 1988: 141). (S)he sent me out hitting: “(S)he sent me away hitting me” In examples like (16), the gerund appears to specify the adverbial manner. In this way, the gerund could be substituted with an infinitive and/or a preposition phrase and remain grammatical in standard Spanish: (17a) Me manda a hablar (con alguien) “(S)he sends me to talk (with someone)” (17b) Me manda hablar “(S)he orders me to talk” (17c) Nos mandó a sacar (algo) “(S)he sent us to take (something) out” (17d) Me mandó pegar (algo) “(S)he ordered me to hit (something)” Nevertheless, the meaning of the standard form varies greatly from NAS. Gerundianismo constructions with mandar have acquired a special, causative meaning. (16a) and (16c) readily substitute the Spanish verb botar ‘throw out/away,’ and variations of (16b) often substitute the standard regañar ‘scold’ in certain social groups (Toscano Mateus 1953; Haboud 1997, 1998). Standard Spanish permits mandar as an order, as illustrated in (17b). However, this does not transmit the brusque manner associated with gerundianismo. It is also important to note that standard Spanish forms (17a) and (17c) maintain the transitive meaning of ‘send/ order’ and therefore require a direct complement, whereas the NAS examples are intransitive. While examples with mandar tend to be limited to descriptions of being sent away brusquely, some variations in the form are beginning to appear. (18a) Le mandaban regalándolo describes someone being sent off happily with a present in hand. Although, this could be interpreted as brusque in certain contexts. In the Salcedo corpus, Muysken cites the metaphoric extension: le mandé soñando todita la noche with the meaning of “I spent all night dreaming” (1984: 383). However, neither Niño-Murcia (1988: 141) nor I have been able to confirm widespread recognition of this example among our informants. Grammaticalized auxiliaries of gerundianismo, pasar, dejar, and mandar, all serve a specific socio-pragmatic function in NAS, acquiring meanings that vary
Northern Andean gerundianismo 253 from their standard counterparts. They also observe the same tendencies to split clitics, as described previously with dar. Therefore, these variations are located somewhere along the spectrum of grammatical complexification: (18a) Le mandaban regalándolo Le-PRO mandar-3p PRET regalar-GER lo-DO Her/Him-PRO send-3p PRET give as a gift-GER it-DIR “They sent him off with a present” (18b) Te dejé lavándolas [las camisetas] Te-PRO dejar-1p PRET lavar-GER las-DO You-PRO leave-1p PRET wash-GER them-DO “I left them washed for you” (18c) Le pasé poniéndola [la cremita] todo el día Le-PRO pasar-1p PRET poner-GER la-DO todo el día-Adv Her/him-PRO pass-1p PRET put-GER it-DO all day-Adv “I spent the day putting cream on her/him”
7
Final remarks
Gerundianismo serves as a defining feature of speech communities throughout the northern Andes. This form encompasses a variety of requests, metaphoric extensions and descriptions, existing in co-variation with other forms of similar sociopragmatic meaning. Haboud, Muysken, Niño-Murcia, and Olbertz agree that this innovative verbal construction developed in northern Andean Spanish only, and not in other situations of language contact between Spanish and Quechua. This can be attributed in part to the pidginized nature of northern Andean Quichua as an imposed lingua franca in Ecuador and Southern Colombia. Nevertheless, no two situations of language contact produce the same changes to lexical and grammatical systems. Most importantly, this feature had to perform a relevant social function within speech communities in the northern Andes to gain widespread use among NAS speakers. Bybee (2015); Silva-Corvalán (1995) and Trudgill (2011) highlight that extralinguistic factors, such as subjective attitudes toward a language along with the duration of contact, can contribute greatly to language change and convergence. Gerundianismo highlights that language contact can encourage some level of syntactic and pragmatic transfer. This can be defined in terms of semantic change through metaphoric extension, additive borrowing and convergence of the Quechua benefactive case marker, an argument shared by the auxiliary and predicate, and utilization of the gerund. Together these features paint a picture of grammatical complexification and transfer in the context of sustained language contact.
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Glossary benefactive (case): Quechua case markers -wa (nominal) and -pa (verbal) used to express an action is carried out to the benefit of another. clitic: a classification of morpheme that may stand alone or attach to words belonging to different syntactic categories. They can function like an affix, but they have a syntactic function. Clitics are often pronouns and possessive adjectives, e.g. lo dijo, vete, su casa. diminutive: a modification to a noun, often with an affix, to denote smallness or affection, e.g. casita ‘small house.’ honorific (case): Quechua case marker -pa often used to soften a request. This could be equivalent in meaning to adding por favor, señora ‘please, ma’am’ or other expressions of formality and politeness. Quechua: this term generally refers to an indigenous family of languages spoken throughout the Andean region of South America. Quechua is also used to describe the people who speak the language. Quichua: the variety of Quechua spoken in Ecuador and southern Colombia. SOV (Subject Object Verb): typological word order of Quechua: T’antata pasachipay ‘bread pass, please.’ standard Spanish: a standardized, variety of Spanish that is politically considered ‘correct.’ This is the form often taught and reproduced in media outlets and educational settings. SVO (Subject Verb Object): typological word order of Spanish: el gato come pescado ‘the cat eats fish.’
Notes 1 See Muysken (2005, 2013), Palacios (2011), Silva-Corvalán (1995), Sankoff (2002, 2013), and Thomason (1991). 2 Quichua is used in this chapter to describe the variety of Quechua spoken in Ecuador, Quechua refers generally to the language family (and varieties) spoken outside of Ecuador. 3 For an extensive explanation of the Spanish gerund see Fernández Lagunill (1999). For the Quechua gerund see Catta Quelen (1985). 4 The spelling on this gerund form varies greatly in written transcriptions of Quechua. Some variations include: -cpi, -kpi, -jpi, -gpi, and -pti (Niño-Murcia 1988: 109). 5 All examples without citation I personally observed and were produced by NAS speakers. 6 The pronoun le changes to se when placed in sequence with the direct object pronouns lo, los, la, or las. 7 See also Heine and Kuteva (2005) where they define grammatical complexification as ‘grammatical replication.’ 8 For a more complete discussion of the uses of dejar and pasar, see Haboud (1997). 9 This is often classified as a perfective: le dejé cambiado “I left it changed for him.”
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Niño-Murcia, Mercedes. “Construcciones verbales del español andino: interacción quechua-española en la frontera colombo-ecuatoriana.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1988. ———. “The gerund in the Spanish of the North Andean region.” In Spanish in four continents, edited by C. Silvia-Corvalán, 83–100. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995. Olbertz, Hella. “Dar + gerund in Ecuadorian highland Spanish: contact-induced grammaticalization?” Spanish in Context 5.1 (2008): 89–109. Palacios Alcaine, Azucena. “Nuevas perspectivas en el estudio del cambio inducido por contacto: hacia un modelo dinámico del contacto de lenguas.” Lenguas Modernas 38 (2011): 17–36. Sankoff, Gillian. “Linguistic outcomes of language contact.” In Handbook of sociolinguistics, edited by J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, and N. Shilling-Estes, 638–668. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. ———. “Linguistic outcomes of bilingualism.” In The handbook of language variation and change, edited by J. K. Chambers and N. Shilling-Estes, 501–518. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen, ed. Spanish in four continents: studies in language contact and bilingualism, 1–14. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995. Thomason, Sarah. Language contact. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. ——— and Terrance Kaufman. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Torre, Carlos and Steve Striffler. The Ecuador reader: history, culture and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Toscano Mateus, Humberto. El español en el Ecuador. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigación Científica, 1953. Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistic typology: social determinants of linguistic complexity. England: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Further readings Fishman, Joshua A. Can threatened languages be saved? Reversing language shift, revisited: a 21st century perspective. England: Multilingual Matters, 2001. Greenberg, Joseph H. Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. Harris, Alice C. and Lyle Cambell. Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hornberger, Nancy. “Literacy, language maintenance, and linguistic human rights: three telling cases.” Sociology of Language 127.1 (2009): 87–104. Kasper, Gabriela. “Linguistic politeness: current research issues.” Pragmatics 14.2 (1990): 193–218. Labov, William. Principles of linguistic change: social factors. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010. Ocampo, Francisco and Carol A. Klee. “Spanish OV/VO word-order variation in Spanish Quechua bilingual speakers.” In Spanish in four continents, edited by C. Silvia-Corvalán, 71–82. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995. Sessarego, Sandro and Melvin González-Rivera, eds. New perspectives on Hispanic contact linguistics in the Americas. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2015.
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Topics for discussion 1
Gerundianismo is unique to the Spanish spoken in northern Andean region. Interpret the following examples in standard Spanish and English. a b c d e f
Pásame la mochila y yo te doy llevando. Deme calentando la merienda. Le di sacando unas fotos. Hazlo para que me dejes preparando listo el hígado. ¿Me puedes dar retirando esto? Voy a pasarme viendo una platita.
2
In other regions of Ecuador and Colombia, gerundianismo is uncommon. In coastal Ecuador, for example, it would be more common to hear: pásame or pásate el pan. What sociopolitical and geographical factors could account for this difference?
3
Dar + gerund is an example of a metaphoric extension of the verb’s lexical meaning ‘give’ (an object) to the giving of acts. Identify of at least three examples of metaphoric extension in a language you speak or study.
4
Describe what process is at work when the word ‘text message’ is used as the verb ‘text,’ as in ‘she texted me.’ Give two additional examples of this type of shift in a language you speak or study.
5
Could language contact produce both grammatical simplification and complexification? What circumstances could determine one or the other? Cite an example.
6
If two features carry similar socio-pragmatic meaning, such as gerundianismo and the standard Spanish imperative, what social factors would determine the use of one construction over the other?
7
Cancha, huracán, and chocolate are examples of lexical borrowing. Identify borrowed elements in a language you speak or study. What language do they come from? How has their meaning adapted to the new language?
8
Look up the definitions of other examples of lexical borrowing from Quichua in northern Andean Spanish. How would you express these ideas in another variety of Spanish or English? a b c d e f g
Chochos Guambra Guagua Chuchaqui Chochar Huasipichai Ñaña
12 Spain’s language policies and the discourse of contact linguistics A diachronic approach Eva Núñez-Méndez Constant technological innovation, globalization, and the wide use of Internet have transformed our perception of the world and our way of communicating. Today, it is part of our digital routine to interact with languages different from our maternal tongue. The Internet allows us to communicate in real time, using computing platforms where any user can read, write, listen, record, and share opinions, and participate in blogs in any language. These modern technological resources function as multilingual environments. Furthermore, technology can help minority languages to recover from attrition and continue their development, aided by unlimited exposure to users in remote areas. Digital devices facilitate information transfer and speakers’ interactions. Documenting, creating, sharing, storing, editing, connecting, transferring, and publicizing are daily tasks of our hyper-connected lives, where social media influences language practices and personal relations. In this digital age, contact linguistics becomes one of the main pillars of society and culture, permeating everyday life and wider contexts. Who speaks what language to whom, when, and for what purpose is the foundation for shaping sociocultural practices, demographics, political planning, media approaches, and behavioral tendencies in bilingual or multilingual communities. In language contact, there is usually a predominant mainstream language (constitutional or not) versus one or two minority group languages (three in the case of Spain) with or without official recognition. Under these circumstances, legal support becomes fundamental to instate effective linguistic education and practices, oriented toward integrating linguistic minorities into society, far from repressive political legislations that lead to discrimination and isolation. Based on languages in contact and their impact in society, this chapter investigates how the historical multilingualism in the Iberian Peninsula has resulted in modern Spain’s local language-in-education policies. In doing so, it evaluates the most recent data in demographics, statistics, and statutory implementations.
