Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region 9783968690940

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his study offers a linguistic analysis of the Afro-Mexican Spanish spoken in the Costa Chica region, one of the largest Afro-Mexican enclaves. The present investigation not only accounts for the Afro-Hispanic linguistic remnants of this Spanish variety, but also examines the current linguistic characteristics and sociolinguistic status of this speech area on the brink of extinction. Additionally, this monograph proposes a Rhizomatic Linguistic Model to interpret data derived from contact situations.

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NORMA ROSAS MAYÉN is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Cultures, and Human Rights Investigator at the University of Southern Indiana. She received her Doctorate in Spanish Linguistics from Purdue University in 2007. In addition, she has studies in Arabic Language (Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco), Sanskrit Language and Literature (University of Delhi, India), and French Phonetics (Université de la Sorbonne-Paris IV, France). Her research areas include Afro-Hispanic Linguistics, Creolistics, and Judaic studies.

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Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnans in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region

45_Lengua y Sociedad.pdf

NORMA ROSAS MAYÉN

Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnans in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region

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Norma Rosas Mayén

Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region

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Lengua y Sociedad en el Mundo Hispánico Language and Society in the Hispanic World Editado por / Edited by: Julio Calvo Pérez (Universidad de Valencia) Anna María Escobar (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Luis Fernando Lara (El Colegio de México) Francisco Moreno Fernández (Universidad de Alcalá de Henares / Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University) Juan Pedro Sánchez Méndez (Université de Neuchâtel) Armin Schwegler (University of California, Irvine) José del Valle (The Graduate Center-CUNY) Klaus Zimmermann (Universität Bremen)

Vol. 45

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Norma Rosas Mayén

Afro-Hispanic Linguistic Remnants in Mexico: The Case of the Costa Chica Region

IBEROAMERICANA - VERVUERT - 2021

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Cualquier forma de reproducción, distribución, comunicación pública o transformación de esta obra solo puede ser realizada con la autorización de sus titulares, salvo excepción prevista por la ley. Diríjase a CEDRO (Centro Español de Derechos Reprográficos) si necesita fotocopiar o escanear algún fragmento de esta obra (www.conlicencia.com; 91 702 19 70 / 93 272 04 47)

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© Iberoamericana, 2021 Amor de Dios, 1 – E-28014 Madrid Tel.: +34 91 429 35 22 Fax: +34 91 429 53 97 © Vervuert, 2021 Elisabethenstr. 3-9 – D-60594 Frankfurt am Main Tel.: +49 69 597 46 17 Fax: +49 69 597 87 43 [email protected] www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es ISBN 978-84-9192-170-7 (Iberoamericana) ISBN 978-3-96869-093-3 (Vervuert) ISBN 978-3-96869-094-0 (e-Book) Depósito Legal: M-8534-2021 Diseño de la cubierta: Carlos Zamora Impreso en España Este libro está impreso íntegramente en papel ecológico blanqueado sin cloro

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HaKadosh Baruch Hu A la memoria de mis padres

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Acknowledgments

One day, a good man told me: “knowledge is like a fruit that if not shared rots in the fruit basket, but if knowledge is shared, it is a sweet and inviting fruit that is delightful to eat”. This is why, in writing this book, I have drawn on fieldwork research carried out in the Costa Chica region, the biggest Afro Mexican enclave in Mexico, as well as on the work of other linguists and anthropologists who have made their research available in books, academic journals, and other media. Having an idea and turning it into a book is as hard as it sounds. The experience is both internally challenging and rewarding. I am grateful to a number of people for encouraging me to start the work, persevere with it, and finally to publish it. I would not have been able to reach this goal without their encouragement and support. Firstly, I want to express my deep and sincere gratitude to each one of my professors who shared with me their deep wisdom through my academic training and who are my true teachers with all the connotations that this word implies: Dr. Robert Hammond, Dr. Felicia Roberts, Dr. Elena Benedicto, Dr. Diane Brentari, Dr. Mary Niepokuj, Dr. Ronnie Wilbur, Dr. Myrdene Anderson, Dr. Quince Duncan, and Dr. Jesús Serna. Secondly, I want to thank the University of Southern Indiana Foundation for Scientific Research for their financial support (grant CLAFDA-19145 for the Costa Chica Region of Mexico). In addition, I would like to include a special note of thanks to Haley Fulk and Sarah Faire for their assistance in the final stages of the preparation of my manuscript, and to the editors of this book, especially Anne Wigger, Chief Editor, who are hereby gratefully acknowledged.

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I am also deeply indebted to and appreciative of my husband, Manuel de Jesús Apodaca Valdez, for his love, kindness, encouragement, patience, company, and care during the fieldwork. Our philosophical debates, exchanges of knowledge, skills, and venting of frustration during the fieldwork helped to enrich this experience. Finally, a very special thanks goes out to all the people from Collantes and La Boquilla, in the Costa Chica region of Mexico, who had no other motivation but friendship and sympathy toward my research. This book would have been impossible without their help.

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Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction……………. ......................................................................

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Chapter 2. Creole Genesis and the Rhizomatic Linguistic Model ....................... 2.1. Theoretical perspectives encompassing creole etiology ..................................... 2.1.1. The continuum model (Hall 1962)............................................................. 2.1.2. The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (Bickerton 1981) ........................ 2.1.3. The Theory of Relexification (Lefebvre 1998) ......................................... 2.1.4. Approximation Theory (Chaudenson 2001) .............................................. 2.1.5. Complementary Theory (Mufwene 2001) ................................................. 2.1.6. The Afrogenesis Hypothesis (McWhorter 2000) ...................................... 2.1.7. Neurobiological Hypothesis (Zimmermann 2006) ................................... 2.1.7.1. Principle of neurobiological constructivism ................................. 2.1.7.2. The neurobiological construction of a creole language ................ 2.1.8. The Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (Sessarego 2017) .................... 2.2. To be or not to be, the Spanish-based creole deliberation .................................. 2.2.1. Chaudenson’s arguments about the lack of Spanish-based creoles in the Caribbean ............................................................................. 2.2.2. McWhorter (2000) and the missing Spanish creoles................................. 2.2.3. Creole-genesis and the scarcity of Spanish-based creoles (Lipski 2005).............................................................................................. 2.2.4. Enhancing dialogue in the Spanish creole debate (Sessarego 2018) ........ 2.3. On the genesis of Papiamentu and the Sephardic linguistic contribution ........... 2.4. The Rhizomatic Linguistic Model ......................................................................

27 28 29 30 31 33 36 41 42 42 45 49 50

Chapter 3. Methodological And Historical Remarks ........................................... 3.1. Study description ................................................................................................

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3.1.1. Theoretical background and motivation .................................................... 3.1.2. Aim of the study and research questions ................................................... 3.1.3. Procedure ................................................................................................... 3.1.3.1. Phase 1: Pilot study ....................................................................... 3.1.3.2. Phase 2: Planned studies ............................................................... 3.1.3.3. Phase 3: Return to the target communities ................................... 3.1.4. Subjects ..................................................................................................... 3.1.5. Methodology ............................................................................................. 3.1.5.1. Participant-observation ................................................................. 3.1.5.2. Open-ended oral interviews .......................................................... 3.1.5.3. Recording and transcription .......................................................... 3.1.5.4. Fieldnotes ...................................................................................... 3.2. A brief documentation of the African presence in Mexico ................................. 3.2.1. Afro-Mexico historical remarks ................................................................ 3.2.2. Speculations on the origins of the Costa Chica’s Black population .......... 3.2.3. Collantes and La Boquilla remnants of an African legacy ........................ 3.2.3.1. Topographical features .................................................................. 3.2.3.2. Origins of the Black population in La Boquilla ............................ 3.2.3.3. Origins of the Black population in Collantes................................

71 72 73 73 74 75 75 76 77 77 78 78 79 79 83 87 87 89 89

Chapter 4. Phonological Characteristics of Costeño Spanish .............................. 4.1. Stop segments ..................................................................................................... 4.1.1. Voiceless stops ........................................................................................... 4.1.2. Voiced stops ............................................................................................... 4.1.2.1. The phoneme /b/ ........................................................................... 4.1.2.2. The phoneme /d̪ / ........................................................................... 4.1.2.3. The phoneme /ɡ/ ........................................................................... 4.2. The phoneme /č/ .................................................................................................. 4.3. Fricative segments .............................................................................................. 4.3.1. The phoneme /f/......................................................................................... 4.3.2. The phoneme /s/ ........................................................................................ 4.3.3. The phoneme /ɏ/ ........................................................................................ 4.3.4. The phoneme /h/ ........................................................................................ 4.4. Nasal segments.................................................................................................... 4.4.1. The phonemes /m/ and /ɲ/ ......................................................................... 4.4.2. The phoneme /n/ ........................................................................................ 4.5. Liquid segments .................................................................................................. 4.5.1. Liquid mutation ......................................................................................... 4.5.2 The phoneme /r/.......................................................................................... 4.6. Archaic and basilectal trends in Costeño Spanish............................................... 4.6.1. Vowel variation .......................................................................................... 4.6.2. Aphaeresis ................................................................................................. 4.6.3. Syllabic prothesis ...................................................................................... 4.6.4. Metathesis..................................................................................................

93 94 94 95 95 96 97 97 99 99 101 104 105 105 105 105 107 107 108 109 109 110 110 111

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4.6.5. Syllable deletion ........................................................................................ 111 4.6.6. Monophthongization ................................................................................. 111 4.7. Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 112 Chapter 5. Morphological and Syntactic Characteristics of Costeño Spanish .. 5.1. Morphological features ....................................................................................... 5.1.1. Verbal morphology .................................................................................... 5.1.1.1. Archaic verb forms........................................................................ 5.1.1.2. Instability in the verbal stem......................................................... 5.1.1.3. Regularization of irregular verb forms ......................................... 5.1.1.4. Unmarked infinitives .................................................................... 5.1.2. Nominal morphology ................................................................................ 5.1.2.1. Deletion of the plural marker ........................................................ 5.1.2.2. Double plural endings ................................................................... 5.1.2.3. Gender instability.......................................................................... 5.1.2.4. Diminutives of common words..................................................... 5.1.2.5. Diminutives of proper names........................................................ 5.1.2.6. Onomastics.................................................................................... 5.1.3. Adjectives and adverbs .............................................................................. 5.1.4. Pronominal system .................................................................................... 5.1.4.1. Subject pronouns........................................................................... 5.1.4.2. Overt subject pronouns ................................................................. 5.1.4.3. Emphatic reflexive pronouns ........................................................ 5.1.4.4. Possessive doubling ...................................................................... 5.1.5. The Costeño locution anta ........................................................................ 5.2. Syntactic features ................................................................................................ 5.2.1. Clitics......................................................................................................... 5.2.1.1. Clitic neutralization....................................................................... 5.2.1.2. Clitic dislocation ........................................................................... 5.2.2. Verbal instability........................................................................................ 5.2.2.1. Lack of subject-verb agreement .................................................... 5.2.2.2. Verbal paradigm modification....................................................... 5.2.3. Deletion of articles .................................................................................... 5.2.4. Deletion and modified use of prepositions ................................................ 5.2.5. Negation-related variation ......................................................................... 5.2.6. The para atrás construction ...................................................................... 5.2.7. Loss of copula ........................................................................................... 5.2.8. Conclusions ...............................................................................................

115 116 116 116 117 118 118 120 120 120 121 121 121 122 123 124 124 125 127 127 128 129 129 130 130 132 132 132 133 135 137 141 141 142

Chapter 6. Lexical Characteristics of Costeño Spanish ....................................... 6.1. The rhizomatic nature of the Costeño lexicon .................................................... 6.2. Preliminary remarks to the Costeño lexicon ....................................................... 6.3. Costeño vocabulary.............................................................................................

145 145 147 149

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Chapter 7. Conclusions ............................................................................................ 163 References ................................................................................................................. 169 Appendix. Photo Gallery ......................................................................................... 181 List of Tables 2.1. Cognitive tasks and conditions ........................................................................... 2.2. Some representative theories on creole genesis .................................................. 2.3. Differences between Sephardic Papiamentu and Papiamentu ............................ 2.4. Contrasts between a rhizomatic and an arboric paradigm .................................. 4.1. Deletion of voiceless stops in coda position word-internally ............................. 4.2. The deletion of /d̪ / in word-final and intervocalic position in Costeño Spanish 4.3. The mutation of /d̪ / into [l] in implosive position word-internally ..................... 4.4. Allophonic distribution of the phoneme /f/ in Costeño Spanish ......................... 4.5. The behavior of /s/ in word-final position in Costeño speech ............................ 4.6. Velarization of /n/ in word- and phrase-final position in Costeño Spanish ........ 4.7. Lambdacism of /r/ in Costeño Spanish ............................................................... 5.1. Possessive doubling in Costeño Spanish ............................................................ 6.1. Proportional contributions to Costeño Spanish from other lexicons ..................

45 50 65 68 94 96 96 100 102 106 107 128 148

List of Figures 2.1. Schema of the process of relexification .............................................................. 31 2.2. Undifferentiated Coding Principle ...................................................................... 43 2.3. Neurobiological Constructivist Process .............................................................. 44 2.4. Typical phases in the process of language acquisition ........................................ 46 2.5. Input and output simplification in Creole languages .......................................... 47 2.6. Bini-Portuguese spoons carved in ivory ............................................................. 61 2.7. Bini-Portuguese spoon with a dual symbolism................................................... 62 2.8. Papiamentu Linguistic Rhizome ......................................................................... 69 3.1. Subjects’ age percentage ..................................................................................... 75 3.2. Subjects’ education level..................................................................................... 76 3.3. Geographical location of the Afro-Mexican enclaves ........................................ 82 3.4. Geographical location of the Afro-Mexican communities of the Costa Chica ... 84 3.5. Geographical location of Collantes, La Boquilla and Puerto Minizo ................. 88 6.1. Costeño lexicon composition .............................................................................. 148 Appendix Figure A.1. The Redondo ...................................................................................................... A.2. Everybody is ready for the wedding .................................................................. A.3. Making tortillas .................................................................................................. A.4. Preparing tichinda tamales ................................................................................. A.5. Taking a break .................................................................................................... A.6. Removing the corn grains ..................................................................................

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A.7. Cuajinicuilapa Department of Health Services .................................................. A.8. Capitán and Capitana ......................................................................................... A.9. The researcher and friends ................................................................................. A.10. Mama-Came reciting verses............................................................................. A.11. A bread-maker .................................................................................................. A.12. The participants of the Devils’ Dance .............................................................. A.13. An Afro-Mexican family .................................................................................. A.14. After lunch time ...............................................................................................

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Introduction

From colonial times up to the present, Mexico has been characterized by its linguistic pluralism as a result of multiethnic and multicultural encounters that have shaped what is called Mexican Spanish. In this sense, Mexican Spanish may be considered an amalgamation of modalities in which each region of the country exhibits a different variety. Although dialectal diversity itself is not considered a negative factor, sometimes it generates negative attitudes among speakers toward non-prestige varieties that tend to diminish and marginalize the speech of certain ethnic groups, as is the case with Afro-Mexicans. The African presence in Mexico, as in the rest of the Americas, has been a sociohistorical fact since colonial times. Nevertheless, there are no records of the African speech of that period for two reasons: 1) the orality of their linguistic manifestations, and 2) because most speakers were illiterate. In this respect, Zimmermann (2012: 289) states: El hecho de la escasa alfabetización de los africanos dificultó durante mucho tiempo la emergencia de productos literarios afromexicanos escritos. Solo después de la abolición de la esclavitud pudo resultar un cambio al respecto. Por eso habría que concentrar la investigación en la existencia de una eventual literatura oral durante la época de la esclavitud. Actualmente no se han encontrado testimonios de tal tradición oral, lo que [no] significa que no la haya habido.

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Despite the absence of Afro-Mexican speech samples of the colonial era, there are written linguistic sources (historical documents, and some of a literary nature) that Zimmermann (1995: 64-67) has classified as follows: 1. Direct documents of the language (Inquisitorial Acts of the 16th and 17th centuries housed in the historical and archiepiscopal archives of Mexico, as well as some isolated historical documents). 2. Metalinguistic observations on languages (slave statements found in historical chronicles transcribed by missionary friars, in which slave uprisings are reported. This type of document, written in a literary indirect style, gives a “voiceˮ to black slaves and freed mulattoes). 3. Imitations of the black speech (travel stories and literary texts, like Villancicos1 or other popular songs, written by non-Afro-Hispanic authors that tried to “imitateˮ the speech of the blacks).

These historical and literary sources, although valuable, do not reliably represent the actual speech of the African population of Colonial Mexico. Regarding this, Zimmermann (2012) comments: “Por eso no podemos considerar la lengua de estos textos ni necesariamente típica de México no como lengua auténtica de la población afrohispana, sino como una imitación aproximativa y tal vez estereotipada trasmitida por textos literarios” (294). Besides the lack of reliable speech samples from the African population during the colonial period, when exegesis is made of the historical analysis of the African presence in Mexico, it is observed that its invisibility has covered the transit through the ages of modernity. Socio-politically, Afro-Mexicans, as an ethnical component of Mexico, have been relegated to a vacuum of social life due to the perceived inferiority of Africa and its descendants. This situation has been reinforced by the Mexican nationalist discourse of mestizaje2 that 1

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On villancicos (Christmas carols), Zimmermann (1995: 69) comments: “Los villancicos son secuencias de cantos. En aquel tiempo dentro de esas secuencias de cantos, se acostumbraba reservar un canto a los negros. Estos cantos se conocen con títulos como: ‘guineo a 5’, ‘negro a 8’, ‘negrillo’, etc. Por cierto, no debemos olvidar (como lo hace Megenney, 1985) que muchos villancicos no eran improvisaciones populares espontáneas, sino que habían sido compuestos por poetas profesionales, muchas veces por encargo. Un ejemplo de ello son los villancicos de Sor Juana Inés de la cruz, en los cuales aparecen también secuencias afrohispanas.” For an analysis and list of the Afro-Hispanic linguistic features of Christmas carols, see Zimmermann (1995) and (2012). The term ‘mestizaje’ (from Latin mixticius “to mix”) refers to the biological and cultural mixture of individuals who come from different ethnic groups. Throughout history, the ethnic union has received various names. For instance, in colonial Mexico, the term castas was used

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Chapter 1. Introduction

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has helped to develop a political strategy of homogenization by considering all Afro-Mexicans to be mestizos of some sort3. In Mexico, the invisibility of the Afro-Mexicans is a kind of “minimizationˮ. It is a manifestation of institutional racism, which navigates among the resources of the denial of racism and its normalization. Certainly, racism is totally denied in Mexico. It has been reduced to total irrelevance to the point that it has never existed in Mexican society, due to its high degree of miscegenation. The racism towards the Afro-Mexican communities insists on three things: 1) a historical and cultural distance from Africa; 2) the exoticism and distant character of Afro America; and 3) a pre-Colombian past and a predominant indigenous presence. Each of these lines contends that miscegenation is the norm in all of the country. The third one, deeply instilled as ideology, is translated into a genuine expression of nationalism, which denies the racism and the African presence in Mexico. In this respect, Moreno (2012) argues: “La desracialización (racelessness) se refiere al proceso de normalización racial y racista que permite que el pueblo mexicano se exprese y esté convencido por la idea de que en México no hay racismo porque todos somos mestizos, porque todos estamos ‘mezclados’” (17). Akin to Moreno (2012), Michel Wieviorka (2009) in his analysis of the phenomenon of racism claims: El problema radica en el funcionamiento mismo de la sociedad, de la cual el racismo constituye una propiedad estructural, inscrita en los mecanismos rutinarios que

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to refer to a mixture or union of people of different ethnicity. The concept emerged with the Spanish conquest and colonization of the American continent, where Spaniards and Indians mixed. Most of these unions were often illegitimate. So, Spaniard colonists, concerned to distinguish the results of such miscegenation, divided offspring of mixed couples into three general groups: mestizo (Spanish-Indian), mulatto (Spanish-Black), and zambo or zambaigo (Black-Indian), which in turn overlapped, creating more subdivisions within each of these three main categories causing confusion and misidentification between groups and generating a complex social system of castas, which was based on physical characteristics (skin color and phenotype). Therefore, people of African descent, not only in Mexico but in the rest of Latin America, are the historical product of various degrees of miscegenation. The ideologization of the concept of miscegenation ignores the fact, hidden by this ideologization, that there are different types of miscegenation with different ethnic and cultural signs. For more discussion on Mestizaje and castas see José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica, México: Editorial Porrúa, 2007; Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, La población negra de México. Estudio etnohistórico, México: SRA-CEHAM, 1981; María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions. Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico, California: Stanford University Press, 2008, 42-60; Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind. The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization, New York: Routledge, 2002,17-31; Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting. Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. This is one of the reasons why the term Afromestizo, introduced by the Mexican scholar Aguirre Beltrán, is avoided in the present study.

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aseguran la dominación y minimización de los negros, sin que nadie necesite teorizarlos o trate de justificarlos mediante la ciencia. El racismo se presenta, por tanto, como un sistema generalizado de discriminaciones que se alimentan o se informan unas a otras: existe un círculo vicioso … que asegura la reproducción casi automática de la discriminación de los negros en la vivienda, en la escuela o en el mercado de trabajo (37).

In contemporary Mexican society, Afro-Mexican communities occupy places at the lowest rank of the socio-economic ladders. Some of them remain forgotten and isolated from the mainstream and manifest extreme poverty and a lack of basic services. Currently, Mexico has four Afro-Mexican enclaves. One of them is the small community of Nacimiento de los negros situated in Northern Mexico in the state of Coahuila. The other three are located in the Southern part of the country: the Gulf of Mexico region (the southern part of the state of Veracruz and the coastal area of the states of Tabasco and Campeche), the southeastern region of the Yucatan Peninsula (the state of Quintana Roo), and the Costa Chica region (the northern coastal area of the state of Guerrero and the southern coastal area of the state of Oaxaca, both on the Pacific Ocean), the latter being the largest, with approximately thirty-seven Afro-Mexican communities. In particular, Costa Chica’s black population is believed to have originated from African slaves who were brought to this area to work on the large cattle ranches and agricultural fields during the colonial period. In addition, runaway slaves reached this same area in search of refuge by forming small, marooned communities (Aguirre Beltrán 1989a; Motta Sánchez and Machuca Ramírez 1993; Vaughn 2001a). For a long period of time this Afro-Mexican enclave remained isolated, basically until the mid-1960s4, when a coastal highway that currently links Acapulco to other towns and villages of the Costa Chica region of Guerrero and Oaxaca was finished. Such a situation of isolation not only allowed the African phenotype to survive in the area, but also permitted some social practices and cultural manifestations such as dance, music, oral tradition, the use of medicinal herbs, cuisine, the custom of bride capture, polygamy, round houses, hollowed-out canoes made from single logs, musical instruments, and names which evoke African regions and tribes to survive, just to mention a few. It is also important to highlight that since colonial times the Afro-Mexicans of Costa Chica have been in contact with other neighboring indigenous groups

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The Costa Chica region was not only populated by Afro-descendant communities; there were other local ethnic groups —such as Mixtecos, Amuzgos, Chatinos, including some mestizos— that also stayed isolated during the same period.

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Chapter 1. Introduction

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(coastal Mixtecs, Chatinos, and Amuzgos)5, as well as with Asiatic sailors and slaves, especially from the Philippines, who entered through the Port of Acapulco after 1573. By the middle of the 19th century, Costa Chica’s population also received some influence from Chilean immigrants who spent time on the coast near Pinotepa Nacional on their route to the Sacramento Valley during the epoch of the California Gold Rush. As a result, these cultural and linguistic contacts have undeniably shaped the life and speech of the Afro-Mexicans of Costa Chica over the years. Basically, the Costa Chica region seems so varied and complex that it has seduced many scholars in the last decades. Most of the current research on this geographical area has focused on historical and anthropological investigations, and only very few works have addressed linguistic aspects (Gillian 1976; Aguirre-Beltrán 1989b; Díaz-Pérez 1993; Althoff 1994). This situation seems also to have occurred in other Afro-Hispanic enclaves of Latin America, except for the Caribbean zone. Towards the end of the 20th century, most Afro-Hispanic linguistic research focused on the literary and folkloric testimonies of past centuries, in particular Bozal literature6, which to some degree reflects the earlier 5

6

Despite the inter-ethnic difficulties present in the region, given the prevailing economic and social asymmetries between the local indigenous people and Afro-descendants, economic (in some cases parental) and religious ties are common. Bozal literature is understood as the samples of the speech of black bozales (slaves recently arrived from Africa, who barely spoke Spanish) pictured in the Spanish literature of the Golden Age and in the colonial literature of Latin America (Lipski 1986d; Diaz-Campos 2014; Jones 2019). In this vein, Jones (2019) in his book entitled Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain points out that the habla de negros cannot be theorized without a close reading of the term “bozal”, saying that: “Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their essay ‘What Is a Minor Literature’ argue: ‘Each language always implies a deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth.’ Paradoxically, early modern Spanish constructions of Africanized Castilian fragment and rupture the black body, precisely indicating the ‘deterritorialization of the mouth, the tongue, and the teeth’ to which Deleuze and Guattari refer. Habla de negros or habla bozal depicts how illiterate black slaves might enunciate, pronounce, and speak Castilian incorrectly. Originally, the word ‘bozal’ meant ‘savage’ or ‘untamed horse,’ ultimately referring to the Portuguese and Castilian spoken by black slaves. The ‘bozal’ is also a muzzle: the device employed to censure, silence, and tame humans’ words and to also prevent animals from barking and biting. Africans labeled as ‘bozales’ were viewed as newcomers to the Iberian world in general, unacquainted with its social and cultural practices. As the category’s use rapidly declined on the Iberian Peninsula, due to shrinking black populations, the term did, however, continue to circulate in the Anglophone slave vernacular and Spanish Caribbean colonies —primarily in Cuba— well into the twentieth century, circulating in Blackface teatro bufo performances and private religious celebratory gatherings called cajón de muerto from the Congolese-centered Palo Mayombe religious-spiritual traditions … My reading of bozal embodies a somatic-linguistic relationship based on the definition of the lexicographer Covarrubias, who defines ‘bozal’ as: ‘el negro que no sabe otra lengua que la suya; y la lengua, o lenguaje se llama labio, y los labios bezos; de boca, boza, y de allí bozal’. Covarrubias’s entry reveals Spain’s somatic

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speech patterns of African slaves with a great tendency to exaggerate, stereotype and create distortions of “non-white” Spanish (Lipski 1986b, 2005; Zimmermann 2012). In the words of Lipski (1986b: 73, 75): Dada la escasez de dialectos criollos afrohispánicos en la actualidad, para investigar los contactos lingüísticos entre esclavos negros y colonos españoles, es necesario recurrir a los pequeños núcleos dialectales que manifiestan vestigios del lenguaje acriollado de antaño, y sobre todo a la documentación literaria y folklórica de los siglos pasados … es preciso examinar las primeras indicaciones del habla bozal española y portuguesa, que aparecen en documentos literarios de los siglos y , casi siempre con el fin de parodiar el habla de esclavos y sirvientes africanos, representados como bufones o charlatanes.

Although an interesting and somewhat helpful tool for the historical reconstruction of Afro-Hispanic varieties, this Bozal literature does not reflect the contemporary speech and sociolinguistic reality of many Afro-Hispanic communities of Latin America. However, remarkably in the last years, several linguistic studies have been carried out providing interesting and important data on the current speech of the African descent communities in the Americas. Along with a robust literature on the Afro-Hispanic varieties in the Caribbean (Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic), also noteworthy are the more recent works on Afro-Hispanic varieties in the Mainland: Afro-Peruvian Spanish (Sessarego 2015; Gutiérrez Maté 2018), Afro-Ecuadorian Spanish (Sessarego 2013a, 2014a; Schwegler 1999, 2014; Lipski 2009), Afro-Bolivian Spanish (Sessarego 2014b, 2013b; Lipski 2008), Afro-Venezuelan Spanish (Díaz-Campos & Clemments 2008, 2005; Megenney 1999; Álvarez & Obediente 1998), Afro-Colombian Spanish (Lipski 2020; Sessarego 2019; Schwegler 1999), Afro-Panamanian Spanish (Lipski 2005, 1989), Afro-Costa Rican Spanish (Bell 2019; Pizarro Chacón & Fallas Domian 2014; Pizarro Chacón & Cordero Badilla 2015; Herzfeld 2001, 1995) among others. These academic works not only focus on the formation and evolution of these Afro-Hispanic dialects spoken in the Americas; but some of them also offer historical, socio-economic and demographical data on the black population of these Afro-Hispanic enclaves during the colonial period. They also provide a detailed analysis of their linguistic characteristics, adding to the long-lasting debate on the creolized or non-creolized state of these Afro-Hispanic language varieties.

and cultural fixation on big African lips. The trope of big (African) lips recurs in countless sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Spanish archival, poetic, prosaic, and theatrical works” (Jones 2019: Chapter 1).

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The present study contributes to this linguistic arena by describing in a qualitative manner the current speech of two Afro-Mexican communities, Collantes and Santa María de la Luz Chicometepec, locally known as La Boquilla, situated in the Costa Chica region of Oaxaca, and it is based on data collected in situ. In the study of any Afro-Hispanic variety, it is necessary to consider the following three aspects: 1) What is a creole and how does it originate; 2) Why is there a scarcity of Spanish-based derived creoles in the Americas; 3) To what extent could an Afro-Hispanic variety be considered a remnant of a creole stage. Keeping in mind the above three aspects, Chapter 2 of the present study offers a discussion of some of the most representative theoretical perspectives that have marked current research on creole genesis, such as: a) the Continuum Model (Hall 1962) that proposes a three-stage ‘life-cycle’ in which a creole designates the second stage; b) the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (Bickerton 1981) which establishes that creoles originate from universal psychological or physiological laws, and not from the influence of substrate languages; c) the Theory of Relexification (Lefebvre 1998) that suggests that a creole is a product of three main structural processes: relexification, reanalysis and dialect leveling; d) the Approximation Theory (Chaudenson 2001) that considers creoles to be the result of a sociolinguistic change based on a centripetal continuum of language approximations marked by restructuring ‘marginal’ varieties (i.e. basilectal varieties) moving toward their autonomy in a new linguistic system (i.e. a creole); e) the Complementary Theory (Mufwene 2001) which postulates that creole evolution is triggered by a restructuring process of competition-and-selection favoring some linguistic features and disfavoring others in the communicative acts among speakers; f) the Afrogenesis Hypothesis (McWhorter 2000) —a theory derived from the Monogenesis Model first outlined by Lenz (1926)7— 7

The first systematic study dedicated to a Spanish-based creole language (Papiamentu) was carried out by Rodolfo Lenz (1926) — who in turn based his study on Schuchardt’s (1882) first observations of the Portuguese linguistic features in Papiamentu (Jacob 2012: 18). Lenz’s monograph entitled El Papiamiento, la lengua criolla de Curazao (la gramática más sencilla) —first published in the Annals of the University of Chile in 1926-1927 and one year later as a book (1928)—, correctly identifies Papiamentu as a Creole language derived from an Afro-Portuguese-based creole of West Africa. He describes Papiamentu as “el criollo negro-portugués traído por los esclavos … La fuerte modulación melodiosa (que es característica para muchas lenguas de negros) le da un tono mui expresivo sentimental que falta en el holandés y el español” (705-706). Lenz’s (1928) analysis of Papiamentu’s grammatical structure raised the question of the Afro-Portuguese genesis of the Creoles, outlining, avant la lettre, the subsequent theories of monogenesis and relexification, and unwittingly unleashing the well-known controversy of monogenesis vs. polygenesis, by stating that: “La semilla portuguesa (el vocablo) cae en terreno africano (el modo de pensar i hablar de las lenguas negras) i nace un árbol (la jerga negro-portuguesa a la cual tienen que acomodarse todos los negros transportados en buques portugueses). Según la lengua europea que prevalece en el lugar de destino, en este tronco negro-portugués se hacen injertos españoles, franceses, ingleses y

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establishes that the Caribbean and Indian Ocean creoles are derived from pidgins developed in West African slave stations and settlements rather than in the colonial plantations during the trade period; g) the Neurobiological Hypothesis (Zimmermann 2006) explains the genesis and evolution of Creole languages from linguistic constructs that take place in the brain of each individual, in which processes of selection and addition occur, as well as new creations. These individual constructions are verified explicitly or implicitly through a process called viabilization that becomes interactive and intersubjective when people socialize, allowing to explain not only the existence of idiolects, but also groups of idiolects (i.e. creole languages and dialects); and the h) Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (Sessarego 2017) which points out a legal factor of colonial slavery that sets up apart the territories ruled by the Spanish Crown from other European powers: the presence versus the absence of slaves’ legal personality. This legal factor precluded the formation of Spanish-based creoles in the Americas. Chapter 2 also comments on the scarcity of Spanish-based creoles in the Americas based on criteria from Chaudenson (2001), McWhorter (2000), Lipski (2005), and Sessarego (2018). For Chaudenson (2001), creolization failed to occur in the Spanish colonies due to the following causes: Hispanicization, evangelization, education, black-white demographic disproportion, and a prolonged homestead society period. McWhorter (2000), on the other hand, asserts that Papiamentu and Palenquero are considered synchronically, but not diachronically, to be Spanish-based creoles. Lipski (2005) argues that the creole features found in Afro-Caribbean Spanish are not traces of an extinct Spanish creole but are the result of linguistic encounters with established Caribbean creoles in the area. Sessarego (2018), on the other hand, sustains that the paucity of genuine Spanish-based creoles is due, in great part, to the presence of legal personality among the Slave population in the Spanish colonies. Finally, Chapter 2, based on the philosophical concept of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), proposes a rhizomatic model to interpret data derived from linguistic contact situations according to the following rhizomatic linguistic principles:

holandeses. Solo estas ramas injertadas se cultivan, pero la savia que los alimenta guarda sus caracteres del suelo africano en la articulación y en el modo de pensar (la gramática)” (Lenz, 1928: 80). According to Lenz (1926, 1928), the Afro-Portuguese transplanted to the ABC Netherlands Antilles suffered, especially at the beginning of the 19th century, a strong process of decreolization and Hispanicization.

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Principles of the Linguistic Rhizome • A language variety/creole is not derived from one unique linguistic root. • There is not a single homogenous linguistic community.

Chapter 3 is divided into two parts. The first focuses on the qualitative methodology used in this study supported by the following fieldwork methods: participant-observation, open-ended oral interviews, recordings, transcription and fieldnotes (written notes, mental notes, drawings, maps, photographs and video recordings). The second part offers historical observations on the African presence in Mexico along with a socio-historical reconstruction of the two communities under study, Collantes and La Boquilla, due to a lack of written records. Chapter 4 is devoted to the phonetic and phonological traits that characterize the speech of these two Afro-Mexican communities, henceforth Costeño, trying to maintain and respect the way the people of this region identify themselves. In general, Costeño Spanish exhibits the following phonological processes that are also found in many other Afro-Hispanic language varieties: a) vocalic, consonantal and syllabic reductions; b) vowel variation; c) epenthesis; d) consonantal substitution; e) weakness/deletion of the segment /d̪ / in intervocalic and word-final position; f) variable behavior of the segment /s/ especially in word-final position ranging from strong to weak realizations; g) occasional liquid mutation; f) invariable realization of the voiced palatal fricative /y̵/; and g) word-final nasal velarization. In addition, Costeño Spanish presents a labialized phone [hʷ], an allophonic variant of /f/ (i.e. oficio /ofisyo/ > [o.hʷí.syo] ‘occupation’, café /kafe/ > [ka.hʷé] ‘coffee’, familia /familya/ > [hʷa.mí.λya]), which I claim in this study is rooted in West African languages. The high frequency of the segment /č/ in approximately 35.98% of the Costeño lexicon from different linguistic sources that are not heard outside of the Costa Chica region of Mexico is also remarkable as the following words illustrate: chacalmaca [ča.kal.má.ka] ‘a special type of net’, chambalé [čam.ba.lé] ‘mosquito’, pachiche [pa.čí.če] ‘creaseless’, chacalín [ča.ka.líŋ] ‘river shrimp’, chimeco [či.mé.ko] ‘dirty face’, chincualear [čiŋ.kwa.ʎyár], ‘to be happy’, and so on. Chapter 5 is divided into two parts. The first part accounts for the morphological characteristics of Costeño Spanish. The most significant of these morphological traits that have also been attested in other Afro-Hispanic varieties are the following: a) unmarked infinitives; b) deletion of the plural marker in different contexts; c) double plural endings; d) gender instability; and e) post-verbal redundant subject pronouns. These are all morphological traits that Costeño shares with other Spanish varieties worldwide. The second part of Chapter 5 presents syntactic characteristics of Costeño. Among these syntactic traits, it is important

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to highlight those considered commonplace in Afro-Hispanic modalities such as a) the deletion of articles and common prepositions; b) the sporadic loss of copula; and c) negation-related variation. In particular, Costeño exhibits the following two types: 1) reduplication of the negative no (i.e. No desprecio yo mi saber no ‘I do not dismiss my knowledge’) and 2) the co-occurrence of the negative sentential no with the negative-indefinite expression nadie ‘nobody’ in preverbal position (i.e. Nadien no la oyó ‘Nobody heard her’). Chapter 6 discusses the lexical composition of Costeño which exhibits words from various languages, a fact that reinforces its rhizomatic linguistic nature. Among the local indigenous languages that have contributed to shape the Costeño lexicon, since the beginning of its formation, the influence of coastal Mixtec, Chatino and, into a lesser extent, Amuzgo and Nahuatl is remarkable. The latter was probably brought through Nahuatl speakers who, at times, come down from the Mountain or from communities of Tierra Caliente (in the State of Guerrero) to the Costa Chica of Oaxaca to carry out commercial activities (Ortiz Álvarez 2005; Matías Alonso and Medina Lima 1995). In addition, historically, the presence of Nahuatl speakers in the area has been documented. In this regard, Dehouve (2002) argues: En la Costa Chica, eran “mexicanos” cuatro pueblos (Nexpa, Cuautepec, Xalapa y Copalitech), y en la Costa Grande se encontraban dos: Coyuca y Citlala. En la parte oriental del estado, los códices, particularmente numerosos, nos proporcionan un cuadro cronológico que va del 1300 al 1565: del 1300 al 1461, hubo un periodo de convivencia entre los tlapanecos, los mixtecos y los nahuas. La dominación mexica se inició hacia 1461 durante el gobierno de Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, señor de Tenochtitlán, concluyendo en 1522, después de la llegada de los españoles (37-39)8.

Apart from the local-indigenous languages influence in the lexicon, as any other Afro-Hispanic variety, Costeño exhibits African lexical remnants as well as Spanish words formerly used but now out of use in contemporary Mexican Spanish. In addition, it is important to underline the Philippine lexical contribution, mainly from Tagalog. Also, to a lesser extent, Chilean Spanish, along with other lexical sources of unknown origin, have influenced the lexicon of Costeño Spanish. 8

‘On the Costa Chica there were four Mexican towns (Nexpa, Cuautepec, Xalapa and Copalitech), and on the Costa Grande there were two: Coyuca and Citlala. In the eastern part of the state, numerous codices provide us with a chronological table that goes from 1300 to 1565. Between 1300 and 1461, there was a period of coexistence among the Tlapanecos, the Mixtecos and the Nahuas. Mexica domination began around 1461 during the government of Moctezuma Ilhuicamina, Lord of Tenochtitlan, concluding in 1522, after the Spanish arrival (37-39).’ [All translations provided in footnotes are my own].

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The aforementioned language sources have coexisted in the target region at different periods of time and have contributed to build up the current Costeño lexicon by giving to it a singular and regional air that is not found in any other part of Mexico. The present study not only accounts for the Afro-Hispanic linguistic remnants in Costeño Spanish but also for the endangerment situation that current Costeño speech and culture face. The constant emigration from these rural communities either to the larger cities of Mexico or to the United States has dramatically affected traditional life in those communities as well as the status of language in the region. This situation together with the increase of globalization in the last decades, socioeconomic absorption, linguistic forces to adapt standard variety of Mexican Spanish, natural disasters, drug trafficking, and public insecurity in the region confirms our hypothesis that Costeño Spanish is in danger of extinction.

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C

2

Creole Genesis and the Rhizomatic Linguistic Model

In the literature on creole languages, there is controversy about their origin. Various scholars have proposed different theories that address this issue (Hall 1962; Bickerton 1981; Lefebvre 1998; McWhorter 2000; Chaudenson 2001; Mufwene 2001; Zimmermann 2006; Sessarego 2017, among others). There is also debate about the scarcity of Spanish-based derived creoles (Chaudenson 2001; McWhorter 2000; Schwegler 1993; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2018) as well as about the degree of creolization of certain Afro-Hispanic varieties around the world (Granda 1971, 1976; Holm 1988; Megenney 1985, 1999; Schwegler 1996; Lipski 1994b, 1996, 2005; Sessarego 2015, just to mention some). In the Afro-Hispanic arena, it is undeniable that the three aforementioned areas of research intertwine. For this reason, in Section 2.1 of the present chapter, some of the most relevant theories on creole genesis that have influenced current research on creole linguistics will be discussed. Based on the conclusions of some scholars (McWhorter 2000; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2017), Section 2.2 is devoted to the controversy concerning the relative scarcity of Spanish-based creoles in America. Section 2.3 offers a discussion on the genesis of Papiamentu and the Sephardic linguistic contribution, pointing out a Sephardic Papiamentu variety. Finally, section 2.4 proposes the Rhizomatic Linguistic Model, applied to the configuration of Papiamentu. Such rhizomatic interpretation lays its foundations in the concept of rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and can be applied to interpret linguistic data derived from language contact.

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2.1. Theoretical perspectives encompassing creole etiology Before discussing some of the theoretical hypotheses on the etiology of creoles, I would like to refer briefly to the semantic charge that the term creole bears. In regard to the term creole, Chaudenson (2001: 1-13) offers an interesting discussion about the origin and evolution of the meaning of this word, stressing that semantically the term creole must not be separated from the influence of social and cultural factors. According to Chaudenson, the adjective creole may be used to designate people depending on the color of their skin and/ or place of birth; it can also refer to the cultural activities of some communities such as music, cuisine, magic, folk medicine, oral literature, and so on, as well as to certain type of languages whose peculiarity resides in their sociohistorical development around three fundamental factors that Chaudenson (2001: 34) identifies as ‘unities’: 1. unity of place: creoles emerged typically on islands; 2. unity of time: creoles developed typically within approximately a century; 3. unity of action: creoles evolved in colonial slave communities. It is therefore not surprising that these differences in usage have created certain ambiguities about this term. However, there is still speculation about the origins of the word creole. One of the most convincing is offered by Holm (1988) who argues the following: The origin of the term creole is more certain. Latin creāre ‘to create’ became Portuguese crier ‘to raise (e.g. a child),’ whence the past participle criado ‘(a person) raised; a servant born into one’s household.’ Crioulo, with a diminutive suffix, came to mean an African slave born in the New World in Brazilian usage. The word’s meaning was then extended to include Europeans born in the New World, now the only meaning of the word in Portugal. The word finally came to refer to the customs and speech of Africans and Europeans born in the New World. It was later borrowed as Spanish criollo, French créole, Dutch creol and English creole (Holm 1988: 9, my italics).

Returning to creolistic genesis, one of its primary concerns is the following: When and under which circumstances does creolization take place? Rethinking language as a social tool and speaking as a cultural practice, creolization can be thought of as a process that occurs when two or more cultures enter into contact, becoming instantly impacted by means of all kinds of linguistic and cultural exchanges. The result of this linguistic-cultural collision is unforeseeable in both space and time, a point that I will return to in the third section of this chapter.

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In the literature, there is a set of fascinating and interesting theories encompassing creole etiology; some of those theories will be discussed briefly below.

2.1.1. The continuum model (Hall 1962) Traditionally in linguistics, a creole designates the second stage of a threestage ‘life-cycle’: pidginization, creolization (Hall 1962: 162) and decreolization (DeCamp 1971: 350) postulated in Hall’s classic theory of creole genesis. In keeping with that theory, a creole language emerges when a pidgin becomes the mother tongue of the first generation that speaks it in a community. In this second stage, the creole presents more stabilization and complexification of its system and is no longer circumscribed to reduced functions or to a particular type of communication. Bloomfield (1933: 474) was one of the first to claim that creoles developed from pidgins, stating: “when the jargon [i.e. pidgin] has become the only language of the subject group, it is a creolized language.” However, this continuum model of creole genesis is questionable due to the following shortcomings. First, some scholars, among them Lefebvre (1998), argue that there is no distinction in the process of formation and development between pidgins and creoles. Second, the continuum model is not consistent with history due to the fact that the term pidgin was coined in 1807, long after the term creole had been widely used in European trade colonies (Baker and Mühlhäusler 1990 and Mufwene 2001). Third, this model fails to explain anything about the origin of creoles or about structural similarities among some creole languages which were not found in their superstratum languages such as generic or non-specific articles, fronting of noun phrases for focus, multiple negation and so on (Holm 1988: 64-65). Fourth, the pidgins spoken in countries like Nigeria, Cameron, and Papua New Guinea have overstepped their reduced communicative function by becoming the mother tongue of the most part of the population. These so-called extended pidgins are characterized by their major grade of stabilization and the complexity of their systems. This is another reason to reject the canonical continuum model due to the fact that some pidgins in the world have expanded into regular vernaculars, especially in urban settings, becoming structurally as complex as creoles (Mufwene 2001). Fifth, some creole researchers stress that there is no distinction between creoles and ‘normal’ languages. For instance, Chaudenson (2001) contends that if creoles were to be defined as a particular language family, one should be able to pinpoint structural features that are unique to creoles and attested in all of them.

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Aside from the claim that there is no creole prototype expressible in terms of structural features (Field 2004), the study of creolization is important to theoretical linguistics for the following reasons: 1) as a special case of language appropriation (language acquisition and/or learning); 2) language variation; and 3) language evolution.

2.1.2. The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (Bickerton 1981) Among the theories arising from the more traditional approaches that support the distinction between pidgin and creole languages is the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis of Bickerton (1981). His theory examines some structural differences between Hawaiian Pidgin English (HPE) and Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) such as movement rules, articles, verbal auxiliaries, for-to complementization, and relativization and pronoun-copying (Bickerton 1981: 17-42), concluding that HPE and HCE are formed by different processes. Basically, the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis establishes three stages in language evolution: 1) no language, 2) protolanguage, and 3) language. ‘Protolanguage’ is manifested in ‘ape talk’, ‘the two-word stage of small children’, ‘pidgins’ etc. On the other hand, ‘Language’ in its morpho-syntactic core is said to be due to an innate ‘bioprogram’. The existence of the latter is suggested by its manifestation in first-generation creole children who ‘invent’ morpho-syntactic rules apparently without any help on the part of linguistic input, in Bickerton’s words: The ‘inventions’ of HCE speakers ... were not peculiar to them, but followed a regular pattern of ‘invention’ which emerged whenever human beings had to manufacture an adequate language in short order from inadequate materials … there is an innate bioprogram that determines the form of human language ... the bioprogram would unfold, just as a physical bioprogram unfolds (Bickerton 1981: 132-135, my italics).

To account for cross-creole structural differences, Bickerton stresses that it is important to consider the following factors: 1) demographical proportion of the native and non-native speakers at the initial stage of colonization; 2) duration of this early colonial stage; 3) increment of the slave population; and 4) the sociolinguistic relation between the lexifier and the non-lexifier speakers (Bickerton 1981: 176-177). In summary, the Language Bioprogram Hypothesis establishes that creoles originate from universal psychological or physiological laws, and not from the influence of substrate languages. Bickerton (1981) claims that children are critical to the emergence of creoles by fixing the parameters of these new grammars

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(i.e. new languages) in their unmarked (i.e. default) settings as specified in Universal Grammar.

2.1.3. The Theory of Relexification (Lefebvre 1998) Relexification Theory is based on a cognitive perspective that involves three major processes: relexification, reanalysis and dialect leveling. Relexification is a mental process that produces a new language, the creole, whose phonological representation of its lexical entries are derived from the language of superstratum but their syntactic and semantic representations are derived from the corresponding lexical entries in the substratum languages as is depicted in the following diagram reproduced from Lefebvre (1998: 16), the leading proponent of this theoretical framework.

Figure 2.1. Schema of the process of relexification

The above diagram suggests that relexification can be considered as the result of a transfer of linguistic features from one language or group of languages to a new one (i.e. the creole), if and only if lexical properties are involved in this process. According to Lefebvre (1998), Haitian Creole is a French relexification of languages of the Ewe-Fon (or Fongbe) group. An interesting point in Lefebvre’s theory is that relexification may apply to both major category lexical items (nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs and derivational affixes) as well as to minor category lexical entries (determiners, complementizers, tense markers, etc.), only if the items of the second kind bear some semantic content; in case they do not, they are simply copied but not relabeled. Put another way, those minor-category lexical items that do not carry semantic content present a null form; they are not pronounced when they

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are relabeled. Lefebvre (1998) stresses that the phonological null representation of certain lexical entries during the process of relexification explains why creole lexicons look ‘simpler’. Also, for relexification to take place, speakers must possess a mature lexicon (i.e. a well-established grammar); otherwise the lexical entries of their relexified lexicons cannot reproduce the semantic and syntactic properties of their substratum languages. Under Lefebvre’s criterion, it would be difficult to establish a distinction in the process of formation between creoles and pidgins because both undergo relexification. The second process implicated in Lefebvre’s theory of creole genesis is reanalysis, which consists of modifying the function of a grammatical feature selected from an existing language into a new one which is emerging. This process is also common in linguistic change. For instance, the reanalysis of object pronouns as subject and/or possessive pronouns in Jamaican Creole English: Mi kyaan dringk mi kaafi me can’t drink me coffee ‘I can’t drink my coffee’ (Radford 1997: 64, my italics)

Finally, the third process is dialect leveling which reduces variation of the lexicons previously produced by relexification, especially in those creoles which were originated by the confluence of various substratum lexicons. Dialect leveling operates at the output level of relexification. At one point in his discussion, Lefebvre stresses that the genesis of creole languages constitutes a particular case of Second Language Acquisition (L2): “It has been claimed that creole genesis is a function of second language acquisition in the specific context where substratum speakers have reduced access to the superstratum language” (Lefebvre 1998: 36), a statement widely accepted among creolists. However, as Mufwene (2002) pointed out, Relexification Theory is questionable due to the following shortcomings. This theory has not taken into account several features that Haitian Creole shares with nonstandard varieties of French, and also does not account for those cases in which Haitian Creole has selected structural options which are not consistent with those of Ewe-Fon. To sum up the discussion so far, Relexification Theory is based on a cognitive perspective where three mental processes are involved: relexification, reanalysis and dialect leveling. In particular, the process of relexification is responsible for the creation of the new language and relexification could be considered as one of the many strategies used to acquire an L2. The realization of this linguistic transaction makes no distinction in the process of formation between creoles and pidgins.

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2.1.4. Approximation Theory (Chaudenson 2001) Contrary to Lefebvre’s theory (1998) in which creole genesis is the result of a structural process (i.e. relexification), Approximation Theory states that the formation of creoles is the result of a sociolinguistic rather than structural development. Chaudenson (2001), its principal proponent, particularly analyses the sociohistorical conditions that characterize the French-based creoles spoken in the Indian Ocean region. For him, the socioeconomic development of the transplanted European societies into the new colonies is divided into three main phases: Phase I, the homestead society (société d’habitation); Phase II, the plantation society; and Phase III, the end of migration. The first two phases are the most significant in the formation of a creole due to the socioeconomic and historical factors that characterize them. Following Chaudenson (2001), Phase I is defined by a binary system where early ‘white’ colonists with their indentured servants and African slaves lived in close and constant interaction: “The initial period is characterized by two important features that might be thought incompatible: the total domination of Blacks by Whites and their nearly identical daily lives, marked by a total interaction between the two communities” (Chaudenson 2001: 98). During this Robinsonnade1 period, a majority of the early European settlers were males, a fact that exhorted the interethnic mixture between white men and black women. The characteristics and conditions of this black-white proximity in their socio-cultural relationships facilitated the linguistic conditions for speakers of substrative languages to acquire a closer version of the lexifier; in other words, acrolectal approximations of the lexifier2. Chaudenson (2001) is one of the first scholars to point out that the lexifier language spoken by the early colonists was not the “standard” version but varieties of the standard: One of the biggest and most appalling mistakes in research on French creoles has been to use the present French norm as the point of reference. However, although we do not know much about the varieties of French spoken by the colonists, we can be sure that they were very different from modern standard French (Chaudenson 2001: 66, my italics). 1

2

Chaudenson uses this term to refer to the life conditions between whites and blacks during the initial phase as follows: ‘They worked in the fields, fished and hunted together, lodged in the same wood-and-leaf ‘huts’, suffered from the same ills, and experienced the same food shortages in the same destitution’ (Chaudenson 2001: 101). Chaudenson’s concept of approximative language is ‘not a ‘supplementary’ language used for particular functions or communication situations [pidgin] but rather the only habitual means of communication. It was probably used as a primary language by many speakers’ (Chaudenson 2001: 110).

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Certainly, many of the early European colonists were from different regions of the ancestral country, from a low social stratus, illiterate and sometimes non-native speakers of the lexifier language. It is also safe to say that the European colonial languages (French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch) were still undergoing important linguistic changes in their formation during the trade colonial period (Hammond 2001; Mufwene 2001; Lipski 2005; Rupert 2017, among other references therein). In spite of such an unstable situation, the sociolinguistic and economic conditions of the Phase I period were not auspicious for creolization to take place, but rather they drove acrolectalization forward. Contrary to the homestead society in which the white population outnumbered the black and the socio-economic conditions between whites and blacks were similar, in Phase II there was a significant increase in the slave population and as a consequence, another way of life and work organization developed. This socio-economic change is called the plantation society by Chaudenson (2001) and is characterized by a serial ternary system, where the creole slave population occupies the middle space between whites and bozals. Before proceeding further, it is important to clarify Chaudenson’s distinction among the terms creole (criollo), ladino and bozal. Chaudenson states: “‘bozal’ a slave introduced less than a year ago, speaking the language of the country poorly or not at all; ‘ladino’ a slave brought a long time ago (more than a year) whose linguistic competence is judged to be sufficient’; ‘criollo’ a creole slave, i.e. a slave born in the country Chaudenson (2001: 88).

Bearing those distinctions in mind, once bozals arrived in the new land, most of them were designated to work in the fields under the criollos’ supervision (i.e. commanders) with whom they socialized and received language input (i.e. approximations of the target language). During the first months/years, the bozal work-sector developed speech based on approximations that were less close to the local koiné, a phenomenon referred by Chaudenson as basilectalization. According to him, basilectal and acrolectal varieties coexisted during the colonial period, with the former being the most prevalent during Phase II, propitiating the linguistic conditions for creolization to take place, in Chaudenson’s (2001: 127) terms: “We see that the core phenomenon was thus a shift to the exponent of approximations of French, a square approximation which seems to me to be the true moment and place of creolization: the autonomization of this approximative system in relation to French.” From the preceding citation, it is possible to infer that for Chaudenson approximative French is the most neutral term to describe the emergence of French-based creoles as ‘autonomous linguistic systems’. His centripetal model of communication can be roughly compared to the wave-formation process in

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acoustic physics. For instance, when someone throws a stone into a water pool, the waves closer to the stone’s impact are the best formed compared to those formed most faraway, which become ill-formed and sometimes imperceptible. Under this sketchy comparison, the closer waves would be the acrolectal varieties while the furthest away the basilectal, and the most imperceptible wave, the one placed in the outer ring from the water and stone collision, could be considered the new autonomous linguistic system (i.e. creole). Chaudenson concludes, referring to the moment of autonomy of a creole, the following: These approximations were in turn approximated by the next generation of slaves, who largely did not get to interact with speakers of French [the lexifier] proper. Such circumstances and processes resulted in the ‘autonomization’ of these approximations in relation to French [the lexifier], with which learners no longer had constant direct contact (Chaudenson 2001: 146, my italics).

The French creolist clearly considers the process of creolization as successive ‘generations of creoles’, and in this sense their approximative model accounts for both the similarities and differences among (French) creoles and also shows the impact of sociohistorical factors on language change. That is, these are lengthy homestead periods with a majority of Europeans for first-generation creoles (i.e. endogenous creoles), as opposed to accelerated growth in the slave population in plantation settings for second-generation creoles (i.e. exogenous creoles). In addition, Chaudenson’s (2001) theory relates the sociohistorical and linguistic development of French-based creoles with other French varieties that are considered radical (français marginaux), like those spoken in North America that show some linguistic features similar to those found in French-based creoles (Gendron 1970 and Poirier 1979, among other references). There are considerable reasons that support Chaudenson’s centripetal system of communication: 1) the youth of the slave population allowed them a rapid linguistic adaptation toward the local variety of the lexifier; 2) the approximative lexifier (AL) was used as a habitual means of communication both intrafamilial and interfamilial3; 3) the local French variety was considered a language of prestige in the new colonies4; and 4) strategies of linguistic appropriation that undoubtedly were used by the slaves, who tended to approximate their speech

3 4

See Chaudenson (2001: 99-113). Chaudenson (2001: 128) argues: “The acquisition of the local variety was the crucial element in gaining access to intermediate social status in colonial society. It was the only way of gaining the small benefits that distinguished Creoles from bozals, and that allowed the latter to escape the hell of the ‘field’ and the pickaxe.”

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toward the lexifier by means of approximative systems5 in naturalistic settings just like non-native speakers learn a L2/foreign language (FL) in non-institutional settings. As mentioned in section 2.1.1, Chaudenson (2001) argues that there is no distinction between creole and non-creole languages. Creoles, as any other language, also undergo linguistic innovations both internal and external even if they have not existed for long periods of time. External innovations are the product of face-to-face verbal interactions where idiolects play a significant role in linguistic change and language transmission, especially in creole evolution. Quite germane to Chaudenson’s argument is Milroy’s (1992: 4) conception of linguistic change as something attributed to the speakers in social contexts and not to the language system itself: “languages which have no speakers do not change”. To Milroy, linguistic change is not found in written or inscribed formats, but in active speech (i.e. daily interactions among speakers). It occurs among the members of a community where linguistic change originates and spreads becoming a norm of use for that society. In summary, Chaudenson’s (2001) approximative theory states that creole genesis is the result of sociolinguistic change based on a continuum of language approximations marked by restructuring ‘marginal’ varieties (i.e. basilectal varieties) moving toward their autonomy in a new linguistic system (i.e. a creole), developed in the transplanted societies which were born out of 17th century European colonization. The Approximative Theory embraces both the linguistic aspects of the creolization process and the socio-economic histories of the relevant territories.

2.1.5. Complementary Theory (Mufwene 2001) Complementary Theory set up by Mufwene (2001) states that creole genesis is the result of a gradual restructuring process in the mind of the speakers of a complex adaptive system in which two or more languages coexist and where

5

Chaudenson (2001: 158) accurately distinguishes between interlanguage and approximative systems as follows: “Language appropriation … does not proceed by simply transferring syntactic structures of the first/source language to the target language (which would not account for first-language acquisition), but by elaborating hypotheses on the structure of the target language. This is why the term interlanguage … seems rather inadequate. It evokes a segmentation, part of which is the source language. The very form of the term accounts for why ‘interlanguage’ is sometimes mentally represented as intermediate between the source and target languages. This is inadequate, of course, because child language acquisition has interlanguages without source languages. I find approximative system a more adequate term than interlanguage.”

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ecological factors, both internal and external, play a central role in the evolution of creoles. Mufwene distinguishes between internalized language (I-L) and externalized language (E-L). The former is what is called an idiolect (an individual speaker’s system of a language) and the second is the ensemble of I-Ls that co-occur in a speech community where speakers communicate successfully with each other (communal language). It is at the idiolectal level where language change occurs. Since idiolects are not identical, speakers of a language community have to accommodate their speech to each other by a process known in the literature as focusing6 (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985). In other words, speech accommodations occur by means of a constant competition-and-selection processes in which all kind of changes can occur. The analogy between language and species that Mufwene (2001) proposes is noteworthy. In keeping with that model, the genetic makeup of a parasitic Lamarkian species is subject to change several times during its life period, just as languages undergo various states of linguistic change. Also, the vitality of that species depends on its hosts, similar to what occurs in languages too. Put another way, parasites do not exist without hosts in the same way that languages do not exist without speakers. Bearing in mind that linguistic change occurs even when no contact between languages is involved, it is evident that non-native speakers of a language are not the only ones that acquire an ‘imperfect’ version of it. Mufwene (2001), along with other scholars, argues that the lexifier language brought by the early European colonists was neither a monolithic nor a standard variety but rather a developed koiné arisen from the coexistence of different dialects, both metropolitan and regional, that they spoke due to the practice of recruiting labor from different places during the colonial period: The settlement histories of the territories also suggest that the lexifiers were not completely focused or stabilized, since they too were then still emerging as new vernaculars. Such diffuseness did not, however, entail absence of a target (Mufwene 2001: 131, my italics).

According to Mufwene, a koiné is formed out of the contact of its preexisting dialects by a process of competition and selection of linguistic features from the different dialects that coexist. The diversity of languages/language varieties form a set-theory union of features (i.e. a feature pool) that potentially remains in the mind of the speakers and is available and/or accessible to them in their 6

Speech accommodation yields to a focusing process whereby members of the same speech community communicate more like one another than like nonmembers.

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spontaneous speech acts as well as in the mutual accommodations of their regular verbal intercourses. Mufwene (2001: 5) states: “koinés develop by leveling out differences among dialects of the same language or among genetically and typologically related languages, and by reducing the varieties in contact to their common denominator.” It is precisely through communicative acts that linguistic features (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) undergo restructuring. They can be done and redone several times or can exhibit different distributions within their system; this reorganization does not necessarily match or replicate the lexifier. Also, during the course of the restructuring process, one linguistic component may become more influenced than another by another language or language variety. When the massive slave trade took place, the new slave arrivals therefore attempted to learn and to approximate their speech to the local koiné by contributing to further restructuring it into an “imperfect replication” of the lexifier (Mufwene 2001). Such ‘imperfect replication’ or better said interference7 was intensified by the decreasing disproportion of native and fluent speakers of the local koiné during the plantation period, especially after segregation was institutionalized on the large plantations and the slave social sector had less access to the colonial European varieties, a phenomenon referred to by Chaudenson (2001) as basilectalization, which continued up to the collapse of the plantation industry. Mufwene accurately points out that this sociohistorical situation does not suggest a break in the transmission of the lexifier but rather that the lexifier was gradually transmitted in a significantly restructured form. This leads him to consider creole languages as restructured varieties of the colonial koinés: “When several such changes co-occur, a language may be restructured into a new variety that some speakers may doubt belongs in their language. This has been typically been the case for creoles, which linguists like to disfranchise as separate languages” (Mufwene 2001: 158). Part of the Mufwene’s conception on the evolution of creoles is based on the term Founder Principle that establishes the following: Founder Principle (Harrison et al. 1988) Structural features of today’s creoles were largely determined by those that were produced by the founder populations who were simply considered ‘amplifiers of variation’.

7

When two or more linguistic systems coexist, they overlap creating confusion in the mind of their speakers. Such confusion has been considered an “imperfect replication” due to the interference of two or more languages (Mufwene 2001).

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Some ethnographic pieces of evidence exist that support the Founder Principle: 1) The selection of a particular language as the lingua franca. 2) Cross-territorial differences in the proportions of the lexifier and of the substrate languages speakers that also account for cross-creole variation. 3) The duration of the initial phase. This can be interpreted as the longer the initial phase (the homestead phase) remains, the more transmitters there were of the local koiné. The third piece of ethnographic evidence mentioned above entails another principle named ‘Generative Entrenchment’ that establishes: The Principle of Generative Entrenchment (Wimsatt 2000) Barring some stochastic events in the evolution of a language variety, the oldest features have greater chance of prevailing over some newer alternatives simply because they have acquired more and more carriers, hence more transmitters, with each additional generation of speakers.

Interestingly, the principle of ‘Generative Entrenchment’ may also account for some of the old features that are found in many vernacular creoles/languages and dialects around the world that have been considered non-prestigious in the literature, such as archaisms, conservatisms, and so on. However, in genetic creolistics, what matters is not only the contact origin of the varieties but also the ecological interpretation (i.e. the ethnographic environment) in which languages/creoles evolve. In regard to the internal interpretation of language ecology, Mufwene (2001: Chapter 6) establishes the following set of properties: i) Languages consist of different linguistic units which interface with each other. ii) The different linguistic units interact nonlinearly and on different temporal and special scales. Hence, one may be restructured more than another. iii) Languages organize themselves to produce complex structures and behaviors (i.e. to produce speech). iv) Some inherent features of smaller units allow the systems to respond adaptively to environmental change especially in the emergence of new languages (i.e. creoles). v) The direction and magnitude of change are affected by preexisting conditions (The Founder Principle).

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In regard to the external interpretation of language ecology, Mufwene (2001: Chapter 6) highlights the following socio-historical factors that can be summarized as follows. a) The number of the populations that were present in the contact setting and their demographic proportions relative to each other. b) Language varieties spoken and their typological structures. c) The degree of the heterogeneity of the lexifier and the specific lexical and structural choices that offer to compete with one another. d) The ethnicity and/or social status of the different groups that interact with each other. e) The variation of factors, mainly social and economic, from one stage of colonization to another. f) Differences in the initial conditions of colonization. g) The nature of the plantation industry and/or the employment of the slave sector in the colonies. h) The time of segregation. i) The degree of the socioeconomic integration or absorption. The last external ecological factor mentioned above is also crucial in the attrition and/or death of any language. Language shift or death can also be result of other pressures such as religious, political, and even military. In addition, geographical isolation, territorial relocation, diseases, natural disasters and deforestation also play a significant role. Since the ecology of any language varies from one setting to another, and creoles in particular show the same competition-and-selection processes as any other vernacular language, Mufwene (2001) concludes, echoing Chaudenson (2001), the following: there is no particular reason for assuming that creoles developed by any restructuring processes that distinguish them from other languages. Only the ecologies of their developments, including the makeup of the local koinés that functioned as the lexifiers, were different. These koinés varied from one place to another, which partly accounts for structural differences even among creoles lexified by the same language (Mufwene 2001: 197, my italics).