1
Diachronic accounts: five languages in the Iberian Peninsula
Understanding the modern linguistic configuration of the Iberian Peninsula takes us back to reviewing its history, settlers, and multiple invaders. Many groups have contributed to the linguistic situation in the peninsula over the centuries:
Spain’s language policies 259 Pre-Hispanics, Iberians, Celts, Celtiberians, Tartessians, and Basques; along with the traders in the coasts, Carthaginians, and Greeks; the Romans; followed by the short incursion of Germanic tribes (mostly Visigoths); and finally, the Muslims – all these helped to shape Spanish and other peninsular languages. The process of Latinization was slow and difficult, although the imposition of Latin was finally completed around the 1st century,1 although it was never strong in the northern regions of the peninsula among Asturians, Cantabrians, and Basques. These groups resisted Roman culture and its language for a long time. This persistent resistance is particularly important as it is from these isolated sites, beyond the Cantabrian Mountains, where early Castilian will grow until eventually establishing itself as the dominant linguistic variety that eventually will be called Spanish. Furthermore, Basque, of unknown linguistic affiliation, continued to be spoken under Roman, Germanic, and Arab dominations, protected by its remote and inaccessible mountain location. During seven long centuries of Muslim invasion (711–1492), Arabic was the official language, yet it coexisted with several forms of early Ibero-Romance, used in daily life, and lately attested in the lyric poems of the jarchas, written in the 10th and 11th centuries. As expected, bilingualism inevitably developed in many regions, mainly in the north-center parts of Muslim Iberia; while in the south of the peninsula, linguistic and religious repression in the 11th century by radical Muslims probably led to an Arabic monolingualism, exacerbating an exodus of Mozarabs2 to the north. One of the Romance varieties from Proto-Ibero-Romance spoken by the Hispano-Latin population under Muslims, the southern variety of Mozarabic, also known as Romanandalusí, may have engaged in some diglossia with Hispano-Arabic oral varieties. However, Muslim intolerance provoked the extinction of Mozarabic and the assimilation of Mozarabs by the people of the north, starting the first phase of the Reconquest. If this had not happened, one more Romance language would be spoken in the peninsula today. During the various phases of the Reconquest, isolated holdouts in the north such as Asturias, Castile, Leon, and Aragon engaged in efforts to retake the south from the Muslims. While all the kingdoms sought to retake the peninsula, Castile was most successful. By 1492, Castilian, a peripheral northern dialect, had spread widely to the south, becoming the dominant language; without the Reconquest incentive, Castilian may have never reached its linguistic supremacy, and the linguistic mapping of the peninsula would be of a different kind. Around the beginning of the 9th century, Christians in the north undertook a defensive campaign against Muslims for religious and territorial reasons. At that time, there were multiple states such as the Galician and the Asturian-Cantabrian kingdoms and Castilian, Basque, and Pirenaic sites without a unified political sense of national belonging. The name of Castile itself was first documented in the 10th century to refer to the upper Ebro Valley, where many fortified castles were built against Muslim incursions. All these people from the north spoke intelligible Ibero-Romance varieties, with the exception of the Basques. This heterogeneous linguistic situation changed with the repopulation of settlers from the south, especially during the 9th through 11th centuries, and the mixing of people in the reconquest enterprise. The outcome was probably an accommodation of speech varieties
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Figure 12.1 North of Hispania in the Reconquest: peninsular languages, their kingdoms and origins Author’s creation
to help understanding in the contact situation, resulting in a process of leveling or koineization.3 With the final demographic efforts of repopulating southern Muslim areas with new Christian settlers in the expansion toward the south, alternating periods of adjustment among linguistic varieties must have taken place with the subsequent linguistic repercussions. Northern peripheral regions allowed their languages to survive and develop. The northwest, isolated under the Germanic-Swabians, was the base for Galician and its descendant Portuguese, which extended southward. The northeast, closer to Galia and Gallo-Romance, was the foundation for Catalan and the Pirenaic dialects (such as Aragonese). Basque, always resilient to foreign influence, continued to be spoken, shielded by mountains. Among all the Ibero-Romance varieties concentrated in the north of the peninsula only Castilian manages to impose itself over the others. Reconquering most of the peninsula, with the exception of some peripheral northern areas, Castile ends up outperforming its neighboring kingdoms, spreading its power and its language southward. Without the Reconquest, the linguistic history of Spain and Portugal would have been very different; furthermore, the trajectory and rise of Castilian as a national and transatlantic language would have been inconceivable. In Pharies’s words: “Castile and the Castilian dialect might have remained very far from the cultural and political center of the peninsula” (2015: 36). At the end of the 15th century, the primacy of Castile and its language initiates a new sociopolitical period with an attempt to create a unified modern nation state under only one dominant language. Analyzing contact linguistics in the peninsula entails surveying the history of the people who speak those languages. Without considering sociopolitical events such as settlements, conquests, migrations, wars, and cultural movements in those
Adapted from public geography maps of Spain
Map 12.1 Iberian Peninsula languages during the Reconquest and in 2000
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regions, we cannot understand the complex linguistic setting of the peninsula and its languages in contact. Both the Roman and Muslim invasions and the subsequent Reconquest are crucial to explaining the modern linguistic panorama. It is clear that these events left a trace in shaping peninsular Romance languages evolving from the spoken Latin brought by Roman soldiers. 1.1
Consolidation of a ‘national’ language: Castilian supremacy
With the fall of Granada in 1492, the Catholic Monarchs finally succeed in creating Castilian hegemony in a newly formed state with Castilian as the language of culture and administration. The other non-Castilian minority groups and languages were left along the peripheries. Portugal, established as a kingdom in the 1130s, gaining its independence from Leon, also extended southward at the expense of the common Moorish enemy. In spite of many royal marriages, politics, and even wars, Portugal kept its autonomy and only briefly reverted to Castilian rule under Philip II from 1580 to 1640, thereafter it remained separated from Spain. In synch with Portugal’s territorial expansion southward, Portuguese developed its own linguistic traits, distancing itself from its northern Galaico origins. At the end of the 15th century, the so-called unification of Spain was hardly similar to our modern view of ‘nation’ or ‘state.’ Nevertheless, it was the first attempt to consolidate a Spanish national identity under one common language. It was then when a need to establish codification and norms for this ‘national language’ emerged, in line with the previous standardization efforts of the Castilian Alfonso X in the 13th century. The first orthographies and grammar books, such as Nebrija’s, were published. Furthermore, the Castilianization of the New World colonies and the building of the Spanish empire also demanded an institutionalized linguistic norm. Castilian flourished as the language of the court in Madrid, the government, and the expanding empire during the 16th and 17th centuries, resulting in Spain’s Golden Age in literary production with authors such as Cervantes, Calderón, Góngora, Lope de Vega, and Quevedo. During the 18th century, with the first Bourbons in power, non-Castilian languages lost the status and protection of the last remaining local laws and privileges, although they were still widely spoken in their regions. In 1713, the Royal Academy of the Spanish language was created, consolidating Castilian prestige. In the context of the expansion of education, along with access to the printed word and educational materials, the imposition of Castilian was reinforced throughout Spain in politics, culture, and religion. In 1768, Charles III decreed Castilian as the language of administration and education.4 In the 19th century, in spite of centralizing policies and internal linguistic divisions, a sense of national patriotism emerged to face a common enemy, which was now the French under Napoleon. The ‘national’ language enabled people to unite with a sense of being Spanish, rather than Galician, Catalan, or Basque. Nevertheless, at the end of this century, non-Castilian languages saw the resurgence of their
Spain’s language policies 263 literary outputs with the production of dictionaries, grammars, and orthographies for the first time in many centuries. To a greater or lesser extent, there was a clear diglossic situation despite the Castilian dominance in public life. The beginning of the 20th century is marked by the final loss of an empire. After Bourbon centralism and its chaotic politics, peripheral nationalism, inspired by European Romanticism, began to grow as a reaction to the past climate of central state bureaucracy. Spain’s political instability impeded competing with other modernized and industrialized European nations. The desperate need to modernize the economy brought waves of social unrest to a highly conservative and centralized state. In spite of a short period of prosperity during the First World War, in which Spain was neutral, and the Second Republic (1932–1936), this century was marked by economic recession and two military dictatorships: under Primo de Rivera (1923–1931) and Franco (1939–1975). Regional languages received some recognition and status during the Second Republic, but this was never replicated until after Franco died. Winning the 1936–39 Civil War enabled Franco to reinforce centralism and repress any deviance from his regime, which included proscribing the use of minority languages. Non-Castilian languages were claimed to be inferior, trivial, and only spoken by a few, the uneducated and the peasantry; they were seen as anti-patriotic and, therefore, strictly censored and prohibited by Franco’s policies. In many cases, their use was punished with fines and imprisonment. This linguistic intolerance lasted for 36 years, preventing Galician, Catalan, and Basque from being recognized, revived, published, or much less taught. However, it initiated the emergence of protest movements against Franco. In 1966, the socalled Freedom of Expression Law was passed, relaxing censorship and permitting some publications in non-Castilian languages. However, it was not after Franco’s death in 1975 and the restoration of democracy in 1977, that Spain began dramatic language reforms.
2
Linguistic contact: Spanish and other peninsular languages
When two languages come together, many factors interact and converge, producing borrowing relationships that affect each other in different ways. Outcomes differ according to the circumstances of use: the languages may be used simultaneously or only in certain registers; they may borrow words or structures from each other; or they can develop new forms from the contact situation. They may grow or die out as they are affected by politics, societal pressures, cultural assumptions, and individual attitudes. Contact between languages often depends on chance, which basically determines whether a language survives or not. The element of chance contributes to the life and death of languages: a lost battle, a new religious idea, a natural catastrophe. That is one reason why we are no more likely to tell the future of a language than we can predict the history of those who speak it. (Breton 1991: xi)
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Besides the nature of chance, interaction between languages in contact cannot be predicted or described by a purely linguistic approach. There are multifaceted and multidisciplinary external elements (from society, history, culture, laws, etc.) that intervene in this mutual process. In contact situations, linguistic changes are produced by both internally induced changes and external causes. Since the 1980s it has been demonstrated that “it is the sociolinguistic history of the speakers, and not the structure of their language, that is the primary determinant of the linguistic outcome of language contact” (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 35). In the Iberian Peninsula, the multilinguistic contact situation has been present since ancient times, and can be explained by the addition of external forces to the inherent language component: territorial expansion, wars, religion, transatlantic growth, exploitation of resources, military and political campaigns, power orchestration, and so forth. The current peninsular language mosaic is a reflection of that history, where modern Spanish is in contact with Galician-Portuguese, Catalan, and Basque. 2.1
Spanish in contact with Galician-Portuguese
Contact between Castilian and Galician-Portuguese goes back to King Alfonso X’s period, in the 13th century, when Galicia was integrated into the crown of Castile in 1230. During this time, Galician-Portuguese became a written and cultivated language for literary creation. It flourished during the 13th and 14th centuries with a rich lyric tradition, used in poetry, music, oral folklore, and religious chants, and its use was encouraged by kings and nobles in those regions; this was its golden age. Until the 14th century, both Galician and Portuguese formed a dialect continuum that started to diverge when Portuguese became the official language for the kingdom of Portugal. Written Galician was relegated to use by lawyers, noblemen, and churchmen of the kingdom of Galicia; it was at that time when the first Galician standardization efforts started. It was widely employed in and outside Galicia as the language of culture up to the 15th century, serving as a model for medieval peninsular literature. Alfonso X introduced Castilian as the official language of the kingdom of Castile; however, Galicia, Asturias, and Leon kept their written local languages until the 15th century. Castilian was progressively enforced through Royal decrees, which led to the end of legal records in Galician. During the 15th and 16th centuries, Galician was deeply influenced by Castilian language, culture, and politics to the point that it stopped being used in any official documentation in the 16th century. It was reduced to oral use with very limited written practices. Between the 16th century and the early 19th century, Galician had a minimal literary presence, and it was only spoken varieties, oral tradition, and popular culture that kept the language alive. In spite of the linguistic decline, Galicia maintained its cultural exposure beyond the Middle Ages, thanks to the pilgrimages along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, still popular today. Portuguese expanded toward the south, as did Castilian, after Portugal’s independence from Leon. It was imposed on the Mozarabic-speaking southern areas,
Spain’s language policies 265 soon to be annexed to this new kingdom. It underwent major changes, developing, and spreading to new territories, while Galician reduced itself to an oral form, isolated in the north, continually under Castilian power. Lisbon and its port, away from Galicia, became the point of departure for Portuguese transatlantic expansion and growth. Galician and Portuguese evolved to such an extent that what were originally common language co-dialects resulted in two separate Romance languages. Galician followed Castilian orthographic conventions and tendencies, shifting away from rooted commonalities with Portuguese. Under the Spanish influence, it grew further apart from Portuguese, with the divergence based on phonological features and spelling; examples include the lack of marking for vowels (inexistent in Spanish, marked in Portuguese, i.e.: open á, close â, or nasal ã) and the loss of the labiodental sound for v (characteristic of Spanish – that is, no contrast between bota/vota – and with phonemic value in Portuguese – i.e. bem/vem). Spanish was the only official language in Galicia between the 18th century and 1975. Today Galician is co-official, used as the lingua propia of the local administration, and is taught in bilingual programs. Castilian has a greater presence in the cities and Galician is used in smaller municipalities and rural areas; its use varies according to the age bracket: it is the youngest speakers who use Galician the least and are most likely to be monolingual in Castilian (LOIA 2003). Galician has historically had strong ties with Spanish and its northern dialects in spite of its common origins with Portuguese. Its continuous and intense contact with Castilian over the centuries has shifted Galician to Spanish. Nowadays, there is a trend to include Galician as part of the Lusophony, causing controversy linguistically and politically. In 2016, Santiago de Compostela, the capital, became a member of the Union of Portuguese-Speaking Capitals (UCCLA), and the Consello da Cultura Galega, Council of Galician Culture, was admitted to the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries (CPLP). Whether Galicia shifts from the Spanish to the Portuguese domains due to modern political activism, its role as a minor language is still counterbalanced by the predominant language in the peninsula. 2.2
Spanish in contact with Catalan
From the eastern end of the Pyrenees and since the 9th century, Catalonian counties extended their territories southward, taking their language with them. In the 13th century they conquered Valencia and the Balearic Islands, reaching Murcia, which became Spanish speaking in the 15th century (Wheeler 2010: 190). By then, Valencia had become a sociocultural center of the Crown of Aragon, and Catalan was widespread in the Mediterranean, stretching to Sicily and to Sardinia, where it had official status until the 15th and 17th centuries, respectively. During the 13th to mid-15th centuries, Catalan enjoyed a golden age of literary production and was standardized under the auspices of the Royal Chancery (Costa Carreras and Yates 2009: 6). Nevertheless, in 1479, when the crowns of Castile and Aragon united (Catalonia belonged to Aragon), Spanish became more prestigious than Catalan, which started to fall in