Although the approximation and accommodation theories on creole genesis are fairly similar, the latter puts more emphasis on how patterns of interaction shape the outcome of the new languages (creoles) differently in linguistic-contact settings. Mufwene’s notion of ecology embraces the following aspects: 1) the nature of the lexifier; 2) the structural features of the substratum; 3) ethnolinguistic

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changes among the populations that came in contact; 4) the kinds of interactions between lexifier speakers and those of other languages; and 5) demographic aspects of the populations. Moreover, Mufwene’s (2001) ecological theory approaches variation among creoles in a way that makes it compatible with another current linguistic approach to language variation such as Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993). The process of competition-and-selection of linguistic features from a pool of features proposed by Mufwene (2001) in his language ecology theory could be roughly comparable to the operation of evaluating the collection of possible output forms in OT. In summary, Mufwene’s (2001) accommodation theory states that creole evolution is triggered by a restructuring process of competition-and-selection favoring some linguistic features and disfavoring others. Such a process takes place in the communicative acts among the speakers of a community and are combined with ecological factors, both internal and external, that have a significant impact on the evolution of creoles which does not differ from the evolution of other non-creole languages.

2.1.6. The Afrogenesis Hypothesis (McWhorter 2000) The Afrogenesis Hypothesis proposed by McWhorter (2000) —a theoretical offshoot derived from the Monogenetic Model first outlined by Lenz (1926, 1928) in his study entitled El Papiamiento, la lengua criolla de Curazao (la gramática más sencilla)8—, states that creoles did not originate on plantation settings but rather in the West African trade settlements. Reviving, to some extent, the canonical creole-continuum model, McWhorter (2000) claims those European nations that possessed trade settlements in West Africa during the early trade period developed pidgins. Such pidgins were later disseminated among New World colonies becoming creoles. McWhorter (2000) denies that large plantation settings were the genesis of creole birth, either in the Caribbean or in the Indian Ocean. One of the major arguments that motivate this theory is the supposed anomaly due to the scarcity of Spanish-base creoles, a point to which I will return to in the next section. McWhorter (2000) correlates the non-possession of Spanish trade settlements on the West African coast with the ‘strange’ absence of Spanish-based creoles in America by presenting the following set of facts:

8

Lenz’s work has been cited in the introductory chapter of this book.

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1) There are plantation creoles which emerged via encounters with English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese, but none with Spanish. 2) There were English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese trade settlements in West Africa, but none Spanish (McWhorter 2000: 198).

However, McWhorter’s theoretical posture on creole genesis fails to account for why the putative set of defining features are not shared by all creoles lexified by the same European language. In summary, the Afrogenesis Hypothesis states that Caribbean and Indian Ocean creoles are derived from pidgins that developed in the slave stations established during the trade period by European nations on the West African coast (Portugal, France, England and Holland). According to the Afrogenesis theory, since the Spanish crown did not possess slaves’ stations on West Africa, ‘genuine’ Spanish-based creoles never arose in the Americas.

2.1.7. Neurobiological Hypothesis (Zimmermann 2006) Based on neurobiology, Klaus Zimmermann (2006) proposes a theoretical approach called neurobiological constructivism to explain the genesis and evolution of Creole languages from linguistic constructs that take place in the brain, in which processes of selection and addition occur, as well as new creations.

2.1.7.1. Principle of neurobiological constructivism According to constructivism, the mental representations that human beings have of “reality” are not and cannot be an objective reflection of it. Rather, they are constructions of the human brain, where many factors that go beyond the characteristics of the external world come into play. When our sensory organs receive stimuli from the outside world, they do not encode the physical input that causes the stimulation. In other words, they do not form an objective representation of reality but encode the intensity of electrical signals sent to the brain (i.e. neurological impulses). These neurological impulses are registered in the brain through constructions that differ from what we perceive of reality. Hence the name neurobiological constructivism, because of the brain (re)constructing the electrical discharges it receives through neurons. The following schematic illustrates this process called the Undifferentiated Coding Principle.

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Figure 2.2. Undifferentiated Coding Principle

The schematic shows that once an external stimulus is received by the sensory organs, it becomes an electrical impulse, which is then directed to different areas of the brain where different qualitative perceptions are formed. As each perception is gradually accumulated and mentally (re)constructed, it is selectively stored in the memory through processes of abstraction, categorization, etc. In this manner, the brain constructs an order of perceptions determined by the individual’s experiences as he/she confronts the world. These perceptions are compared to the individual’s collective experience and stored or assigned to an existing category. Hence, memory is the most important “sensory organ” in the circular process of perception, attention, recognition, action, evaluation, and subsequently, learning (Roth 1996, reported in Zimmermann 2006). The following diagram roughly illustrates this neurobiological constructivist process. By this process, it should be noted that each brain makes its own individual construction of the perceived reality, even if it is the same object. In the words of Zimmermann: Cada cerebro efectúa su propia construcción individual de la realidad cognitiva. No debemos creer que el mismo objeto produce la misma construcción en dos cerebros diferentes por ser el mismo objeto… La percepción y la construcción constituyen un proceso integral en el cual cooperan las actividades de la corteza cerebral con las del sistema límbico (Zimmermann 2006: 119-120).

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Figure 2.3. Neurobiological Constructivist Process

In turn, the individual constructions are verified explicitly or implicitly through a process called viabilization defined by Zimmermann in the following terms: La viabilización es un proceso complejo en el cual interactúan todos los órganos sensoriales (por ejemplo, la construcción del espacio que no nos ofrece el ojo). La viabilización está orientada principalmente por los usos prácticos, no por una supuesta cognición pura. En la vida cotidiana los seres humanos se contentan con saber que algo funciona, no se busca, como en las ciencias, una verdad más profunda. Este proceso de viabilización funciona como un proceso de trial and error … Las visiones del mundo (en el sentido de Humboldt), incrustadas en la semántica cultural de las lenguas, son producto de viabilizaciones, o sea de construcciones socializadas y compartidas hasta un cierto punto por todos los miembros de un grupo étnico-cultural o de grupos subculturales (Zimmermann 2008: 26-27).

This viability becomes an interactive and intersubjective viabilization when people socialize their individual constructions, a necessary process to establish communication. The viabilization theory has direct implications on linguistics and creolistics by explaining not only the existence of idiolects, but also groups of idiolects (i.e. creole languages and dialects).

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2.1.7.2 The neurobiological construction of a creole language From the perspective of neurobiological constructivism, the genesis of a Creole language can be accepted as a result of an individual’s perceived reality. This specificity lies in a particular sociolinguistic environment (the historical situation) as well as in a psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic specificity, phenomena affected by external factors that influence the constructed perceptions individuals or the groups. Thus, when speaking of creolization from a constructivist perspective, the following aspects must be considered (Zimmermann 2006: 124): 1

The situation of the affected

2

Cognitive tasks

3

The influence of external factors

a. The situation of slavery. a. The perception of acoustic statements as linguistic statements (that have a complex structure of elliptical or complex sentences, fragments of the speech, etc.) in a language perceived as foreign. b. The construction-reconstruction of the meaning that was attributed by the transmitter, which refers mainly to the intention and meaning of the entire statement, not to its parts. c. The perception of phenomena perceived as linguistic phenomena of another language. d. The identification-segmentation of minor physical elements of the statement and the attribution of meanings to the segments. e. The processing in the brain. f. The production-construction of significant units of the speech. a. The historical-interpersonal circumstances of perception. b. The historical-interpersonal circumstances of the statement’s production.

Table 2.1. Cognitive tasks and conditions

The receiver (i.e. the slave) identifies-perceives and constructs the linguistic elements in the following way: 1) He reconstructs the implicit segmentation of the statement into simpler signs executed by the transmitter.

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2) He rebuilds his own attributions of meanings to be able to use them himself. During the perception process, it is important to underline that the delimitation-identification of linguistic signs does not occur immediately. Rather, it is gradual, a cyclical process of construction and (re)construction, which, in turn, forces the receiver to elaborate a hypothetical construction of a meaning from the tested and automated constructions of his language. In this regard, Zimmermann (2006: 126) comments: “El modelo de percepción se construye en el transcurso de la elaboración de estrategias cognitivas de construir los elementos en L1 para construir los elementos en L2.” This favors the interference of grammatical structures from L1 to L2, and the creation of new linguistic forms. In other words, it gives way to a restructuring process, supported by a viabilization, that stabilizes the constructed perceptual variations and tends to simplify complex units, through a selection of the perceived stimuli of the external world9. Through this process, an emergent idiolectal grammar of emergency is established during the communication. In the words of Zimmermann (2008: 131): “Es importante resaltar como un factor de la criollización la apropiación selectiva de otra lengua para el uso en una situación de emergencia sin el objetivo de adquirirla.” It should be considered that creolization does not follow the prototypical process of acquiring a language, which commonly occurs in two phases:

Figure 2.4. Typical phases in the process of language acquisition

9

“La situación de contacto-apropiación del esclavo deportado por fuerza no se presta a que disponga de condiciones temporales y actitudinales buenas. Por ello no logra reconstruir las segmentaciones implícitas de cada hablante nativo. En el papiamentu encontramos varios ejemplos: el proceso de aféresis de la sílaba no saliente (átona) (gara < agarrar, bruha > embrujar, kava < acabar, dera < enterrar, las contracciones de sustantivos con sus artículos (laman < la mar; laria < el aire) y contracciones de otro tipo … (diasabra día de la razón)” (Zimmermann 2006: 128).

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As far as simplification is concerned, in Creole languages recourse is made to the simplification of input and output.

Figure 2.5. Input and output simplification in Creole languages

In cognitive perception and construction, simplification occurs for both simple and complex linguistic elements that motivates, as already mentioned, an idiolectal grammar of emergency during communication. This is unlike a bilingual child who acquires two languages, builds them, and begins to cognitively separate the elements of each one, under the influence of the linguistic norms of the community where he lives. Slaves, in contrast, were immersed in the contact of two languages (or more), and did not consider the construction of language separation in its formative phase, nor did they receive any type of sociolinguistic orientation or criteria of linguistic normativity. As a result, slaves were forced to use both languages to satisfy immediate communication in a linguistic situation of emergency, without worrying about speaking one language or another. Furthermore, Zimmermann (2006) rightly points out that speaking two languages in a situation of forced communication, without the objective of acquiring one of the languages, is not the same as acquiring a second language intentionally, even if both circumstances require the brain to process two languages. Regarding restructuration and expansion (i.e. grammaticalization), in Creole languages the cognitive (re)construction of morphosyntactic and semantic structures is greater and tends to decrease the corpus, make prosodic changes, etc., including the transformation of lexical meanings to operational. To the cognitive structuring processes of simplicity, expansion and restructuration that occur in creolization, we must add the emotional circumstances of the situation of slaves. Emotions (originating in the limbic system) directly affect the functioning of the brain and the cognitive processing of linguistic constructions. As Zimmermann (2006: 132) points out: “Emociones y actitudes positivas hacia personas y sus atributos contribuyen a una mejor motivación de percepción y construcción; emociones y actitudes negativas producen lo contrario.”

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In the case of slaves, rather than showing a willingness to acquire the language of their masters, they showed an attitude of disdain, in addition to resistance and rejection of the hegemonic community. Finally, the conditions of viabilization in the slaves’ communication became more complex for several extra-linguistic reasons10. Zimmermann (2006: 133) argues that slaves were in a communicative situation of double viabilization. On the one hand, communicative contact with members of the power societies was more restricted, and on the other, contact with other slaves or other people who spoke a similar linguistic variety was more intense (i.e. they shared a similar idiolect of emergency, but not the same). Because the communicative interaction between slaves was more frequent, this led to an imperfect mastery of the target language, creating a continuum of creole varieties at the sociolectal level manifested in three systems: basilect, mesolect and acrolect. In the words of Zimmermann: La construcción mutua y paralela en la viabilización que ocurre en estas condiciones poco favorables conduce a un domino imperfecto de la lengua meta. Obviamente, las situaciones en las cuales se encontraban los esclavos varían según el país, la plantación, o el individuo y cambian con el tiempo, por ello no es sorprendente que se haya dado una gran variedad de soluciones diferentes al inicio del contacto. De hecho, muchos criollistas destacan la alta variación en las lenguas criollas que se manifiesta, por ejemplo —de manera muy simplificada— en los conceptos de basilecto, mesolecto y acrolecto. El hecho de que se haya impuesto una o pocas de las variedades en detrimento de las otras se debe, por un lado, a que la comunicación entre los esclavos era la más frecuente y por otro a la actuación del factor de identidad colectiva en la viabilización (Zimmermann 2006: 133).

Although viabilization among the slaves did not guarantee the cognitive perfection of the target language, it did allow the practice of the “imperfect” constructions of the target language, which reached a point of stability with its delimitations and its attributions of meaning, due to the tough socio-communicative conditions in which the slaves were immersed. This explains why Creole languages with their corresponding varieties emerged in some regions (Haiti, Curaçao, Jamaica), but did not proliferate in other geographic areas (Cuba, Mexico, Brazil). To summarize, the Neurobiological Constructive Model allows a theory of the genesis and evolution of Creole languages from the perspective of the 10

Slave situations varied from one geography to another, from one empire to another. Likewise, the plantations were not the same, some were more ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous, others were more homogeneous (a dominant ethnic group). The slave communities therefore varied from one to another and from one individual to another.

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affected person (i.e. the slave). In this model, the brain (re)constructs perceptions that are not a direct reflection of reality, but electrical signals caused by the stimuli from the external. In the brain, the cognitive system and the limbic system influence the construction of these perceptions. The second of these systems helps to discriminate between what is relevant and irrelevant, as well as incorporating the emotional circumstances of the slave’s situation. Furthermore, we saw that brain (re)constructing is individualized, because each brain processes and internalizes differently. Additionally, in the interactive-communicative act, all of the speaker’s individual constructions are integrated through interactive and intersubjective viabilization, which is nothing other than the negotiation of meanings.

2.1.8. The Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (Sessarego 2017) The Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis proposed by Sessarego (2017) considers the legal regulations in which slavery developed in the Spanish colonies. According to this scholar, Spanish slavery laws differed from those of French, English, Dutch, Danish and Portuguese. Historically, in the realm of jurisdiction, the Roman legal corpus, known as Corpus Juris Civilis, shaped the legal systems of the regions that were colonized by the Romans in Europe. Consequently, during the colonization of the Americas, the Roman laws were transplanted and implemented in the European colonies in different ways, according to the interests of European colonizers, as well as the living and working conditions of slaves. Thus, based on the Corpus Juris Civilis, the Spanish legal system that regulated black captivity overseas was gradually modified and progressively softened into the medieval Spanish code, called the Siete Partidas, and then further smoothed in the Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias of 1681 (colonial laws). Unlike the Roman legal corpus, Spanish colonial laws granted legal personality and a series of legal rights to slaves such as: a) b) c) d) e) f)

Chances of climbing the social ladder Access and incentives to learn the colonial language (i.e. catechization) Chances to improve their social status (i.e. manumission) Limitations on the master’s freedom to punish their slaves The possibility for slaves to own property and accumulate capital The right to have family

These legal rights had impact on the development of black and white social relations and therefore on the evolution of the Afro-Hispanic language varieties of the Americas, facilitating social integration and acquisition of the Spanish

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language to the slave population. Conversely, in other European colonies slaves didn’t have these kind of legal rights (legal personality), a fact that prevented them from having more access to the lexifier language (French, Dutch, English, Danish, Portuguese). Consequently, slaves developed creole languages. Although Sessarego’s Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis accounts, to an extent, for the paucity of Spanish-based creoles in the Americas, his theory is questionable in that it is circumscribed to the realm of jurisdiction, without considering that, in real life, authorities or slave owners did not always meet the colonial laws in the Spanish territories. Moreover, there are other aspects besides de legal one to be considered on the non-creolization of the Spanish in the Americas, a point to which I will return shortly. In a nutshell, the Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis points out a legal aspect that set apart the colonies ruled by the Spanish Crown from other European colonies in the Americas: the presence versus the absence of slaves’ legal personality. A lawful factor that facilitates both social integration and acquisition of the Spanish language among the slave community. To conclude this section, the following table recapitulates the possible sources of creole structures and the seven theories on creoles etiology discussed above. Source Structures Language Universals Substrate influence Superstrate influence Ecological influences Superstrate influence Constructivist influence Legal influence

Theory The continuum model The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis Relexification Theory Approximation Theory Complementary Theory Afrogenesis Hypothesis Neurobiological Hypothesis The Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis

Proponent Hall (1962) Bickerton (1981) Lefebvre (1998) Chaudenson (2001) Mufwene (2001) McWhorter (2000) Zimmermann (2006) Sessarego (2017)

Table 2.2. Some representative theories on creole genesis

2.2. To be or not to be, the Spanish-based creole deliberation With regard to the scarcity of Spanish-based creoles, some studies have addressed this issue (McWhorter 2000; Chaudenson 2001; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2018). In this section, I will briefly comment on these different criteria.

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2.2.1. Chaudenson’s arguments about the lack of Spanish-based creoles in the Caribbean As mentioned in the preceding section, it is a fact that during the colonial trade period the language spoken by the early Spanish colonists was not a standard variety but rather a koiné which probably started to germinate in the Iberian ports and continued developing in the New World Spanish colonies. This linguistic situation had undeniable repercussions for the subsequent Spanish varieties that developed in the Americas. Those varieties present a complex picture as a result of many linguistic encounters with local indigenous languages and with African languages spoken by the slaves, who were imported in massive numbers, especially during the plantation upheaval (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries). In spite of these multilinguistic contacts in the Spanish colonies, ‘genuine’ Spanish-based creoles never arose compared to other creoles that were lexified by other European languages in the New World. In this vein, Chaudenson (2001) is one of the first scholars to claim that the scarcity of the Spanish-based creoles in America is due to the following set of sociohistorical factors: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Hispanicization Evangelization Education Black-White demographic disproportion A prolonged societé d’habitation period

According to Chaudenson, the Hispanicization policy imposed in 1543 by Charles V had as its main purpose the reduction of linguistic diversity in its new colonies. Consequently, as a colonial strategy, the process of evangelization was taken over by different missionary orders (Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustines and Jesuits, among others) that had as a primary goal to assimilate and “protect” both the indigenous and black populations. These priests also taught the local Spanish koiné to those populations. Chaudenson also considers the early establishment of universities in some of the Spanish colonies –Santo Domingo (1538), Lima (1553), Mexico City (1553) and Havana (1728) as a significant argument to justify the lack of Spanish creoles in America. He stresses that during the colonial period the educational system in the new Spanish colonies was very advanced when compared to the rest of European territorial possessions which maintained a rudimentary educational system up until the 19th century. In regard to the disproportion between the black and white population, Chaudenson basically focuses on the demographic figures of Cuba and the Dominican

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Republic, arguing that in Cuba both European and Black populations were very limited for almost two and half centuries. Chaudenson argues that the Cuban demographic situation at the end of the 18th century (1792) was 96,440 whites and 76,180 blacks (of whom 31,847 were free). Such a situation contributed to a better diffusion and stabilization of a local koiné in Cuba, Chaudenson states: It is probable that … Spanish (in its Cubanized form, of course) was the language of the whole population of the Island, whites and blacks alike … At the time of widespread African immigration in Cuba at the end of the eighteenth century … This regional variety of Spanish served as the target language for African slaves, and they therefore learned it using ‘ordinary’ strategies of approximative acquisition. In other words, the phenomenon of ‘square approximation’ which I believe to characterize and define creolization did not occur here (Chaudenson 2001: 131-132).

Subsequently, the limited population of Europeans and Africans in Cuba facilitated the prolongation of a homestead structure that allowed the slave sector to establish strong ties with Spanish speakers by trying to acquire their mode of speech. In The Dominican Republic, on the other hand, the demographic proportion of whites and blacks was 1:3 at the end of the 16th century. The development of a plantation system on the island, as well as the relocation of slave labor from other colonies, precluded the conditions for a Spanish-based creole to develop. Instead, the African population in the Dominican Republic was absorbed linguistically and became more assimilated to Spanish acrolectal varieties. First, there was [in Santo Domingo] a ‘homestead economy’ … accompanied by modest attempts to develop ‘colonial’ crops (such as sugar, ginger, and indigo). Second, Whites and Blacks interacted constantly and lived in close contact under difficult conditions … Blacks assimilated linguistically, with nearly all of them speaking Spanish (Chaudenson 2001: 133, my italics).

For those reasons, the Spanish spoken in Cuba and the Dominican Republic never reached a creole status.

2.2.2. McWhorter (2000) and the missing Spanish creoles While Chaudenson (2001) offers a set of sociohistorical arguments in relation to the absence of Spanish-based creoles in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, McWhorter (2000) focuses on the sociohistorical conditions of the mainland colonies (the Chocó region in Colombia, the Valle del Chota in Ecuador, Veracruz in

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Mexico, the coastal valleys of Lima in Peru and Venezuela), highlighting that these territories offer a different picture from the one found on the Caribbean islands. According to McWhorter (2000), since the early 17th century the mainland colonies experienced a massive importation of West African Slaves, a fact that made the black population outnumber the white and consequently precipitated a colonial reorganization from a homestead to a plantation system, two necessary conditions for creolization to take place (Chaudenson 2001). However, McWhorter (2000) accurately observes that creolization also failed to occur in the tierra firme Spanish colonies. He argues that the speech of the aforementioned Afro-Hispanic enclaves present a robust inflexional morphology and a minimum of structural transfer from African languages that make it easier to classify them as Spanish varieties with the retention of some traces of an imperfect L2 acquisition. This sociohistorical and linguistic situation in the Spanish mainland colonies leads McWhorter to call into question Chaudenson’s (2001) approximative paradigm and, in general, the creole genesis theory that has been articulated for almost thirty-five years. McWhorter states: Moreover, in their early stages, scientific investigations typically work from data most readily at hand … Thus it is natural that genesis theorists have more readily addressed the presence, rather than the absence, of creoles … None of these things, however, belie two simple facts. One: a viable creole genesis theory must account for these Spanish contexts. Two: a limited access model simply cannot do so (McWhorter 2000: 13, my italics).

To address Chaudenson’s claims, McWhorter (2000) postulates a new creole-origin perspective, the Afrogenesis Hypothesis, already referred in the preceding section and reworded here as follows: European-derived creoles did not arise in the colonial plantations, but rather in West African slave stations and settlements. To strengthen his theoretical posture, McWhorter (2000) cites the nonexistence of bona-fide Spanish-based creoles in America, asserting that Papiamentu and Palenquero are considered synchronically, but not diachronically, as Spanish-based creoles, in his terms: “… these creoles [Papiamentu and Palenquero] arose not via the pidginization of Spanish input, but via subsequent relexification of Portuguese creoles, which had themselves developed via pidginization of Portuguese” (McWhorter 2000: 13). In regard to Palenquero, Schwegler’s research (1991b, 1993) traces its linguistic connection to the São Tomense Portuguese pidgin/creole based on sociohistorical and linguistic facts, highlighting the presence of remnants of African languages spoken by descendants of maroon slaves in Palenque de San Basilio.

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Papiamentu, on the other hand, did not arise from a plantation system, but rather as a result of commercial exchange during the slave trade in a homestead environment. The Spanish source in Papiamentu can probably be explained by Spanish-speaking Jews from Holland who arrived in the Leeward islands of the Netherlands Antilles (Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire) with the purpose of reinforcing the commerce links with the Venezuelan coast (Holm 1988; McWhorter 2000; Rupert 2012; Jacob 2012). McWhorter disagrees and insists on the following: … Spanish and Portuguese are partially mutually intelligible, and they were even closer four hundred years ago. Therefore, there was no need for a new Spanishbased creole to emerge at this point: the Jews from Holland have adjusted easily to Portuguese-based early Papiamentu, especially since they spoke Portuguese as well (McWhorter 2000: 15).

McWhorter concludes that is the Portuguese and not the Spanish input that generated the appearance of Palenquero and Papiamentu creoles in the Americas: The Portuguese … explanation resolves this question thus: it is unlikely to be an accident that the two places where a Spanish creole is spoken today are exactly the two countries where we have particularly explicit evidence –as opposed to marginal linguistic evidence– of a Portuguese contact language being a vital element in the context in which the creole was born (McWhorter 2000: 19, my italics).

McWhorter’s conclusion finds echo in Lipski’s following statement: Most scholars investigating Palenquero converge on the opinion that Palenquero is in essence a partially relexified version of an early Afro-Portuguese pidgin first formed in West Africa. In turn, Palenquero is related to Papiamento, with its unmistakable Portuguese elements, with Cape Verdean Portuguese Creole, with São Tomense Portuguese Creole, with Afro-Portuguese texts from the Renaissance, and with vestigial Afro-Hispanic language from several places in Latin America (Lipski 2005: 287, my italics).

In order to find more arguments to support his Afrogenetic theoretical model, McWhorter (2000) also brings into the discussion the historical and sociolinguistic facts that characterize the bozal Spanish varieties in America by focusing particularly on Cuba and Puerto Rico. These bozal modalities have been considered by some scholars as possible remnants of an extinct Spanish creole with an Afro-Lusitanian base (Granda 1970 and 1971; Lapesa 1980; Otheguy 1973; Megenney 1985, among others). However, McWhorter (2000) stresses that there is neither linguistic nor sociohistorical evidence that support such a claim:

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The bozal Spanishes were mere second language varieties spoken by first-generation arrivals…The argument that there was once a Spanish creole spoken throughout Spanish America unduly strains sociolinguistic credibility, and the small amount of empirical evidence for it (Portuguese pidgin remnants) is easily accounted for a simply adstratal phenomena (McWhorter 2000: 31, my italics).

2.2.3. Creole-genesis and the scarcity of Spanish-based creoles (Lipski 2005) As a response to McWhorter’s aforestated bozal Spanish assertion, Lipski (2005) presents an exhaustive comparative analysis of an ample corpus of Spanish Bozal literature from the early colonial period to the 19th century. His corpus includes Africanized language examples not only from the Spanish Caribbean zone (Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic) but also from Spain and mainland Latin American countries including bozal Portuguese excerpts. Lipski does not completely reject the possibility that Spanish was once creolized in the Caribbean, and by extension in some Afro-Hispanic enclaves on the mainland, as we can deduce it from the following quote. The fact that even the most uneducated and geographically isolated chocoano speaks grammatically standard Spanish (although including features typical of rural illiterate speakers worldwide) reveals that earlier barriers to access to full Spanish were completely penetrated, which does not exclude the possibility that prior to acquiring standard Spanish, Chocó residents spoke some kind of Spanish- derived creole (Lipski 2005: 281, my italics).

In spite of such a possibility, Lipski (2005) concludes that the creole features found in Afro-Caribbean Spanish are not traces of an extinct Spanish creole, but rather are the product of linguistic encounters with established Caribbean creoles especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lipski states: Conditions favoring the formation of a stable creole never existed in the Spanish Caribbean. A much more reasonable route for creole-like characteristics of earlier Afro-Caribbean Spanish, as well as contemporary vernacular varieties, is the impact of established creole languages, which in one guise or another formed the linguistic backbone of the nineteenth-century Caribbean (Lipski 2005: 302, my italics).

The métissage of languages in the Caribbean justifies Lipski’s final conclusion for recognition and rehabilitation of the complex linguistic nature of the Spanish spoken in this region, and probably everywhere. Certainly, not only have

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Amerindian, African, Asian and European languages/language varieties left their own baggage on Caribbean Spanish, but deep-rooted Caribbean creoles have also played an important role in the linguistic nuances of the Spanish of this region in an ongoing process whose results are unpredictable. Such unpredictability is precisely abided by the linguistic diversity that Caribbean Spanish offers due to different historical circumstances as Lipski (2005: 301) has pointed out: “The historical circumstances giving rise to Spanish-creole contacts in the Caribbean varied from one region to another, and also varied according to the time period.”

2.2.4. Enhancing dialogue in the Spanish creole debate (Sessarego 2018) Most recently Sessarego’s Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis, discussed above, also addresses the reasons behind the paucity of Spanish creoles in the Americas, compared to the English- and French-based creoles varieties widespread in the area. McWhorter’s Afro-Genesis Hypothesis presents two objections to Sessarego’s Hypothesis: 1) its monogenetic approach (the idea that only African-born pidgins in French/English/Portuguese may lead to all creole varieties derived from each one of them in the Americas), and 2) that it does not provide an accurate analysis of the socio-historical conditions across colonial Spanish America. Based on legal and social aspects encompassed in his Legal Hypothesis on Creole Genesis, Sessarego (2018) states that the only two existing Spanish creoles, Palenquero (spoken in Palenque de San Basilio) and Papiamentu (spoken in the ABC islands), have developed and survived, in great part due to the fact that Spanish colonial laws never applied in these geographical regions. Sessarego is convinced that the existence of legal personality (i.e. the right to not be abused, to own property, family preservation, Christian education, opportunities to obtain manumission, etc.) in the Spanish colonies, prevented the formation of ‘genuine’ Spanish-based creoles. To summarize the discussion on the scarcity of Spanish-based creoles in the Americas, Chaudenson (2001) argues that the approximative paradigm failed to occur in the Spanish colonies due to the following facts: Hispanicization, evangelization, education, black-white demographic disproportion, and a prolonged homestead society period. On the other hand, McWhorter (2000) claims that Spanish-based creoles did not emerge in the Americas because the Spanish empire did not possess slave stations and settlements on the West African coast, where pidginized versions of other lexifier languages arose and were later expanded in the new colonies giving birth to Portuguese-, French-, English- and Dutch-based creoles and the exception of ‘genuine’ Spanish-based creoles in America.

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As a response to the claim that there was once a Spanish-based creole in the Caribbean zone, which probably was extended to the mainland Spanish colonies, Lipski (2005) argues that such idea is not very compelling and that a better alternative is to look at the linguistic impact of established Caribbean creoles on the Spanish of this region. Finally, Sessarego (2018) maintains that the scarcity of Spanish creoles in the Americas is due to the presence of the legal personality in the territories ruled by the Spanish Crown. This legal factor facilitated social integration and the acquisition of Spanish as an (advanced) second language. Regarding to the acquisition of an (advanced) second language, Sessarego in his analysis of Afro Peruvian Spanish argues: The linguistic evidence provided in this chapter has shown that certain aspects of the Afro-Hispanic dialects, often reported in relation to their potential creole origin, can be accounted for as the result of conventionalized advanced SLA strategies. APS, in this respect, fits perfectly with the rest of these vernaculars. This variety presents exactly those features that several scholars would see as symptomatic of a previous creole stage: the use of non-emphatic; non-contrastive overt subjects; invariant verb forms; lack of gender and number agreement across the nominal domain; non-inverted questions; bare nouns. This study, however, has shown that such grammatical elements can be described as the byproduct of advanced second language acquisition phenomena, which do not necessarily imply any (de)creolization phase. The analysis here offered, therefore, breaks with the traditional creole life-cycle (pidginization → creolization → decreolization) that certain scholars would propose to account for the genesis and evolution of these dialects (Sessarego 2015: 77-78).

2.3. On the genesis of Papiamentu and the Sephardic linguistic contribution Up to date, there is still disagreement about Papiamentu’s underlying roots. Unlike most of the creoles that emerged in the Americas, Papiamentu is not based on Dutch, the dominant language of the European colonizers of Curaçao. Some scholars claim that Papiamentu is derived from Portuguese, others think that it is an originally Spanish-based creole that emerged in the island, while others trace its roots to a creole/pidgin that emerged somewhere in the West Coast of Africa (Quint 2000, McWhorter 2000). Regarding the controversy on Papiamentu’s origin, Jacobs stresses: Ever since Lenz’ (1928) pioneering description of PA, its mixed Spanish-Portuguese vocabulary has provoked heavy debate. Lenz’ plea for PA’s Afro-Portuguese origins (“Su gramática … es ‘negro-portuguesa’ en primer lugar” (323)) received support from prominent scholars such as Navarro Tomás (1953), Van Wijk (1958), Valkhoff

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(1966) and Voorhoeve (1973), but linguists defending PA’s Spanish roots (e.g., Maduro 1965, 1966, 1969, DeBose 1975 or Rona 1976) have been similarly numerous. That the debate is far from settled is noted by Lipski (2005: 282), who asserts that up to present “scholars are … evenly divided as to the Spanish vs. Portuguese origins of Papiamento” (Jacobs 2009: 320).

So, the picture on Papiamentu’s pedigree seems complex due to the limited historical evidence. The earliest written reference is traced back to 1704, a diary entry by Father Alexius Schabel, who refers to the language spoken in Curaçao as a “broken Spanish”. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, similar references to the language are found in different legal and religious records like “the language of the country (la lengua del país)”, “in the creole language/ tongue (creolse taal)”, among others (Rupert 2012). Besides these references to the creole spoken among the Curaçaoan islanders, there exists a 1775 letter written wholly in Papiamentu, a correspondence between two Sephardic lovers (Abraham de David de Costa Andrade Jr. and Sarah de Isaac Pardo y Vaz Farro), who were excommuned for adultery by the Mikve Israel synagogue elders (Freitas et al. 2019; Rupert 2012; Jacobs 2012; Liba 2008; Salomon 1982; Wood 1972; Granda 1974). Additionally, there is another document dated 1776 that reproduces a dialogue between two slaves recorded by the Sephardic Jew Samuel Costa Andrade (Freitas et al. 2019; Maurer 1998). This historical evidence suggests that Papiamentu was a full-fledged creole in Curaçao since the beginning of the 18th century spoken not only by the local slave community but also by the Sephardic and Dutch settlers established in the Island. It is important to highlight that the emergence and consolidation of Papiamentu across social class and ethnicity was triggered by Curaçao’s maritime trade, with the island becoming one of the main commercial centers in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and mainland South America. In this regard Liba points out: En 1675, la West Indische Companie declaró la isla como “puerto libre”, utilizando Curaçao como base de comercio de contrabando con las colonias españolas, francesas e inglesas, e incluso, con las islas del Caribe. Los sefardíes de Curaçao jugaron un papel importante en este comercio regional. Dueños de barcos desde 1652, los sefardíes tenían en 1726 más de doscientos barcos, dominando la navegación de la isla. Los sefardíes tuvieron contactos regulares de negocios con más de veinte puertos en el Norte, Centro y Sur América, el Golfo de México y las islas del Caribe (Liba 2008: 33).

Nonetheless, Papiamentu’s genesis is still an enigma and continuously feeds debate among linguists. Most recently, some scholars (Martinus 1996; Jacobs 2009, 2012) have revealed linguistic ties with the Portuguese-based Creole

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languages of Upper Guinea developed and spoken in the West Coast of Africa. Yet no one knows for sure the exact chains of development and transmission of this Upper Guinea-Portuguese creole. However, there is a consensus that the transatlantic slave trade was the medium by which a full-fledged Portuguese-based creole from the Upper Guinea region was transferred to the island of Curaçao during the second half of the 17th century, where it hastily evolved into Papiamentu through Spanish lexification. In this vein, Jacobs (2012) stresses: If these calculations are correct, we are left with a remarkably short space of time of some four and a half decades (1659-1704) or less for this lexical shift to have been carried out. This provides another argument in favor of labeling the referred lexical shift as ‘relexification’ rather than as ‘(heavy) lexical borrowing’, which as noted, occurs at a much slower rate (Jacobs 2012: 326).

But how did Creole languages evolve in West Africa? There are historical records, from the early 16th century, that account for a group of Portuguese emigrants from Cape Verde islands, known as lançados (Jews and “New Christians”), who settled along the West Coast of Africa (from the Petite Côte of Senegal to Sierra Leone in the south). Subsequently, “New Christians”, fleeing from the tentacles of the Inquisition, continued arriving in the region until 1610, thanks to the Portuguese Crown’s edict that on 1601 briefly granted New Christians the right to settle in Portugal’s overseas possessions (Mark 2002). Many of these Portuguese settlers married women from local communities; the descendants of these Luso-African unions were locally called filhos da terra or “Portuguese”. Over the time, they developed an identity characterized by the following parameters: a) occupation, b) language, c) religion, and d) material culture. According to some references (Mark and Silva Horta 2011; Mark 2002), in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in West Africa, to be a “Portuguese” was to be a trader. Most of the Portuguese that settled in the area were long-distance merchants, who traded not only with other itinerant Portuguese seafarers but also with Dutch, French and, later, with English sailors. In this regard, Mark and Silva Horta (2001: 20) cite an excerpt of an unpublished manuscript dated between 1607 or 1608 entitled Relationship of the Entire District of Guinea and Government of Caboberde, written in ancient Spanish by a New Christian named Sebastão Fernandes Caçãoes. En este puerto dali ay una aldea de cien vecinos portugueses y negros. A este puerto vinieron de Flandes gente que professa la ley de Moyssen y acen all[i] y guardan sus ritos y ceremonias como los de Judea y los portugueses quiriendo matar los y echar los de allí corieron mucho riesgo porque acudió el Rey y les dijo que su tierra era feria donde podía auitar todo genero de jente y que nadie se descompassiese en ella

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que les mandaria cortar las cabeças; que la guera si la querian la hiciesen en la mar y no en su tierra que ya dicho que era feria11.

As it was mentioned, the Portuguese who arrived at the Petite Côte of West Africa in the first decade of the 17th century were “New Christians” (recently converted Jews), who, once established in the region, returned to their ancient faith by professing it openly. Concerning this, Mark and Silva Horta (2011: 9) comment: “However, on the geographical margins of empire, where there was no Holy Tribunal, Sephardim were rarely forced to hide their Jewish identity. In fact, the more peripheral a place, the safer New Christians and Jews tended to feel. West Africa was one such place.” Consequently, the religion of the Luso-African communities of the West Coast of Africa was characterized by an amalgamation of Jewish, Christian, and African practices, the latter due to the process of acculturation. It is also important to emphasize that many of the “New Christians” (who were involuntarily converted) adopted Iberian names and surnames, a practice that dates back to the 12th and 13th centuries in the Iberian Peninsula and that obeys specific cultural, religious and historical circumstances. Similarly, this practice is reflected among the “New Christians” who settled in the Petite Côte of West Africa. The tendency of “New Christians” to camouflage their identity using different names and surnames (Jewish and Christian), forced them to live two identities and to accept the idea that individual identity can be flexible in the social, religious, cultural and ideological context determined by the circumstances. Put in other words, “New Christians” haunted what I have called a pragmatic identity. Another interesting aspect of the “New Christians” and Jews’ identity who settled in the Petite Côte of West Africa is the way in which the Jewish condition was transmitted, considering their union with African women. According to the Rabbinic law, the condition of being Jewish is inherited by maternal line. However, under certain circumstances Jewish status became inherited by the father’s line. This was a socio-religious phenomenon that not only occurred in West Africa, but was also carried over to the Americas by the “New Christians” and Jews who settled in the colonies, where there was a high percentage of black 11

‘In this puerto dali there is a community with 100 families of Portuguese neighbors of Portuguese and blacks. To this port came people from Flanders who profess the law of Moses and here they do and maintain their rituals and ceremonies like the ones of Judea. And the Portuguese seeking to kill them and expel them from that place ran a serious risk. Because the king took the side of the [Jews] and he told that his land was a market where all kinds of people had a right to live and that no one would cause disorder in his land; otherwise, he would order that their heads be cut off. If they wanted to make war, they should make it on the sea not in his land which had already said was a market.

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population. This was for instance the case of the black Jewish community of Suriname as well as the Northeast region of Brazil (Mark and da Silva Horta 2011; Ben Ur 2006). On the other hand, aspects of the material culture of “New Christians” and Sephardic Jews settled on the Upper Coast of West Africa were expressed in architectural elements of Portuguese style (i.e. rectangular houses surrounded by a veranda or porch, whose exterior walls were whitened with lime) that contrasted with the circular shape of African style. In addition, there are some artefacts (saltcellars, horns, spoons, among others) that exhibit cultural syncretism preserved in some museums around the world like the following set of Bini-Portuguese spoons carved in ivory (Figure 2.2.).

(Inv. No. 91914)

(Inv. No. 91911)

(Inv. No. 91913)

(Inv. No. 91912)

Figure 2.6. Bini-Portuguese spoons carved in ivory, 16th century, West Africa, Online Collection, Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnology Museum of Vienna)

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Among this set of ivory spoons, the first calls our attention, because it clearly simulates a yad (reading pointer) that serves to follow the Torah text in Hebrew during the Jewish liturgy. Torah pointers traditionally represent the hand with only the index finger extended. However, this Bini-Portuguese spoon has two fingers, index and middle, extended together, like a Christian blessing.

(Inv. No. 91914)

Figure 2.7. Bini-Portuguese spoon with a dual symbolism, 16th century, West Africa, Online Collection, Museum für Völkerkunde (Ethnology Museum of Vienna)

This gesture suggests a dual symbolism representing two religious systems, Jewish and Christian, as a way of protection of the “New Christians” established in the Upper Coast of West Africa to disguise their practice of Judaism when there were Portuguese Christian missionaries or sailors in the coastal areas. The animals and corofis (figures that invoke a spiritual force) exhibited in the previously Bini-Portuguese spoons are expressions of the religious symbolism of the Sapi culture of Sierra Leone and Benin. One of them shows a fish is about to be swallowed by a snake (Figure 2.2., Inv. No 91911), the other two have a bird (Figure 2.2., Inv. No 91913) and a minor mammal (Figure 2.2., Inv. No 91912) finely carved. Such delicate work is the result of an ivory art that mirrors a complex and multicultural iconography. Regarding the ivory art from the Upper Coast of West Africa, Preston Blier (1993) comments: Later ivories, many of them commissioned with European motifs, were acquired primarily from two regions, the area once identified with the Sapi culture (which today lies in the country of Sierra Leone, where related objects were collected by the 1490s), and Benin, a kingdom in what is now Nigeria, which produced ivories for European export beginning in the 1520s. Carvings from these areas, which today are generally referred to as Afro-Portuguese ivories because of their frequent incorporation of both African and European imagery,

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take various forms, including saltcellars, trumpets, spoons, and catholic ritual objects such as pyxes… Although it has been remarked that there are no direct European prototypes for the forms and decoration of the saltcellars and spoons, earlier scholars have stressed the vital role of European patrons in delimiting particular types of imagery (Blier 1993: 376-378, my italics).

Relating to language, it has been said that the first immigrants (lançados) who settled in the Upper West coast of Africa spoke Portuguese, but it is possible that these Portuguese merchants had competence in other languages since they were either Jews or “New Christians”. Before going any further, it is important to recall that in the Iberian Peninsula, most of the Sephardim Jews, converted or not, had proficiency in various languages (Iberian Arabic, Latin, Hebrew, Castilian, Catalan, Galician, Euskara, including their own language Judeo-Spanish/ Portuguese). Their commercial activities demanded them to be skillful at least in two, three or even more languages. So, once established in the West Coast of Africa, these Portuguese traders also learned local African languages to the point that, in subsequent generations, their language(s) gradually developed into a Creole as a result of linguistic contact. In this regard, Mark (2002: 15) comments on the Portuguese community settled on the Petite Côte region: However, it is likely that a form of Crioulo had evolved in the Petite Côte–Gambia region by the first half of the seventeenth century. In 1602, at Portudale on the Petite Côte, Dutch trader Pieter de Marees noted that local people ‘have their own language, a mixture of many different languages.’ This reference strongly suggests the existence, at an early date, of a hybrid or trading language along the Petite Côte. Given the preponderance of Luso-Africans and lançados along this part of the coast, such a language would surely have incorporated Portuguese … By this date, Gambian Portuguese may already have been transformed into a nonstandard version of the language; this is suggested by a 1646 report from an Andalusian Capucine mission. (my italics)

Mark’s quote suggests that by the middle of the 17th century a Creole language was spoken on the Petite Côte (located in current Senegal) and, by extrapolation, in other areas of the West Coast of Africa due to language contact triggered by the intensive commercial activity that developed in the region. Such linguistic situation supports Marinus’ (1996) and Jacobs’ (2009, 2012) arguments about how a full-fledged creole from Upper Guinea was imported to the island of Curaçao through the slave trade by the second half of the 17th century. In Jacobs’ (2012) words:

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The idea that the variety of Upper Guinea PC transferred to Curaçao was a natively spoken creole with an elaborate grammar perfectly matches the widespread assumption … that creolization had started on Santiago [Cape Verde] already in the latter stages of the 15th century and was completed by the mid-16th century, if not earlier. Thus, by the time speakers arrived on Curaçao (1650-1680), it had already had plenty of time to expand syntactically and morphologically owing to the ongoing contact with a morphologically complex language such as Portuguese, but possibly also to internal, contact-independent processes of complexification (Jacobs 2012: 315-316).

In spite of relating the origins and linguistic structure of Papiamentu to an Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole, Jacobs (2012) surprisingly concludes that Papiamentu is not a Portuguese-based creole but a Spanish-based creole. According to him, the Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole underwent a hasty relexification (abrupt lexical shift) towards Spanish since 1659. In his words: Firstly, that the development of PA [Papiamentu] out of Upper Guinea PC [Portuguese Creole] is classifiable as a case of relexification by, rather than as heavy borrowing from Spanish … the first Upper Guinean slaves probably arrived on Curaçao in 1659 (and stopping arriving after ca. 1680). We may thus take 1659 as a terminus post quem. Secondly, the 1775 PA letter and earliest available written PA document shows roughly the same quantity of Spanish-derived lexical material as modern-day PA does. Clearly, this suggests that the most important lexical shift towards Spanish had already been completed by that time, which leaves us with time span of some 115 years or less for the relexification towards Spanish to have occurred ... rapid and far-reaching process of lexical shift of the original Portuguese-based lexicon towards Spanish, a process which, I assume, was activated and completed in the period 1660 and 1700, and primarily involved two languages: Upper Guinea PC and Spanish (Jacobs 2012: 325-326).

As this quote suggests, Jacobs considers Papiamentu to be a Spanish-based creole, arguing that the abrupt language shift of the Upper-Guinea Portuguese Creole towards Spanish was carried out deliberately as mark of a new ethnic identity among the Curaçaoans. Jacobs also takes into account the impact of Spanish as a language of economic and social prestige in the 17th century on Curaçaoan society (slaves, Sephardic Jews, and Dutch, including groups of Spanish speakers in the island) as a factor that motivated the hasty relexification of the Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole toward Spanish. Moreover, Jacobs also suggests that the Jews who settled on Curaçao were fluent in Spanish and that it was their home language. As I have mentioned earlier, Sephardic Jews were fluent in various languages. Nevertheless, to say that Spanish was their home language is arguable, especially in Curaçao, where written (liturgical prayers) and archeological (gravestone

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epitaphs) evidence written in Portuguese exists, suggesting that the Sephardic Jews of the island also used Portuguese along with Spanish in and outside of the home realm (Freitas et al. 2019; Ben Ur 2006). Most recently, some scholars (Freitas et al. 2019; Joubert and Perl 2007; Henriquez 1988) have emphasized the Sephardic linguistic contribution to the evolution and consolidation of Papiamentu as one of the national languages spoken in Curaçao. Interestingly, they have also pointed out a Sephardic Papiamentu variety that developed and coexisted along with Papiamentu in the island throughout the time of its configuration, being a constant influence on it. Table 2.2. below shows some differences in vocabulary between Sephardic Papiamentu and Papiamentu (adapted from Freitas et al. 2019, Joubert and Perl 2007, and Henriquez 1988). Sephardic Papiamentu bañu festehá fora poko dia atras komendu kerendu

Papiamentu

English

baño selebrá fuera poko dia despues komiendo kreyendo

bathroom celebrate outside some days after eating believing

Table 2.3. Differences between Sephardic Papiamentu and Papiamentu

The slight variations that these two Papiamentu varieties exhibit may also be attributed to extralinguistic causes, especially if we consider the second wave of Sephardic immigrants who arrived in Curaçao in 1659, a date that coincides with the arrival of the first group of slaves from Upper Guinea to the island. This event set up the conditions to trigger language contact between these two ethnic groups, influencing each other. According to historical records, Samuel Cohen (Coheno) was the first Jew to arrive in Curaçao in 1634 as an interpreter of J. van Walbeek, and was named by the Dutch soldiers “a judihuelo”. Cohen, originally from Amsterdam, remained eight years in the island. Later, in 1651, the first large group of ten families from the Sephardic Jewish Congregation of Amsterdam arrived in Curaçao. Under the leadership of Joao d’Yllan, this group founded the first synagogue of Curacao called Mikvé Israel-Emanuel (The Hope of Israel), the oldest continually used synagogue in the Western hemisphere until today. The second large group of Sephardic Jews, around seventy people, arrived in 1659, also from Amsterdam under the leadership of Isaac da Costa. This group consecrated the first Jewish cemetery on the island, “Beth Haim” (The House of Life), also considered the

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oldest in the Americas. Most of the tombstones —approximately seventy-five percent— have inscriptions in Portuguese (Jacobs 2012; Liba 2008; Joubert and Perl 2007; Ben Ur 2006). Returning to the linguistic characteristics of Sephardic Papiamentu, Freitas et al. (2019) have reexamined the 1775 letter, highlighting that the variety of Papiamentu used by the Jewish lovers in their correspondence is similar to modern Papiamentu, but that the text exhibits some phonetic-phonological differences like lambdacism, metathesis, and the use of the voiced postalveolar sibilant fricative /ʒ/. They also noticed that the 1775 letter exhibits Portuguese archaisms that in vernacular Papiamentu do not exist, corroborating that the Jewish lovers indeed spoke a variety of Papiamentu. We must keep in mind that along with the first slaves who arrived in Curaçao around 1650, Sephardic Jews were among the earliest speakers of Papiamentu. As a result, the Portuguese/Spanish elements that this creole exhibits are largely a result of the Jewish settlement on the island. It is likely that the Curaçaoan Jewry continued to speak their language(s) with distinctive Jewish lexical elements. This is a reiterative phenomenon found in different geographies around the world where Jewish communities have taken root (for instance Haketia, a Judeo-Spanish variety developed in northern Morocco, Judeo-Latin, JudeoUrdu, and so forth), and the Jews of Curaçao are no exception. Accordingly, Sephardic Jews influenced the genesis and development of Papiamentu, not only through Portuguese/Spanish, but also through their own dialect, Sephardic Papiamentu. In Freitas et al.’s (2019: 34) words: “Therefore, the role of Sephardim was twofold: First, the Portuguese spoken by the Sephardic community influenced classic Papiamentu, later, the Papiamentu dialect specific to this community and its slaves also acted in the configuration of the general variety.” Freitas et al. (2019) show a less radicalized position regarding the configuration of Papiamentu compared to Jacobs (2012). They recognize the Portuguese linguistic elements of Papiamentu and stress the Sephardic sociolinguistic impact on its evolution and consolidation as one of the national languages of Curaçao.

2.4. The Rhizomatic Linguistic Model Considering the complex process of Papiamentu’s configuration, it would be inappropriate to continue circumscribing this creole language into a rigid monogenetic model resulting from an Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole and synchronically relexified by Spanish/Portuguese, depending on the scholar’s position. As discussed in the previous section, Papiamentu is a result of a diversity of linguistic contacts, both diachronically and synchronically, since the beginning

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of its conception up to the present day. Such intense language contact (Upper Guinea Portuguese Creole, Mandinka, Wolof, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English, French, local Amerindian languages, among others) has shaped vernacular Papiamentu, which also displays a rich dialectology in and outside of the island, like Aruba Papiamentu, Bonaire Papiamentu, Sephardic Papiamentu, enclaves of Papiamentu speakers in Brazil and Venezuela, including diastratic layers of Papiamentu that are spoken in Curaçao. Regarding the diastratic aspect of Papiamentu, Joubert and Perl (2007) comment: Papiamentu speakers intuitively perceive that the Papiamentu spoken on the western side of the island is a more basilectal variation of the Creole, as compared to that spoken in Willemstad. This is also based on the fact that the inhabitants of western Curaçao are direct descendants of the slave population, with hardly any mestization having taken place between them and other groups in the population (Joubert and Perl 2007: 50).

The unpredictable linguistic diversity of Papiamentu therefore calls to mind an analogy between the plurality of its linguistic contacts in the Caribbean and the concept of the rhizome12 introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in the opening passage of their work entitled A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. These postmodern philosophers use the term rhizome to describe a theory that allows for multiple and non-hierarchical data interpretation. Their first chapter, ‘Rhizome’, is organized around the distinction between the ‘arborescent’ and ‘rhizomatic’ models of thought. The arboric metaphor is represented by the tree-like structure of genealogy, vertical and stiff, whose branches continue to subdivide into smaller and lesser categories in a binary or unitary way. In contrast, rhizomatic thinking is radically horizontal, multiplicitous, moving in many directions and connected to many other lines of thinking, acting and being. Similar to Milroy’s (1992) use of the concept of networks, rhizomes cut across borders and build links between pre-existing gaps or nodes. Papiamentu multilinguistic configuration obeys to the four principles of the Deleuze and Guattari notion of the rhizome.

12

In botany, a rhizome is defined as a horizontal stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes in all directions. A rhizome is a food-storing organ, beneath the surface of the ground, and enables a plant to reproduce itself. It has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things. Rhizomes defy categorization as individuated entities and instead are populations, multiplicities, rather than unified upright things; ginger can be considered as an example of a rhizome.

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1. Connection 2. Heterogeneity 3. Multiplicity 4. Cartography According to Deleuze and Guattari, connection and heterogeneity suggest an ideal network of a maximal connection between points: “any point of the rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7). In addition, multiplicity suggests that the rhizomatic model is comprised of a multiplicity of lines and connections. This contradicts unitary, binary, and totalizing models. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 8): “There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.” Finally, the cartography principle is related to the notion of a map. Deleuze and Guattari draw a distinction between maps and tracings arguing that a rhizome is A map and not a tracing … The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted, to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation (Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 12, my italics).

Table 2.4. contrasts the characteristics between the rhizomatic and arboric paradigms based on Deleuze and Guattari (1987). RHIZOMATIC Non-linear Multiplicitous Heterogeneity

ARBORIC Linear Unitary and binary Homogeneity

Table 2.4. Contrasts between a rhizomatic and an arboric paradigm

Thus, similar to the rhizomatic model, Papiamentu has entered into contact with a great diversity of languages and language varieties including deep-rooted Caribbean creoles. This fact makes Papiamentu heterogeneous with linguistic features that can be connected to not only one but rather to various linguistic sources, which are always subject to change. Put in other words, Papiamentu is not composed of a unique root, but rather, it derives from a multiple root, a product of different linguistic encounters where various linguistic features coincide and multiply in a rhizomatic way. Hence, it is possible to establish the following rhizomatic linguistic principles:

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Principles of the Linguistic Rhizome • A language (variety) is not derived from one unique linguistic root. • There is not a single homogenous linguistic community.

These principles contrast with the standard and monolithic linguistic notions that have characterized Western thinking (Mufwene 2001, Glissant 2002) and lead to a better understanding of the nature and evolution of Papiamentu, and by extrapolation of other creoles and language varieties spoken not only in the Caribbean, but also around the world, that are connected to each other in a rhizomatic way. In the rhizomatic linguistic model there are no linguistic centripetal forces or linguistic vertical prototypes; each creole/language (variety) is simply part of an entire linguistic entity as Figure 2.8. shows.

Figure 2.8. Papiamentu Linguistic Rhizome

Although the rhizomatic model applied to linguistics is useful for a better understanding of the formation of creoles/language varieties in contact settings, this model tends to be more descriptive rather than predictive and is circumscribed to the external aspects of the language (i.e. socio-historical factors). However, this does not affect the Principles of the Linguistic Rhizome proposed here; on the contrary, as it has been shown in this chapter, the rhizomatic metaphor is a powerful tool that may account for linguistic contact situations in which a diversity of language sources generates heterogeneous linguistic entities such as creoles and any other language variety. The mappable nature of the rhizome also

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accounts for the different Afro-Hispanic language varieties located at different enclaves in the Americas, and by extension everywhere (for instance the Spanish variety spoken in Equatorial Guinea). As a conclusion, a rhizomatic interpretation of Papiamentu supports the plurality of linguistic encounters in Curaçao and their impact on this creole, making it heterogeneous; a linguistic situation that can be extrapolated to other creole/ language varieties spoken around the world. The Rhizomatic Linguistic Model also strengthens the necessity for studying each creole/language variety in its own linguistic ecology (Mufwene 2001), individually (Zimmermann 2006), but without losing its relation to other language (varieties) which it has entered in contact with. Taking into account the Rhizomatic Linguistic Model, the present study focuses on the linguistic analysis of Costeño Spanish, an Afro-Hispanic language variety spoken in the Costa Chica region of Oaxaca in Mexico. As Papiamentu, Costeño Spanish is also product of linguistic contacts that took place in this Afro-Mexican enclave during and after colonial times. Unfortunately, as it was mentioned in the Introductory Chapter, this Afro-Mexican variety is facing extinction in the region due to extralinguistic factors (socioeconomic absorption, linguistic forces of standardization in favor of normative Spanish, natural disasters, drug trafficking and public insecurity in the region and, consequently, emigration, especially by the younger generations).

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C

3

Methodological and Historical Remarks

3.1. Study description 3.1.1. Theoretical background and motivation In the Introductory Chapter of this work, it was stated that towards the end of the 20th century most of the Afro-Hispanic linguistic research had focused on historical (chronicles and archival documents) and literary (Bozal literature and Villancicos) testimonies of past centuries, which do not accurately reflect the speech patterns of African slaves and have a great tendency to exaggerate, stereotype and create distortions of ‘non-white’ Spanish (Lipski 1986b; Zimmermann 1996). In contrast, in the last decades, several linguistic studies have been carried out providing interesting and important data on the current speech of the African descent communities in different regions of the Americas. These studies encompass Afro-Hispanic varieties of the Caribe (Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic) and of the Mainland (Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Venezuela, Panama and, to a lesser extent, Mexico). The present research contributes to this linguistic arena by analyzing the current speech of two Afro-Mexican communities of the Costa Chica region of the state of Oaxaca. Unlike Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico, the Costa Chica region on the Pacific coast was never an important sugar cane production region; its economic importance lay in cattle, a point to which I will return later. For this reason, a

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different kind of slave-life evolvement may have influenced language and culture in the Costa Chica region when compared to Veracruz or even other AfroMexican enclaves (see Figure 3.3 below). To date, there have only been five studies carried out on the Costa Chica which allude to the speech of the region. The first study, conducted by Aguirre-Beltrán (1989b), entitled Cuijla: esbozo etnográfico de un pueblo negro, is still one of the most influential references rich in ethnographic material, history, tradition, folklore, social life, language and ethnic characteristics of the inhabitants of Cuajinicuilapa, an Afro-Mexican community in the state of Guerrero. The second, by Díaz Pérez (1993), entitled Choco, chirundo y chano: vocabulario afromestizo, studies the Afro-mixed lexicon of the state of Guerrero. The third study, conducted by Althoff (1994), entitled Afro-Mestizo Speech from Costa Chica, Guerrero: From Cuaji to Cuijla is the first piece of fieldwork carried out by a linguist in the area, in which the speech of 20 subjects from two Afro-Mexican communities of the state of Guerrero, Cuajinicuilapa and San Nicolás is analyzed. The fourth is a valuable anthropological Ph.D. dissertation entitled Race and Nation: A Study of Blackness in Mexico carried out by Vaughn (2001a) in the Costa Chica region of Oaxaca which briefly refers, in a nonsystematic way, to some features of Collantes speech, a Black community in the region. Finally, the fifth is also an anthropological study, carried out by Gillis (1976), who refers to the speech of the Afro-Mexican communities of the Costa Chica region in the following terms: Uno de los aspectos de la cultura que se dice derivada de los “morenos” es hablar “pallo”. Esta palabra particular se refiere no solamente a la fonología africanizada; por ejemplo, la supresión de s antes de las consonantes, sino también a la manera pesada y lenta de pronunciar el lenguaje con un ritmo peculiar. Otra identificación del lenguaje “pallo” es el uso de un léxico particular; por ejemplo, la voz “mba” que se sitúa entre el sí y el “umhmm” del lenguaje afroamericano, tanto en uso, como en significado (Gillis 1976: 99)1.

3.1.2. Aim of the study and research questions The goal of the present study is to describe in a qualitative and more systematic manner the current speech of two Afro-Mexicans communities, Collantes

1

‘One of the aspects of the culture that is said to be derived from “morenos” is to speak “Pallo”. This word not only refers to the Africanized phonology; for example, the deletion of s before consonants, but it also refers to the heavy and slow way to pronounce the language with a peculiar rhythm. Another characteristic of the “pallo” speech is the use of a particular lexicon. For instance, the word “mba” is placed between the words yes and the “umhmm” of the Afro-American speech, both in use and in meaning.’

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and Santa María de la Luz Chicometepec, locally known as La Boquilla, situated in the Costa Chica region of Oaxaca, as well as to highlight the importance of this Afro-Mexican enclave for future linguistic, sociological and anthropological investigations. Throughout this study, I will refer to this particular variety as Costeño Spanish. By keeping and respecting this local term, I want to express my respect to the way the people of this region identify themselves. Bearing this in mind, I will attempt to answer the following questions. 1) What are the distinctive phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical elements of Costeño Spanish? How is it similar to or different from other Spanish varieties? 2) Could some Costeño linguistic characteristics be considered a result of the African linguistic legacy? 3) What conclusions can be drawn about the linguistic rhizomatic nature of Costeño Spanish in light of the evidence presented in this study? 4) What linguistic and extralinguistic factors are involved in the standardization of Costeño Spanish that put this dialect in danger of extinction?

3.1.3. Procedure The present study is based on data collected on-site during the following three phases of study.

3.1.3.1. Phase 1: Pilot study During Phase 1, I traveled across the Costa Chica region by public transportation, starting in the Port of Acapulco in the State of Guerrero and finishing in Puerto Escondido in the state of Oaxaca. During this first exploratory trip, I had the opportunity to visit various Afro-Mexican towns and villages of the area2, as well as to accomplish the following goals: 1) select two Afro-Mexican communities for future study; 2) establish personal contacts with local authorities and members of the two selected communities (Collantes and La Boquilla) and 3) gather some preparatory linguistic material for preliminary analysis. The criteria to select the two target communities are shown in (1):

2

These include in the state of Guerrero: San Marcos, Copala, Marquelia, Juchitán, Azoyú, El Terrero, and Cuajinicuilapa; and in the state of Oaxaca: El Ciruelo, Estancia Grande, Pinotepa Nacional, Corralero, El Chivo, Collantes, La Boquilla, Morelos, San José del Progreso, Charco Redondo and El Azufre (See Figure 3.4).

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(1) Criteria for the communities’ selection. • Geographic isolation. • Neighboring locations between them. • Non-industrialized communities. • Socio-historically considered as Black. • Economically, socially and politically marginalized. • The majority of the population with evident African phenotype. • Personal empathy toward members of both communities developed since the first time. Among the aforementioned criteria, the last one was probably the most crucial from the beginning of my fieldwork, because I actively attempted to become accepted into the research communities in order to develop close relationships and to identify myself with the people that I was studying. This is very important in the field especially when one has to return again and again to the same research communities. Additionally, each time that I left either of the two communities, Collantes or La Boquilla, I was careful to let the communities’ members know that I would probably return to visit them into the near future. This is an effective and ethical way to reinforce links between subjects and researcher by setting up the basis of an open and friendly relationship. It is important to keep in mind that subjects become more than subjects in the field. On this matter Duranti (1997: 95) accurately points out: “It is simply patronizing or racist to think of the people we study as innocent victims of our own academic and scientific plans. They have their own ideas, plans, and goals. We must fit into their lives like they need to fit into ours.”

3.1.3.2. Phase 2: Planned studies Consecutive planned studies were carried in the two target communities. This phase was the most intense and productive. I remained in the field. Those temporary stays allowed me to become immersed into both Afro-Oaxacan communities, meet more community members, closely interact with all of them, and participate in their daily life activities. During this period of time, I had the opportunity to attend a series of social and religious events like weddings, birthdays, traditional medical practices, funerals, food preparation for feasts, local performances such as dance and music, sporadic demonstrations of oral tradition in daily life, as well as fishing activities like the cangrejada (crab catching). The aforementioned events gave me the opportunity to obtain information about the socio-cultural context and history of the two target communities, to

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identify new potential research domains for future study and most significant, and to build understanding and positive relationships with the subjects. In this manner the task of constructing my fieldnotes, as well as carrying out interviews and recordings became easier. Such a privileged position allowed me to capture spontaneous speech in natural settings and to grasp communicative nuances, as well as to learn about the explicit and tacit aspects of the culture of these two Afro-Oaxacan communities, Collantes and La Boquilla.

3.1.3.3. Phase 3: Return to the target communities During the Phase 3, the following objectives were accomplished: 1) gather more data; 2) corroborate some previous data collected in situ; 3) clarify some words, ideas and chronologies, in short, to follow up on anything that I did not understand or that seemed doubtful; 4) revisit some members of both communities who had become true friends.

3.1.4. Subjects A total of 72 subjects, 46 women and 26 men were recorded, ranging in age from 18 to 85 years old. The Figure in (3.1) depicts the subjects’ age percentage.

Figure 3.1. Subjects’ age percentage

Figure 3.1 shows that the age of the majority of the interviewed subjects (45%) oscillates between 51 and 70 years old, followed by a second group (33%) whose age ranges between 31 and 50 years old. The younger group that is represented by the 14% includes those between 18 and 30 years old. Finally, only

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8% of the total of subjects form the oldest group ranging in age between 71 and 85 years old. This figure only includes those subjects who were willing to be recorded. However, I also verbally interacted with many other members of both communities. The main occupation areas of the subjects are agriculture, fishing and, to a lesser extent, livestock. Agriculture attracts the highest concentration of available labor for both women and men. Fishing, on the other hand, is a secondary activity in the two communities. The educational level of the subjects ranges from illiterate (22 subjects), to incomplete elementary school (44 subjects), and beyond elementary school (6 subjects). Figure 3.2 depicts the percentages of the educational level of the subjects.

Figure 3.2. Subjects’ education level

3.1.5. Methodology Despite variations in methodological theories within the academy, they can be reduced to basically two methodologies: quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, quantitative methodology, whose main principle is “reliability”, quantifies the results of the data obtained. On the other hand, qualitative methodology, based on “authenticity”, does not report its results in numbers but as the observation and immersion into the research topic, in order to be able to offer an assessment of the data gathered (Agar 1996; Duranti 1997; Johnstone, 2000; Weinberg 2002; Silverman 2004). The researcher may choose one or the other according to need, and it is possible to combine both quantitative and qualitative methodologies within a single research project. Bearing in mind the above distinction, the methodological aspect of this present research only utilizes

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qualitative methodology, insofar as I am not quantifying but rather evaluating, documenting and interpreting linguistic aspects of Costeño Spanish. The aforestated methodologies employ specific methods. Nonetheless, there are different methods available to researchers, and each researcher uses her/his own methods based on previous experiences and according to the particular circumstances and needs of the fieldwork. Because most of the subjects who participated in this study were illiterate or did not show real reading proficiency (see Figure 3.2 above), and because some elders had vision problems, I was not able to use written surveys. I therefore relied on the following methods: participant-observation, open-ended oral interviews, recording and transcription, and fieldnotes.