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decline. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, Spanish was used in legal and literary works, and most of the speakers from urban and intellectual classes became bilinguals. In 1659, Spain ceded northern portions of Catalonia to France, causing Catalan to become subjugated to French, which ultimately led to discrimination against its use and its prohibition shortly after the French Revolution (1789). In 1714, after the War of Spanish Succession and with the arrival of the royal Bourbons, Spanish was enforced throughout Spain. It was not until the 19th century that Catalan experienced a revival, Renaixença, that is still present today, and was only interrupted by Franco’s language repression laws (1939–1975). Nowadays, Catalan is the sole official language in Andorra (since 1993) and is also officially recognized by the General Council of the Pyrénées-Orientales (since 2007), unlike France, which only recognizes French as its official language. As of 2004, speakers of Northern Catalan in France have been reduced to people aged 60 or older (Wheeler 2010: 191). In comparison to Basque, Catalan presents a relative uniformity in its dialects, mutually intelligible, although with differences in the written form. Valencian counts with its own Royal Academy of Valencian Culture (RAVC), founded in 1915, and its Valencian Language Academy (AVL), from 1998; while both are official, the two disagree about Valencian spelling. The RAVC promotes a standard independent from Catalan, sparking much controversy, while the AVL is based on the Norms of Castelló and is the most accepted. Both Valencia and the Balearic Island standards admit alternate forms that do not concur with standard Catalan (i.e. néixer, naixer, ‘to be born,’ estrella, estrela, ‘star,’ Catalan IEC and Valencian AVL spellings, respectively). This discrepancy shows Valencians’ lack of cultural identification with Catalans and their perception of Valencian as separate from Catalan; in this line, they requested Valencian versions of the 1978 Constitution and the 2004 European Constitution, with the results being identical to the Catalan versions. In spite of this sociopolitical divergence, linguists do classify Valencian as a Catalan dialect.5 Castilian has been in contact with Catalan since the 15th century, when Castilian started to be used as lingua franca for legal, trading, literary, and religious purposes. In 1535, Juan de Valdés (2017 [1535]) stated that it was the language not only spoken in Castile but also in the rest of Spain. As the language of the Empire and of Golden Age authors (such as Cervantes), Castilian became a highly valued sociocultural tool for communication. In Catalonia, it was not a matter of imposition (except for the Francoist period) that resulted in Castilian becoming the predominant language, but a matter of convenient instrumentality. In 1910, Agulló Vidal stated that “one should avoid impositions and antagonisms against habits and traditions in relation to languages; Castilian was never imposed by decree in Catalonia but voluntarily and slowly adopted by the people, as a result of its growing prestige” (Dolça Catalunya 2017). Since the earliest texts appearing in 1080 (Moran 2004: 37), Catalan’s history has experienced ups and downs, enjoying an impressive revitalization in current times. With normalization campaigns, Catalan has been imposed in education, administration, and mass media, increasing the number of speakers. However,
Spain’s language policies 267 many see this imposition as linked to political ideologies of division and nationalism, not to prestige or culture. As a result, more Catalans are opting for Castilian as their habitual language (50.7%) versus the imposed Catalan (36.3%). The historical antagonism between these two languages sets the social framework for shaping Catalans’ identity, attitudes, and their separatism aspirations. 2.3
Contact with Basque: historical accounts
While the Iberian and Tartessian languages became extinct, Basque survived; neglected by Romans and other invaders, it was isolated in the mountains, and therefore kept a high dialectal variation. While the geopolitical limits of its speakers in ancient times are unknown, its geographical distribution was reduced, forced to retreat further and further by the Reconquest campaigns. It stretched northeast to both sides of the Pyrenees and to southeastern regions and valley settlements up to the 14th century, as this Huesca law from 1349 confirms, penalizing the use of Arabic, Hebrew, or Basque in marketplaces with a fine of 30 sols: Item nuyl corridor nonsia usado que faga mercaderia ninguna que compre nin venda entre ningunas personas, faulando en algaravia nin en abraych nin en basquenç: et qui lo fara pague por coto XXX sol. (Urquizi Sarasua 2013: 40) By the 16th century, the Basque-speaking area was basically the same as the present-day. Still, it has been contracted, pushed northwards, in continuous decline. Navarre was never totally Basque speaking (mostly the south); politically separated with its own kingdom until annexed to Castile in 1512, this province had its own local laws or fueros even under Franco’s regime. Today, the Navarre Statute of Autonomy recognizes this linguistic diversity, unlike the French Basque Country, where Basque has no official recognition. Shielded by the terrain, Basque was exposed to minimal impact from other neighboring languages; nevertheless, it adopted many Romance words from Latin and its descendants Gascon, Navarro-Aragonese, and Castilian. In turn, Basque has also lent vocabulary to Romance speakers, besides toponyms and onamastics, such as alud, angula, chabola, chorro, izquierdo, zarza, zorro, zurdo, and so forth (DRAE 2018). Basque geographical proximity and long contact with primitive Castilian set the basis for a substratum hypothesis (largely debated by linguists). Both languages share similarities that other peninsular languages do not have such as the loss of distinction between bilabial [b] and labiodental [v] (Basque does not have [v]); loss of the initial Latin f- (inexistent in Basque in that position); loss and voiced sibilants (Basque does not have voiced sibilants); the trilled vibrant (characteristic of Basque in the word initial position); and the reduction of the Latin vowel system to five. Most experts agree on either a direct or indirect Basque influence in the formation of old Castilian.6 Basque was never a widely spoken language in comparison with Catalan and Galician. It was not perceived as a language of prestige or worthy of documentation,
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lacking a medieval literary tradition in which to base the unity of the language. They had to rely on the Basque in isolated rural areas as their base, as it was not spoken in urban areas or by the middle class. The Basques accepted Castilian dominance and kept Basque in its oral form in a diglossic subordination. Additionally, they never had a strong kingdom or an established geographical and cultural center like Barcelona in Catalonia and Santiago in Galicia. In the 19th century, they experienced major industrial and economic growth, as did Catalonia, generating bourgeoisie and banking elites, who welcomed working with the Spanish State. They reacted to their sense of cultural identity focusing on race (‘origin’ by birth or descent), displacing the bonding effect of language, leitmotiv for identity and nationalism among Catalans. The core value of race and language marks 20thcentury nationalist and separatist initiatives in these two communities. Basque fragmentation in dialects and subdialects, some almost mutually incomprehensible, has jeopardized its spread and bilingual growth, resulting in a much less wide-reaching language than its other minority counterparts. 2.4
Spain and other minority languages
So far, we have only referred to the indigenous languages as the main scope of this chapter; however, it is important to mention other minority languages as a result of modern migrations and the integration into the European Union. For example, Catalonia has 662,300 residents with non-regional languages including Arabic, 151,700; Rumanian, 56,100; Berber Amazigh, 41,800; French, 38,800; Galician, 33,200; and Russian, 31,900.7 There is a growing number of non-European immigrants, especially from North Africa and Latin America, coming to Spain in search of employment and better social opportunities. They usually concentrate in industrialized regions and cities where jobs might be available. Latin Americans are attracted by the shared language, culture, and religion. On the other hand, immigrants from North Africa, Arabs, and Muslims, do not speak Spanish and suffer from discrimination and isolation. Often Spain becomes their route to other more tolerant parts of Europe. Another smaller minority is the Spanish (and also Portuguese) gypsy community who speaks caló, considered a dialect of Spanish with words and expressions from different origins. They have lived in southern parts of the peninsula for centuries in spite of State efforts to assimilate them based on racist prejudices: under Franco, they were harassed and persecuted. In contemporary Spain, following European Community (EC) integration policies, the government has developed programs to bring them into mainstream life without eroding their distinctive cultural and linguistic heritage.
3
Language policies and planning: education in modern Spain
With the end of the dictatorial regime in 1975, radical changes affecting language policies took place in Spain. The new constitution of 1978 recognizes 17 selfgoverning regions or Comunidades Autónomas, giving linguistic rights and official
Spain’s language policies 269 status to Galician, Catalan, and Basque in their regions as stipulated in Article 3, which reads: (1) Castilian is the official Spanish language of the State. All Spaniards have the duty to know it and the right to use it. (2) The other Spanish languages shall also be official in the respective selfgoverning Regions in accordance with their Statutes. (3) The wealth of the different linguistic modalities of Spain is a cultural heritage, which shall be specially respected and protected. Clause 1 clearly prescribes the duty to know Castilian, counterbalanced with the recognition of protecting and respecting minority languages as official in their Autonomous Communities in clauses 2 and 3. Nevertheless, some ambiguities arise from this constitutional wording. The geographical limitations of the minority languages mean that they are still subordinate to Castilian as the national language. Non-Castilian Spanish citizens could argue that they do not have the same rights as Castilian-mother tongue speakers. A native Galician speaker does not have the right to use Galician in official contexts in Seville, for example, or expect the State to provide Galician teaching to their children if they happen to live in Andalusia. However, Castilian must be used and provided for across Spain. The future of minority languages and dialects takes second place to Castilian based on territorial limitations, which are intrinsically linked to cultural and linguistic identities. Giving preference to Castilian in Article 3 competes with equality before the law of Article 14: Spaniards are equal before the law and may not in any way be discriminated against on account of birth, race, sex, religion, opinion, or any other personal or social condition or circumstance. The potential negative meaning of clause 2, limiting minority languages to the peripheries, is compensated with a well-intentioned belief in linguistic pluralism in clause 3, that allows Communities to define their local varieties for recognition and protection. Although some contradictions are inherent in this policy, there is no doubt that it promotes significant advances for non-Castilian languages. Once Spain joined the EC in 1986, new language policies were implemented in line with other member states. First, Spanish became another official language of the EU. Second, Spain needed to follow the EC’s 1977 language directive, by which it must encourage the teaching of people’s mother tongues. Third, Spain Table 12.1 Minority language population of Autonomous Communities8 Autonomous Communities
Population 2016
% total Spanish pop. 46.5 mill 2016
Languages
% bilingual daily speakers
Galicia Catalonia Basque Country
2,718,525 7,522,596 2,189,534
6.89% 16% 5.4%
Galician Catalan Basque
89.1% 96% 29.3%
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had to comply with the EC language policies to support minority and regional languages, also called lesser-used languages, to foster good relations between these communities. This European supranational legal approach was perceived by Catalans, Galicians, and Basques as a great opportunity to strengthen their cultures and languages. Minority languages can be used as a contact language in accordance with the Resolution of the European Parliament in 1990. Since 2004, Spain’s co-official languages were institutionalized in the EU, which means that citizens have the right to use them to communicate with the EU, although with some restrictions in terms of translation and interpreting. For example, Catalan could be used but then translated into one of the EU’s official languages; however, the response will not be provided in Catalan. Documents can be translated into these languages but with no legal value for EU officials. A legal framework is needed to promote minority languages’ teaching and learning, with the subsequent language planning to influence or modify societal linguistic behavior. This kind of implementation is usually carried out by governments, State agencies, supranational or international groups (such as the EU), or by private organizations (such as religious or media groups). The success of these linguistic campaigns principally depends on the resources, the institutional support, and meticulous planning, which may develop threefold according to corpus, status, and acquisition. Corpus planning deals with the internal organization of the language or its corpus, for which the role of academies such as the RAE is crucial. Status planning is based on promoting the language and providing the resources to do so. Acquisition planning seeks to expand the use of the language by studying and planning how it is acquired and learned, for example in the education system, complementing status planning (Mar-Molinero 1997). 3.1
Educational policies and language planning
Successful language planning and bilingual education are the results of effective educational policies. Without the support of education, the promotion and revival of minority languages would be impossible. Therefore, it is important to explore education laws. The first official regulation of the education system in Spain occurred with the Public Instruction Act of 1857. It introduced schooling for children between the ages of six and nine. From 1857 until 1970, the laws changed several times extending or reducing school years. Since the establishment of democracy in 1977, educational policy has been regulated according to Article 27 of the constitution, which asserts the basic right to a free education. Within the central State legal framework, the Autonomous Communities have flexibility to legislate their own education laws according to article 149.3, which encompasses responsibilities such as the founding, construction, and management of institutions, the supervision of teachers and other staff, and the security and the enforcement of compulsory education laws (through social services or the local police if necessary). The central government designs the legal framework regulating the curriculum, the objectives, skills, evaluation criteria, standards, and
Spain’s language policies 271 learning outcomes, under Article 6a of the LOMCE. The State finances all the public educational institutions and, partially, some private ones. Common to all the Communities in Spain, the most important legislations affecting education and language planning have been: • •
• •
• • •
LEG 14/1970, General Education Law under Franco’s regime. Basic general education (EGB) was obligatory for children until 14 years of age. It was replaced by LODE. Statutes for Autonomy (Catalonia and Basque Country in 1979; Galicia in 1981). These laws establish that it is the right of the respective Autonomous Communities to regulate education throughout their respective territories as long as they remain in compliance with the laws of the central State. LODE 1985 affirmed all Spaniards’ right to education. In addition, it provided for economic funding for both public and private educational centers. LOGSE 1990. The Organic Law for General Education System aimed to increase the quality of the educational system by including periodic assessment and evaluation. It introduced infant education and it extended compulsory education up to 16 years of age. It was replaced in 2006 by LOE. 1992 European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages protects and promotes languages used by traditional minorities. ESO 1994, Obligatory Secondary Education regulates compulsory and free education for all students from age 12 to 16. LOE 2006, Organic Law of Education normalizes all public teaching in Spain. • •
•
•
Article 1.99 permits teaching all academic subjects in the co-official, including those of no linguistic content. Article 1.109 promotes plurilingual education from infant-primary to secondary education.
LOMCE 2013 or “Ley Wert,” Organic Law for the Improvement of Quality in Education aims to improve retention and quality. Students have the option of devoting their last year (at age 16) to vocational training, instead of following the regular pathway. It is basically an amendment to the previous LOE. Ley 40/2015. The State standardizes the use of co-official languages in the public administration.
In spite of sharing the same constitutional linguistic rights, the three regions in Spain with minority languages do not follow the same language planning in response to clause 2 of Article 3, by which they can stipulate their own. The resulting Local Normalization Laws of each Autonomous Community aim for the same objective: promotion and equal status of their languages with Castilian and stable bilingualism; nevertheless, their language planning differs in accordance with their heterogeneous sociocultural, historic, and linguistic trajectories. The normalization of their languages in society is their number one priority in their
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planning, although encouraging bilingualism depends on many other factors such as the economy, politics, resources, and the media of each region. Among the three regions, the most successful language planning has happened in Catalonia, where bilingual education has succeeded; unlike the Basque Country, where bilingual programs are still struggling to normalize Basque in daily life. The three Autonomous Communities completed their own Statutes and specific normalization laws in the eighties: the Basque Country in 1982 (Navarre in 1986), and both Galicia and Catalonia in 1983. Valencia and the Balearic Islands did the same in 1983 and 1986, respectively. Since then language normalization laws have been updated by the constitution and are resumed in SSTC 87/1983, 82/1986, 83/1986, 84/1986, 123/1988, 74/1989, 46/1991, 337/1994, 31/2010 and 137/2010 (Guía Jurídica 2017). 3.2
Language planning in Galicia
Galicia has a small population of over 2.7 million people, slightly more than the Basque Country; nevertheless, by contrast, immigration is not high in this Autonomous community. In fact, it is quite the opposite, as it has provided emigrants to other peninsular regions (and the Americas). Furthermore, it is perceived as a conservative, rural, and backward-looking society, in the remote northwestern corner of the peninsula. Although Galician does not have social status and its use does not imply official and social advancement like Catalan, the Xunta language planning committee is trying to improve these attitudes and promote Galician in all contexts of society. It is mainly middle-class professionals and intellectuals who speak it fluently in all contexts, as balanced bilinguals, without a clear diglossia situation.9 According to the 2011 census, 89.1% of the population uses Galician every day and 43.8%, over one million, use only Galician.10 Between 2001 and 2011, Galician monolinguals have dropped 13%. However, this does not concern the Xunta as the numbers of bilinguals, using both Galician and Castilian daily, have grown 15%, becoming almost half of the population, 45.4%. Castilian monolinguals have dropped less than 2% since 2001. The trend seems to indicate a decrease in monolinguals and an increase in bilingual use in all the four provinces. It seems that language planning is bearing fruit. Among the seven cities, Santiago, the capital, has the fewest Castilian monolinguals, 8.9%, while Pontevedra has the most, 12.7%.