3.1.5.1. Participant-observation Participant-observation was adopted, because during my pilot study I realized the observation of a particular community cannot be carried out from a distant and safe point, but rather by being within the community. The degree of participant-observation during this field research varied from nonparticipation, to passive, moderate, active participation, and complete participation in both communities. This method provides several advantages. Firstly, it enhances the quality of the data obtained during fieldwork by capturing spontaneous speech in natural settings. Secondly, it is crucial for understanding and interpreting particular speech exchanges among the members of the target communities. Thirdly, it is also helpful in establishing a closer contact between the researcher and the community members, facilitating the researcher participation in many socio-cultural events of the community. Fourth, it encourages the formulation of new research questions and hypotheses grounded in on-the-scene observation.

3.1.5.2. Open-ended oral interviews As a participant-observer, I was in a position to use everyday conversations as an interview technique. I complemented participant-observation with open-ended oral interviews. I chose this type of interview due to the following reasons. Firstly, as already mentioned, most of the social actors to be interviewed had a low educational level and open-ended interviews avoid potentially uncomfortable situations like a subject having to admit that (s)he cannot read well or does not know how to read. Secondly, this type of interview has the advantage of being flexible and generally is pleasant and enjoyable for the subjects, some of whom love to talk.

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Open-ended interviews also allow the researcher to explore any topic in depth and to cover new topics as they arise. Moreover, this type of interview builds understanding and can develop positive relationships between the interviewer and the interviewee by asking about comfortable and culturally appropriate topics. The issues discussed during the interviews were the following: a) community origins, b) festivities, c) traditions, d) food, e) clothing, f) dance and music performances —in particular the Devils dance, g) oral tradition, h) family way of life, i) main community activities, and j) personal history.

3.1.5.3. Recording and transcription 72 oral interviews were audio recorded, personal interviews as well as group interviews were conducted, but rarely were more than two subjects interviewed in a single session. The duration of each interview varied from one subject to other. Since transcription is crucial in fieldwork, especially when the research is linguistically oriented, a selection of the most salient fragments of each recording to be transcribed for the purpose of analysis was made. Recordings and transcriptions offer a highly reliable record to which one can eventually return to build linguistic analyses and confirmation of hypotheses and results.

3.1.5.4. Fieldnotes In the field, I was unable to make audio recordings of all different types of speech for various reasons. These include ethical, practical, and so on. Because of these limitations, I complemented my documentation in the field with written notes, drawings, maps, photographs and video recording. This essential ethnographic material helped me reconstruct an event for later analysis, generalize, synthesize and elaborate theoretical assumptions. My intention was to gather data to facilitate my on-going analysis of Costeño speech. It is important to stress that although fieldnotes represent an extension or projection of the individual who wrote them, fieldnotes can also be helpful for future researchers in the field. To sum up the discussion so far, I combined the aforementioned methods because observation and participation of events and activities in the field generally produce a number of questions that can be addressed and/or clarified only if the researcher remains in the field and corroborates data as many times as necessary. I underscore this point because, while analyzing some of my preliminary recordings and fieldnotes that I made during the three phases of my study,

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some questions came up that were difficult to answer once I was geographically removed from the target region. It is, therefore, important to be present in the field, in order to ask questions that may emerge from previously fieldnotes and recorded material.

3.2. A brief documentation of the African presence in Mexico 3.2.1. Afro-Mexico historical remarks In the 16th century, after the decimation of the indigenous populations in Mexico, as in many other Latin American countries, the transatlantic slave trade became central to the economy of New Spain (Aguirre Beltrán 1989a, 1989b, 1994; Palmer 1976; Choy López 1999; Duncan 2001; Glissant 2002; Lipski 2005; Nguo-Mve 1994; Muhammad 1995; Guevara Sangínes 1997; Landers 1997; Vaughn 2001b; Vinson III and Vaughn 2004; Rupert 2012; Jacob 2012; Sessarego 2015). In general, African slaves were introduced into the Mexican territory through the authorized ports of Veracruz and Campeche. Later, slaves were imported by way of the port of Acapulco, but those slaves were used under different types of conditions resulting in the intricate caste system that characterized the New Spain society (Aguirre Beltrán 1989a, 1994; Muhammad 1995; Vaughn 2001a, 2001b; Lipski 2005). In this manner, Aguirre Beltrán (1994) states the following: Las diversas formas de esclavitud que se dan en la colonia … esclavos conquistadores, esclavos reales, esclavos domésticos, esclavos a jornal, esclavas sexualmente explotadas, esclavos de las minas, de las haciendas, de las plantaciones, de las pesquerías y de los obrajes son formas distintas de extraer excedentes del trabajo de hombres cuya propiedad, voluntad y destino están ubicados en una casta señorial que da perfil peculiar a la sociedad novoespañola (Aguirre Beltrán 1994: 26)3.

According to Aguirre Beltrán (1989a), the early slaves who were shipped to Mexico proceeded from various African ethnic groups located between the Guinea and Sierra Leone rivers. Those groups of slaves included Mandé (Sierra Leone and Liberia), Malinké or Mandinga (Gambia), Bambara, Tucolor,

3

‘The different types of slavery that arise in Colonial times … conquering slaves, royal slaves, domestic slaves, working-day slaves, sexually exploited slaves, mining slaves, ranch cattle slaves, plantation slaves, fishing slaves, and workshop slaves are different ways to extract a surplus of work from men whose propriety, will and destiny are placed into a feudal caste system that gives a particular profile to the society of New Spain.’

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Fula (Senegal and Mauritania), Bariba (Nigeria), Chamba, Banda (Ivory Coast), Kanuri (Sudan), Saquenda and Gwari (Nigeria), and so on. The majority of this African population was concentrated in the main urban areas of colonial Mexico such as the Central valleys of Puebla (Paredes Martínez and Lara Tenorio 1997), Michoacán (Chávez Carbajal 1997), Guanajuato (Guevara Sanginés 1997), and Mexico City (Ngou-Mve 1994; Aguirre Beltrán 1994). Vinson and Vaughn (2004) stress that approximately 55% of those slaves lived in Mexico City in 1646. Palmer (1976) divides African slavery in Mexico into three main periods. The first, from 1519 to 1580, represents a sequence of epidemics that took place in Mexico such as smallpox (1520), measles (1529), and typhus (1545 and 1576) which devastated a large part of the indigenous population (Aguirre Beltrán 1989a: 201-203). The second, from 1580 to 1650, is characterized as the most important period of African slaves’ introduction into the Mexican territory, a fact that placed Mexico as the second nation in America in the number of imported slaves (Aguirre Beltrán 1989a; Palmer 1976; Lipski 2005). Additionally, Aguirre Beltrán (1989b) claims that during three centuries of Spanish colonization, approximately 250,000 African slaves were introduced into Mexico. This figure represents no more than 1% to 2% of the entire colonial population. Nonetheless, as some scholars (Muhammad 1995; Vaughn 2001a; Vinson and Vaughn 2004; Lipski 2005) have pointed out, it would be difficult to provide an accurate account of the number of Africans brought into Mexico, since many of them were introduced illegally and many others died during the journey. The third period, from 1650 to 1827, marks a gradual decline of the black population due to diseases and death in the agricultural fields, workshops and mining centers of Mexico (Palmer 1976; Aguirre Beltrán 1994; Guevara Sangínes 1997; Lipski 2005). Perhaps, such gradual diminution of the Black population might also be attributed to the theory of blanquiamiento ‘whitening of the races’ (Aguirre Beltrán 1989a; Duncan 2001; Vinson and Vaughn 2004). In this vein, Duncan (2001: 41) argues: “En concreto, el racismo español no se fundamentaba en la exclusión absoluta sino en el mito del ascenso gradual de las familias por vía de sus descendientes. Se necesitaban seis generaciones para blanquearse.”4 Moreover, the decrease of the black population in Mexico is also the result of two socio-historical and political movements, the Independence and the Revolutionary periods, in which many Afro-Mexicans gave their lives for these two

4

‘Specifically, Spanish racism was not based on an absolute exclusion but rather on the myth of gradual ascent of families through their descendents. This whitening process required six generations.’

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causes5. Remnants of the Revolutionary period (1910-1920) are still reflected in some current pagan and secular Afro-Mexican traditions of Costa Chica such as the custom of bride capture that, according to the testimony of several of my subjects, especially women, is one of the most common methods of marriage in the region. Another inherited Afro-Mexican tradition is the local festivity in honor of Señor Santiago which takes place yearly from July 25th - 31st. This celebration consists of a procession with members of the community, both women and men, dressed as Mexican revolutionary warriors, a cowboy style clothing and accessories, riding horses through the streets. The Señor Santiago festivity takes place in all the Afro-Mexican towns and villages of Costa Chica and is accompanied by music and fireworks, probably evoking both the main occupation of the slaves brought to the area, cattle enterprises, and the active participation of the Afro-Mexicans before and during the Mexican Revolution. For many centuries, African presence has permeated the life of Mexico through various cultural practices such as music, dance, labor techniques, cuisine, popular medicine, oral tradition, and so on. Nowadays in Mexico there are four geographic areas where not only the Sub-Saharan legacy but also the phenotype are clearly visible. Three of these pockets are located in the south of the country: the Gulf of Mexico region (the southern part of Veracruz6 and the coastal area of Tabasco and Campeche), the south eastern region of the Yucatan Peninsula (Quintana Roo), and the Costa Chica region (the southern coastal area of Guerrero and the northern coastal area of Oaxaca, both on the Pacific Ocean). The remaining Afro-Mexican area is located in the north of Mexico in the state of Coahuila and is named Nacimiento de los Negros. The members of that small community are descendants of Afro-Seminoles who spoke an archaic form of the English creole Gullah still present in liturgical songs and in part of the vocabulary of that community. Figure 3.3 depicts the geographical location of these four Afro-Mexican enclaves.

5

6

Vinson and Vaughn (2004) divides the history of Mexican blacks in three historical periods based on a large corpus of existing literature. The first comprises the Colonial and Independence periods (1521-1821), the second is the pre-Revolutionary period (1822-1910), and the third is the post-Revolutionary period (1921 up to the present day). In Veracruz, these towns would include, but are not limited to, Tamiahua, Mata Clara, El Coyolillo, Jamapa, and Tierra Blanca.

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Figure 3.3. Geographical location of the Afro-Mexican enclaves.

Although the African ethnic component in Mexico is a fact, the Afro-Mexican population has been invisible in the written history of Mexico. Proof of this is the annual official census and Mexican history textbooks (Aguirre-Beltrán 1994; Duncan 2001; Vinson and Vaughn 2004). Afro-mixed communities, not only in Mexico but in all the Latin American countries, have not received proper political and social recognition. They have even been relegated to an inferior social status and stigmatized. In the last decades, attempts to valorize African roots in Mexico include but are not limited to: a) El Programa Nacional Nuestra Tercera Raíz (Our Third Root National Program), sponsored by El Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (National Council for Culture and Arts), which since 1989 has highlighted and promoted various activities to emphasize the importance of the African legacy in Mexico as a determining factor in the socio-historical composition of the country; b) México negro (Black Mexico), a non-governmental organization which is working for the rights of the Afro-Mexicans of Costa Chica; c) El Museo de las Culturas Afromestizas (the Museum of Afro-Mestizo Cultures) which is located in the Afro-Mexican village of Cuajinicuilapa in the state of Guerrero —this museum is unique in its genre in all of the country and is a window to the past and present of the African presence in Mexico—; d) Afro Mexico, a series of documentaries created by Canal Once (in late 2019) to vindicate the African legacy that

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exists in Mexico. In these documentaries specialists and researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) participate, as well as musicians and other Afro-descendant artists. All of them guide the viewer in a dynamic and profound way through the history and contributions of Afro-descendants in Mexico; e) Academic research on Afro-Mexican and Afro-Hispanic studies in general, both national and international, that annually presents its findings in symposia that take place in different cities of Mexico —for example the Afroamerica International Colloquium sponsored by the UNAM—, as well as publications on Afro Mexican studies that circulate inside and outside of the country. Regardless of national and international efforts on behalf of Afro-Mexican communities, many of them still remain forgotten and isolated from the mainstream and manifest extreme poverty, a lack of basic services and, in addition, the lack of a black consciousness (Motta Sánchez and Machuca Ramírez 1993; McDowell 2000; Vaughn 2001a, Vinson and Vaughn 2004). This is the case with the Costa Chica region that until recently has received little attention in comparison to the Gulf of Mexico region, in particular, Veracruz.

3.2.2. Speculation on the origins of the Costa Chica’s Black population The Costa Chica region extends between the Pacific coast and the Southern Mountains of Mexico. Its extension comprises, as already mentioned above, parts of the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca, starting in the north from San Marcos, Guerrero and concluding in the south in Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca. This is a large Afro-Mexican enclave in Mexico with approximately thirty-seven communities (Vaughn 2001a). A partial list would find them in the State of Guerrero: Cuajinicuilapa, Copala, Marquelia, Maldonado, San Nicolás, Montecillos, Punta Maldonado, El Pitahayo, Juchitán, and so on, and in the state of Oaxaca: Santo Domingo Armenta, El Ciruelo, San José Estancia Grande, Santiago Tapextla, Cerro de la Esperanza (EL Chivo), Corralero, El Carrizo, El Azufre, José María Morelos, Collantes, Santa María de la Luz Chicometepec (La Boquilla). As we can see in Figure 3.4, some of Afro-Costa Chica’s towns and villages are linked to the coastal Federal Highway opened to public transportation in mid-1960s. However, some other towns still remain in relative isolation, far from the highway, only linked by unpaved roads impassable during the rainy season. In this respect, Gillian (1976) points out: Parecería entonces que buena parte del carácter sociocultural de todos los habitantes “morenos” proviene de un tipo de esclavo casi cimarrón, localizado a todo lo largo de la Costa Chica en pequeñas ínsulas, algunas de las cuales están aún tan aisladas, que en la época de lluvias (junio a septiembre), es imposible llegar a ellas por tierra

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tales como Río Viejo, Cuyuche, Collantes, etc. Estos agregados sociales mantienen una paz intranquila con las comunidades mixtecas y ambas han estado sujetas a formas clásicas del poder regional colonial de la zona (Gillian 1976: 100, my italics).

Figure 3.4. Geographical location of the Afro-Mexican communities of the Costa Chica

Unlike the Afro-Mexicans of Veracruz who retell stories that trace their origins to Cuba (Vaughn 2004)7, in the Costa Chica region no link to Cuba is invoked among the Afro-Mexicans that inhabit the area. In general, the Black population of Costa Chica is believed to have originated from slaves brought to work on the region’s large cattle ranches, as well as in the cacao and cotton agricultural fields in the 16th century (Aguirre Beltrán 1989b; Motta Sánchez and Machuca Ramírez 1993; Muhammad 1995; Vaughn 2001a, 2001b; Martínez Gracida 2003). In this vein, Martínez Gracida (2003) states:

7

Vaughn (2001a: 4-5) states that: “Because of Veracruz’s proximity to the Caribbean, and the relatively constant contact between Cuba and Veracruz since the colonial period, and more importantly, in the last half century, Veracruz has always touted a certain kinship with Cuba. Rather than offer a detailed narrative as to the circumstances under which they arrived from Cuba, most Afro-Veracruzanos understand their origins as a matter of common sense … It is my tentative view that the image of Blackness in Veracruz has much more to do with the 20th Century Cuban immigration than it does with the Afro-Veracruzano slave trade.”

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Refiere la tradición jamiltepecana que por los años de 1550 a 1590, se presentó en Jamiltepec, con el fin de fundar una estancia de ganado mayor, un español de altas polendas, en compañía de su esposa y 200 negros de ambos sexos que eran sus esclavos, los cuales tenían a su cargo 200 cabezas de ganado vacuno y yegüerizo. Al él se le llamaba el ‘Mariscal’ y a ella la ‘Mariscala’ … Estos negros procrearon allí muchos hijos, quienes por enlaces progresivos formaron un censo de más de 400 almas y son los progenitores de los negros costeños (Martínez Gracida 2003: 28, my italics)8.

There is also evidence that runaway slaves reached the Costa Chica area seeking refuge. These escaped slaves formed small marooned communities along the Pacific coast, among which the most important were Santo Domingo Armenta in the state of Oaxaca and Cuajinicuilapa in the state of Guerrero9 (Aguirre Beltrán 1989b; Brout 1976; Bilby and N’Diayde 1992; Vaughn 2001a, 2001b). In this regard, Aguirre Beltrán (1989b) argues: Al incremento natural de estos vaqueros es necesario añadir la agregación de negros cimarrones, esto es, de negros huidos de sus manos [sic], procedentes del Puerto de Guatulco y de los ingenios de Atlixco … Fueron los cimarrones de Guatulco los más perseguidos y con ello quienes en mayor número buscaron el protector aislamiento de Cuijla (Aguirre Beltrán 1989b: 59, my italics)10.

Martínez Montiel (2005), on the other hand, sustains that many of the Black population that arrived in Costa Chica proceeded from Congo and Bantú origins, as well as from other tribal groups along the Atlantic rim of West Africa. In addition, there is also a rumor among the Costeño community members that reaches mythical speculation. This invokes a shipwreck along some point of the coast —El Faro, Playa Blanca or Puerto Minizo depending of the version— 8

9

10

‘According to the Jamiltepecan tradition from 1550 to 1590, a Spaniard from an upper socio-economic class arrived in Jamiltepec with the intention of establishing a cattle ranch. He was accompanied by his wife and 200 black slaves of both sexes who were in charge of 200 head of cattle and horses. This Spaniard was named Mariscal and his wife was named Mariscala … The black slaves procreated through interrelationships and increased their number up to 400 and they are considered the Costeño black offspring.’ Martínez Gracida’s narration is similar to the one offered by Aguirre Beltrán (1989b: 58). It is important to highlight that for many years Guerrero and Oaxaca formed one federative entity in Mexico, but the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty and the Constitution of 1957 urged a geographic-political separation into two states. ‘To the growth of ranch cattle slaves, it is necessary to add runaway slaves who came from the Port of Guatulco and from the sugar plantations of Atlixco … the former were the more persecuted and found an isolated refuge in Cuijla.’ Althoff (1994: 249) argues that Cuijla is the old, abbreviated name of Cuajinicuilapa pronounced as [kwihla] and is no longer heard. However, one of my subjects (M13) claims that Cuijla is the name by which local indigenous population refers to Cuajinicuilapa.

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carrying black slaves (Vaughn 2001a). The survivors of this wreck formed the first coastal communities and with the passing of time they grew in number and are the ancestors of the Afro-Mexicans of Costa Chica. In this regard, Espinosa (2014) comments: Los abuelos y señores de edad de las localidades de la Costa Chica decían que la raza negra llegó en un barco … “En el barco venían hombres y mujeres, pero éste se quedó por donde ahora está el Faro”. Otra voz local añade: “El barco se hundía, y los que venían saltaron y nadaron a la orilla. Ellos eran morenos”. Seguido viene quien dice: “La raza morena bajó de un barco que se hundió allá en el Faro. Aquí hicieron familia. Por eso abunda la raza morena por aquí”. Otro añade: “Contaba mi abuelo que toda esta negrada, llegó en un barco que se hundió allá cerca de Oaxaca. Dicen que todavía, cuando la marea baja, se ven los restos del barco”. En el mismo sentido se comenta: “[Los de la raza negra] creo que vinieron en un barco que encalló allá por Punta Maldonado. Ellos eran bien morenos. Ya nosotros nos mezclamos, estamos más cruzados”. Desde esa perspectiva se dice: “Sí, vinieron en el barco que se hundió. Venían personas bien negras, y empezaron a vivir aquí … Hace años aparecieron los fierros del barco allá en el Punta Maldonado” (Espinosa 2014: 139-140)11.

The different accounts of the possible origins of the Costa Chica’s Black population therefore suggest what Martinican scholar Édouard Glissant (2002), while referring to the origins of Creole cultures, has called a ‘prophetic vision of the past’. In Glissant’s (2002: 86) words: “El pasado no ha de ser reconstruido de forma objetiva (o incluso subjetiva) por el historiador, sino que ha de ser imaginado también, de forma profética, por las gentes, las comunidades y las culturas que se han visto privadas del mismo.”12 Glissant’s citation may explain why it is impossible to confirm the specific origin of the Black population of Costa Chica, as it would also be difficult to trace the origin of most of the descendants of the African Diaspora. The circumstances under which slaves were captured, 11

12

‘Grandparents and old people of the Costa Chica villages said that Blacks arrived on a ship ... “Men and women came on the ship, but it stayed where the Faro village is now.” Another local person adds: “While the ship was sinking, those who came on jumped and swam to the shore, all they were Black.” At times, there is someone who says: “Many Blacks came down from a ship that sank at the Faro village. Here they raised family, that is why black people abounds here”. Someone else adds: “My grandfather used to say all these Blacks arrived on a ship that sank near Oaxaca. They still say that when the tide goes out, you can see the remains of the ship.” In the same vein, it is commented: “[Those of the black race] I believe they came on a ship that ran aground by Punta Maldonado. They were very dark people. Now we are more mixed.” From the same perspective, it is said: “Yes, they came on a ship that sank. Black people arrived and settled here ... Some years ago the iron construction of the ship appeared at Punta Maldonado”.’ ‘The past must not be reconstructed only in an objective way (or even subjective) by the historian, but also it has to be imagined in a prophetic way by the peoples, communities, and cultures that have been derived from it.’

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transported, and sold in the region reflect the same story everywhere. Subject to a barbarous genocide, slaves were forced to forget not only their origin but also family, history, religion, and especially their language. The discussion so far has only been a general overview of the different hypotheses of the genesis of the Black population of the Costa Chica region. Nonetheless, each Afro-Mexican town and village of this enclave offers its own version that differs, to a certain extent, from the rest. I will now discuss the origin of the Black population in the communities under study: Collantes and La Boquilla. It is important to stress that due to the lack of written records, the following description is based on personal observation and on tape-recorded information from members of these two Afro-Oaxacan communities.

3.2.3. Collantes and La Boquilla remnants of an African legacy 3.2.3.1. Topographical features Collantes is a community of approximately 3,000 people which is located 18 km (11 miles) south of Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca. Collantes is the last town on the paved road that leads from Pinotepa Nacional, the Municipality’s headquarters, to the coastal lowlands near the once-important Puerto Minizo, located approximately 10 km from Collantes. Toward the South, an unpaved road 2 km long links Collantes with a former lemon processing plant that is no longer in use. In the past, prior to this former lemon processing plant, the earlier barrio of Collantillo was located here. Across the Arena River the small-sized community (rancho) of La Boquilla with approximately 1,500 inhabitants is located. Unlike its neighboring community, La Boquilla belongs to the Municipality of Santa María Huazolotitlán, Oaxaca. During the rainy season (from June to September), to go from one community to another one needs to hire a canoero (boatman) who will take you from one side to the other of the Arena River. During the rest of the year, the stream lowers, so one can easily cross the river by walking. The Arena River empties into the Pacific Ocean through Puerto Minizo; there are many stories about this port that are associated with the African slave trade since Colonial times. Figure 3.5 shows a close-up of the geographical location of Collantes, La Boquilla and Puerto Minizo. During the summer, this subhumid-tropical region registers a maximum temperature of 42°C/110°F, while in December and January the temperature decreases to approximately 19°C/64.6°F, which is the coldest season. The flora is one which is mostly found in the savanna along with uniform lines of coconut palms. Its fauna exhibits species like chicatana (a type of ant), rats, iguanas (both green and black), herons, rabbits, armadillos, cuija, turtles and rattlesnakes, among the most common.

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Figure 3.5. Geographical location of Collantes, La Boquilla and Puerto Minizo.

Collantes and La Boquilla are two rural communities of remarkably African offspring. However, many of the people of the two towns notably show a mixture of Black, Indian and white blood, as a product of miscegenation and cultural borrowings that define their ethnic characteristics in which the African phenotype is predominant. As mentioned above (Section 3.1.4.), agriculture is the primary activity among Collanteños and Boquilleños. Generally, they grow corn, sesame, peanuts, papayas, watermelons, beans, green beans, bananas, mangos, coconuts and lemons. There are two types of agricultural techniques. The first is called the “temporal modality” in which the crop duration lasts from the rainy season to the dry season (May to October). The second is called the “agriculture of chagüe”, a local term referring to the type of agriculture that develops near the Arena River and it lasts all year because of sediments and wetlands left by the river. Fishing, on the other hand, is their secondary activity; residents usually go to fish in either Puerto Minizo or the Arena River to catch tichinda (clam), chacalín (a very small river shrimp), endoco (small lobster), crab, various other types of fish, and other kinds of seafood.

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3.2.3.2. Origins of the Black population in La Boquilla La Boquilla is one of the oldest towns in the coastal region of Oaxaca. According to a document preserved as a manuscript in the local Health Center, this village existed even before the Aztec empire. The document stipulates that when Captain Pedro de Alvarado arrived to conquer the region in 1522, many native Amerindians died due to a series of epidemics that took place during the Colonial period including the bubonic plague, smallpox, measles and typhus. Such a situation required the importation of African slaves into the area who came from Western Sudan, Congo and the Guinea Gulf. According to the memories of some elders, during the Colonial period the Hacienda of Spanish brothers Dámaso and José Gómez was settled in La Boquilla, covering an area of 200 km² (almost 5,000 acres). At that time, African slaves were employed to cultivate cotton and to work on the Gómez cattle production. As time went on, other groups of blacks, who had escaped from other neighboring slave settlements such as Jamiltepec and Estancia Grande, arrived in La Boquilla, and some others perhaps arrived after the Independence of Mexico, an event that coincided with the collapse of the Gómez Hacienda. This picture leads me to hypothesize that most of the current Black population in La Boquilla comes from those different groups of slaves who arrived at different times in the history of the region.

3.2.3.3. Origins of the Black population in Collantes Near La Boquilla, on the other side of the Arena River in what is nowadays the town of Collantes, another former Hacienda known as La Guadalupe was developed by the Spanish Del Valle family. On this hacienda cotton, cacao and chilis were cultivated by both Blacks and Indians, who carried out the hardest work. Toward 1820, almost at the end of Mexico’s Independence War, Manuel Collantes arrived in Puerto Minizo from Spain and was accompanied by a group of Black workers. They probably came from the central area of Mexico and had run away from the Mexico’s Independence movement which inspired the masses, especially in that area of the country. Then, looking for a safe refuge in a secluded place like the coastal region of Oaxaca, Manuel Collantes offered Don Cosme del Valle, the owner of La Guadalupe, his workers’ labor as a guarantee to be able to remain there along with the entire first cotton harvest as a payment. In agreement, Don Cosme del Valle extended Manuel Collantes all the guaranties for working on his land.

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Among the group of Blacks who arrived with Collantes, there was one called Mané13, who was the Black brigade’s chief and the closest servant of Mr. Collantes. Years later, Collantes became sick and decided to return to Spain, his homeland, naming Mané as his only successor by giving him his house, animals and labor instruments. Mané did not only inherit all his master’s belongings but also his name. In this way, Mané adopted Collantes as his last name14. Once Mané Collantes continued cultivating his master’s rented land, he decided to grow corn instead of cotton due to the scarcity of this product in the region, therefore becoming the only producer of this basic grain. As a result, many people from surrounding areas like Estancia Grande, Tapextla, Santo Domingo Armenta and Cuajinicuilapa used to come to the Collantes’ neighborhood to buy corn. These people used to say: Vamoj a comprá maí al barrio ´e Collantej (let’s go to Collantes’ neighborhood to buy corn); hence, the name of the current town of Collantes15. Although it would be difficult to confirm the authenticity of the aforementioned events, since no written history has been recorded about it, the oral narratives of Collanteños and Boquilleños are still fresh in their memories and this may replace, to some extent, the absence of written historical records. To sum up the discussion so far, the Afro-Oaxacans who currently live in La Boquilla and Collantes no doubt descend in large part from black Africans who arrived, for one reason or another, in this coastal region at different periods of time. It would be difficult to provide with any certainty their ethnic origin

13

14

15

I claim that Mané is the apocopated form of Mandé, the name of an uprooted African group from Ghana on the West African coast. According to Aguirre Beltrán (1946: 107), members of the group Mandé were imported to Mexico during the 16th century exerting a significant influence on Colonial Mexico, in his words: “De estos negros los que forman el grupo Mandé fueron sin duda los que mayor influencia ejercieron en México, durante toda la centuria del . Entraron bajo la denominación general de Mandingas y dejaron como recuerdo de su presencia en la Nueva España una cantidad de accidentes geográficos que llevan su nombre y la supervivencia del gentilicio como popular designación del dominio.” ‘Among the group of black slaves who exerted more influence in Mexico during the Sixteenth Century were, without a doubt, the group Mandé. They entered under the general name of Mandingas and left their impact on the New Spain through various geographical names, and the survival of their group name as a vestige of their popular domain.’ In addition, Mandé also designates a group of languages spoken in Sierra Leone’ (Lipski 2005: 199). According to Motta Sanchez (2004), in Colonial times the last name was seen as an index of genealogy and lineage and many Indians and Blacks lacked them. It was not until the 18th century that holding a last name became a widespread practice, probably due to the Reforma Borbónica applied to New Spain. I was fortunate to interview subject M13 who remembered most of the historical events of Collantes and was willing to spend a great deal of time discussing them with me. I want to thank subject M13 for his invaluable testimony.

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since many of the slaves brought to America, as it is well known, took the name of colonial trading posts. In this regard, Chaudenson (2001: 77) stresses that: “It is significant that slave ‘nations’ generally do not bear the names of ‘ethnic groups,’ but rather those of trading posts on the African coast where slaves were brought together before they were transported to America.” Hence, we can comprehend the misunderstandings about the ethnical and regional origins of many of the African slaves shipped to the Americas. In addition, the layers of interethnic mixing among blacks, indians and whites in these two communities, and by extension in the entire region, make it impossible to distinguish the original source of the current black population of Collantes and La Boquilla. Despite this situation, their influential Sub-Saharan heritage is preserved to the present day in different forms in La Boquilla and Collantes, and these include, but are not limited to, carrying heavy loads on their head (especially women), like buckets of water and bateas (punts) of food; funeral practices; local dances like la danza de los diablos (the Devils’ dance); music; forms of weddings; popular medicine; agricultural and fishing techniques; oral tradition; the way of preparing local dishes like cangrejos con frijoles (crab with beans), salsa de chicatanas or chirmole (ant’s sauce), tamales de tichinda (clam tamales), bocadillo de coco y cabio (sweet coconut), muenganos, among other original foods. With the passing of time, many of these cultural manifestations have resisted assimilation or loss by acquiring certain peculiarities that make the Costa Chica region different when compared with other regions of Mexico and other Afro-Mexican enclaves.

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C

4

Phonological Characteristics of Costeño Spanish

In an effort to distinguish black African cultural practices in the Costa Chica region of Mexico, scholars have focused on a number of elements: round houses, hollowed canoes made from single logs (locally known as artesa)1, names which evoke African regions and tribes, dance, music, oral tradition, the use of medicinal herbs, polygamy, cuisine, the custom of bride capture and, to a lesser extent, speech patterns. The present chapter focuses on phonological and phonetic aspects of the Spanish currently spoken in the Costa Chica region of the state of Oaxaca. The scope of this phonological analysis is limited to two Afro-Mexican communities, Collantes and La Boquilla, where the present study was carried out. As will be seen, the phonetic and phonological aspects that characterize the speech of these two Afro-Mexican communities, Costeño Spanish, do not differ too much from those found in Cuijleño Spanish, a Costeño sister variety spoken in the Costa Chica area of the state of Guerrero (Aguirre Beltrán 1989b; Althoff 1994). In fact, most of the phonetic and phonological traits in Costeño are also attested in non-conservative Spanish dialects, as well as in rustic and popular speech. This chapter is divided into seven sections. Section 4.1 focuses on the phonetic and phonological behavior of both voiceless and voiced stop segments. 1

Artesa is a type of dance (son de artesa), which is performed by the Afro Mexicans of the Costa Chica region over an elongated zoomorphic wooden box also named artesa.

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Section 4.2 concentrates on the affricate segment /č/ which is found in approximately 35.98 per cent of the lexicon currently used in the Costa Chica region of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Section 4.3 discusses fricative phonemes; with special attention to the segment /f/ which presents an interesting set of allophones in prevocalic contexts, the most exceptional being the phone [hʷ], which I claim here is rooted in West African languages. Section 4.4 focuses on the nasal phonemes, highlighting an atypical process of nasal assimilation that is found not only in the Costeño speech but also in the Spanish of the Caribbean Diaspora (Bjarkman 1989). Section 4.5 is devoted to an analysis of the Spanish liquid phonemes and their behavior in Costeño. Section 4.6 addresses other phonological processes that also take place in Costeño, such as vowel variation (4.6.1); aphaeresis (4.6.2); syllabic prothesis (4.6.3); metathesis (4.6.4); syllable deletion (4.6.5); and monophthongization (4.6.6). Finally, Section 4.7 presents general conclusions concerning phonological and phonetic characteristics of Costeño Spanish.

4.1. Stop segments 4.1.1. Voiceless stops In the Costeño dialect, the voiceless stops /p/, /t̪ / and /k/ have a strong tendency to be deleted in coda position word-internally. The following examples in Table 4.1 selected from the data analysis illustrate this phenomenon.