Table 12.2 Linguistic competence in Galicia based on the 2011 census Total population 2016
Galician speakers: daily use
Bilinguals
Only Galician
Only Castilian
2,718,525
89.1%
45.4%
43.8% 1.1 million
10.8% 287,837
Adapted from Galician Statistic Institute for Population and Housing, Census 2011, Faro de Vigo, October 14, 2014
Spain’s language policies 273 Table 12.3 Linguistic competence of Galician provinces in 2011 Provinces
Bilinguals
Only Galician
Only Castilian
A Coruña Lugo Ourense Pontevedra
45.6% 32.7% 36% 52.9%
43% 59.9% 56.3% 34.4%
11.3% 7.2% 7.6% 12.7%
Adapted from Galician Statistic Institute for Population and Housing, Census 2011, Faro de Vigo, October 14, 2014
Besides having a strong literary tradition dating back to the 13th century, Galician has been standardized by the Royal Galician Academy (RAG), which was founded in 1906 and supported by the Xunta and the universities. Shifting from Spanish and Portuguese domains, Galician has been able to develop its own standard norm; its orthography was regulated and made law in 1983. In 2003, the Academy approved another reform, specifically to deal with ‘normative wars’ between Spanish and Portuguese spelling influences. Concurring with the normalization law for minority languages, various legislations were passed to protect Galicia’s self-government and its language. The following are the most important ones: • •
Organic Law 1/1981 Article 31, Galician Status of Autonomy. Law 1/1981 Article 5 recognizes Galician as the native language and its status as co-official language. • •
•
Article 5.3. Galician government will promote the use of Galician in public, cultural, and media situations, providing all the resources possible to facilitate its learning. Article 5.4. Nobody will be discriminated against on account of language.
Law of Linguistic Normalization 3/1983. • • • • •
Article 1. Galician is the autochthonous language of Galicia. All Galicians have the duty to know it and the right to use it. Article 2. The public authorities of Galicia will guarantee the normal use of Galician and of Castilian, the official languages of the selfgoverning region. Article 3. Public powers will adopt the necessary measures without the possibility of anyone being discriminated against on the basis of language. Article 4.1. Galician is official in public institutions and administration, according to the Autonomous Community’s resolutions. Article 6.1. Galician citizens have the right to use Galician to interact with the administration.
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•
Local Administration Law Act 5/1997 Article 7.1. Galician is also the language for local administration. • •
•
•
Article 6.3. Public powers will promote Galician. Article 18. Galician will be the customary language used on radio and television and in other means of public communication liable to administration by or competition from business concerns of the Self-governing Community.
Article 7.3. Galician Government will promote the incorporation of the Galician language in the local administration through training programs. Act 2/2009 Article 35. The administration will guarantee the constitutional and linguistic rights both of Galician and of Spanish.
Decree 124/2007 regulates the use and promotion of Galician in education. It imposes the use of Galician at 50% minimum in all the subjects, both in primary and secondary education. It was very controversial. Proceeded/ modified by 79/2010. Decree 79/2010 promotes plurilingualism in non-university education. Schools choose the vehicular language after asking parents for their children’s predominant language, and program the same teaching hours in both Castilian and Galician. It is still active, although the EU disapproves of parents choosing the vehicular language.
The Galician Statue of Autonomy and the Law of Linguistic Normalization are basic to the recognition and promotion of the Galician language and the guarantee of the linguistic rights of Galician speakers. The current legislation imposes the right to use Galician in the administration. Public powers are obliged to protect Galician. In spite of Galicia’s two divergent linguistic trends, reintegrationism and isolationism, the Royal Galician Academy and the Institute for the Galician Language have come to a consensus for the standard norm. Reintegrationists see Galician and Portuguese as varieties of a single language and support the Portuguese spelling system. Isolationists and most public and Government organizations consider them two distinctive languages, with Galician orthographic conventions converging with the Spanish model. The controversy is traced back to the 19th century with the Rexurdimento ‘revival,’ when Galician began to be written again for the first time since the medieval ages. As a result, it needed standardization; up to that time it had been dismissed, forbidden, or not used officially. Nowadays, reintegrationism and isolationism have become sociocultural movements that defend the history and traditions intertwined with either Portugal or Spain, respectively. This ‘normative fight’ has formed the basis for political activism; however, there has never been a radical separatist movement as in Catalonia or the Basque Country. So far, Galicians, unlike Catalans or Basques, have dissociated themselves from the political debate of separatism and independence. They accept Castilian
Spain’s language policies 275 predominance and the central State authority. Promoting Galician over Castilian seems unfeasible to them. Castilian has always been welcomed and acceptable for teaching to their children, and for public communication. There is a common effort to create a bilingual Galicia, without discriminating against Spanish, as has happened in secessionist Catalonia. 3.3
Language planning and bilingual education in Catalonia
Among the three non-Castilian communities, Catalonia presents the most vigorous language planning. It also has the biggest population, over 7.5 million. Like the Galician system, it also prohibits discrimination based on language. Catalan is perceived as a prestige language that helps social mobility and cultural acceptance within the Autonomous Community. Its use and teaching have received favorable support by both the government and the people. Catalonian language promotion programs have proved to be successful due to a combination of many factors: the use of Catalan in all contexts, both official and public; instruction in Catalan in basic education; the development of modern mass media technologies; literature, and cinema in Catalan; and local government planning strategies for social cohesion and the integration of immigrants. There are daily newspapers, television, and radio stations exclusively in Catalan. Cultural arts (cinema, theater, and publications) are flourishing in the local language, including translations into Catalan from languages other than Castilian. Most public notices, advertisements, street names, menus, tickets, Internet, and so forth are exclusively in Catalan (sometimes also in bilingual format). Many public schools offer their curriculum entirely in Catalan through immersion programs. The outcome raises the bar in comparison to the other two Communities. The imposition of a system known as ‘immersion,’ with Catalan as the only vehicular language in state schools, has guaranteed everyone educated in the past 30 years has a command of it. However, thanks to the presence of Spanish in daily life and the media, virtually all Catalans are perfectly bilingual. (The Guardian, November 22, 2012) The non-native Catalan-speaking immigration population is the only challenge for language planners. These groups concentrate in focal areas, in the industrial belts of the cities, especially around Barcelona. A high number of Catalonia residents are of national immigrant origin. Many of these came from poor rural regions, mainly Andalusia and Galicia, during the 1960s and 1970s, when Catalan was still proscribed. Most of them and their children have come to understand and speak Catalan since democracy was established in the 1970s. In the nineties, almost 50% of Catalonia’s population was not born there (Mar-Molinero 1997: 134). On the other hand, over the last 20 years, there has been another important flux of nonnational migrant workers from Latin America, who claim Spanish as their mother language and have a passive knowledge of Catalan.
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Table 12.4 Population that speaks and understands Catalan in 2014
Catalonia Valencia Balearic Islands
Population 2014
Understands Catalan
7,522,596 5,004,844 1,103,442
7,122,882 4,444,301 1.068,132
Speaks Catalan 94.6% 88.8% 96.8%
6,045,198 2,561,479 888,271
80.4% 51.1% 80.5%
Adapted from Informe Cat 2016 sobre la llengua catalana, based on 2014 census
Table 12.5 Origins of immigrants in Catalonia in 2014: main groups Percentages
Origins of foreign residents
26.6% 21.8% 20.3% 7.7%
European Union countries North Africans Latin Americans (South) Asia (South)
Adapted from Generalitat de Catalunya, Report on the integration of immigration in Catalonia (2016: 12–14)
Most immigrants express their desire for their children to learn Catalan to qualify for the same employment opportunities and benefits as native Catalan-speaking children. This situation reflects a political and social consensus to establish Catalan as the language of instruction in primary and secondary schools. In the 1990s, in response to the demand of immigrant parents and to promote the local language, the Generalitat implemented early immersion programs at schools to ensure equal rights among all children, regardless of origin or mother tongue. At the beginning of the 21st century, when Catalonia suffered a dramatic demographic change with a population increase of 1.5 million from 2000 to 2010 due to international immigration (varying from 2.9% in 2000 to 15.9% in 2010),11 the educational system was already established to enforce Catalan as the main instrumental language for social advancement and equality. With the LIC plan in 2004, preschool and primary school aged children unable to speak Catalan followed the immersion education programs, while older children attended the aules d’acollida, welcome centers, created specifically to teach children from non-Catalan homes.12 By learning Catalan, immigrant children would be integrated into Catalan society; they would achieve equal rights through the education system, which became the point of contact between their families and the Catalan society (Wyn Edwards 2016). Since the creation of the Autonomy Community and the legalization of Catalan as a co-official language in 1979, language education has been pro-active in reviving and promoting Catalan. Education is central to the expansion of Catalan to
Spain’s language policies 277 both children and adults, at public schools and at institutions with literacy classes. Making Catalan the vehicular language at schools and providing literacy programs (not only for Catalan speakers who did not have a formal learning, but also for non-Catalan speakers settled in Catalonia) have provided for Catalan’s notable exposure and revival. The Generalitat has continuously implemented and enforced laws to help language education programs succeed. Some of the most influential language policies are the following: • •
1977. Restoration of the Generalitat, self-government of Catalonia, which is responsible for statutory education. Organic Law 4/1979 or Statue of Sau. Article 15, Catalonia Status of Autonomy. •
• •
•
•
Law of Linguistic Normalization 3/1983. • • •
• • • •
Article 3 states that the language of Catalonia is Catalan, co-official with Spanish. The Catalonia government will insure normal and official use of both, promoting and fostering full equality. It also offers a provision that Aranese will also be taught and protected. Article 32 says that legal acts in Catalan or Castilian will carry full validity and effect. Article 35 focuses on language in education, specifically in universities in Catalonia. At university level, both staff and pupils have the right to express themselves, orally and in writing, in whichever official language they choose. Article 36 focuses on Aranese, stating that all individuals in Aran have the right to know and use Aranese, and to be assisted orally and in writing in Aranese when dealing with any Public Administration entities and with the Generalitat. Article 14.1 declared Catalan as the medium of instruction for all levels. Article 14.4. All children in Catalonia are expected to master both Catalan and Castilian by the end of their statutory education. Article 14.5.a. Pupils are not to be segregated in different classes or schools on the basis of language.
Law 4/1983. Law for the use and teaching of Valencian. Law 3/1986 regulates Catalan as the language of the Balearic Islands Autonomous Administration. LOGSE 1990 facilitated implementation of immersion programs after 1992. Law of 1998. Current model of statutory education. Replaced Law 3/1983. • Article 20. Declares that Catalan is an essential tool to ensure social cohesion, communication, and integration among all of Catalonia’s citizens; Catalan is the medium of instruction for all levels of statutory education and the medium of communication for teaching and administration.
278 •
• •
Eva Núñez-Méndez LIC plan 2004, Language and Social Cohesion. The Generalitat aims to integrate international immigrants and to promote social cohesion. Its objectives are to strengthen the Catalan language, promote equal rights, and encourage intercultural education. Local education plan, PEE. The Generalitat fosters collaboration between schools, families, and the community in order to create additional support outside the school to learn Catalan. Constitutional Tribunal educational reform 2012. This bill demands Spanish be used as the main teaching language for those families that choose it. Coursework must be offered in both languages ‘in balanced proportions.’ Proposed under Rajoy’s presidency.
Together these principles provide the legislative basis for modern language practices and policies in Catalonia. Establishing a Catalan-medium statutory education system for social cohesion has been key to consolidating and restoring this minority language. With the help of the Institute of Catalan Studies (IEC), founded in 1907 to standardize Catalan and promote its culture, the Generalitat has succeeded in giving Catalan a sustainable revitalization in society and politics. Despite the popularity of immersion programs in the 1990s (specifically after the LOGSE reform), in which no Castilian was introduced until as late as seven or eight years of age (taught as a separate subject, often limited to as little as two hours a week), many protests have emerged since then. Learning Catalan as early as possible has been compulsory and enforced by the government. This aggressive pro-Catalan insistence has sparked reactions not always from within Catalonia itself. The absence of Castilian and the predominance of Catalan in public education have incited dissent through the press and the courts. For example, in 2007, the RAE vice director, Gregorio Salvador, declared that it is against human rights and discriminatory that children with Spanish as their mother tongue cannot learn it at school in some communities. “They have created linguistic immersion dictatorial regimes. This coercion is like going back to Franco’s times, but now in the opposite direction.”14 Pérez Reverte shared the same concerns: Spanish is not a nationalist language because it is not an identity mark for anyone; it is plurinational and multilingual [. . .]; a generous, open language, where everybody is welcome and where every rigorously documented variety is welcome and is incorporated.15 Table 12.6 Linguistic competence in Catalan from 1986 to 201413
1986 1996 2003 2008 2014
Understand
Speak
Write
90% 94.5% 96.5% 94.6% 94.6%
64% 75.3% 81.6% 78.3% 80.4%
31% 45.8% 58.8% 61.8% 60.4%
Spain’s language policies 279 Complaints and court cases against the imposition of Catalan at schools has led to the 2012 reform that allows the use of Castilian as vehicular language if parents decide so. The Generalitat has refused to implement this new directive that has enraged pro-Catalans, further deepening tensions with Madrid. Extremist nationalists protest against this law as a return to Franco’s era. Furthermore, it has become a point of contention in the debate regarding a referendum of independence.16 Speaking Catalan intensifies the sense of belonging to a unique Catalonian ethnic identity. The language as a symbol of the Autonomous Community helps Catalonians to define themselves versus the rest of Spaniards and the central State. This historical antagonism has fueled independence campaigns. Since Pujol’s government (1980–2003), there have been multiple referendums, authorized or not, about their independence and statutory rights. González, Aznar, Zapatero, and Rajoy, Spanish presidents, have denied the legality of these elections, considered unofficial and of minimal participation. In 2014, under Zapatero’s presidency, the referendum had 37% participation, of which 80.7% voted yes and 10% no (El País, November 10, 2014). In October 2017, another banned referendum took place: independence won 89% of the vote, though with only a 43% turnout and voting irregularities (Time, October 23, 2017). The State government, considering Article 155 (by which the State can intervene in the Community to enforce laws), is impeding this separatist motion. Subsequently, prominent separatist Catalan leaders have been taken under custody and accused of sedition by Spain’s High Court, the Audiencia Nacional (El País, October 19, 2017). At the time of writing, the Spanish Senate has approved measures to take direct control of Catalonia, shortly after the region’s parliament declared independence, which Spain is deeply set against. The 2012 reform reverses the previous policy that allowed giving regional languages priority in schools, giving Castilian the same priority. Still, this reform is a clear effort to promote the bilingualism guaranteed by the Spanish constitution. While there is clearly an opposition to pro-Catalan education policies in and out of Catalonia, it appears that the majority of Catalans accepts the pro-Catalan bilingual situation (with 40% of the population interested in learning it). Nevertheless, and according to the Generalitat de Catalunya Language Survey 2013 (2014) of people over 15, Spanish has grown as a habitual language with 50.7% of the population preferring it to Catalan, with 36.3%. Three million people do not have Catalan as their first language. We can see from the case of Catalonia just how closely language education resembles political dynamics. Legislation on Catalan normalization, social Table 12.7 Language use by population percentage in Catalonia in 2013
First language Language of identification Habitual language
Catalan
Spanish
Other languages
31% 36.4% 36.3%
55.1% 47.6% 50.7%
10.6% 8.5% 5.9%
Adapted from Generalitat de Catalunya Language Survey 2013 (2014)
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cohesion, and immigration have strengthened intergenerational language transmission and social use. Factors such as school, age, birth origin, employment situation, and place of residence influence Catalan-Spanish bilingualism, which has steadily increased with a growing population improving its reading and writing skills in Catalan, despite demographic and government changes. Pro-independence politics will only help to spread and intensify the already existing vitality of Catalan today; nevertheless, it remains to be seen if this region’s fate is to be a European Republic. So far, no EU country has expressed support for the separatist movement (EUObserver, July 17, 2017). 3.4
Language planning in the Basque Country
With just over two million people, this community is the smallest of the three minority language regions. According to Basque Government statistics, 29.3% of the population claim to be balanced bilinguals, with 33.9% of the population older than 16 years old being Basque speakers. Because of its isolation from the Romance language continuum and resultant difficulty, Basque is not widely used as a form of communication, but rather more as a symbolic identity marker. It has been mainly spoken in remote rural areas, which explains why there is the additional problem of many dialects that now compete to become the standard Basque. The lack of a literary tradition and a solid Language Academy (like RAE, RAG, or IEC) has made the teaching of Basque and its promotion in public life very problematic. In 1919, the Royal Academy of Basque, Euskaltzaindia, was founded, and in the 1960s, it developed the Euskara Batua as the normative Basque to condense dialect divergence. Furthermore, this region has a high number of non-Basque national immigrants (especially the south), who do not speak or learn Basque. Table 12.8 Linguistic competence in the Basque Country in 2016 Total population Basque speakers Passive Castilian 2016 16 years and older bilinguals monolinguals 2,189,534
631,000 33.9%
356,000 19.1%
877,000 47%
Adapted from VI Inkesta Soziolinguistikoa 2016 (2017: 5)
Table 12.9 Linguistic competence in the Basque Country by province in 2016 Provinces
Basque speakers 16 years or older
Passive bilinguals
Castilian monolinguals
Alava Biscay Guipuzkoa
19.2 27.6 50.6
18.4 20.4 17.3
62.4 52 32.1
Adapted from VI Inkesta Soziolinguistikoa 2016 (2017: 6)
Spain’s language policies 281 In the 1960s, the first schools were opened, first clandestinely, and then later on supported by private organizations; these ikastolas tried to promote Basque culture and identity, and the acquisition of Basque. The Euskara Batua was created to help its standardization in education, the media, and literature, and to help Basque speakers to understand each other (impeded by high dialectal diversity). Also during the 1960es, the banning of Basque under Franco’s repressive regime boosted the creation of the revolutionary group ETA, which became a feared terrorist movement. Based on Article 3 of the constitution and the subsequent Law of Linguistic Normalization, various legislations passed to protect Euskadi’s autonomy and its language. The more significant ones are: •
Organic Law 3/1979 gives the statute of autonomy to the Basque Country. • •
• • •
Article 6 states Euskera’s official status in Euskadi. All its inhabitants have the right to know and use both Euskera and Spanish. Article 16 stipulates that the Basque government is entirely responsible for education planning in its community.