/asept̪ e/ /sept̪ yembɾe/ /ɡelaget̪ sa/ /at̪ mosfeɾa/ /d̪ okt̪ oɾ/ /t̪ rakt̪ oɾes/ /komflikt̪ o/ /okt̪ ubɾe/ /est̪ ɾikt̪ o/

Costeño [a.se.t̪ é] [se.t̪ yém.bɾe] [ɡe.la.ɤé.sa] [a.mós.fe.ɾa] [d̪ o.t̪ óɾ] [t̪ ra.t̪ ó.ɾe] [koɱ.flí.t ̪o] [o.t̪ ú.βɾe] [eʰ.t ̪ɾí.t ̪o]

acepté ‘I accepted’ septiembre ‘September’ Guelagetza ‘The City of the Clouds’ atmósfera ‘atmosphere’ doctor ‘physician’ tractores ‘tractors’ conflicto ‘conflict’ octubre ‘October’ estricto ‘demanding’

Table 4.1. Deletion of voiceless stops in coda position word-internally

The deletion of voiceless stops is also extended to those words that exhibit complex internal codas composed by two segments (i.e. a voiceless stop + /s/) as occur in the following examples: experiencia /ekspeɾyensya/ > [es.pe.ɾén.sya]

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‘experience’, Tapextla /t̪ apekst̪ la/ > [t̪ a.péh.la] ‘name of a neighboring town’, and so on. The elimination of voiceless stops in coda position word-internally is a process that occurs frequently in vestigial Spanish (Lipski 1990; Holloway 1997), rural speech and in informal discourse in many dialects. Additionally, voiceless stops are deleted in word-final position in toponymic items like Metepec /met̪ epek/ > [me.t̪ e.pé], Tultepec /t̪ ult̪ epek/ > [t̪ ul.t̪ e.pé], Jamiltepec /hamilt̪ epek/ > [ha.mil.t̪ e.pé] among other local words of the Costa Chica region. The realization of the voiceless dental stop [t̪ ] as a voiceless alveolar fricative [s] in the word ritmo /rit̪ mo/ > [rís.mo] ‘rhythm’ is found in some Costeño speakers2.

4.1.2. Voiced stops Generally in Costeño, the voiced stops /b, d̪ , ɡ/ are realized as [b, d̪ , ɡ] after /l/, in phrase-initial and postnasal positions and alternate with their respective fricative allophones [β,ð̪ ,ɤ] in other environments. The corpus under analysis does not exhibit any case of fortition of the segments [β,ð̪ ,ɤ] either in intervocalic position or after the flap segment [r] as occurs in other Afro-Hispanic varieties of Latin America (Megenney 1985, 1989a and 1999; Hammond 2001; Díaz-Campos and Clements 2005; Lipski 2005). However, the voiced stops /b, d̪ , ɡ/ still display certain deviations from patrimonial Spanish that will be discussed below.

4.1.2.1. The phoneme /b/ For some Costeño speakers, the voiced bilabial stop /b/ presents a certain degree of variation and is realized occasionally either as a voiced velar stop [ɡ] word-initially, or as a voiced velar fricative [ɣ] when /b/ precedes the Spanish rising diphthong [we] or a [+ round] vowel as occurs in the following items: abuelo /abwelo/ > [a.ɤwé. lo] ‘grandfather’, bueno /bweno/ > [ɡwé.no] ‘good’, vomitar /bomit̪ aɾ/ > [ɡo. mi.t̪ á] ‘to vomit’, vuelta /bwelt̪ a/ > [ɡwél.t̪ a] ‘turn’. This phonological process is an example where the [- coronal] group of obstruents function as a natural class. In the literature, there are very few instances of this. The realization of /b/ either

2

The same pronunciation for this lexical item is also heard in the inner-city jargon of some neighborhoods of Mexico City like in Tepito, La Lagunilla, Ciudad Netzahualcoyotl and San Lorenzo Totolinga, among others of this type.

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as [ɡ] or [ɤ] has been also attested in vestigial Spanish (Lipski 1990; Holloway 1997), at the basilectal level, as well as in informal speech in many dialects.

4.1.2.2. The phoneme /d̪ / In Costeño, as in many other Spanish dialects, there is a tendency to delete / d̪ / in word-final and intervocalic position as shown in the examples in Table 4.2. __#

V__V

navidad /nabid̪ ad̪ />[na.βi.ð̪ á] ‘Christmas’ usted /ust̪ ed̪ / > [uʰ.t̪ é] ‘you (formal)’ enfermedad /enfeɾmed̪ad̪/ > [eŋ.hʷeɾ.me.ð̪ á] ‘illness’ verdad /beɾd̪ ad̪ / > [beɾ.ð̪ á] ‘truth’ autoridad /awt̪ oɾid̪ ad̪ / > [aw.t̪ o.ɾi.ð̪ á] ‘authority’

zapateado /sapat̪ ead̪o/ > [sa.pa.t̪ e.á.o] ‘tap dance’ venado /benad̪o/ > [be.ná.o] ‘deer’ lado /lad̪ o/ > [lá.o] ‘side’ arado /aɾad̪ o/ > [a.ɾá.o] ‘plow’ delgado /d̪elɡad̪ o/ > [d̪ el.ɤá.o] ‘thin’ soldado /sold̪ ad̪ o/ > [sol.d̪ á.o] ‘soldier’

Table 4.2. The deletion of /d̪ / in word-final and intervocalic position in Costeño Spanish

The data also display several cases in which /d̪ / is pronounced as [l] in coda position word-internally, as illustrated by the following examples in Table 4.3. Costeño ellos admiten todo /ey̵os#ad̪mit̪ en#t̪ od̪ o/ nos admiramos /nos#ad̪ miɾamos/ mucha gente la admira / muča#hent̪ e#la#ad̪ miɾa/

[e.y̵o.al.mí.t̪ en̪.t̪ o:] [no.hal.mi.ɾá.mo]

‘They accept everything’ ‘We were surprised’ ‘Many people admire her’

[muň.ča.hen̪ .t̪ e.lal.mí.ɾa]

Table 4.3. The mutation of /d̪ / into [l] in implosive position word-internally

The change of /d̪ / into [ɾ] in intervocalic position is almost non-inexistent in Costeño, as the data account for only one case: solo quedaron siete / solo#ked̪ aɾon#syet̪ e/ > [so.lo.ke.ɾa.ɾon.syé.t̪ e] ‘only seven remained’. Rhotacism of the segment /d̪ / occurs more frequently in other Afro-Hispanic varieties like those in Dominican Republic (Núñez Cedeño 1987; Megenney 1982), Venezuela (Megenney 1999); Peru (Lipski 1994b; Sessarego 2015); the Chocó region of Colombia (Granda 1977, Sessarego 2013a), Equatorial Guinea (Lipski 1986e), and in the Africanized Spanish of the Río de la Plata region (Lipski 1998).

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4.1.2.3. The phoneme /ɡ/ A non-etymological and epenthetic [ɡ] is at times inserted into a word as shown by the following instances: olía /olia/ > [ɡo.lí.a] ‘it smelled’, aire /ayre/ > [ay.ɤre] ‘air’. The insertion of a non-etymological [g] is also found in vestigial Spanish, as well as in rural speech.

4.2. The phoneme /č/ In Costeño Spanish, the voiceless alveopalatal affricate /č/ maintains its occlusive onset, and at least in this corpus sample, and the deaffricated allophone [š] (voiceless alveo-palatal fricative) is absent. The deaffricated [š], however, is found in other Spanish varieties such as the one spoken in the state of Chihuahua in the northern region of Mexico, sporadically in Isleño (Lipski 1990), in Puerto Rican Spanish (Vaquero de Ramírez 1978), and in the provinces of Sevilla and Jaén in the Andalucian region of Spain3. Curiously, one of the subjects realized /č/ as [s] in the toponymic word Chilpancingo4 pronouncing [sil.pan.síŋ.ɡo] instead of the usual [čil.pan.síŋ.ɡo]. Because this lexeme only occurred three times in the speech of the same subject and in the same lexeme, I conclude that the realization of /č/ as [s] in those cases is either a confusion at the ideolectal level or simply an idiosyncratic form. Perhaps more significant is the high percentage of the Costeño words in which the phoneme /č/ occurs, approximately 35.98% out of the total. These words come from different linguistic sources: Coastal Mixtec, Chinantecan, Amuzgo, Náhuatl, African languages, Andalucian archaisms, Caribbean, and others of unknown origin that give the Costeño dialect a peculiar flavor which is not found in other regions of Mexico. Most of these words are of daily use among the members of the Costeño community and form part of their AfroMexican dialect. With respect to /č/, Coronado stresses the following: … la Ch, no la C, es y ha sido fundamental en el español tan único que hablamos en la Costa Chica de Guerrero y Oaxaca … la Ch al igual que la Ll desaparecieron como letras … ese día sentí que un poco de la esencia costachiquense se perdía entre la inconsciencia o entre el mutismo de los mexicanos … Nada debería hacer una academia de la lengua a favor de la globalización, sin tomar en cuenta la esencia

3 4

Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Andalusia.” Ms. Cited with the permission of the author. (http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/Levante.pdf.) The capital city of the state of Guerrero, Mexico.

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tan regional y comunitaria de un pueblo que más sabe hablar que escribir … Costa Chica se escribe con Ch … (Coronado 2004: 16, my italics)5.

Certainly, the high number of Costeño words in which the phoneme /č/ occurs, represented in Spanish by the grapheme ch, is amazing. Here, as an illustration, I briefly cite a folk passage below in (1), which is extracted from a contemporary popular song Negrito ‘Lovable black’ that I recorded from the local XEJAM broadcast6 during the program Cimarrón: la voz de los Afro-Mexicanos ‘Runaway Slave: The voice of Afro-Mexicans’, which airs every Sunday afternoon for a half-hour and is targeted at the Afro-Mexican community of Costa Chica. (1) Fragment of the Negrito’s song. Yo nací en un bajareque sin doctores ni enfermeras. Mi máma me trajo al mundo con la ayuda de partera. Y crecí cuidando cu[č]es y pejcando [č]acalín con mi [č]icalmaca vieja en el río de por aquí. Negrito [č]imeco y feo casi [č]irundo me crié… Negrito pu[č]undo…

I will return to the meaning of the boldface words in detail in Chapter 6 which is partially devoted to the Costeño lexicon.

5

6

‘… the grapheme Ch rather than C has been fundamental in the Spanish variety that we speak in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero and Oaxaca … both graphemes Ch and Ll have disappeared (from dictionaries) … On that day, I felt that the costachiquense essence was being lost between the nonawareness and silence of the Mexicans … a language academy should do nothing in favor of globalization without bearing in mind the needs of a regional community that speaks more than it writes … Costa Chica is written with a Ch …’ Although 70% of the XEJAM broadcast day is programmed in indigenous languages (Coastal Mixtec, Amuzgan and Chatino), the other third or so is in Spanish. Hence most of the local and national news, music, and other type of information are heard in the aforementioned indigenous languages.

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4.3. Fricative segments 4.3.1. The phoneme /f/ In Old Spanish, the Latin consonant f in word-initial position becomes [h] when it was followed by most vowels (Lapesa 1980; Lloyd 1987; Penny 1991; Resnick 1981)7 as occur in the following items: Lat. fŭngu > hongo /honɡo/ Old Span. ‘mushroom’, Lat. formīca > hormiga /hormiɡa/ Old Span. ‘ant’. This word-initial [h] continued its development up to Modern Spanish in which the grapheme h- lacks any phonetic realization. Curiously, Costeño Spanish still preserves the ancient aspiration in some words derived from Latin8, although not categorically, as shown by the following excerpts selected from the data: se hierben para el desayuno /se#ɏeɾben#para#el#d̪ esaɏuno/ > [se.hyeɾ.βeŋ.pa.la. y̵ú.no] ‘(the eggs) are boiled for breakfast’ (Lat. fĕrvēre ‘to boil’); no está hondo /no#est̪ a#ond̪ o/ > [no.t̪ a.hón̪ .d̪ o] ‘it is not deep’ (Lat. fŭndu ‘deep’). Also, the f- of the past tense conjugation of the Spanish verbs ser ‘to be’ and ir ‘to go’ undergoes aspiration in Costeño: fui /fwi/ > [hwí] ‘I was/went’, fuiste / fwist̪ e/ > [hwíʰ.t̪ e] ‘you were/went’, fue /fwe/ > [hwé] ‘(s)he was/went’, and so on. Analogically, the Spanish verbs huír /uiɾ/ ‘to run away’ and hayar /aɏaɾ/ ‘to find out’ are pronounced with initial aspiration, [hu.íɾ] and [ha.y̵áɾ] respectively in all verbal paradigms and derived forms, as the local and classic saying of all the Afro-Mexican women born in the Costa Chica region shows, when answering the question: Where are you from? They usually say: De aquí mero, soy yo nacida, criada y [hu.y̵i.ð̪ a] ‘Here in this very place, I was born, grown up and ran away’. But aspiration of the graphemes f and h in word-initial position is not only found in Costeño dialect, it is also attested in vestigial Spanish (Lipski 1990; Holloway 1997), in the Chocó region of Colombia (Granda de 1977, Schwegler 1999, Sessarego 2019), in the Spanish of Murcia9, as well as in rural speech. Furthermore, the phoneme /f/ exhibits a more interesting phonetic treatment in Costeño speech extending its aspiration to any pre-vocalic occurrence. As a result, the segment /f/ in this Spanish dialect presents the following allophonic distribution: If /f/ precedes [+ round] vowels (i.e. /o/ and /u/), it simply undergoes debuccalization (i.e. [h]); on the other hand, if /f/ precedes [- round] vowels 7

8 9

On the contrary, Latin f- was preserved before r and in the group fŏ > #__ [we] as shown in the following examples: Lat. fŏrte > fuerte /fwerte/ Old Span. ‘strong’, Lat. frīgĭdo > frío / frío/ Old Span. ‘cold’ and so on. Retention of word-initial /f/ in words derived from Latin is still found in some rural areas of Asturias and León in Spain. Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Murcia”. Ms. Cited with the permission of the author. (http:// www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/Murcia.pdf.)

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(i.e. /a/, /e/ and /i/), it is realized with an additional vowel-like gesture of the lips exhibiting a labial secondary articulation (i.e.[hʷ]) as shown in Table 4.4. /f/ → [hʷ]/ ___ V [- round]

falta /falt̪ a/ > [hʷál.t̪ a] ‘lack’ fajarse /fahaɾse/ > [hʷa.háɾ.se] ‘to fasten’ falleció /fay̵esyo/ > [hʷa.y̵e.syó] ‘(s)he passed away’ familia /familya/ > [hʷa.mí.λya] ‘family’ me enfadé /me#enfad̪ e/ > [meŋ.hʷa.ð̪ é] ‘I got mad’ febrero /febɾeɾo/ > [hʷe.βɾé.ɾo] ‘February’ me enfermé /me#enfeɾme/ > [meŋ.hʷeɾ.mé] ‘I got sick’ enfermedad /enfeɾmeð̪ að̪ / > [eŋ.hʷeɾ. me.ð̪ á] ‘illness’ café /kafe/ > [ka.hʷé] ‘coffee’ oficio /ofisyo/> [o.hʷí.syo] ‘job’ finca /finka/ > [hʷíŋ.ka] ‘farm’

/f/ → [h]/ ___ V [+ round]

forma /forma/ > [hóɾ.ma] ‘form’ conforme /konfoɾme/ > [koŋ.hóɾ.me] foto /fot̪ o/ > [hó.t̪ o] ‘picture’ te conformas /t̪ e#konfoɾmas/ > [t̪ e.koŋ. hóɾ.ma]

fumaba /fumaba/ > [hu.má.βa] ‘s(he) smoked’ difunto /d̪ ifunt̪ o/ > [d̪ i.hún̪ .t̪ o] ‘dead person’ fulana /fulana/ > [hu.lá.na] ‘so-and-so’ fumigando /fumiɡand̪ o/ > [hu.mi.ɤán̪ .d̪ o] ‘fumigating’

Table 4.4. Allophonic distribution of the phoneme /f/ in Costeño Spanish

The allophonic distribution shown in Table 4.4 for the Costeño segment /f/ also matches Aguirre Beltran’s (1989b) and Althoff’s (1994) findings on Cuijleño speech, a Costeño sister variety spoken in the Costa Chica area of Guerrero. Regarding the allophone [hʷ], attested in other Afro-Spanish varieties (Lipski 1990; Megenney 1999; Hammond 2001; Sessarego 2014b, 2015, 2019), Althoff (1994) relates this to an earlier voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ] (Lloyd 1987: 223). However, I suggest another possible linguistic link for the Costeño labialized [hʷ] via the influx of West African languages. This argument is based on the following four points. Firstly, the Costeño corpus, including the recordings from the pilot study, does not display any occurrence of the voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ] in the speech of the 74 subjects either from Guerrero (Cuajinicuilapa, El Terrero, El Faro) or from Oaxaca (Collantes, La Boquilla, El Chivo, El Ciruelo, La Estancia and Morelos). Second, the OtoManguean languages (Coastal Mixtec, Amuzgan, and Chatino) which surround and have been in contact, to certain extent, with the Spanish spoken in the target area, do not exhibit labialized consonants in their phonological inventories. Thirdly, some scholars (Hoffman 1963; Hyman 1970; Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1979; Kenstowicz 1994; Gussenhoven and Jacobs 1998) argue for the

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existence of labialized consonants in some of the West African trade languages such as Nupe and Margi, among others, in which labialization can represent phonemic contrasts10. Fourthly, a West African presence in this Afro-Mexican pocket is undeniable during the colonial period (Aguirre Beltrán 1989a; Guzmán Calvo 2003; Vinson III and Vaughn 2004). Moreover, there is also the possibility to consider that the segment /f/ becomes [hʷ] everywhere, and that the labial or round secondary articulation is deleted in contexts where [hʷ] is followed by a [+ round] vowel, due to the OCP (Obligatory Contour Principle) that states that adjacent identical features are prohibited. Hence a [+round] consonant cannot be followed by a [+ round] vowel. Therefore, I conclude that the labialized phone [hʷ] found in the Spanish spoken in the Costa Chica region of Mexico is a phonetic West African remnant rather than a manifestation of an earlier voiceless bilabial fricative [ɸ]. The labialized segment [hʷ] has been also attested in other Afro-Hispanic varieties such as in the Province of Esmeraldas in Ecuador (Lipski 2009), the Chocó region of Colombia (Sessarego 2019), in the Yungas region of Bolivia (Lipski 2008; Sessarego 2014b), the central coastal area of Peru (Mendoza 1976; Erikson 1986; Lipski 1994; Sessarego 2015) and in the Andean highlands of Peru (Mendoza 1976: 83; Lipski 1994).

4.3.2. The phoneme /s/ The variable behavior of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in syllable- and word-final position allows us to classify Spanish dialects in three main categories: 1) Those dialects that retain the sibilant segment /s/ in all environments (northern and eastern Spain, most of Mexico and Guatemala and the Andean region of South America); 2) Those Spanish varieties in which /s/ undergoes debuccalization in [h] in preconsonantal and phrase-final position except in word-final prevocalic settings (southcentral and southwestern Spain, coastal Mexico, and the Río de la Plata region of South America; and 3) Those that aspirate and/or delete /s/ even in word-final prevocalic environments (southern Spain, Central America, the Caribbean, Andalucía, most of the Pacific coast of South America and the Canary Islands).

10

Kenstowicz and Kisseberth (1979) cite the following minimal pairs in Nupe and Margi languages. Nupe: [e:gʷa:] ‘hand’ versus [e:ga:] ‘stranger’; [tʷa] ‘to trim’ versus [ta] ‘to tell’. Margi: [pá] ‘build’ versus [pʷá] ‘pour in’; [sà] ‘drink’ versus [sʷà] ‘shut’; [gà] ‘and’ versus [gʷà] ‘enter’.

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The aspiration of /s/ in coda position word-internally tends to be the norm in Costeño as the following items show: fresco /fɾesko/ > [fɾéʰ.ko] ‘fresh’, este /est̪ e/ > [éʰ.t̪ e] ‘this’, usted /ust̪ ed̪ / > [uʰ.t̪ é] ‘you (formal)’, respetar /respet̪ aɾ/ > [reʰ.pe.t̪ á] ‘to respect’, espada /espad̪ a/ > [eʰ.pá.ð̪ a] ‘sword’, and so on. The behavior of /s/ in word-final position, in contrast, tends to be more unstable than in preconsonantal and prevocalic environments, ranging from strong to weak realizations among Costeño speakers as the examples illustrated in Table 4.5. Retention of /s/ in preconsonantal and prevocalic contexts /nos#konosimos/ > [nos.ko.no.sí.mo] ‘we met each other’ /los#musikos/ > [los.mú.si.ko] ‘the musicians’ /los#maest̪ ɾos/ > [los.ma.éʰ.t̪ɾo] ‘the teachers’ /las#posad̪ as/ > [las.po.sá.ð̪ a] ‘the posadas’ /las#klawsuɾas/ > [las.klaw. sú.ɾa] ‘the graduations’ /t̪ enemos#d̪ os#aɾkusas/ > [t̪ e.né.mos.d̪ o.saɾ.ku.sa] ‘we have two arcuzas’ /d̪ os#eɾan#d̪ e#t̪ apekst̪ la/ > [d̪ os.é.ran̪ .d̪ e.t̪ a.peh.la] ‘two were from Tapextla’ /nad̪ a#mas#jun.t̪ a.d̪ a/ > [no.má.sa.hun̪ .t̪ a.ð̪ a] ‘just in free relation’

Aspiration/deletion of /s/ in preconsonantal contexts

Aspiration/deletion of /s/ in prevocalic contexts

/las#flores/ > [laʰ.fló.ɾes] ‘the flowers’ /los#webos/ > [loʰ.ɡʷé.βo] ‘the eggs’ /los#mueɾt̪ os/ > [loʰ.mwéɾ.t̪ o] ‘the dead’ /los#kamarones/ > [loʰ.ká.ma. ɾo.ne] ‘the shrimp’ /nenes#čikit̪ os/ > [ne.ne.či. kí.t̪ o] ‘little babies’ /los#d̪ yablos/ > [lo.ð̪ yá.βlo] ‘the devils’ /los#čikit̪ os/ > [lo.či.kí.t̪ o] ‘the little ones’ /mis#papases/ > [mi.pa.pá.se] ‘my parents’

/kon#los#amigos/ > [koŋ.lo.ha. mí.ɤo] ‘with the friends’ /nad̪ a#mas#eso/ > [na.má.he. so] ‘only that’ /mis#abwelos/ > [mi.ha.ɤwé. lo] ‘my grandparents’ /en#los#alt̪ aɾes/ > [en.lo.al.t̪ á. ɾe] ‘on the altars’ /nos#inbit̪ an/ > [no.im.bí.t̪ aŋ] ‘they invite us’ /d̪ os#iny̵eksyones/ > [d̪ o.iɲ.y̵e.syó.ne] ‘two injections’

Table 4.5. The behavior of /s/ in word-final position in Costeño speech

The fact that the behavior of /s/ is variable in word-final position makes it difficult to place this dialect in one of the aforementioned categories; however, with certain exceptions, Costeño Spanish would fall into the second one, since the aspiration of /s/ is more perceptible among the speakers in word-final prevocalic contexts.

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As a consequence of the variable behavior of /s/ in word-final position, a prevocalic [s] is added at times to the beginning of certain groups of words that begin with a vowel, such as kinship, body parts, numbers and, into a lesser extent, items of common use in the community. The following excerpts in (2) are extracted from the data and illustrate this point. (2)

Insertion of [s] in prevocalic position word-initially in Costeño. a) cuatro hijos /kwat̪ ɾo#ihos/ > [kwa.t̪ ɾo.sí.ho] ‘four sons’. b) el animal /el#animal/ > [el.sa.ni.mál] ‘animal’.

The insertion of a prevocalic [s] in word-initial position has also been attested in Andalusian11, Isleño, and Brulé12 Spanish. Lipski (1990), when referring to Isleño speech, points out the following: Epenthetic /s/ is at times added to the beginning of words, through false analogy with word-final plural /s/, which often remains as [s] if the following word begins with a vowel. Such a process is common in many creole French dialects (for example, oisea[u]x (sic) > zoizeaux ‘bird’); among the isleños, examples include al sotro [otro] día ‘the next day’ and un sijo [hijo] ‘a son’. This type of phonological restructuring is frequent in language creolization, when contact with the received superstrate language is suddenly cut off (Lipski 1990: 29).

In creole literature, this phonological process is known as article agglutination or fossilized determiners. McWhorter (2000), when referring to the French-based plantation creoles of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, (FPC), states the following: The fossilized determiners on many FPC nouns are well-known (Mauritian lavi ‘life’ from la vie [lavi-là] ‘the life’, dilo ‘water’ from de l’eau [dilo-là] ‘the water’). Baker (1984, 1987), followed by Grant (1995), who found that the percentage of nouns with fossilized determiners varies considerably from one FPC to another. In addition, the same noun can have a different fossilized determiner in one creole than in another; for example, man is nõm in Antillean (< un homme) and zom (< les homes) in Mauritian (Grant 1995: 154) … Of course, the determiners are completely fossilized in the modern creoles, with lexical meanings long stabilized (McWhorter 2000: 176-177).

11

12

In Andalucian Spanish, the epenthetic [s] undergoes aspiration surfacing as [h] as in los [h]ojos ‘the eyes’, las [h]orejas, and so on. See Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Andalusia.” Ms. Cited with the permission of the author. (http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/ Andalusia.pdf.) In Brulé Spanish, /s/ becomes [+ voiced] and is realized as [z] due to the linguistic contact with Acadian French, English and probably Haitian creole speakers who were brought from Haiti into the region after 1791 as slaves (McWhorter 2000: 163).

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It would be dangerous to claim here that in the data under study those words that exhibit an epenthetic [s] word-initially should be considered cases of article agglutination; in Costeño, the majority of the cases, with very few exceptions such as those in (2) above, are result of a resyllabification process as the following examples in (3) show. (3)

Resyllabification of word-final [s] in prevocalic contexts in Costeño. a) seis años /seys#aɲos/ > [sey.sá.ɲo] ‘six years’ b) los hombres /los#ombres/ > [lo.só.me] ‘the men’ c) para sus hijos /para#sus#ihos/ > [pa.su.sí.ho] ‘for her sons’ d) las hojas de plátano /las#ohas#de#plat̪ ano/ > [la.so.ha.de.plá.t̪ a.no] ‘banana leaves’ e) las orejotas /las#oɾehot̪ as/ > [la.so.ɾe.hó.t̪ a] ‘big ears’ f) mis hijos /mis#ihos/ > [mi.si.ho] ‘my sons’ g) cincuenta y tres años /sinkwent̪ a#i#t̪ ɾes#aɲos/ > [siŋ.kwen̪ .t̪ ay.t̪ ɾe.sá.ɲo] ‘fifty three years old’.

Furthermore, cases of resyllabification also occur after the aspiration of [s] in word-final position as some of the Costeño examples in the third column of the Table 4.5 above show and also are shown in the following examples in (4). (4)

Aspiration and resyllabification of word-final [s] in prevocalic contexts. a) las ollitas /las#oy̵it̪ as/ > [la.ho.y̵í.t̪ a] ‘the little pots’ b) unas amigas /unas amigas/ > [u.na.ha.mí.ɤa] ‘some friends’

As a conclusion, the word-final plural /s/, realized or aspirated, undergoes resyllabification in prevocalic contexts. Exceptionally, an epenthetic [s] may be added word-initially in pre-vocalic contexts through false analogy with the process of resyllabification of word-final plural /s/ in Costeño.

4.3.3. The phoneme /y̵/ Another division among Spanish dialects is into two major categories, yeísta and lleísta. The lleísta varieties, which represent a very limited number in the Spanish-speaking world, include in their phonological inventory the phonemes /y̵/ (a voiced palatal slit fricative) and /ʎ/ (a voiced lamino-palatal lateral liquid) which are represented by the graphemes y and ll respectively. On the other hand, the yeísta dialects lack the phoneme /ʎ/ employing /y̵/ in its place. Costeño Spanish falls into the yeísta category.

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In general, the pronunciation of the voiced palatal fricative /y̵/ is realized as [y̵] in Costeño speech rather than the weak pronunciation [y] found in the northern area of Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula (Hammond 2001), as well as in certain Spanish varieties spoken in the United States. Also, in absolute-initial position, among Costeño speakers the voiced alveo-palatal grooved fricative allophone [ž], a sound that characterizes other Spanish varieties such as those spoken in the Rio de la Plata region in South America, is relatively rare.

4.3.4. The phoneme /h/ In Costeño, as is common in many areas of Mexico, the graphemes j and g before front vowels are realized as a voiceless glottal fricative [h]. Such pronunciation is also attested in southern Spain, the Canary Islands, northern areas of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean zone. The following examples illustrate this: gente /hent̪ e/ > [hén̪ .t̪ e] ‘people’, jarros /har#os/ > [há.řo] ‘cups made of clay’, girar /hiɾaɾ/ > [hi.rá] ‘to turn’, San Juan /san#hwan/ > [saŋ. hwáŋ] ‘Saint John’, and so on. In addition, my data also include one exceptional case in which the segment /h/ is realized as [s] in the item jilguero /hilɡeɾo/ > [sil.ɡé.ɾo] ‘goldfinch’. Because this pronunciation occurred just once in the speech of one of the subjects, I conclude that it may be a confusion at the ideolectal level or a simple performance error.

4.4. Nasal segments 4.4.1. The phonemes /m/ and /ɲ/ In Costeño, the bilabial nasal /m/and the palatal nasal /ɲ/ generally behave as in most other Spanish dialects without exceptional articulations.

4.4.2. The phoneme /n/ The alveolar nasal /n/ word-internally before a consonant undergoes the well-known process of regressive nasal-place assimilation affected by the next consonant presenting the following set of allophones: [m], [ɱ], [ń], [n̪ ], [n], [ň], [ɲ] and [ŋ]. Costeño, like other American and Andalusian dialects, lacks the interdental and retroflex nasal assimilations, [ń] and [ň] respectively, found in the northern and central regions of Spain (Hammond 2001).

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In word- and phrase-final position, on the other hand, /n/ undergoes velarization in Costeño, (i.e.[ŋ]) as shown by the examples in Table 4.6. /n/ → [ŋ] in word-final position limón /limon/ > [li.móŋ] ‘lemon’ región /rehyon/ > [r̥ e.hyóŋ] ‘region’ corazón /koɾason/ > [ko.ɾa.sóŋ] ‘heart’ algodón /alɡod̪ on/ > [al.ɤo.ð̪ óŋ] ‘cotton’ tradición /t̪ ɾad̪ isyon/ > [t̪ ɾa.ð̪ i.syóŋ] ‘tradition’ revolución /rebolusyon/ > [ř̥e.βo.lu.syóŋ] ‘revolution’

/n/ → [ŋ] in phrase-final position No nos invitaron /no#nos#inbit̪ aɾon/ > [no. noʰ.em.bi.t̪ á.ɾoŋ] ‘(they) didn’t invite us’ Otra vez canta la canción / ot̪ ɾa#bes#kant̪ a#la#kansyon/ > [o.t̪ a.βes. kan̪ .t̪ a.la.kan.syóŋ] ‘Once again sing the song’ Está bien /est̪ a#byen/ > [t̪ a.βyéŋ] ‘It is fine’

Table 4.6. Velarization of /n/ in word- and phrase-final position in Costeño Spanish

In addition, Costeño also displays an ‘atypical’ velarization in word-final preconsonantal and prevocalic environments, similar to the one attested in some Spanish varieties of the Caribbean Diaspora (Bjarkman 1989)13. The following instances in (5) illustrate this phenomenon. (5)

13

Velarization of /n/ in other contexts in Costeño Spanish. (5.1) Preconsonantal contexts. a) Esos era[n] tiempos viejos. [e.so.é.ɾaŋ.t̪ yem.po.βye.ho] ‘There were other times.’ b) Se mata[n] dos reses para el comelito[n], para que la gente… [se.ma.t̪ aŋ.dó.ře.se.pal.ko.me.li.t̪ oŋ.pa.ke.la.hen.t̪ e] ‘Two cows are killed for the feast and the guests.’ (5.2) Prevocalic contexts. a) Llega[n] algunos y ya se sube[n] a bailar. [y̵e.ɤaŋ.al.ɡú.noy.y̵a.se.su.βeŋ.a.βay.la] ‘Some people arrive and they immediately start to dance.’ b) Lo parte[n] al otro día. [lo.páɾ.t̪ eŋ.a.o.t̪ ɾo.ð̪ í.a] ‘(The cake) is cut up to the next day.’ c) A veces anda[n] aquí, a veces en el norte. [be.se.an̪ .d̪ aŋ.a.kí.be.se.nel.noɾ.t̪ e] ‘Sometimes (they) are here, sometimes (they) are in the USA.’

Bjarkman (1989: 239) cites the following cases of velarization in word-final preconsonantal environments: u[ŋ]#boleto ‘a ticket’, u[ŋ]#francés ‘a Frenchman’, u[ŋ]#chiste ‘a joke’.

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Despite the fact that Costeño tends to velarize /n/ in various contexts, my data do not exhibit any case of nasal deletion accompanied by or without nasalization of the preceding vowel, as occurs in the speech of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands (Samper Padilla 1990) and in Brulé Spanish (Holloway 1997). Therefore, Costeño resembles those non-conservative Spanish dialects by its tendency to velarize /n/ in different environments.