Law of Linguistic Normalization 10/1982 supports Basque’s co-official legal status in its implementation in education and society. Foral Law 18/1986 gives legal status to Basque in Navarre, also as a coofficial language. Law 1/1993, the Basque Public Education Act allows public schools to teach Basque under three models: • • •
model A, in Spanish with Basque components; model B, in both Spanish and Basque, following a bilingual approach; and model D, exclusively in Basque; Spanish is a subject.
In primary education, Basque plays a more prominent role where model B is preferred and increasing. In 2015–2016, under the ESO reform (passed in 1994), 64.3% of infant primary education institutions chose Basque, 25.7% both languages, and 9.4% Castilian. In secondary education, Basque is a compulsory subject in all public schools. At that level, almost all students are taught under model A; some of them opt to be exempted from Basque classes. 42.1% choose Basque, 2.1% bilingual classes, and 55.4% Castilian, according to the Institute of Basque Statistics, Euskal Estatistika Erakundea 2015–2016. Castilian is used in higher education, although Basque is the teaching language in some courses at public universities such as the University of the Basque Country. Students, if they so wish, can submit papers and assignments in Basque. There are also Basque language schools, euskaltegis, state-funded and private, for people over the age of 16. Basque language and culture are also taught at 37 universities all over the world through the Etxepare Basque Institute Program.
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In 2016, Cristina Uriarte, the Basque government’s education minister, indicated that the commitment to education is strongly linked to national identity (BBC News, June 15, 2016). Today there are well-intentioned efforts to promote Basque in the public education system and in administration wherever possible; nevertheless, its function is more symbolic than practical. Basque is still perceived with less prestige and status than the other two minority languages. 3.5
Revitalization of languages and media impact
Moving forward with bilingual education and bicultural practices requires great effort from society, official institutions, and mass media. Technological advances, migration waves, and economic transactions help create a global context where languages interact daily. Minority languages are expected to succumb to the major predominant languages and their highly influential social presence. That is why the media plays a key role in promoting and restoring language popularity, as much if not more than education. Newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet can strengthen a minority language for success and advancement. Broadcasting exclusively in the regional language leads to its dissemination and normalization in public life, creating, and promoting a linguistic consciousness. The spread of Galician, Catalan, and Basque in a time of globalization depends greatly on media strategies for social and linguistic planning, as television and radio critically impact collective attitudes and ideologies. Consequently, the three communities have seriously invested in their media resources as a sociopolitical tool to promote linguistic diversity, bilingualism, and cultural appreciation for their languages. In the case of Galicia, they have one public television channel, A galega: TVG, and Radio Galega, broadcasting exclusively in Galician. Since the 1970s, local radio stations have regularly used Galician, although not with a substantial audience. Oral forms heard in the media appear alien to many of the rural L1 Galician speakers, not used to the Castilianized pronunciation of standard Galician. The absence of dialectal variation in broadcast programs feeds the prestige-oriented ideology that rural Galician lacks value. It also exacerbates the diglossic differentiation between rural and urban spoken varieties, the latter becoming more ‘standard.’ Broadcasters speaking in Galician with strong Spanish accents reinforce the pervading discourse of Castilian Spanish superiority (Beswick 2011: 47). It is to be seen whether Galician oral dialectal varieties will be included in public contexts such as that of broadcasting. Since 1983, Catalonia has had the Generalitat-funded Televisió de Catalunya, TVC, as its public network. Today, it is composed of six channels: TV3, TV3 HD, 33/Super3, 3/24, Esport 3 and TV3CAT, all in Catalan. It is received in Catalonia and the Balearic Islands; unofficially also in Andorra, La Franja, and the Valencian Community (although forbidden since 2010).17 Among the three minority languages, Catalan broadcasting is the most aggressive, pushing ahead with its mission of promoting a strong sense of identity, cultural awareness, and pro-Catalanist fervor. Being in the most modern and
Spain’s language policies 283 industrialized regional economy in Spain, Catalonians take advantage of mass media technologies to immerse themselves in the language and to outreach large audiences cost-efficiently. Their efforts have proven successful: in 2014 more than 80% of the population spoke Catalan. The Basque Community lacks Catalonia’s linguistic media impact. Its public broadcast is Euskal Irrati Telebista, EiTB, (Basque Radio Television) and Euskal Telebista, ETB, (Basque Television). EiTB, running since 1982, has four domestic channels and five radio stations, broadcasting local news and entertainment in the whole Basque region and in nearby areas such as Burgos, Cantabria, Zaragoza, La Rioja, and in the French Basque Pyrenees. ETB1 is a general channel in Basque; ETB2 (from 1986) broadcasts in Spanish; ETB3 (from 2008) offers programs for children in Basque; and ETB4 (from 2014), a sports channel, is in both Spanish and Basque. EiTB also runs two international bilingual channels, ETB Sat and Canal Vasco for worldwide and Latin American audiences respectively. There is a need to broadcast bilingually as more than 50% of the population does not understand Basque and only 20% considers it the main language (Montrul 2013: 266). Broadcast and digital media provides insights into these regions’ linguistic discourse, aiming to increase favorable societal attitudes to minority language practices. On the one hand, it helps to disseminate minority languages; but on the other, in our globalized societies, it incites competition with major world languages. Galician, Catalan, and Basque must face not only the mass media communication influence of Spanish, but that of English as well. The new era of linguistic diversity very much depends on the accessibility and outreach of these modern mass media outlets, which strengthen the hegemony of the predominant languages.
4
Concluding remarks
From a diachronic approach, updated research and data confirm the prevalence of Spanish over minority languages in Spain, despite strong implementations in linguistic planning since the 1970s. The normalization laws of Galician, Catalan, and Basque have promoted bilingualism and linguistic awareness in those Communities; Catalan is the most thriving case due to its institutional support and insistent social cohesion approach. Galician and Catalan are quite accessible to Castilian speakers, their shared lexicon and structural similarities to Spanish as fellow Romance languages has helped to promote passive understanding of the language among residents and national migrants. The less widespread and geographically accessible Basque, however, is barely spoken in urban areas. Both Catalan and Basque have nationalist trends with decentralizing sociopolitical implications, bound to their modern industrialized regions and economic development, unlike Galicia. Language is highly emotive for Catalans as an identity marker, while not so much for Basques or Galicians, who are content with Spanish coexistence. Besides these differences, there are many similarities based on language and its cohesive role in society; after all, the prime core value lays on avoiding the social stigmatization and linguistic discrimination that marked their pasts. In the contact linguistic discourse, integration
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matters, and education and the media contribute to its success. It is hoped that this chapter opens an appetite for future studies in language contact and its subsequent repercussions in society, culture, education, and institutional domains.
Glossary Aranese: a variety of Pyrenean Gascon (descended from Occitan), spoken in the Val d’Aran, northwestern Catalonia. biculturalism: presence of two different cultures in the same region. The term started to be used in the mid-1950s. Considering language as a prime factor in cultural behavior, individuals are considered bicultural if they speak the languages of both their heritage culture and their receiving culture (Schwartz and Unger 2010). Some authors have gone further, suggesting that true biculturalism involves synthesizing the heritage and receiving cultures into a unique and personalized blend (Benet-Martínez et al. 2002). Biculturalism was originally derived from the acculturation literature, but expanded to include cultural practices, values, and identifications, not just behaviors. bilingual education: involves teaching academic content in two languages, in a native and secondary language with varying amounts of each language used in accordance with the program model. It can be maintenance or pluralist, when there is equal teaching of and in two languages throughout the children’s schooling, or assimilationist or transitional, when the aim is moving them over to eventual monolingual education in the majority language. Castilianization: this term describes the expansion of the Castilian language across the territories of the Castilian Crown. It is also used to refer to the imposition of the Spanish language in the former Spanish colonies and its adoption by indigenous peoples. ESO: Educación secundaria obligatoria, Obligatory Secondary Education. It is compulsory and free for students from age 12 to 16 in Spain. It was passed in 1994. ETA: Euskadi ta Askatasuna, or Basque Country and Freedom, was formed in 1959 to fight for an independent Basque state. It first emerged as a student resistance movement opposed to Franco’s dictatorship, during which the Basque language was banned, their distinctive culture suppressed, and intellectuals imprisoned and tortured. The group has killed 864 people since 1968. In 2011, it declared a ceasefire and, in April 2017, a disarmament. Spain, the United States, and the EU have listed ETA as a terrorist organization (BBC News April 8, 2017). Latinization: the practice of adopting the Latin language and culture; also called Romanization. normalization: linguistic normalization, used as a synonym of standardization, refers to making a language ‘normal,’ using it in all normal linguistic functions in society. It also applies when the language returns to its ‘normal’ role after being prohibited. Furthermore, this term describes raising subordinate languages to equal status with the predominant language, making them ‘normal.’
Spain’s language policies 285 Reconquest: in medieval Spain and Portugal, a series of campaigns by the Christian States to recapture territory from the Muslims, who had occupied most of the Iberian Peninsula for seven centuries (711–1492). Romance language: a language derived from the Latin spoken throughout the Roman Empire, i.e. Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, French, etc. standardization: the process by which conventional forms of a language are established and maintained. It may occur as part of the natural development of a language in a speech community or as an effort by members of a community to impose one dialect or variety as a standard.
Notes 1 Agrippa reached the Cantabrian Mountains by 19 BC (Fear 2000: 31). 2 Mozarabic means “one who imitates Arabs.” Corriente states that this term was used originally to refer to the people, but not their language, for which he instead prefers Romanandalusí or Romance-andalusí (2004: 186). 3 Koineization occurs when speakers accommodate their speech to that of others, according to Penny “each speaker selects those variants that come nearest to those used by others” (2009: 47). 4 “Para que en todo el Reyno se actúe y enseñe en lengua castellana [. . .] y a este efecto derogo y anulo todas qualesquier resoluciones, o estilos, que haya en contrario [. . .] Mando, que la enseñanza de primeras Letras, Latinidad y Retórica, se haga en lengua castellana generalmente, donde quiera que no se practique, cuidando de su cumplimiento las Audiencias y Justicias respectivas” (Pere Marcet i Salom 1998: 46). 5 In 1535, Juan Valdés already described Valencian and Catalan as the same language: La valenciana es tan conforme a la catalana, que el que entiende la una entiende casi la otra, porque la principal diferencia consiste en la pronunciación, que se llega más al castellano, y assí es más inteligible al castellano que la catalana. For further studies about language attitudes towards Valencian and its language planning see Martínez Ibarra (2016) and Triano-López (2007). 6 Not all linguists support the Basque substratum hypothesis in its entirety: some postulate the influence of the Ibero-Basque combination, or just Iberian, or even the influence of an old Cantabric language variety. Most agree with Basque influence in some phonetic features but not in others. For more information see Núñez-Méndez (2016: 137). 7 La información.com June 21, 2014. 8 Statistics from Spanish National Statistic Institute (INE) most recent Census of 2011, as July 2017; Galician Statistic Institute for Population and Housing, Census 2011; Etnologue 2017; and VI Inkesta Soziolinguistikoa 2016, published in 2017. 9 See Loureira-Rodríguez (2007) for Galicia as a diglossic society. 10 Faro de Vigo, October 14, 2014, based on Galician Statistic Institute for Population and Housing, Census 2011. 11 IDESCAT, Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya 2014. Statistics Institute of Catalonia. 12 Generalitat de Catalunya (2011). 13 El Mundo, January 9, 2009; La información.com, June 21, 2014, and Generalitat de Catalunya Language Survey 2013 (2014). 14 “Es un atentado contra los derechos humanos [. . .] imponer la enseñanza de lenguas cooficiales a los que no las tienen como idioma materno sería volver a los tiempos pasados y a la situación que tanto se criticó del franquismo” (El País, May 11, 2007). “Hay, en España, comunidades autónomas que han inventado regímenes dictatoriales de inmersión lingüística. La dictadura de Franco impuso a los catalanes la lengua española
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y resulta que los catalanes consideraron que aquello fue un atropello. Efectivamente lo fue, pero ahora es a la inversa. Los hijos de castellano hablantes, en Cataluña, no tienen la opción de estudiar en castellano” (El Clarín, May 28, 2017). 15 “El español no es una lengua nacionalista, porque no es una seña de identidad para nadie; es plurinacional y multilingüe, a pesar de lo que dicen los estúpidos y los manipuladores, una lengua generosa, abierta, donde cabe todo el mundo y donde cualquier variante documentada con rigor es incorporada” (El Mundo, May 11, 2017). 16 The Telegraph, December 5, 2012, and Vanguardia, July 1, 2012. 17 The right-wing PP government of the Valencian Community ceased all TV3 broadcasts in the Valencian community (Civera 2011).
References Appel, René and Pieter Muysken. Language contact and bilingualism. London: Edward Arnold, 1987. Benet-Martínez, V., J. Leu, F. Lee, and M. W. Morris. “Negotiating biculturalism: cultural frame switching in biculturals with oppositional versus compatible cultural identities.” Cross-Cultural Psychology 33 (2002): 492–516. Beswick, Jaine. “Linguistic ideology in Galician factual radio broadcasts: towards the Castilianization of Galician pronunciation traits?” In Spanish at work, edited by N. LorendoDus, 35–49. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Breton, Ronald. Geolinguistics: language dynamics and ethnolinguistic geography. Translated by H. F. Schiffman. Canada: University of Ottawa, 1991. Cenoz, Jasone. “Learning a third language: Basque, Spanish and English.” In Spanish in contact, issues in bilingualism, edited by A. Roca and J. Jensen, 13–27. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 1996. Civera, Jesús. “Persecución y muerte de TV3.” Levante-EMV, February 18, 2011. Clyne, Michael. Dynamics of language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Corriente Córdoba, Federico. “El elemento árabe en la historia lingüística peninsular.” In Historia de la lengua española, edited by R. Cano, 185–235. Barcelona: Ariel, 2004. Costa Carreras, Joan and Alan Yates. The architect of modern Catalan. Barcelona: Institut d’Estudis Catalans, 2009. Dolça Catalunya. “Imposición del castellano? Pero si se habla en Cataluña desde el siglo XV.” March 11, 2017. DRAE. Diccionario de la lengua española, 2018. Real Academia Española. http://dle.rae.es/ Fear, Andrew T. “Prehistoric and Roman Spain.” In Spain: a history, edited by R. Carr, 11–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Generalitat de Catalunya. Pla per a l’actualització del programa d’immersió lingüística en el context multilingüe actual 2007–2010. Barcelona: Departament d’Educació, 2011. ———. Language survey: language use of the population of Catalunya 2013. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2014. ———. Report on the integration of immigration in Catalonia. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 2016. Guía Jurídica. Normalización lingüística. Wolters Kluwer. Accessed July 13, 2017. http:// guiasjuridicas.wolterskluwer.es/home/EX0000013357/20080708/Normalizacionling%C3%BCistica IDESCAT. Institut d’Estadística de Catalunya, 2014. www.idescat.cat/en/ Informe Cat 2016 sobre la llengua catalana. Barcelona: Plataforma per la llengua, 2016.
Spain’s language policies 287 Inkesta Soziolinguistikoa VI. VI Encuesta sociolingüística of 2016. Euskadi: Gobierno Vasco, 2017. Institute of Basque Statistics. Euskal Estatistika Erakundea 2015–2016. Accessed July 14, 2017. http://en.eustat.eus/estadisticas/tema_300/opt_0/ti_Pupils_teachers_and_centres/ graficos.html Lane Greene, Robert. You are what you speak. New York: Delacorte, 2011. LOIA. Conselho da Cultura Galega: Centro de documentación sociolingüística de Galicia, 2003. Accessed July 25, 2017. http://consellodacultura.gal/arquivos/cdsg/loia/socio. php?idioma=2&id=3 Loureira-Rodríguez, Verónica. “Are Galicians bound to diglossia? An analysis of the nature, uses and values of standard Galician.” In Spanish in contact: policy, social and linguistic inquiries, edited by K. Potowski and R. Cameron, 119–132. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Mar-Molinero, Clare. The Spanish speaking world: practical introduction to sociolinguistic issues. London: Routledge, 1997 [2006]. Martínez Ibarra, Francisco. “Spanish and Valencian in contact: a study of the linguistic landscape of Elche.” In Spanish language and sociolinguistic analysis, edited by S. Sessarego and F. Tejedo-Herrero, 135–153. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016. Montrul, Silvina. El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Moran, Josep. Estudis d’història de la llengua catalana. Barcelona: L’Abadia de Monserrat, 2004. Núñez-Méndez, Eva. Diachronic applications in Hispanic linguistics. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2016. Penny, Ralph. “La pertinencia de la dialectología y de la sociolingüística para la historia del español: unidad y divergencia en el romance peninsular.” In Tendencias actuales en la investigación diacrónica de la lengua, edited by L. Romero Aguilera, 45–60. Barcelona: Universidad de Barcelona, 2009. Pennycook, Alastair. “The right to language: towards a situated ethics of language possibilities.” Language Sciences 20.1 (1998): 73–89. Pere Marcet i Salom, Joan. Historia de la lingüística catalana. Barcelona: Eumo, 1998. Pharies, David. A brief history of the Spanish language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Schwartz, Seth and Jennifer Unger. “Biculturalism and context: what is biculturalism, and when is it adaptive?” Human Development 53 (2010): 26–32. Silva Corvalán, Carmen, ed. Spanish in four continents: studies in language contact and bilingualism. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1995. ——— and Sánchez Walker, Noelia. “Subjects in early dual language development.” In Spanish in contact: policy, social and linguistic inquiries, edited by K. Potowski and R. Cameron, 3–22. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Thomason, Sarah and Terrence Kaufman. Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Triano-López, Manuel. “Language attitudes and the lexical de-Castilianization of Valencian: implications for language planning.” In Spanish in contact: policy, social and linguistic inquiries, edited by K. Potowski and R. Cameron, 101–118. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Urquizi Sarasua, Patricio. Gramática de la lengua vasca. Madrid: Uned, 2013. Valdés, Juan de. Diálogo de la lengua. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2017 [1535]. www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/dialogo-de-la-lengua-0/html/fede437e82b1-11df-acc7-002185ce6064_2.html
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Wheeler, Max. “Catalan.” In Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world, 188–192. Oxford: Elsevier, 2010. Wyn Edwards, Catrin. “Language-in-education policies, immigration and social cohesion in Catalonia: the case of Vic.” Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 19.5 (2016): 530–545.
Further readings Bell, Allan. The guidebook to sociolinguistics. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Díaz-Campos, Manuel. The handbook of Hispanic sociolinguistics. Oxford, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Holmes, Janet. An introduction to sociolinguistics. London: Routledge, 2013. Klee, Carol and Andrew Lynch. El español en contacto con otras lenguas. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009. Mar-Molinero, Clare. The politics of language in the Spanish-speaking world. London: Routledge, 2000. Nevalainen, Terttu and H. Raumolin-Brunberg. Historical sociolinguistics. London: Routledge, 2014.
Topics for discussion 1 Do you think most people in the Iberian Peninsula were speaking a similar form of Romance in the 11th century? Argue for or against this position. 2 Discuss the advantages or disadvantages of standardization, particularly in the area of education. For instance, in the case of Spanish in Spain, what standard norm should be taught at schools? What standard norm should be taught to speakers in bilingual areas, and to second language learners of Spanish? 3 Comment on what speakers may think of their regional language variety (Catalan, Galician, or Basque) versus Spanish as the predominant language. 4 Language and race are essential to defining group identity. In which ways do you think Galicians, Catalans, and Basques would define their identity as different from other Spaniards? 5 Do you think language can be a core value for defining any of the Spanish provinces’ identities? Explain. 6 Do you agree with the idea of lumping all three communities together as “Spain’s linguistic minorities”? If so, what commonalities do you observe among them? What differences do you perceive in relation to other groups? Should the historical context be considered on a case by case basis? 7 Read the following quotes and explain. a
“Language planning aims deliberately and consciously to influence or change individual and/or societal language behavior.” (Mar-Molinero 1997: 132)
Spain’s language policies 289 b
“In language contact situations and in language acquisition we observe the same principles at work which characterize change in unstressed languages: generality, frequency, distance, and semantic transparency.” (Silva Corvalán 1995: 11)
c
“Literacy and language education need to be understood as potential tools for social control rather than automatically as a means to social emancipation.” (Pennycook 1998: 82)
d
“Bilingualism or language contact in itself is not a scientific discipline. It is an issue, a subject or a field to which various disciplines can contribute. The disciplines can interact or, on the other hand, function independently, because of differing viewpoints, methodologies or terminologies.” (Appel and Muysken 1987: 7)
e
“In the classic diglossic situation, two varieties of a language, such as standard French and Haitian creole French, exist alongside each other in a single society. Each variety has its own fixed functions – one a ‘high,’ prestigious variety, and one a ‘low,’ or colloquial, one. Using the wrong variety in the wrong situation would be socially inappropriate, almost on the level of delivering the BBC’s nightly news in broad Scots.” (Lane Greene 2011)
8 Suggest examples of or solutions to how official authorities can promote vernacular languages and avoid their attrition under the dominant language. 9 Read the following quote and explore other alternatives: “Except for specific cases of family bilingualism, the main routes to bilingualism and multilingualism are natural acquisition by interaction in the community and school learning, using the second or third language either as the medium of instruction or as a school subject.” (Cenoz 1996: 15) 10 What kind of external or internal factors is the author discussing? “It is often impossible to assess if a change is externally motivated by language contact or internally motivated, and multiple causation is likely. Some latent changes are greatly accelerated by contact, especially where the languages share some unified typology.” (Clyne 2003: 242) 11 Basque is typologically very different from Romance languages, and therefore, it has been described as difficult to learn for Castilian speakers. In lieu of this statement, comment on this quote: “Exposure to two typologically different languages appears to have helped the bilingual child grasp the contrasting structures sooner (and perhaps more easily) than a monolingual child.” (Silva Corvalán 2007: 18)
Index
Note: Page numbers in italics indicate a figure and page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. 19th-century Texas 33–35; changing Texan-Hispanic population 40–42; Mexican immigration 41; newspapers 37–40; -ra/-se usage during 35–37 Abakuá 99 accommodation theory 58 Acuerdos de San Andrés Larrainzar 183, 187 Adaeseños 31–33 additive borrowing 239–240 administrative jurisdictions in the Caribbean dialect zone 95 African languages: Papiamentu 105–107; in Spanish-speaking Caribbean 97–99 Afro-descendent 110 Afro-Hispanic contact 120 Afro-Hispanic creole 99–100; double negation in 100–101 Alfonso X 262, 264 ALGR (Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico) 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 210, 211 Amerindian languages: attrition of in Mexico 188–189; in Colombia 145–146, 171n1; influence on Mexican Spanish 188–189 ‘Amichel’ 27 Anzaldúa, Gloria 53 Aranese 284 Arawakan 96 Arayanos 135–137, 138 armed conflict, in Colombia 151 Ascasubí, Hilario 219 assibilation 188, 191 assimilation of loanwords into recipient language 231–232, 232
asymmetrical power dynamics: in language ideologies 17–19; in performance 19–22 Atlas Lingüístico y Etnográfico de Colombia (ALEC) 155 attitudes: toward Colombia’s language diversity 151–154, 152; toward contact group in Brazilian/Uruguayan border study, measuring 76, 76–80, 78, 79; toward contact language in Brazilian/ Uruguayan border study, measuring 80–82, 81, 82 attrition, of Amerindian languages in Mexico 188–189 Austin, Stephen F. 33–34 auxiliary-predicate relationship in gerundianismo 244–245 availability of Guarani loanwords 229–231, 230 ‘bad hombres,’ Trump’s usage of 62 Banda Oriental 218 bandeirantes 222–223, 233 baqueanos 233 Basque Country: language planning in Spain 280–282; Spanish contact with 267–268 bateyes 138 Battle of San Jacinto 42 Bello, Andrés 154 benefactive clitic 247–248 biculturalism 4, 284; in Los Angeles 60–61; on the Uruguayan/Brazilian border 70; see also Brazilian/Uruguayan border bidialectalism 59 bilabial sounds 43–44, 48
Index bilingual education 191–192 bilingualism 192; in 17th-century Andean region 242–243; in Catalonia 275–280, 276; Chicana/o Spanish 54; codeswitching 44–45; differential 61–62; diglossia 58; evaluating performance of jornaleros 21–22; generating linguistic capital through 19–22; between Nahuatl speakers and Europeans 184; object pronouns 44; in Palenque 162–165; in Paraguay 200; parental transmission of Spanish to children 18–19; teaching Lengua in Colombia’s schools 167–168; in Texas 42–43 Blanch, Lope 12, 13, 188 Borderlands (Anzaldúa) 53 Border Patrol 9–10 border regions 9; in dialectological studies of Spanish in the Southwest 12–14; Dominican-Haitian contact 120–123; enforcing 9–10; Haitian creole in the Dominican-Haitian border 104–105; identity in 10–11; in ideological studies of Spanish in the Southwest 17–22; inequalities in 10; significance of proximity to in sociolinguistic studies 14–15; social construction of the border 11; sociolinguistic studies of language perceptions in 15–17; in sociolinguistic studies of Spanish in the Southwest 14–17; transborder integration 10; see also Brazilian/Uruguayan border; U.S.-Mexico border Border Spanish, competition with New Mexican Spanish 13–14 borrowings 64 Boyer, Jean-Pierre 122 bozal creole 99–100; double negation 100–101; Papiamentu 105–107; particle ta + infinitive 101–102 braceros 123, 138 Brazil 69 Brazilian/Uruguayan border: attitude toward contact group, measuring 76, 76–80, 78, 79; attitude toward contact language, measuring 80–82, 81, 82; cluster analysis of attitudinal data 82–88, 83, 86; competence in the contact language, measuring 71–76, 73, 74, 75; independent variables for study informants 72–75; see also cluster analysis of attitudinal data from Brazilian/Uruguayan border study;