4.5. Liquid segments 4.5.1. Liquid mutation In Costeño Spanish, lamdazation of the non-lateral alveolar flap /ɾ/ in favor of [l] sporadically occurs in word- and syllable-final preconsonantal position as shown by the examples in Table 4.7. /ɾ/ → [l] tocar /t̪ okaɾ/ > [t̪ o.kál] ‘to touch’ guisar /ɡisaɾ/ > [ɡi.sál]] ‘to cook’ volar /bolaɾ/ > [bo.lál] ‘to fly’ tomar /t̪ omaɾ/ > [t̪ o.mál] ‘to drink’ jalar /halaɾ/ > [ha.lál] ‘to pull out’ hacer /aseɾ/ > [a.sél]‘to make / to do’ ver /beɾ/ > [bél] ‘to see’ porque /poɾke/ > [pól.ke] ‘because’

Table 4.7. Lambdacism of /ɾ/ in Costeño Spanish

Notice that in the examples in Table 4.7, lateralization of /ɾ/ frequently takes place in infinitives. In Costeño, lateralization alternates with deletion of /ɾ/ in the same environment, a point to which I will return presently in Chapter 5 (Section 5.4) which is devoted to Costeño morphology and syntax. The reverse process, rhotacism of the alveolar lateral liquid /l/, is almost nonexistent in Costeño. My data only account for two cases, both involving the same lexical root, as seen in the following: salsa /salsa/ > [sáɾ.sa] ‘sauce’ and salsita /salsit̪ a/ > [saɾ.sí.t̪ a] ‘diminutive of salsa’. Only a few cases of liquid neutralization in prevocalic contexts, like the following, appear in the data: crin /kɾin/ > [klíŋ] ‘horse hair’, cumplen /kumplen/

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> [kúm.pɾeŋ] ‘(They) fulfill’. In general, these types of liquid mutation are also found in some areas of Spain (Andalucía, León, Murcia, Cáceres and Badajoz), the Canary Islands, the Caribbean zone, Afro-Hispanic varieties, as well as in vestigial Spanish such as Brulé (Holoway 1997), Isleño (Lipski 1990) and Traditional New Mexican Spanish (Bills 1997; Bills and Vigil 1999). In addition, three isolated phenomena affecting final liquids were found in the Costeño data. The first deals with deletion of /ɾ/ in cluster onsets as the following two instances illustrate: otra /ot̪ ra/ > [ó.t̪ a] ‘another’ and prórroga /pɾoroɡa/ > [pó.ř̥o.ɤa] ‘extension’. The second is the addition of a non-etymological [r] in the word albaca /albaka/ > [al.bá.kaɾ] ‘basil’. The third is liquid gliding; this phonological process converts a final liquid to a palatal glide [y] as in the verb creer /kreer/ > [kréy] ‘to believe’. Liquid gliding is frequent in some areas of the Dominican Republic (Alba 1979; Lipski 1994; Núñez Cedeño 1997).

4.5.2. The phoneme /r/ In Costeño, the alveolar trill /r/ exhibits variable behavior that is be difficult to characterize as a pronunciation of the phone [r]; in its place, an ample range of allophonic realizations, both voiced and voiceless, occur in the speech of the Costeño speakers ranging from assibilated [ř]/[ř̥], simple vibrant non-lateral [ɾ]/ [ɾ̥], and multiple vibrant non-lateral [r]/[r̥ ]. In fact, one isolated case was found in which /r/ was realized phonetically as [d̪ ], likely with [r] as an intermediate stage, in the Spanish verb reproduce /repɾod̪ use/ > [d̪ e.pɾo.ð̪ ú.se] ‘s(he) reproduces’ in the speech of one of the subjects. A similar process has been reported in Villa Mella Spanish in The Dominican Republic (Núñez Cedeño 1987). The various allophonic realizations of /r/ along with the fact that in Spanish the non-lateral liquids /r/ and /ɾ/ are in a bizarre almost complementary distribution14 have led to some scholars to conclude the existence of only one non-lateral liquid phoneme in Spanish, with [r] being considered an allophonic variant of /ɾ/ (Harris 1983; Núñez Cedeño 1989; Núñez Cedeño and Morales-Front 1999, Hammond 1999, 2001). In this vein, one of the most significant contributions in the field of Spanish dialectology has been carried out by Hammond, who since 1980a has followed an intense and interrupted sequence of analytic studies and detailed spectrographic analyses of more than 500 individual recordings from more than 35 Spanish dialects from Latin America, the Canary Islands and

14

“(1) Only the phoneme /r̄/ occurs in word-initial environments and syllable-initial position within a word after the consonants /l/, /n/, or /s/. (2) Only the phoneme /r/ is found in final environments and in clusters of two consonants. (3) Both non-lateral liquid phonemes occur in syllable-initial position following a vowel within a word” (Hammond 2001: 275).

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Spain, including Spanish varieties in the United States of America. The statistical results of his analyses can be summarized in the following claim: In normal spanish discourse, the segment [r] simply does not occur in the speech of the vast majority of native spanish speakers. (Hammond 1999: 138)

Although, it could be difficult for some native Spanish speakers to accept this precept, the truth is that the statistics reveal that the phoneme /ɾ/ probably exhibits more different allophonic variants than any other Spanish phoneme15. Summing up this discussion, Costeño Spanish sporadically exhibits liquid mutation favoring lambdization of /ɾ/ rather than rhotacism of /l/, a phonological process that is also found in other regions like in some areas of Andalucía, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, Afro-Hispanic varieties, as well as in vestigial Spanish. I also claim here that in Costeño the non-lateral segment /ɾ/ exhibits an ample range of allophonic realizations including the alveolar trill [r].

4.6. Archaic and basilectal trends in Costeño Spanish 4.6.1. Vowel variation In Costeño, vocalic segments sporadically present substitutions as show the following examples: ostiones /ost̪ yones/ >[us.t̪ yó.ne] ‘large oyster’, buñuelo / buɲwelo/ > [bo.ɲwé.lo]/[bi.ɲwé.lo] ‘a local type of pastry’, vesícula /besikula/ > [bi.sí.ku.la] ‘gall bladder’, vestuario /best̪ waɾyo/ > [biʰ.t̪ wá.ɾyo] ‘costume’, epazote /epasot̪ e/ > [i.pa.só.t̪ e], procesión /pɾosesyón/ > [pɾo.si.syóŋ] ‘procession’, medicina /med̪ isina/ > [me.ð̪ e.sí.na] ‘medicine’, entonces /ent̪ onses/ > [an̪ .t̪ ón. se] ‘then’, seguido /seɡid̪ o/ > [si.ɡí.ð̪ o] ‘followed’, anoche /anoče/ > [a.nó.či] ‘last night’, etc. Vowel variation is also frequent in vestigial Spanish, Afro-Hispanic varieties and in rural speech. Given the socioeconomic profile of the subjects who participated in this study, fishermen and peasants with nearly a total lack of formal education, it is, therefore, not surprising to find this phenomenon in their speech.

15

Hammond (2001: 277) also accounts for posterior allophonic realizations attested in the casual discourse of Puerto Rican speakers: the voiceless dorsal post-velar strident slit fricative [χ], the voiced uvular trill [R] and the voiceless uvular trill [R̥ ].

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4.6.2. Aphaeresis Costeño exhibits deletion of an onsetless vowel in word-initial position, generally the segment /a/, although not categorically, as the following excerpts in (6) chosen from the sample show: (6)

Cases of aphaeresis in Costeño a) Acarreábamos agua /akareabamos#agwa/ > [ka.ř̥e.á.βa.mo.a.ɤwa] ‘We used to bring water’ b) Ya no ayuda /y̵a#no#ay̵ud̪ a/ > [y̵a.no.y̵ú.ð̪ a] ‘(The government) does not help anymore’ c) Le agarró la gripe /le#agaró#la#gɾipe/ > [le.ɤa.r̥ ó.la.ɤɾi.pa] ‘S(he) got the flu’ d) ¿No se te hace aburrido? /no#se#t̪ e#ase#aburid̪ o/ > [no.se.t̪ á.se.βu.řyo] ‘Doesn’t it bore you?’ e) Ajonjolí /ahonholí/ > [ho.lí] ‘sesame’ f) Estamos echando versos /est̪ amos#ečand̪ o#beɾsos/ > [t̪ a.mo.čán̪ .d̪ o.βeɾ.so] ‘We are reciting verses’

Cross-linguistically, aphaeresis is a common process. In Spanish, this phenomenon has been attested for many centuries16 and is still found in Brulé Spanish (Holloway 1997), Traditional New Mexican Spanish17 and other Afro-Hispanic varieties (Megenney 1999; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2014b, 2015).

4.6.3. Syllabic prothesis In contrast to the preceding phenomenon, Costeño sometimes exhibits syllabic prothesis as the following instances show: (7)

16 17

Cases of prothesis in Costeño a) según /segun/ > [a.se.ɤúŋ] ‘according to’. b) chile /čile/ > [a.čí.le] ‘chili pepper’. c) torear /t̪ oɾeaɾ/ > [a.t̪ o.ɾé.aɾ] ‘to fight (bulls)’. d) me molesta /me#molest̪ a/ > [me.a.mo.lés.t̪ a] ‘That bothers me’. e) se juntan /se#hunt̪ an/ > [se.a.hún̪ .t̪ aŋ] ‘They live together’. f) participado /paɾt̪ isipad̪ o/ > [d̪ es.paɾ.t̪ i.si.pá.ð̪ o] ‘participated’. g) me abandonó /me#aband̪ ono/ > [me.ð̪ e.sa.βan̪ .d̪ o.nó] ‘s(he) left me’.

Megenney (1999: 88) cites Espinoza (1930: 250) who argues: “la distancia desde la sílaba inicial hasta la acentuada en palabras de más de dos sílabas debió favorecer la pérdida de la a-.” Personal fieldwork at Picuris Pueblo, New Mexico, carried out in December 2004.

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Megenney (1999: 84) offers a brief list of prefixes that are used in new prothetic formations like a-, des-, en-, in-, etc. This phenomenon is also found in rural speech and in Afro-Hispanic varieties.

4.6.4. Metathesis In the Costeño sample, cases of metathesis are extremely rare; I only found the following: pared /paɾed̪ / > [pa.ð̪ éɾ] ‘wall’, ciudad /syud̪ ad̪ / > [swi.ð̪ á] ‘city’, and its derivative form ciudadano /syud̪ ad̪ ano/ > [swi.ð̪ a.ð̪ á.no] ‘citizen’. In vestigial and Africanized Spanish, this process tends to occur more frequently.

4.6.5. Syllable deletion Costeño exhibits significant phonological reductions; the following instances in (8) display some cases extracted from the corpus: (8)

Cases of syllable deletion in Costeño. a) nada /nad̪ a/ > [ná:] ‘nothing’. b) nada más /nad̪ a#mas/ > [no.má]/[na:.má] ‘nothing else’. c) el huracán Paulina /el#uɾakan#paulina/ > [fɾa.káŋ.paw.li.na] ‘the huracane Paulina’. d) para el desayuno /para#el#d̪ esay̵uno/ > [pa.la.y̵ú.no] ‘for breakfast’. e) no está aquí /no#est̪ a#aki/ > [noʰ.t̪ a.kí] ‘s(he) is not here’. g) para allá /paɾa#ay̵a/ > [pa.y̵á] ‘over there’. h) hermanita /eɾmanit̪ a/ > [ma.ní.t̪ a] ‘sister’.

Syllable deletion is also commonplace in vestigial Spanish, rural speech and in informal discourse across Spanish dialectology.

4.6.6. Monophthongization Cases of monophthongization are rare in Costeño but at times are heard among the community speakers. The following instances illustrate this phenomenon: aunque /awnke/ > [áŋ.ke] ‘though’, quieren /kyeɾen/ > [ké.ɾeŋ] ‘they want’, and so on. Monophthongization is very frequent in vestigial Spanish and rural speech.

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4.7. Conclusion The phonological and phonetic aspects that characterize Costeño Spanish are also found in many other Spanish dialects, whether or not they have been influenced by African languages and cultures. Strictly considered, however, most of these same traits are found in non-conservative Spanish dialects, like those spoken in the southern region of Spain, the Canary Islands, the Caribbean Diaspora, vestigial and Afro-Hispanic varieties including rustic and popular speech. We saw that in general terms Costeño exhibits the following phonological processes: a) vocalic, consonantal and syllabic reductions; b) vowel variation; c) epenthesis; d) consonantal substitution; e) weakness/deletion of the segment /d̪ / in intervocalic and word-final position; f) variable behavior of the segment /s/ especially in word-final position ranging from strong to weak realizations; g) occasional liquid mutation; f) invariable realization of the voiced palatal glide / y̵/; and g) nasal velarization word-finally. In the Afro-Hispanic linguistic arena, some of the phonological operations previously mentioned, such as liquid mutation, weakness and/or deletion of the segments /s/ and /d̪ /, epenthesis, and phonological reductions have been considered to be an influence of sub-Saharan substrate by various scholars (Granda 1994, 1988, 1977; Megenney 1990, 1989, 1985, 1982; Quilis 1995; Schwegler 1991a; Lipski 1986a, 1986c, 1994, 1994b, 1998, 2005; Sessarego 2014b, 2015, 2019). Nevertheless, since these phenomena also take place in other Spanish varieties where no African presence is attested, this fact obviously mitigates against their supposed African origin. This debate is still open in the literature and is more suggestive rather than conclusive. However, unlike its other Spanish relatives, Costeño presents an exceptional labialized sound [hʷ], an allophonic variant of /f/ (i.e. oficio /ofisyo/ > [o.hʷí. syo] ‘occupation’, café /kafe/ > [ka.hʷé] ‘coffee’, familia /familya/ > [hʷa. mí.λya]) which I claim in this study is rooted in West African languages and is attested in other Afro-Hispanic varieties. The high frequency of the segment /č/ in approximately 35.98% of the Costeño words from different linguistic sources that are not heard out of the Costa Chica region of Mexico is also remarkable like chacalmaca /čakalmaka/ > [ča.kal.má.ka] ‘a special type of net’, chambalé [čam.ba.lé] ‘mosquito’, chacalín [ča.ka.líŋ] ‘river shrimp’, chimeco [či.mé.ko] ‘dirty face’, and so on. This picture gives us an idea of the rhizomatic nature (Chapter 2 Section 2.4 of this study) that the Costeño dialect conveys, reflecting not only linguistic connections with other (Afro)Spanish varieties and languages, but also heterogeneity in its own phonological component that makes it a multiplicitous Spanish

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variety rather than a monolithic one; Costeño is a product of its linguistic contacts since the beginning of its formation in the colonial period. Costeño, as any other language/dialect in the world, has been subject to constant linguistic change through the speech acts of its speakers who rework and adapt Costeño to their daily necessities, as well as their cultural and social manifestations. This fact has given this Afro-Hispanic variety its own singularity and linguistic flavor without losing its relation to other Spanish relatives worldwide. In this manner, Costeño Spanish fulfils the linguistic rhizomatic principles stated in Chapter 2 (Section 2.4): Principles of the Linguistic Rhizome • A language (variety) is not derived from one unique linguistic root. • There is not a single homogenous linguistic community.

These principles allow us to better understand the phonological and phonetic trends of Costeño Spanish currently spoken in the Afro-Mexican communities of Collantes and La Boquilla located in the Costa Chica region of Oaxaca.

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5

Morphological and Syntactic Characteristics of Costeño Spanish

In the preceding chapter devoted to phonological trends in Costeño Spanish, the linguistic rhizomatic nature of the dialect that allows it to be linked with other Spanish varieties worldwide was highlighted. The present chapter reinforces such a rhizomatic constitution by focusing on morphological and syntactic aspects of this Afro-Hispanic variety. Also, as we will see presently, Costeño morphological and syntactic traits reveal more about its linguistic African heritage, which at times coalesces with another linguistic force, the Oto-Manguean, and in particular the Mixtec language, with which Costeño has also had contact. The result of these multiple linguistic contacts sometimes makes it difficult to discern to what extent a given linguistic form should be attributed to either one of those contact languages. Furthermore, a morphosyntactic analysis of Costeño enables us to become more aware of its erosional status due to the following external factors: socioeconomic absorption, the constant micro-impacts of Spanish standardizing elements, emigration, drug trafficking, and natural disasters. To describe the morphological and syntactic characteristics of Costeño Spanish, the present chapter is divided in two main parts. The first part addresses the morphological characteristics which are divided as follows. Subsection (5.1.1) focuses on Costeño verbal morphology characterized by the use of archaic verb forms (5.1.1.1), vowel instability in the verbal stem (5.1.1.2), regularization of

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irregular verb forms (5.1.1.3) and unmarked infinitives (5.1.1.4). Subsection (5.1.2) concentrates on nominal morphology which presents an interesting picture, particularly the aspect dedicated to Costeño onomastics (5.1.2.7) that casts a partial light on the provenience of some of the slaves who arrived in the Costa Chica region of Mexico. Subdivision (5.1.3) looks at the characteristics of adjectives and adverbs. Finally, (5.1.4) analyzes the Costeño pronominal system characterized by its use of overt subject pronouns, emphatic reflexive pronouns and non-canonical possessive forms. The second part of this chapter is devoted to syntactic trends and is divided into the following seven subsections: (5.2.1) focuses on clitics; (5.2.2) accounts for some aspects of verbal instability, such as the lack of subject-verb agreement (5.2.2.1) and verbal paradigm modification (5.2.2.2). Subsections (5.2.3) and (5.2.4) address the phenomena of the deletion of articles and prepositions respectively. Subdivision (5.2.5) deals with negation-related variation and the two types found in Costeño Spanish (reduplication of the negative no and the preverbal negation nadie no... ‘nobody’). Subsection (5.2.6) discusses the para atrás construction and its frequent use among the Costeño community speakers. Subsection (5.2.7) accounts for sporadic cases of loss of the copula in this Afro-Mexican variety. Finally, (5.2.8) presents general conclusions concerning Costeño morphological and syntactic characteristics.

5.1. Morphological features 5.1.1. Verbal morphology Costeño Spanish exhibits morphological variations in its verbal system that can be classified into four main categories: 1) the use of archaic verb forms; 2) vowel instability in the verbal stem; 3) regularization of some irregular verb forms; and 4) unmarked infinitives.

5.1.1.1. Archaic verb forms As in vestigial Spanish and rural speech, Costeño tends to retain archaic verbal forms such as vide (vi) ‘I saw’, haiga (haya) ‘there may be’, semo (somos) ‘we are’, trujimo (trajimos) ‘we brought’, and so on. The endurance of these verbal archaisms in this Spanish variety, as well as in others, can be easily explained by the principle of “Generative Entrenchment” (Wimsatt 2000) referred to previously in Chapter 2 (Subsection 2.1.5) and repeated here in (1).

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The Principle of Generative Entrenchment (Wimsatt 2000) Barring some stochastic events in the evolution of a language variety, the oldest features have greater chance of prevailing over some newer alternatives simply because they have acquired more and more carriers, hence more transmitters, with each additional generation of speakers.

5.1.1.2. Instability in the verbal stem Costeño also displays vocalic variation in the stem of some verbs of frequent use as shown by the following examples in (2). (2)

Vowel variation in the verbal stem. a) s[i]guí (s[e]eguí) ‘I followed’ b) [i]ncuentra ([e]ncuentra) ‘s(he) finds’ c) d[i]spierto (d[e]spiertos) ‘awake’ d) [e]nvitaron ([i]nvitaron) ‘they invited’ e) part[e]cipar (part[i]cipar) ‘to participate’ f) d[i]cía (d[e]cía) ‘(s)he said’ g) v[e]sitala (v[i]sitarla) ‘to visit her’ h) p[i]dí (p[e]dí) ‘I asked for’ i) d[e]rige (d[i]rige) ‘(s)he leads’ j) rec[e]birse (rec[i]birse) ‘to graduate’

This type of vowel change in the verbal stem is commonplace in rural speech, as well as in vestigial Spanish. Also, the imperfect tense sometimes exhibits syllabic reduction in the stem as the following Costeño examples illustrate: víamo [bí.a.mo] (veíamos [be.í.a.mos]) ‘we saw’, rían [rí.an] (reían [re.í.an]) ‘they laughed’. At other times, an epenthetic b is added to the verbal ending accompanied with or without diphthongization in both second- and third-conjugation verbs seen in the following instances: caiba [káy.βa] (caía [ka.í.a]) ‘s(he) fell down’, traiban [t̪ ráy. βan] (traían [t̪ ra.í.an]) ‘they brought’, creiba [kréy.βa] (creía [kre.í.a]) ‘s(he) believed’, saliban [sa.lí.βan] (salían [sa.lí.an]) ‘they went out’. This process is motivated by analogy with the first-conjugation verbs and is frequent in rural Spanish speech. Additionally, my corpus accounts for one isolated case in which a non-etymological diphthong is added to the stem of the present subjunctive as in apriendan [a.pɾyén.d̪ an] (aprendan [a.pɾén.d̪ an]) ‘they learn’. The addition of epenthetic diphthongs into the verbal stem is also attested in some Spanish Peninsular varieties, as well as in vestigial dialects like Isleño Spanish (Lipski 1990) and Brulé Spanish (Holloway 1997).

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5.1.1.3. Regularization of irregular verb forms Sometimes, irregular past participles are regularized, as the following excerpts in (3) show, which are from the data under analysis. (3)

Regularization of irregular past participles in Costeño. a) Hemos ponido[po.ní.ð̪ o](puesto [pwés.t̪ o]) la danza do vece. ‘We have performed the dance twice.’ b) La chicalmaca tá rompida [rom.pí.ð̪ a] (rota [ró.t̪ a]). ‘The net is broken.’ c) Ella ha dicido [d̪ i.sí.ð̪ o] (dicho [d̪ í.čo]) mucha cosa mala. ‘She has said many bad things.’ d) Se jue allá pal norte y ya no ha volvido [bol.βí.ð̪ o] (vuelto [bwél.t̪ o]). ‘He has gone to the USA and has not come back yet.’

Regularization of irregular forms of the past participle is a frequent process that occurs among many bilingual speakers, Spanish L1 child learners, Spanish L2 learners, as well as at the basilectal level. The latter explains the existence of this morphological phenomenon in my corpus given the linguistic and socioeconomic profile of my subjects (peasants and fishermen), who also lack a normative educational background.

5.1.1.4. Unmarked infinitives In the preceding chapter (Subsection 4.5.1), it was stressed that in Costeño the morpheme -r /ɾ/ of the verbal infinitive is frequently either lateralized or deleted. However, among the Costeño subjects whose speech I recorded, deletion of final –r is more common than simple lateralization among the community speakers. The following excerpts in (4) illustrate this morphological process. (4)

Unmarked infinitives in Costeño. a) ¿Qué le voy a dar de [ko.mé]? ‘What I will give her to eat?’ b) Voy a [kum.plí] ora el treinta de julio cuarenta y nueve. ‘I’m going to be forty-nine years old on July 30th.’ c) Le voy a [pre.ɤun̪ .t̪ á]. ‘I will ask him.’ d) Se le van a [se.ká] loj nene. ‘Babies will make you old’ e) Mañana va a [sé]. ‘It will be tomorrow.’

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f) Jui [ɡa.rá] chacalina. ‘I went to get river shrimps.’ g) Yo no me voy a [d̪ e.há]. ‘I will not allow it.’ h) Sí, él va [bi.ní]. ‘Yes, he will come.’ i) Nosotro vamo a [t̪ ɾa.βa.há]. ‘We are going to work.’

Notice that in the examples in (4), the last vowel of the unmarked infinitive (the theme vowel) is stressed as a compensation of the deletion of the segment /ɾ/. In this vein, Megenney (1999) argues the following: esta estructura nos recuerda el tipo de construcción que ocurre en los lenguajes criollos afro-hispánicos, los cuales muy a menudo contienen construcciones verbales del tipo infinitivo no inflexionado (generalmente sin la /r/ final y con el acento tónico sobre la última vocal) (Megenney 1999: 97, my italics)1.

Certainly, unmarked infinitives have characterized those creoles with a certain degree of Spanish base (Granda 1988, 1994; Holm II 1988; Schwegler 2003, 2014), as well as bozal Spanish varieties from the middle of the sixteenth until the beginning of the 20th century (Lipski 1994b, 1998, 2005; Otheguy 1973). Even more, this morphological trait is found in the current speech of many of the Afro-Hispanic enclaves in Latin America (Megenney 1999, 1989; Lipski 1986a, 1986c; Díaz-Campos and Clements 2005; Schwegler 1991a; Granda 1977; Sessarego 2013a, 2014b, 2015), in vernacular Caribbean Spanish, and sporadically in Andalusian Spanish varieties and the Pasiego dialect of the Cantabrian region in Spain2. Summing up the discussion so far, Costeño Spanish exhibits reduction and fluctuation in its verbal morphology, such as use of archaic verb forms, vowel instability in the verbal stem, and regularization of past participle irregular forms. These phenomena have characterized those Spanish varieties that have been geographically isolated and/or marginalized from the mainstream. Additionally, Costeño verbal morphology also exhibits unmarked infinitives, a trait that has been attested in Africanized Spanish since the colonial period.

1

2

‘this structure reminds us of the type of construction that is found in Afro-Hispanic creoles, which often exhibit unmarked infinitives (usually with loss of the final /r/ and stress on the last vowel)’. Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Asturias, Leon and Cantabria.” Ms. Cited with the permission of the author (http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/Asturias.pdf).

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5.1.2. Nominal morphology 5.1.2.1. Deletion of the plural marker In the preceding chapter (Subsection 4.3.2), it was established that the behavior of the segment /s/ is variable in the Costeño speech. Such a phenomenon affects the morphology of the word especially the plural marker which sometimes tends to be deleted in the following contexts: (5)

Lack of the plural mark in Costeño Spanish (5.1) The morphological plural marker of determinants, adjectives and nouns in the noun phrase. a) Tán chiquito puéj mij nene. (Están chiquitos pues mis nenes.) ‘My sons are still little.’ b) Soy pobre que no jayo ni pá lo cigarro. (Soy pobre que no tengo ni para los cigarros.) ‘I am poor that I don’t even have money for cigarettes.’ (5.2) The morphological verbal marker of the second person of singular and plural forms. a) De llegando nosotro juimo con el médico. (De llegando nosotros fuimos con el médico.) ‘Since arriving, we went to the physician.’ b) Antonce le compramo doj vestidito. (Entonces le compramos dos vestiditos.) ‘Then, we bought her two dresses.’

In the literature of Spanish dialectology, attrition and erosion of the Spanish plural marker are phonetic dependent processes conditioned by different linguistic components: phonological (context, stress), morphological (word length), syntactic (syntagmatic relations and redundancy), and sociolinguistic variables like social stratum, age, and sex (Terrell 1979; Ranson 1992; Cepeda 1995; Morales de Walters 1997; Lafford 1989).

5.1.2.2. Double plural endings Unlike the preceding phenomena, some Costeño speakers tend to duplicate the plural marker by adding the suffix –ses to form the plural of those words that end with a stressed vowel, as occur in the following examples found in my data: papá > papase(s) ‘parents’, mamá > mamase(s) ‘mothers’, and so on. The duplication of the plural mark occurs frequently in the Spanish of the Dominican

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Republic (Henríquez Ureña 1940a; Jorge Morel 1974; Jimenez Sabater 1975; Nuñez Cedeño 1987; Lipski 1994) and in popular Spanish (Lipski 1990).

5.1.2.3. Gender instability Although gender usage seems to be generally stable in Costeño, some speakers sporadically assign inappropriate gender to certain words as seen in the following instances that show an improper article: el casamiento > la casamiento ‘the wedding’, un vasito > una vasito ‘a small glass’, la costumbre > el costumbre ‘the custom’, and so on. Occasionally nautical and rustic forms such as la mar ‘the sea’ and la calor ‘the hot weather’ are preferred over the standard, el mar and el calor respectively, as occurs in many other Spanish dialects. In addition, some local words exhibit confusion in their morphological gender as seen in the following examples: chacalina/chacalín ‘river shrimp’, chandero/chandera ‘dirt’, tirincho/tirincha ‘a big bag’, and so on. More generally, gender variation is a morphological process that occurs among Spanish L2 learners, as well as in vestigial Spanish and Afro-Hispanic varieties.

5.1.2.4. Diminutives of common words In Costeño, a few common names at times display variation in their diminutive formation as we can observe in the following items: caldito > caldiyito ‘broth’, salesita > salita ‘salt’, costalito > costaliyo ‘sack’. The diminutive formation of such common items can vary from one region to another within the same country. In particular, the Spanish spoken in the state of Oaxaca in Mexico offers an interesting diversity in the formation of its diminutive forms that can vary even from one community to another due to the linguistic pluralism that exists in this region. This is a matter that deserves further investigation.

5.1.2.5. Diminutives of proper names Generally in Spanish, there is a tendency to prefer short first names and Costeño is no exception. Most of these first names in Costeño undergo reduction as illustrated by the examples in (6) extracted from the data.

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Diminutives and hypocorisms of proper names in Costeño. Ignacio > Nacho Nicanor > Nico Rufina > Güina Silveria > Bella Salomé > Salo Anacleta > Cleta Clemencia > Mencha Leonor > Noi Bernandina > Berna Nestor > Ñeco Dagoberto > Dago Rosa Elena > Lena Gudelia > Chana Treberta > Berta Camerina > Came Francisco > Chico Filogonio > Goño Concepción > Conchi

This tendency to shorten names has been also attested in Cuijleño, a Costeño sister variety spoken in the state of Guerrero (Aguirre Beltrán 1989b; Althoff 1994). Furthermore, a close examination of the names in (6) reveals their archaic nature. Some of them may have been common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but nowadays are bizarre in contemporary Mexican society. In fact, they continue to dwindle even within the Costeño community. The survival of these names in the Costa Chica region is a product of its social and linguistic isolation from the mainstream. These names may also be heard in other rural areas of Mexico where mass communication is still inaccessible, and probably in other places of Latin America and Spain.

5.1.2.6. Onomastics Another interesting issue that deserves attention in the Costeño nominal nomenclature is the following group of last names found in my corpus: Bacho, Mariche, Liborio, Habana, Mayoral, Corcuera and Ayona. These last names come up repeatedly among the Afro-Mexicans of the Costa Chica but are generally absent outside of this community. Probably, the most revealing among them is Habana which gives us a historical glimpse about the probable provenience of some of the African slaves that were imported to the Costa Chica region during the colonial period to labor in the fields and on the cattle ranches. According to Aguirre Beltrán (1989a), the majority of the black slaves who were introduced to Mexico came from the Antilles, the Cape Verde Islands and Guinea Coast. Many of them lost their real names and assumed the name of the slave station from which they came: En tales casos los negros perdían el nombre de su nación de origen y tomaban el del entrepôt o punto intermediario de donde procedían. Este fue el caso de los esclavos que entraron a la Nueva España con las denominaciones de Brasil, Santo Domingo, Cartagena, Castilla y Portugal, durante el siglo y con los de Curazao, Jamaica,

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Barbados y Margarita durante el , y con los de Habana y Francés durante el (Aguirre Beltrán 1989: 148, my italics).

3

The existence of the last name Habana among the Afro-Mexicans of the Costa Chica therefore suggests that at the time of widespread African immigration in Cuba (the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century), some of the African slaves who arrived in the Costa Chica region were formerly living in Cuba and were then shipped to Mexico, as it was the practice during the slave trade period (Granda 1988; Chaudenson 2001; Lipski 2005, 2008). In short, Costeño nominal morphology presents a set of characteristics that can be considered, on the one hand, common to other Spanish varieties such as the deletion and duplication of the plural marker and gender variation. Others, on the other hand, belong exclusively to the Costeño linguistic ecology, such as the formation of diminutive forms and onomastics. The latter in some way casts a partial light on the provenience of some of the black population of the Costa Chica region of Mexico.

5.1.3. Adjectives and adverbs Because of its geographical and linguistic isolation for many years, Costeño exhibits adjectives and adverbs similar to those found in vestigial Spanish, Afro-Hispanic varieties and in rural speech, such as muncho ‘a lot’, endenantes (pronounced [e.nan̪ .t̪ es]/[e.nan̪ .t̪ e]) ‘before’, naiden/naide/nadien ‘nobody’, ansina ‘like this’, and so on. Additionally, it is frequent to hear among Costeño speakers the following adverbial expressions selected from the data under analysis: (7)

3

Costeño adverbial locutions a) más de nuevo (otra vez/de nuevo/nuevamente) ‘once again’ Noj volvieron a llamá máj de nuevo. ‘They called us once again.’ Yo llegué más de nuevo. ‘I arrived once again.’ b) largo (lejos) ‘faraway’ No tá largo, la laguna ahí tá cerca ‘It is not faraway, the lagoon there is close.’

‘In that case, the slaves lost their nation name by taking the name of the slave station or intermediate point from where they were shipped to the Americas. This was the case of the slaves who were introduced into New Spain during the 16th century with the names Brasil, Santo Domingo, Cartagena, Castilla and Portugal; in the 17th century, with the names of Curazao, Jamaica, Barbados and Margarita; and in the 18th century, with the names of Habana and Francés.’