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informants of Brazilian/Uruguayan border study; regression analysis Caballero, José de la Luz 101 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez 27–29 Cabrera, Lydia 98 California: indigenous languages of 51–52; linguistic diversity in 51; missions 52; Proposition 187 62–63; Proposition 227 63; racist linguistic practices in 61–62; restrictive language policies 62–64; see also Los Angeles Californios 64 caló 13, 23, 268 carabalíes 99 Cárdenas, Lázaro 189 Caribbean Spanish 95; African languages in Spanish-speaking Caribbean 97–99; Afro-creole influence in Cuba 105–107; bozal creole 99–100; in contact with Afro-Atlantic creole languages 102–104; creole-to-Spanish contacts 107–109; Dominican-Haitian contact 120–123; double negation 100–101; español atlántico 96; factors shaping 96; Haitian creole in the Dominican Republic and Cuba 104–105; Latin American contact languages 96; micro-dialects 97; particle ta + infinitive 101–102; phonetics, African languages’ influence on 99; Spanishlexified creole, existence of in the Caribbean 102 Caro, Miguel Antonio 154–155 Castilian 262–263; contact with Catalan 266 Castilianization 262, 284 Catalan: contact with Castilian 266; Renaixença 266; Spanish contact with 265–267 Catalonia, language planning and bilingual eduation in 275–280 Catholic Church: reducciones 198; role of in Colombia’s educational system 157 caudillos 233 Central America, Spanish dialect contact in Texas 47–48 Central American Spanish: differences with Mexican Spanish 57; in Los Angeles 56–60; see also Chicana/o Spanish Chaco War 198 Chanás 219 Charrúas 219–220
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Index
Chicana/o Spanish 53–56, 64; acquisition of among Central Americans 59; Central American varieties 56–60, 57; codeswitching 55–56; diglossia 59–60; language transfer 54–55; picture-naming task 59; traits 54–55; as urban ethnic dialect 54 class identities: in Laredo, Texas 19–22; slantwise behavior 21 clitic climbing 247 clitic placement in gerundianismo 247 cluster analysis of attitudinal data from Brazilian/Uruguayan border study 82–88, 83, 86; see also informants of Brazilian/Uruguayan border study; regression analysis CNC (Confederación Nacional Campesina) 182 code-switching 15–16, 19–20, 22, 44–45, 64; Chicana/o Spanish 55–56; intersentential 23; intra-sentential 23; single switches 55 cognates 71, 88 Colombia 145–146; Amerindian languages 171n1; armed conflict in 151; bilingualism in Palenque 162–165; ethnic languages 145–146, 151, 156–158, 171n3; ethno-education 170; generational language abandonment in Palenque 162–165; geography 147–151, 148; global view of 145–146; historical attitudinal circumstances in 154–156; intellectual history of 154–156; language contact in 153–156; language diversity 151–154; language ecology 151; Lengua 163–164, 166–169; linguistic diversity in 150; as monolingual society 147; Palenquero 151–152, 152; population density 149; San Andrés-Providencia creole 153; viewed from within 146–147 colonial era language policies of Mexico 183–184 colonias 20–21, 23; slantwise behavior 21 competence of contact language at the Brazilian/Uruguayan border: independent variables 72–75; measuring 71–76, 73, 74, 75; variables not selected 75–76 Comunidades Autónomas 268–270, 269 conceptual shifts in standard Spanish and NAS 250–253 congos 134–135 consonants, implosive position 48
contact linguistics 3; African languages in Spanish-speaking Caribbean 97–99; Afro-Atlantic creole, contact with Caribbean Spanish 102–104; AfroHispanic contact 120; attitude toward contact group in Brazilian/Uruguayan border study, measuring 76, 76–80, 78, 79; attitude toward contact language in Brazilian/Uruguayan border study, measuring 80–82, 81, 82; cluster analysis of attitudinal data from Brazilian/Uruguayan border study 82–88, 83, 86; in Colombia 153–156; creole-to-Spanish contacts 107–109; Dominican-Haitian contact 120–123; elision of the unstressed personal pronoun in Guaranitic contact zone 205–206; en, use of with motion verbs in Paraguayan Spanish 207; Guarani lexical elements in contact zones 207–208; in the Iberian Peninsula 260, 262; indigenous languages in contact with Spanish in the Caribbean 96–97; loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish 225–227; measuring competence of at the Brazilian/Uruguayan border 71–76, 73, 74, 75; morphosyntactic properties of Paraguayan Spanish 208–210; in the northern Andes 240; in Paraguay 201; pidgin 110; Spanish contact with Basque 267–268; Spanish contact with Catalan 265–267; Spanish in contact with Galician-Portuguese 264–265; stereotyping minority groups 131–132; see also gerundianismo convergence 58, 239, 249; see also gerundianismo Corpus Christi Star (newspaper) 38 Correa, José Alejandro 3 Cortés, Hernán 180 creole 110, 119, 120; Afro-Atlantic, Caribbean Spanish contact with 102–104; Afro-creole influence in Cuba 105–107; bozal creole 99–100; as Caribbean Spanish contact language 107–109; decreolization 170; Haitian 101, 120, 122, 134–135, 137; Haitian creole in the Dominican Republic and Cuba 104–105; kreyòl 104; Palenquero 151–152, 152; San Andrés-Providencia 153; Spanish-lexified, existence of in the Caribbean 102 criollos 180, 189, 233 crossing 20–21
Index Cruz, Celia 101 Cuba: African languages spoken in 98; Afro-creole influence in 105–107; bozal creole 99–100; double negation among Haitians in 105; Haitian creole in 104–105 Cuervo, Rufino José 154–155 dative clitic 246 de Ayala, Guaman Poma 242 de Azara, Félix 218 decreolization 170 de Francia, Gaspar Rodríguez 198 deictic attitudes of Brazilian/Uruguayan border study informants 82 de Jesús, Father Antonio Margil 31 demographics: of 19th-century Texas 40–42; historical demographics of Mexico 181; Latino demographics for L.A. County 56; of modern Texas 42 de Rivera, Primo 263 dialect contact: between Central American and Mexican Spanish 57; Central American Spanish in Los Angeles 56–60 dialect leveling 58 dialectology 23; the border in studies of Spanish in the Southwest 12–14; Caribbean Spanish micro-dialects 97; DPUs 88; engaging borders in 13–14; erasing borders in 12–14 diasporas, Haitian 132 Díaz, Porfirio 41, 181 differential bilingualism 61–62 diglossia 58, 59–60, 64, 185; during Paraguay’s colonial era 197–198, 199; in Spain 262–263 diminutives 254 Dirección General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe 191 direct/indirect indexicality 65 direct linguistic convergence 239 Direct Method 185, 186 direct objects: in Haitianized Spanish 131; leísmo 204–205 disappearance of native languages in Uruguay 223 discrimination, against Mexico’s indigenous groups 189–190 displacement of traditional forms with contemporary forms 13–14 divergence 58 Dominican-Haitian contact 120–123; Arayanos 135–137; Haitianized Spanish 124–131; migration to Hispaniola
293
123–124; racialization of the Haitian 133–135; ‘spoiled identities’ 131–132 Dominican Republic, Haitian creole in 104–105 Dominican Spanish 124 double negation: in Caribbean Spanish 100–101; among Haitians in rural Cuba 105; in Paraguayan Spanish 206 DPUs (Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay) 69, 88 Duarte, Juan Pablo 122 earliest settlers in Texas 30–31 education: bilingual 191–192; bilingual in Catalonia 275–280; Direct Method 185, 186; eradication of indigenous languages in Mexico 185–186; ethnic languages in Colombia’s educational system 156–158; General Law of Education 187; intellectual history of Colombia 154–156; intercultural 192; in modern Spain 268–270; Proposition 227 63; Proyecta 191; teaching Lengua in Colombia’s schools 167–168 ejidos 182 El Bejareño (newspaper) 38–39 El Centinela (newspaper) 38 El Clamor Público (newspaper) 40 El Ranchero (newspaper) 39–40 empresario 48 en, use of with motion verbs in Paraguayan Spanish 207 enforcing borders 9–10 engaging borders in dialectology 13–14 English language, creole English 107–109 epenthesis 64 eradication of indigenous languages in Mexico 185–186 ESO (Educación secundaria obligatoria) 284 español atlántico 96 Espinosa, Aurelio 12 ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) 284 ethnic languages: in Colombia 145–146, 151, 171n3; in Colombia’s educational system 156–158; disappearance of in Uruguay 223 ethno-education 170 Euskaltzaindia 280 Euskara Batua 280 EVLA (Español Vernáculo de Los Angeles) 53, 53–54; see also Chicana/o Spanish
294
Index
explorers: Alonso Álvarez Pineda 27; Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 27–29; Mala Cosa 29 expression of future in Spanish monolingual speakers 46 EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) 182–183; Acuerdos de San Andres Larrainzar 187 first-person singular 110 Franco 263 Galicia, language planning in 272–275 Galician-Portuguese, Spanish contact with 264–265 geminates 156, 171 generalization of the third person in Haitianized Spanish 129–130 General Law of Education 187 generational language abandonment in Palenque 162–165 geography of Colombia 147–151, 148 geolinguistics 233 gerund, in Spanish and Quecha 240–243 gerundianismo 3, 239, 243, 244–246; auxiliary-predicate relationship 244–245; clitic climbing 247; clitic placement 247; dative clitic 246; grammatical complexification 248–250; grammaticalized auxiliaries of 250–253; as a question 245; variations of 245–246 Giraldo, Montes 156 global view of Colombia 145–146 Gramática de la lengua castellana (Bello) 154 grammatical complexification 239, 240, 248–250; see also gerundianismo grammaticalized auxiliaries of gerundianismo 250–253 Guarani 211, 227–228; ban on 198; criollo 201; decline in monolingualism 199–201, 200; factors influencing preservation of in Paraguay 197–198; Jopará 201; lexical availability of Guarani loanwords 229–231, 230; lexical elements in contact zones 207–208; loanword assimilation 231–232, 232; loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish 226–227; personal pronouns 205–206; phonological adaptation of loanwords 228–229; place-names in Uruguay 225–227; upper-class usage of 198
Guenoas 220–221, 234n4 Guerra, Kathleen S. 3 Gutiérrez, Manuel J. 3 habitus 20 Haedo, Gómez 220 Haitian creole 110, 120, 122, 134–135, 137; in the Dominican Republic and Cuba 104–105 Haitian-Dominican contact 120–123; Arayanos 135–137; Haitianized Spanish 124–131; migration to Hispaniola 123–124; racialization of the Haitian 133–135; ‘spoiled identities’ 131–132 Haitianized Spanish 124–131, 137, 138; direct objects 131; generalization of the third person 129–130; infinitives 125–126; -ndo 125–128; phonetics 124–125; pronoun usage 130–131; unmarked third person 128; verbal agreement 128–129 Haitian Revolution 97–98 heritage language 64–65 Hidalgo, Father Francisco 31 Highland Spanish 47 high-level bilingual skills 21–22; diglossia 58, 64 Hispanics, demographic changes in 19th-century Texas 40–42 Hispaniola 138; migration to 123–124 historical attitudinal circumstances in Colombia 154–156 history of Mexico 180–183 honorifics 254 Houston, Sam 42 Hugarte, Pi 225 human capital 21 Iberian Peninsula: Castilian as ‘national’ language 262–263; contact linguistics 260, 262; language contact 263–264; Latinization of 258–259; minority languages 268; reconquest of 260; Spanish in contact with Basque 267–268; Spanish in contact with Catalan 265–267; Spanish in contact with Galician-Portuguese 264–265; see also Spain ‘ichupe’ 204 identity: in border regions 10–11; Border Spanish as marker of 14; class identities in Laredo, Texas 19–22; habitus 20; -ra/-se usage in 19th-century Texas 35–37; ‘spoiled’ 131–132
Index ideological studies of Spanish in the Southwest 17–22 ikastolas 281 implosive position 48 INALI (National Institute of Indigenous Languages) 187–188 indefinite article, redundant use of in Paraguayan Spanish 206–207 independent variables for Brazilian/ Uruguayan border study informants 72–75 indigenous groups: discrimination against 189–190; in Mexico 179 indigenous languages: of California 51–52; Caribbean Spanish contact languages 96–97; disappearance of in Uruguay 223; eradication of in Mexico 185–186; INALI 187–188; of Mexico 182; sociolinguistic studies on 188–189; Tarascan Project 186 indirect indexicality 65 indirect linguistic convergence 239 inequalities in border regions 10 infinitives 110; in Haitianized Spanish 125–126 informants of Brazilian/Uruguayan border study 89n6; attitude toward contact group, measuring 76, 76–80, 78, 79; attitude toward contact language, measuring 80–82, 81, 82; independent variables 72–75; role of opposite sex in questionnaire answers 85–87, 90n9; selecting 89n3 innovative form 46–47, 48 intellectual history of Colombia 154–156 intercultural education 192 interdependencies between cultural clusters 10 internal motivation of changes 46–47 inter-sentential code-switching 23 intra-sentential code-switching 23 introduction of Spanish to the Americas 223–224 Jaime, Blas W. Omar 219 jarchas 259 Jesuit towns and land in 18th-century Uruguay 222–223 Jones, Anson 34 Jopará 201, 211 jornaleros, evaluating bilingual performance of 21 kateyano 163 Kikongo 99; double negation 101
295
koineization 58, 65, 285n3 kreyòl 104 labiodental sound 48 La cosmographie Vniverselle (Thevet) 220 la leva 181 Lamar, Mirabeau 34 language: habitus 20; maintenance and shift 14–15; as nationalist icon 16–17; slantwise 21; social construction of the border 11 language attrition 192 language contact 119; African languages in Spanish-speaking Caribbean 97–99; Afro-Atlantic creole, contact with Caribbean Spanish 102–104; AfroHispanic contact 120; between Central American and Mexican Spanish in Los Angeles 56–60; in Colombia 153–156; creole-to-Spanish contacts 107–109; Dominican-Haitian contact 120–123; elision of the unstressed personal pronoun in Guaranitic contact zone 205–206; en, use of with motion verbs in Paraguayan Spanish 207; Guarani lexical elements in contact zones 207–208; in the Iberian Peninsula 260, 262, 263–264; indigenous languages in contact with Spanish in the Caribbean 96–97; loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish 225–227; morphosyntactic properties of Paraguayan Spanish 208–210; in the northern Andes 240; in Paraguay 201; pidgin 110; Spanish in contact with Basque 267–268; Spanish in contact with Catalan 265–267; Spanish in contact with Galician-Portuguese 264–265; stereotyping minority groups 131–132; see also gerundianismo language diversity, of Colombia 151–154 language ecology, of Colombia 151 language ideologies: borders in studies of the Spanish language in the Southwest 17–22; performative negotiation of 19–22 language planning in Spain 270–272; Basque Country 280–282; Galicia 272–275 language policies 1, 2; of California 62–64; in Catalonia 277–280; in Mexico’s colonial era 183–184; in modern Mexico 185–188; in modern Spain 268–270; in Paraguay 197–201; pre-Columbian language policies in
296
Index
Mexico 183; Proposition 187 62–63; Proposition 227 63 language shift 192 language transfer 43–45, 240; Chicana/o Spanish 54–55; code-switching 44–45; degree of transferability 45; external versus internal motivation of changes 46–47; innovative form 46–47; minority languages 46; model of linguistic interaction 44; motivation of changes 45–46; progressive constructions 45 la Raya 123, 138; see also Haitianized Spanish Laredo, Texas, class identities case study 19–22 L.A. Spanish 53 Latin America, Caribbean Spanish contact languages 96; see also Colombia Latinization of the Iberian Peninsula 258–259 Laws of Burgos 184 legislation: education and language planning in Spain 271; protecting Galicia’s self-government 273–274; see also language planning in Spain leísmo 204–205, 211 Lengua 163–164, 166–169; teaching 167–168 LEP (Limited English Proficiency) 63 lexical availability of Guarani loanwords 229–231, 230 lexical creations 55 Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas 187 Lieber, Francis 101 lingua franca 48 linguistic capital, generating through bilingual practices 19–22 linguistic diversity, in Colombia 150 linguistic hegemonies 11 linguistic identity 1–2 Lipski, John M. 31; Latin American Spanish 155 loans 55 loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish 225–227; assimilation 231–232, 232; lexical availability of Guarani loanwords 229–231, 230; phonological adaptation 228–229 loísmo 211 Los Angeles 52–53; biculturalism 60–61; Central American Spanish in 56–60, 57; Chicana/o Spanish 53–56; Latino
demographics for L.A. County 56; see also Chicana/o Spanish Lowland Spanish 47 low-level bilingual skills 21–22; diglossia 58, 64 maintenance and shift 192; sociolinguistic studies of 14–15 Mala Cosa 29 maquiladora 23 Martinez, Glenn A. 2, 9–10 maximal borderlands 9, 23 Mayan civilization 180 measuring: attitude toward contact group in Brazilian/Uruguayan border study 76, 76–80, 78, 79; attitude toward contact language in Brazilian/Uruguayan border study 80–82, 81, 82; competence of contact language at the Brazilian/ Uruguayan border 71–76, 73, 74, 75 media role in Spain’s language revitalization 282–283 mega-scripts 11 Mennonites 88–89 Mexican Spanish, Amerindian language influence on 188–189 Mexico: Acuerdos de San Andres Larrainzar 183, 187; CNC 182; colonial era language policies 183–184; criollos 180; Dirección General de Educación Intercultural y Bilingüe 191; Direct Method 185; discrimination against indigenous groups 189–190; eradication of indigenous languages 185–186; EZLN 182–183; General Law of Education 187; history of 180–183; INALI 187–188; indigenous groups in 179; indigenous languages 182; language families in 187; language perceptions in Reynosa 16; Ley General de Derechos Lingüísticos de los Pueblos Indígenas 187; Mayan civilization 180; modern era language policies 185–188; monoculturalism, overcoming 189–191; monolingualism 189–191; Nahuatl 32; positivism 180–181; pre-Columbian language policies 183; Proyecta 191; Revolutionary War 181–182; sociolinguistic studies on indigenous languages 188–189; suppression of French intervention 185; War of Independence 181; War of the Reform 41; Yaquis 181; see also U.S.-Mexico border
Index micro-dialects of Caribbean Spanish 97 migration: of Haitians to Hispaniola 123–124; topodynamics 124 minimal borderlands 9 minority groups, stereotyping 131–132 minority languages 46; in Spain 268, 268–270, 269 missions 29, 29–31; in California 52; reducciones 198; in Uruguay 222 Mock Spanish 62, 65 model of linguistic interaction 44 modern era language policies of Mexico 185–188 monoculturalism in Mexico, overcoming 189–191 monolingualism, in Colombia, historical attitudinal circumstances 154–156 monolingual Spanish 43–44 morphological future 46 morphosyntactic properties of Paraguayan Spanish 208–210 motivation of changes in language transfer 45–47 Mozarabic 259, 285n2 Muñoz, Petit 220 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 182 Nahuatl-speaking groups 32, 180; bilingualism with Europeans 184; possessive duplication 188–189 NAS (North Andean Spanish): conceptual shifts in 250–253; gerund 243; gerundianismo 244–246 negritud 168 Nepantla 56 New Mexican Spanish 12, 13–14 newspapers, in 19th-century Texas 37–40 non-inverted questions 110 normalization 284 Núñez-Méndez, Eva 3 object pronouns 48; for English-Spanish bilingual speakers 44 original peoples of present-day Uruguay 218–219; Chanás 219; Charrúas 219–220; Guarani 221–223; Guenoas 220–221, 234n4 Ortiz López, Luis A. 3 Palenque: Lengua 163–164, 166–169; racism in 164 Palenquero 101, 151–152, 152; kateyano 163; phonological transfers 162
297
Papiamentu 105–107, 110 Paraguay: bilingualism in 200; Chaco War 198; decline in Guarani monolingualism 199–201, 200; diglossia in 199; double negation 206; elision of the unstressed personal pronoun 205–206; en, use of with motion verbs in Paraguayan Spanish 207; Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia 198; Guarani, factors influencing preservation of 197–198; Guarani lexical elements 207–208; language contact 201; language policies 197–201; leísmo 204–205; morphosyntactic properties of Paraguayan Spanish 208–210; reducciones 198; redundant use of the indefinite article in Paraguayan Spanish 206–207; standard Spanish 201; upperclass usage of Guarani 198; war with Triple Alianza 198; see also Guarani parental transmission of Spanish to children 18–19 parodies of Haitians in folkloric texts 135 particle ta + infinitive in Caribbean Spanish 101–102 performance, asymmetrical power dynamics in 19–22 periphrastic future 46 permeability of loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish 228 phonetics: of African languages, influence on Caribbean Spanish 99; geminates 156; of Haitianized Spanish 124–125; of Spanish of the Guaranitic contact zone 202–203 phonological transfers between Palenquero and Spanish 162 phonotactic rules 233 pidgin 110, 119; see also creole Pineda, Alonso Álvarez 27 place-names, in Uruguayan Spanish 225–227 pocho habitus 20, 23 polite request forms, gerundianismo 245–246 polysynthetic languages 228 population density of Colombia 149; see also demographics Portal of Texas History 37 Portugal 262 positivism 180–181 possessive duplication, in Nahuatl-speaking groups 188–189
298
Index
power: disequilibrium between Brazil and Uruguay 69–70; engaging in language ideology 17–19; engaging in performance 19–22; mega-scripts 11 pre-Columbian language policies in Mexico 183 prejudice, in language contact situations 131–132; see also racism preliterate society 233 present indicative future 46 preservation of Guarani, factors influencing 197–198 PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) 182 progressive constructions 45 pronouns: dative 246; elision of the unstressed personal pronoun in Guaranitic contact zone 205–206; usage in Haitianized Spanish 130–131 Proposition 187 62–63 Proposition 227 63 proximity to border regions, significance of in sociolinguistic studies 14–15 Proyecta 188, 191 Puerto Rico: African languages spoken in 98; bozal creole 99–100 qualitative approach 89 quantitative approach 89 Quechua 240, 254; benefactive case markers 248–250; gerund 240–243; loanwords in Uruguayan Spanish 227 Quicha 240, 248–250, 254 racialization of the Haitian 133–135 racism: in California’s linguistic practices 61–62; direct/indirect indexicality 65; on the Dominican-Haitian border 131–135; in Palenque 164 -ra/-se usage in 19th-century Texas 35–37 reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula 260 reducciones 198, 221 redundant use of the indefinite article in Paraguayan Spanish 206–207 regression analysis 89; attitude toward contact group in Brazilian/Uruguayan border study, measuring 76, 76–80, 78, 79; attitude toward contact language in Brazilian/Uruguayan border study, measuring 80–82, 81, 82; competence of contact language at the Brazilian/ Uruguayan border, measuring 71–76, 73, 74, 75 Renaixença 266 Republic of Texas see Texas
requests, gerundianismo 244–246 research, sociolinguistic studies on indigenous languages in Mexico 188–189 restrictive language policies in California 62–64 revitalization 171; of Spanish languages 282–283 Revolutionary War 181–182 Reynosa, Mexico, language perceptions in 16 Rodríguez, Yliana V. 3, 9–10 Romance languages 285 San Andrés-Providencia creole 153 Sánchez-Muñoz, Ana 3 santería 98 Santo Domingo 95; Haitian creole 101 schools: ban on Guarani in 198; Proposition 227 63; teaching Lengua in 167–168 Schwegler, Armin 3, 162–163 Second Republic 263 selecting informants of Brazilian/ Uruguayan border study 89n3 semantic differential 89 semantic extension 55 semi-creole languages 138 semispeaker 233 settlers: in 19th-century Texas 33; Adaeseños 31–33; earliest settlers in Texas 30–31 Silva, Sargent Benito 220 single switches 55 slantwise behavior 21, 23 slavery, in 19th-century Texas 41 Smith, Juan 38–39 social construction of the border 11 socio-grammatical complexification 239 sociolinguistics 4; borders in studies of the Spanish language in the Southwest 14–17; language perceptions in border regions 15–17; study of indigenous languages 188–189 Southwest U.S.: borders in ideological studies of Spanish in 17–22; borders in sociolinguistic studies of Spanish in 14–17; dialectological studies of Spanish in 12–14; language perceptions in 15–17 SOV (Subject Object Verb) 254 Spain: in the 20th century 263; Basque Country, language planning in 280–282; Catalonia, language planning and
Index bilingual education in 275–280, 276; Comunidades Autónoma 268–270, 269; consolidation of a ‘national’ language 262; diglossia 262–263; education in modern 268–270; Galicia, language planning in 272–275; language planning 270–272; legislation affecting education and language planning 271; minority languages 268; revitalization of languages and media impact 282–283; Second Republic 263 Spanglish 53–54 Spanish language: in 19th-century Texas 33–35; in 19th-century Texas newspapers 37–40; Afro-Hispanic contact 120; bilabial sounds 43–44; borders in ideological studies of in the Southwest 17–22; borders in sociolinguistic studies of in the Southwest 14–17; Chicana/o Spanish 53–56; code-switching 55–56; contact with Basque 267–268; contact with Catalan 265–267; contact with GalicanPortuguese 264–265; dialectological studies of in the Southwest 12–14; differences between Central American and Mexican 57; Dominican Spanish 124; elision of the unstressed personal pronoun in Guaranitic contact zone 205–206; gerund 240–243; Guaraniinfluenced 201; of the Guaranitic contact zone, phonetics 202–203; Haitianized 124–131, 137; Highland Spanish 47; introduction to the Americas 223–224; L.A. Spanish 53; Lowland Spanish 47; monolingual 43–44; morphosyntactic properties of Paraguayan Spanish 208–210; New Mexican Spanish 12; particle ta + infinitive 101–102; phonological transfers with Palenquero 162; progressive constructions 45; -ra/se usage in 19th-century Texas 35–37; as Texas’ lingua franca between the 17th and 19th centuries 30–31; Uruguayan Spanish 217, 223–224; valuing based on context 18–19; see also bilingualism; Caribbean Spanish; Chicana/o Spanish; code-switching; creole; Haitianized Spanish; language transfer; Uruguayan Spanish Spanish-lexified creole, existence of in the Caribbean 102 speech communities 82 ‘spoiled identities’ 131–132
299
standardization 285 standard Spanish 201, 254; conceptual shifts in 250–253 stereotypes, in language contact situations 131–132 subject pronouns 48; in Papiamentu 106 substrate 192; Basque substratum hypothesis 285n4 SVO (Subject Verb Object) 254 Symeonidis, Haralambos 3, 206 ta constructions, in Caribbean Spanish 101–102 Taíno 96 Tarascan Project 186 tasha 30 tejas 30 Texas: 1783 census of Spanish Texas 31; 19th-century 33–35; Adaeseños 31–33; annexation to the United States 34–35; Battle of San Jacinto 42; bilingualism 42–43; demographics in the 19th century 40–42; earliest settlers in 30–31; explorers 27–29; linguistic changes motivated by historical events 35–37; missions 29–31; newspapers in the 19th century 37–40; place-names 30; -ra/-se usage during the 19th century 35–37; slavery in 41; Spanish dialect contact 47–48; Stephen F. Austin 33–34 Texas Revolution 34 Thevet, André 220 third-person singular 110 Tongue of the Tirilones, The (Blanch) 13 topodynamics 124, 138 toponymy 233 topostatic 138 transborder regions: integration 10; mega-scripts 11 transculturation 14, 23 transmission of language, parental transmission of Spanish to children 18–19 Tratado de Permuta 222 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo 35 Triple Alianza, Paraguay’s war with 198 Trujillo, Rafael 123 Trump, Donald, and usage of ‘bad hombres’ 62 UCCLA (Union of Portuguese-Speaking Capitals) 265 UNAM (National University of Mexico City) 182
300
Index
United States: Border Patrol 9–10; Texas’ annexation to 34–35; see also Southwest U.S.; U.S.-Mexico border unmarked third person, in Haitianized Spanish 128 unstressed personal pronouns, elision of in Guaranitic contact zones 205–206 upper-class usage of Guarani 198 Uruguay 69, 217; Chanás 219; Charrúas 219–220; disappearance of native languages in 223; Guarani 221–223; Guenoas 220–221, 234n4; linguistic history of 224–225; missions 222; original peoples of 218–219 Uruguayan Spanish 217, 223–225; lexical availability of Guarani loanwords 229–231, 230; place-names 225–227 U.S.-Canada border 9 U.S.-Mexico border 9–10; colonias 20–21; interdependencies 10; language perceptions on 15–17; see also Southwest U.S.
variation 48; in competence of contact language 71–72 variations of gerundianismo 245–246 velarization 110 verbal agreement, in Haitianized Spanish 128–129 verbs: direct objects in Haitianized Spanish 131; grammaticalized auxiliaries of gerundianismo 250–253 viejos 134–135, 138 vitality 233 vociferation 168, 171
variables not selected for in Brazilian/ Uruguayan border study 75–76, 80
Zamudio, Valencia 184 zero borderlands 9
War of Independence 181 War of the Reform 41 xenophobia, differential bilingualism 61–62 Xunta language planning committee 272 Yaquis 181 Yoruba 98