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c) más atrás (después) ‘after’ Ella salieron maj atrá que Jasi. ‘They graduated after Jasiel.’ d) añales (muchos años) ‘many years’ Hace añales que pasó eso. ‘That happened many years ago.’ e) más poco (muy poco) ‘occasionally’ Ora yo voy máj poco. ‘Now, I go occasionally’. f) más antes (antes) ‘before’ Máj ante ello se laj robaban. ‘Before, they used to capture them.’

The adverbial locutions in (7) are also found in other varieties found in the Spanish spoken in other isolated rural areas and Afro-Hispanic enclaves of Latin America. In the specific case of Costeño, this dialect remained isolated until the mid-1960s, when the coastal highway which currently links Acapulco to other towns and villages of the Costa Chica region of the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca was finished. Prior to that date, routes to the Costa Chica were limited to dirt roads impassable during the rainy season (Gillian 1976; Aguirre Beltrán 1989b; McDowell 2000). Even today, many out-of-the-way settlements on the coast are inaccessible after the rains begin in June. This is the case of the La Boquilla community where I conducted part of this field research. In regard to morphological malformation of adjectives, this is almost nonexistent in Costeño. My data report only one isolated case milagriento (milagroso) ‘miraculous’.

5.1.4. Pronominal system 5.1.4.1. Subject pronouns In the Afro-Hispanic literature, the use of second person singular pronoun vos has been considered as evidence that Spanish was once creolized (Granda de 1988; Schwegler 2003; Lipski 2005). The pronominal form vos is found in those creoles with a certain degree of Spanish-based formation, such as Palenquero, Papiamentu and Chabacano (Caviteño, Ermitaño and Zamboangueño), as well as in voseo dialect zones of Central and Southern Latin America. In the Costa Chica region of Mexico, it seems that the pronoun vos was used by community speakers approximately 50 years ago; but, contrary to Aguirre Beltrán’s (1989b: 206) claim about the obstinate use of the pronoun vos in the

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Cuijleño speech of Guerrero: “El voseo, tan generalizado en América Central y del Sur, perdura obstinadamente en Cuijla”4, my data do not show any case of voseo. Categorically, Costeño employs the second person singular pronoun tú (informal) for direct address along with the plural form ustedes. It appears that the absence of the pronoun vos in my sample gives us an idea about the linguistic evolution that Costeño Spanish has undergone in the last fifty years by leaving no trace of the pronominal form vos in current speech. Regarding the second person singular pronoun usted (formal), Costeño alternates this with the rustic and affectional form tío/tía ‘uncle /aunt’ to address someone with respect, generally an older person, even if there is no kinship among speakers5. Hence, it is very common to hear Costeño expressions, such as buenoj día tía Moncha ‘Good morning, Mrs. Ramona’, ¿Cómo le va tío Lencho? ‘How are you today, Mr. Lorenzo?’ ¡Al rato voy tía Guina! ‘I will stop by later on, Mrs. Rufina!’, and so on. Aside from its semantic charge of respect, the use of tío/tía is at times heard among frasteros ‘community outsiders’ (from the Spanish word forastero). The use of this affectional form to refer to outsiders marks a closer tie between them and the community, facilitating their access to more social events and greater participation in daily life. Moreover, the rustic form tío/tía coexists with a more emotive and respectful form in the Costeño speech. I am referring to the use of the locution Mama ‘mom,’ which precedes the diminutive form of a personal feminine name as in Mama Came, Mama Lena, and so on. The Mama locution is exclusively used to address the oldest and most respected women into the Costeño community. This expression, in particular, attracted my attention suggesting an African pragmatic connection with the strongly matriarchal system that has characterized some of the West African cultures since colonial times (Vubo 2005).

5.1.4.2. Overt subject pronouns In the literature of Spanish dialectology, the use of overt subject pronouns has been attested in Murcian, Andalucian, Caribbean and vestigial Spanish, as well as in Afro-Hispanic varieties. Likewise, Costeño exhibits overt subject pronouns, especially the first person singular pronoun yo ‘I’. However, Costeño differs from its Spanish relatives in that it has a tendency to place the overt

4 5

‘The use of voseo, commonplace in Central America and South America, endures in Cuijla.’ In Spain the form tío/tía, and its phonetic variants, is also used, but in a sense of camaraderie within an informal context and never to address someone with respect.

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subject pronoun post-verbally, although not categorically, as shown in the following examples in (8). (8)

Overt subject pronouns in Costeño. a) Siempre no quería yo. ‘Always, I didn’t want’. b) Estoy muy agradecida con el Señor yo. ‘I am very grateful with the Lord’. c) Me sintía yo mal. ‘I felt bad’. d) Nativo dejte pueblo soy yo. ‘I am from this very town’. e) Cuando yo pienso no tené pa comer. ‘When I think (that) I have nothing to eat’. f) Nomá yo le dijera, nomá me gujtaba yo el gujto de bailá. ‘I just want to tell you that I liked to feel the pleasure of dancing’.

The use of overt subject pronouns may arise as a result of the natural processes of final consonantal reduction, especially when those final consonants indicate verbal number or plural nouns. In the Afro-Hispanic literature, the use of overt subject pronouns has been considered as evidence that Spanish was once creolized (Granda 1988; Holm II 1989; Megenney 1999; Schwegler 2003; Lipski 2005; Sessarego 2014b, 2015). In this vein, Megenney stresses the following: Esto podría representar una indicación de una posible etapa intermedia entre un lenguaje plenamente criollo (o semi-criollo) en cuanto a la necesidad de usar los pronombres personales sujetos y una lengua sintética que requiere pocas veces el uso de tales pronombres (así como el español normativo) … La presencia constante de los pronombres personales es uno de los rasgos típicos de los lenguajes criollos, y en el palenquero colombiano la regla general requiere el uso categórico de estos pronombres (Megenney 1999: 117, my italics)6.

It may be impossible to discern here to what extent Costeño Spanish was restructured during the colonial period. However, the occasional use of overt

6

‘This may be considered as an intermediate stage between a genuine creole (or semi-creole) with respect to the need to use personal pronoun subjects and a synthetic language. The former makes an extensive use of personal subject pronouns while the latter rarely makes use of them (as in normative Spanish) … The frequent use of personal pronouns is one of the most salient features of creole languages; for instance, Palenquero categorically makes use of this type of pronouns.’

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subject pronouns in this Spanish dialect could be considered as a remnant of a restructuring status.

5.1.4.3. Emphatic reflexive pronouns Costeño occasionally exhibits emphatic reflexive pronouns as is depicted in the following examples selected from the data under study. (9)

Emphatic reflexive pronouns in Costeño. a) Se me enjuermó mi nene por una semana. ‘My baby got sick by one week’. b) A loj catorce se me murió mi papá. ‘When I was fourteen, my daddy died’.

Pragmatically, the examples in (9) are considered a more personal way to express a state that unexpectedly occurred when compared to those constructions that do not exhibit emphatic reflexives. As an overextension of the use of this type of pronouns, Costeño also presents the following unusual cases in (10). (10) Unusual cases of emphatic reflexive pronouns in Costeño. a) Aquí me nacieron mis padrej. ‘Here, my parents bore me’. b) Aquí mi mamá me nació. ‘Here, my mom gave birth to me’.

5.1.4.4. Possessive doubling In Spanish the genitive construction is marked either by a possessive form (mis lápices, los lápices míos ‘my pencils’) or by a possessive phrase introduced by the preposition de (la casa de Alicia ‘Alicia’s house’). However, the genitive construction may take various forms in Spanish cross-dialectally and Costeño is no exception. This dialect sporadically doubles the possessive marker as shown by the examples in Table 5.1 selected from the sample.

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128 Costeño Son mi sijo mío mi vestuario mío mi esposa mía

‘my sons’ ‘my costume’ ‘my wife’

Table 5.1. Possessive doubling in Costeño Spanish

The doubling of the possessive marker, in the same form as in Costeño7, is also attested in Honduras (Lipski 1994: 272) and in Traditional New Mexican Spanish8.

5.1.5. The Costeño locution anta In Costeño, the use of the locution anta before a person’s name to signify one’s home is also observed. The phrase anta Noi, then, is understood to mean ‘Leonor’s house’. Furthermore, it seems that the possessive locution anta has undergone a semantic expansion in the Costeño community allowing it to refer to any kind of location, and then, to the specific question: ‘What store are you going to?’ The response might be anta Güina referring to Rufina’s store. Similarly, to the general question: ‘Where are you going?’ it is still possible to hear answers like antan loj muertito ‘to the cemetery’. Clearly, the Costeño expression anta(n) is an elliptic form of adonde está(n). Through all the Costa Chica region and beyond it, Puerto Angel and Huatulco Bays in Oaxaca, the Costeño locution anta(n) is preferred instead of the canonical phrase a casa de ‘one’s house’ introduced by the preposition a with a directional value. Similar expressions are also attested in rural areas Spanish worldwide. For instance, in Northern Mexico and in the border region between Sinaloa and Sonora states, it is commonplace to hear the elliptic locution anca and its variant anque meaning both a/en casa de ‘one’s house’ as in Rogelito, ve anca tu 7

8

Lipski (1994) accounts for other two forms of possessive doubling across Spanish dialectal variation: a) de la María su casa of the María her house ‘María’s house’ (Bolivia) b) hijo de un su papá son of a his father ‘his father’s son’ (El Salvador) Personal fieldwork carried out at Picuris Pueblo, New Mexico in December 2004.

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ná ‘Rogelito, go to your grandma’s house’. Similarly in the Southern region of Spain and in some rural zones of Castilla, it is frequent to hear the locution ande (a donde) ‘one’s place’, for example, Fui ande la Aurora ‘I went to Aurora’s house’. In addition, Megenney (1999) in his study about the Spanish spoken in Barlovento, an Afro-Hispanic enclave in Venezuela, attests the locative-domestic construction en caje and its variant case (en casa de) ‘at one’s house’ citing the following examples. “mira ayel etaba en caje Eramo un negrito que llaman el Diablo” (Megenney 1999: 127) ‘look, yesterday I was in a negrito’s place that is called the Devil’ and “Yo te voy a llevá case de un señol, case un curioso” (Megenney 1999: 127) ‘I will take you to a man’s house, a house of a curious man’. Megenney considers the Barloventeña locution caje/case a semi-creole remnant of a Spanish archaic fossilization: En resumen, parece ser que esta expresión proviene de un arcaísmo hispánico, con posible apoyo diacrónico creado por una alta frecuencia de uso de la expresión en un ambiente geográfico relativamente aislado, y por analogía con el morfema donde en casa de, tan arraigado en el basilecto hispánico, y que es a la vez una expresión elíptica de donde está. A la vez, es posible que, como arcaísmo, haya sido fosilizado como componente de un lenguaje semi-criollo anterior, del periodo colonial (Megenney 1999: 127, my italics)9.

Quite germane to Megenney’s statement, I claim that the Costeño locution anta is a Spanish fossilized archaism, a product from a restructured language status during the colonial period that has survived up to the present day in the speech of the Costa Chica region of Mexico.

5.2. Syntactic features 5.2.1. Clitics Generally in Costeño, the clitic system exhibits no systematic discrepancies; however, my data account for the following two isolated phenomena related to clitics, clitic neutralization (5.2.1.1) and clitic dislocation (5.2.1.2). 9

‘In summary, it seems that this expression comes from a Spanish archaism which emerged as a result of the frequent use of this expression in a relatively isolated geographical area. Also, it could be as analogy with the expression en casa de that often occurs at the basilectal level. In addition, this expression can be considered an elliptic form of de donde está. It is also possible that this archaism has been fossilized as a component of a former semi-creole language during the colonial period.’

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5.2.1.1. Clitic neutralization In the literature of Spanish dialectology, clitic neutralization is an ‘atypical’ case that arises as product of linguistic contact with languages that lack an explicitly rich system of agreement inflections (Luján and Parodi 2001). The Costeño data display several cases of clitic neutralization in favor of the clitic pronoun lo as we can see in the following examples in (11). (11) Clitic neutralization in Costeño. a) Lo gritó su mamá y se jue el chamaco. (Le gritó su mamá y se fue el chamaco). ‘His mom yelled him and the boy got out’. b) Su palabra lo ignoran. (Sus palabras las ignoran). ‘They ignore their promises’.

(11a) is a genuine case of loísmo that occurs in other Spanish varieties and consists of the use of the clitic pronoun lo, the masculine singular form used as a substitute for other direct objects, in place of the pronoun le which is used for indirect objects. On the other hand in (11b), the clitic pronoun las, the feminine plural form used to replace direct objects, undergoes mutation in favor of the clitic lo. I claim here that the cases of clitic neutralization in (11) may be interpreted as Mixtec percolations through indigenous bilingual speakers, who sometimes enter in linguistic contact with the Costeño community by selling textiles, embroideries, and food stuffs. Most of these Mixtec speakers have a tendency to neutralize the Spanish clitic system into the pronoun lo when they communicate in their second language (i.e. Spanish). So, I conclude that the contact between the Costeño and Mixtec communities might be responsible for the cases of clitic neutralization found in my sample. Nonetheless, the matter awaits further study, especially in this coastal region of Mexico.

5.2.1.2. Clitic dislocation In Spanish, clitics always attach proclitically to finite verb forms. However, the Costeño sample exhibits two isolated cases of clitic dislocation as shown by the following examples in (12):

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(12) Cases of clitic dislocation in Costeño. a) pareceme seems-neuter 3rd. sg. Cl. me parece. Cl. seems-neuter 3rd. sg. ‘It seems to me’. b) Vino y garrole el cuchillo y trosole la piola. came-past.3rd.sg and took-past.3rd.sg. Cl. the knife and cut-past.3rd.sg. Cl. the head

vino y le agarró el cuchillo y le trozó la cabeza. came-past.3rd.sg and Cl.took-past.3rd.sg. the knife and Cl.cut-past.3rd.sg. the head

‘She came and seized his knife and cut his head’.

The cases in (12) resemble those Medieval Spanish constructions which attach object pronouns enclitically to finite verbs to avoid clitics in initial position, as we can see in the following excerpts in (13) extracted from Medieval Spanish Literature. (13) Placement of clitics in Medieval Spanish. a) Cantar del Mio Cid (12th century) así commo llegó a la puorta, fallóla bien çerrada… ‘As soon as he got the door, he found it closed’ (Cited in Resnick 1981: 167) b) Milagros de Nuestra Señora (13th century) Dixoli brabamientre: “Don obispo lozano,… ‘He told him emphatically: Don obispo lozano,…’ Mandólo que cantasse como solie cantar,… ‘He ask him to sing as he used to sing,…’ (Cited in Resnick 1981: 172-174)

Attachment of enclitic pronouns to finite verbs is not limited to Costeño; it is also reported in some Leonese dialects of Spain10 and, in general, is not infrequent in rural speech.

10

Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Asturias, Leon and Cantabria.” Ms. Cited with the permission of the author. (http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/Asturias.pdf).

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5.2.2. Verbal instability 5.2.2.1. Lack of subject-verb agreement At times, Costeño speakers do not show subject-verb agreement as illustrated by the following examples in (14). (14) Lack of subject-verb agreement in Costeño. a) Jui sacá cangrejo garramo (agarré) poquito. ‘I went to pick up crabs and I got very few’. b) Aquí incontré otro muchacho que fueron (fue) papá de mi sijas. ‘Here I found another guy who was the father of my daughters.’

Lack of subject-verb agreement is also attested in other Africanized Spanish varieties (Granda 1977, 1988, 1994; Lipski 1994, 1994b, 1986a, 2005; Megenney 1999; Schwegler 1991a; Sessarego 2013a, 2013b, 2015, 2019), in vestigial Spanish varieties (Lipski 1990; Holloway 1997), and also among L2 Spanish learners.

5.2.2.2. Verbal paradigm modification Torres (1989) and Silva-Corvalán (1983) have pointed out that modality distinctions tend to be lost easier than verbal paradigm and aspect in Spanish. Although my Costeño sample does not display any change of verbal mood, it accounts for a certain degree of instability in the verbal paradigm as shown by the following examples: (15) Verbal paradigm modification in Costeño. a) Mij padre no jueron (eran) daquí. ‘My parents were not from here.’ b) Era una cuadriyita que se jorman (formaba) de cinco o die casita. ‘It was a small town composed of five or ten little houses’. c) … y el que lleva (llevaba) el arao con el chicote en la mano lej tumbaba que se apuraran. ‘… and the one who had the plough with the whip in his hand, he hit them so they would hurry up.’ d) Ellos ya vinía sabido (sabían) que ya no iba a saná ella. ‘They already knew that she was going to die.’

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Notice that in the examples in (15), the paradigm of the imperfect sometimes tends to be avoided. This seems odd since the imperfect is one of the most regular paradigms in Spanish. Further investigation, however, has to be done in this matter.

5.2.3. Deletion of articles The deletion of articles is a common phenomenon that is found in Afro-Hispanic varieties (Megenney 1999; Granda 1977, 1988, 1994; Lipski 1986a, 2005; Sessarego 2013a, 2013b, 2015, 2019), vestigial Spanish (Lipski 1990, Holloway 1997), in the Murcian dialect of Spain11, and in general among L2 Spanish learners. Likewise, these Costeño data show that this dialect is susceptible to losing definite articles, although not categorically, as seen in the following examples in (16). (16) Deletion of definite articles in Costeño. a) Queman (los) torito. ‘They burn fireworks.’ b) Aquí sacan (la) procisión. ‘From here the procession takes place.’ c) Lo parten a(l) otro día. ‘They cut (the cake) up to the next day.’ d) Quebrá (el) maí. ‘To blend corn grains.’ e) El baile de (los) moros. ‘The Moor’s dance.’

Although suppression of articles could be considered to some extent idiosyncratic, it is an unstable phenomenon that also occurs during the first stages of creolization, as well as in the beginning of language erosion (Lipski 2005: 297). Unfortunately, the latter seems to be the case of the Costeño Spanish spoken by the older generations due to the following factors: socioeconomic absorption, linguistic forces of standardization, emigration, and natural disasters, as will be discussed below. As already stated (Subsection 5.1.3 above), after the opening of the Acapulco-Pinotepa Nacional federal highway (mid-1960’s) the two communities under study, Collantes and La Boquilla, began to lose their geographical

11

Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Murcia.” Ms. Cited with the permission of the author. (http:// www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/Murcia.pdf).

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and linguistic isolation like many other communities of the Costa Chica region. During the last decades, the mass media along with an increment of schools in the area have introduced a constant influx of Spanish standardizing elements into the culture of these people, both Afro-Mexicans and indigenous. Also, the back-and-forth rate of regional emigration to distant urban areas has exposed the Spanish of the target area to more prestigious speech models closer to the national and regional standard. Furthermore, natural disasters and drug trafficking in the target area have forced the relocation of many people from the Costa Chica to other places, within and out of the state of Oaxaca, including emigration to the United States especially by the younger generations. All these natural and socioeconomic factors have had a sociolinguistic impact on the Costeño Spanish of the older generations and are moving this dialect to extinction. In fact, the tendency toward standardization of the Spanish spoken in the Costa Chica region was formerly predicted by Aguirre Beltrán during his anthropological fieldwork carried out in Cuajinicuilapa in the state of Guerrero: La carretera pavimentada que unirá el Puerto de Acapulco con la ciudad de Ometepec, y a ésta con Pinotepa Nacional, aunque iniciada hace ya varios años, es construida lentamente … Cuando la carretera se termine, el acceso a Cuijla será rapido … Mientras tal situación subsista el aislamiento centenario de inclusión negra habrá de persistir y, con ello, Cuijla retardará su cabal integración a la vida activa del país (Aguirre Beltrán 1989b: 90)12.

Years later, Althoff (1994) in his study on Cuijleño speech corroborates Aguirre Beltran’s prediction arriving at the following conclusion: features of the “español antiguo,” spoken in the area over 120 years ago, and redolent of the African heritage, are now but vestiges and memories, and there is every indication that even the few remaining traces of the older speech will succumb to standardization as this region, remote and virtually ignored for hundreds of years, continues to assimilate to the broader and increasingly more modern Mexican society (Althoff 1994: 254).

Althoff’s (1994) conclusion on Cuijleño speech is expected, since for many years the village of Cuajinicuilapa has functioned as one of the major 12

‘The asphalt road of the highway that will link the port of Acapulco with Ometepec and Pinotepa Nacional, though begun several years ago, is still in the process of construction … When this highway is finished, the access to Cuijla will be easier … until then, the isolation of the black communities of this geographical area will continue and with that, the integration of Cuijla to the Mexican mainstream will be delayed.’

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administrative/governmental centers of the Costa Chica region of Guerrero. Hence it is one of the cities with the greatest contact with large numbers of people in the area. In addition, its favorable geographical location (along both sides of the highway) makes it more accessible than any other Afro-Mexican village or town of the Costa Chica region. As a result, “progress” in the decades since mid-1960’s is most evident in Cuajinicuilapa, and this situation has naturally affected its speech which at first glance presents a higher degree of normativeness when compared to the Spanish spoken in the towns of Collantes and La Boquilla. However, even if the speech of these two settlements seems to remain less unaffected, it is likewise succumbing day by day to the forces of standardization which act, metaphorically speaking, as a language killer13 (Nettle and Romaine 2000; Ostler 2000). In this figurative sense, ‘standard’ Spanish becomes what I call here a language parricide in the target area, since it is killing (absorbing) its Costeño Spanish relative, as well as other local indigenous languages. Thus, I conclude that Costeño Spanish as spoken by the older generations is in an erosional state and the occasional omission of articles in my data can be considered to be an index of this unstable status.

5.2.4. Deletion and modified use of prepositions Along with the loss of definite articles, the deletion of common prepositions also occurs in the Costeño dialect, although not categorically, as we can infer from the following examples in (17). (17) Deletion of common prepositions in Costeño dialect. a) Tá como (a) una hora caminando (de) aquí. ‘You spend one hour from here walking.’ b) Jui (a) sacá cangrejo. ‘I went to pick up crabs.’ c) Se fríen (en) un sartén. ‘They are fried in a frying-pan.’

13

English, French, Spanish, among other languages around the world, are considered ‘language killers’. This metaphor is relative and is restricted diachronically and synchronically. That is, Spanish can synchronically be considered a ‘language killer’ in some geographical areas but a ‘language victim’ in others. For instance, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, Spanish is considered a killer of many indigenous languages of the region (i.e. Mixteco, Tlapaneco, Amuzgo, Chatino, among others) due to a language shift among the members of these communities in favor of Spanish. In contrast, Spanish in the USA is a victim; it is being asphyxiated by another language killer, American English.

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136 d) Lo voy (a) completá. ‘I will get them.’ e) (a) vece sí, (a) vece no. ‘Sometimes yes, sometimes not.’

One of the reasons for which some prepositions tend to become deleted is because of their semantic charge that can be inferred from the surrounding context (Lipski 1990). In addition, Costeño speakers at times substitute the use of some prepositions as illustrated in the following cases: (18) Modification of prepositional usage in Costeño. a) Yo hacía comale de (para) la tortilla. ‘I made comales for tortillas.’ b) Arroz de (con) leche. ‘Rice pudding.’ c) Le mordió la culebra del (en el) pié. ‘The serpent bit his foot.’

Perhaps more significant is the sporadic elimination of both preposition and definite article as shown in the examples in (19). (19) Deletion of preposition and definite article in Costeño. a) Como (en los) tiempos viejos. ‘As in the past times.’ b) Trabajabamo (en el) campo. ‘We worked in the field.’ c) (De) aquí sacan (la) procisión. ‘From here the procession takes place.’

The deletion and/or modified use of prepositions have also been reported in other Afro-Hispanic varieties (Megenney 1999; Granda 1977, 1988, 1994; Lipski 1986a, 2005; Sessarego 2014b, 2015, 2019), the Leonese and Montañés dialects of Spain14, and vestigial Spanish (Lipski 1990, Holloway 1997). In general terms, the exclusion and/or variability of syntactic categories such as determiners, prepositions, the complementizer que, etc. have characterized the partial acquisition of Spanish as a second language (Lipski 2005). Furthermore, similar types of syntactic reductions and/or variations are found in non-healthy languages/dialects cross-linguistically. In this vein, Dressler (1972: 454) points

14

Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Asturias, Leon and Cantabria.” Ms. Cited with the permission of the author (http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/Asturias.pdf).

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out ‘a disintegrating language is characterized by fluctuations and uncertainties of its speakers’. Dressler’s statement strengthens my claim on the erosional status of the Costeño Spanish discussed in the preceding point. However, it should not be assumed that all cases of language/dialect death involve reduction and/or variability in form.

5.2.5. Negation-related variation In the literature of Spanish dialectology, negation-related variation is a phenomenon that has been found in those regions characterized by a heavy historical African presence during the colonial period, such as in the Palenque de San Basilio (Schwegler 1991b), in the Dominican Republic (Schwegler 1996; Lipski 1994), in rural eastern Cuba (Ortíz López 1999), the Chocó region of Colombia (Schwegler 1991a; Lipski 1994; Sessarego 2019), in the southern region of the Maracaibo Lake in Venezuela (Megenney 1999), in vernacular Caribbean Spanish (Lipski 2000), in 19th-century Afro-Cuban texts (Lipski 2005), in AfroPeruvian Spanish (Sessarego 2015; Gutiérrez Maté 2018), Afro Bolivian Spanish (Lipski 2008), and in the Chota Valley of Ecuador (Sessarego 2013a) . On the other hand, this phenomenon has also been found in some Spanish varieties that have had contact with indigenous populations, such as the Andean Spanish of the northwestern region of Argentina (Postigo de Bedía 1994), and Paraguayan Spanish (Choi 1998). Additionally, it has been reported in the Spanish spoken near to the area of Catalonia in Spain through interference with Catalan15. In the aforementioned Spanish dialects, negation-related variation may be manifested in one, or more, of the following four forms. 20) Typology of negation-related variation a) Reduplication of the negative no Nosotros no vamos no. (Dominican Republic, Lipski 1994) We not go-1st.sg. not ‘We are not going.’ b) Co-occurrence of no with post-verbal negative phrases like nada/ná ‘nothing’16.

15 16

Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Levante.” Ms. Cited with the permission of the author. (http:// www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/Levante.pdf.) According to Lipski (2000), there is a pragmatic difference between the types (a) and (b) in (20). The former is pronounced with no pause and with falling intonation, reflecting enclitic status. The second, on the other hand, is produced with a stressed accent to put emphasis on a categorical rejection.

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No es difícil ná. (Puerto Rico, Lipski 2000) Not is-3rd.sg. difficult nothing ‘It is not difficult.’ c) Co-occurrence of no with negative phrases like nadie ‘nobody’ in preverbal position17. Nadie no está. (Río de la Plata region, Zagona 2002) Nobody (not) is-3rd.sg. ‘Nobody is there.’ d) Null negation with hasta ‘until’18 Vamos hasta que termine. (Colombia and Mexico, Bosque 1980) Go-pret.1st.pl. until that end.pr.subj.3rd. sg. ‘We will not go until it ends.’

20 (a) and 20 (b) are cases of what is known as negative concord19 and are interpreted as a single negation. 20 (c), on the other hand, is a case of double negation reading20 (Swart 2004, Corblin et al. 2004). In 20 (d) the sentential negation no is deleted. 17 18

19

20

Tampoco no estudia ‘S(he) neither study’. See Lipski, John. “The Spanish of Levante.” Ms. Cited with the permission of the author. http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/j/m/jml34/Levante.pdf.) More instances of elliptic negation in Spanish: a) Será publicado hasta fines de año. ‘It will not be published until the end of the year’. b) Cierran hasta las nueve. ‘They don’t close until 9 o’clock’. c) Hasta que tomé la aspirina se me quitó el dolor de cabeza. ‘Until I took the aspirin my headache did not go away’. Negative concord is the general term for cases where multiple occurrences of negative expressions get a single negation reading. This phenomenon is commonplace in Romance languages in which negative particles sometimes co-occur with verbal negation (sentential negation) and sometimes do not, as the following examples show: Portuguese: a) Ninguém veio (Swart 2004: 13) Nobody cam b) Não veio ninguém SN came bobody ‘Nobody came’ French c) Luc n’a rien vu (Corblin et al. 2004: 26) ‘Luc has seen nothing’ In this regard Swart (2004: 14) states: ‘When the preverbal negation is expressed by a Neg expression, a marker of sentential negation is excluded. Insertion of a preverbal marker of sentential negation in combination with a preverbal n-word generally leads to ungrammaticality, and marginally to double negation readings (in certain dialects only, cf. Zagona 2002)’. The following example illustrates a double negation reading in French: French a) Luc n’a pas rien vu (Corblin et al. 2004: 26) ‘Luc has not seen nothing’

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According to the typology in (20), my Costeño sample unexpectedly exhibits the following cases of negation of the types (a) (i.e. no…no) and (c) (i.e. no nadie…) as show in the examples in (21) and (22) respectively. (21) Reduplication of the negative no in Costeño. a) ya no pescamos allí no anymore not fish-2nd.pl. there not ‘We do not fish there anymore.’ b) no va a lavar no not go-3rd.sg. to wash not ‘s(he) is not going to wash.’ c) ya no pejca uno bien ya jayando ese animal ya no not fish-3rd.sg. someone well finding that animal not ‘Once that someone finds that animal, it is not possible to fish well.’ d) no desprecio yo mi saber no not dismiss-1st.sg. I my knowledge not ‘I do not dismiss my knowledge.’ (22) Pre-verbal negation of the type nadie no … in Costeño21. a) a nadien no conocía. PA nobody (not) know-imperfect.3rd.sg. ‘S(he) knew nobody.’ b) nadien no sabía. nobody (not) know-imperfect.3rd.sg. ‘Nobody know.’ c) nadien no la auxiliaba. nobody (not) CL(DO) help-imperfect.3rd.sg. ‘Nobody helped her.’ d) nadien no la oyó. nobody (not) CL(DO) listen-preterit.3rd.sg. ‘Nobody heard her.’

Regarding the cases of negation in (21) and (22) above, two potential conjectures may be offered. At first glance and given the undeniable African presence during the colonial period in the two Afro-Mexican communities under study (Collantes and La Boquilla), one could claim that the types of negation found in the Costeño sample stem from African languages (KiKongo and kiMbundu). 21

Contrary to the cases on (20) which were extracted from the open-ended oral interviews collected on-site, the cases on (21) were extracted from a current Collanteño corrido (Collanteño ballad) titled El corrido del 8 de noviembre ‘The ballad of November 8th’ that was performed by the local group Los Collanteños ‘The Collanteños’ (CD-Track 2) during my field research in the Afro-Mexican town of Collantes.

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Nevertheless, the Oto-Manguean family, in particular the Mixtec language, could also be another potential linguistic source for the existence of negationrelated variation in Costeño. Some scholars (Daly and Hyman 2005; Haspelmath 2005) have pointed out that Mixtec speakers make use of two or more negative expressions in the sentence as shown in the examples in (23). (23) Negation in Mixtec. a) Ñá– níšìnu- dö NEG –CMP.NEG- run- animal ‘The animal did not run.’ b) Ñánídàkunu- ši- dö NEG-CMP. NEG- causative- run- she- animal ‘She did not make the animal.’ Daly and Hyman (2005: 152)

As we can infer from (23), Mixtec is a verb-initial language type (i.e. VSO) and as such exhibits preverbal negative particles22. In the examples in (23) the negative particles precede the verb in an analytical way but, because Mixtec is also a tonal language, negation could be sometimes manifested by tone (Daly and Hyman 2005). This picture suggests that the Costeño cases in (22) have probably arisen through Mixtec interference; because for many centuries contact between Afro-Mexican and Mixtecan populations of the Costa Chica region has taken place through intermarriage, commerce, and language contact. On the other hand, the type of double negation in (21) more closely resembles the Africanized pattern claimed for other Afro-Hispanic varieties of Latin America considering the undeniable African presence in the communities of Collantes and La Boquilla since colonial times. Therefore, given the scarcity of examples of negation-related variation in my Costeño sample, it would be difficult to provide here a more complete and accurate picture of the true linguistic source of this phenomenon in this Spanish dialect. However, this is a provocative link for further investigation.

22

Welsh is also an initial-verb language and presents preverbal negative particles as the following examples taken from Bury (2004: 1-2) show. a. (Ni) chiciodd y bachgen mo’r bêl. NEG kicked the boy the ball ‘The boy didn’t kick the ball’. b. Gwn na chiciodd y bachgen mo’r bêl. Know.1SG NEG kicked the boy the ball ‘I know that the boy didn’t kick the ball’.

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5.2.6. The para atrás construction In Spanish cross-dialectally, para atrás constructions are attested in those Spanish varieties that have entered in contact with English, such as the Spanish spoken in the United States, Puerto Rico, Gibraltar, Belize, Trinidad and some bilingual areas of Central America (Lipski 1987). In all these dialects, it is frequent to hear locutions of the following type: dar para atrás ‘to give back’, venir para atrás ‘to come back’, hablar para atrás ‘rise ones voice/to respond’, viajar para atrás ‘to return from a trip’, llamar para atrás ‘to call back’, and so on in which the expression para atrás simply plays the role of the English verbal particle ‘back’. Also, the para atrás construction has existed in Spanish worldwide designating movement in a backward direction (Lipski 1987), and it is exclusively used with the Spanish verb ir ‘to go’ which sometimes tends to be deleted. A couple of examples in (24) depict this point. (24) Para atrás construction in Costeño. a) … y ya depué como a lo seis…siete año se jueron lo señore pa’trá y ya quedó la danza aquí. ‘After six…seven years the men went away and the dance remained here.’ b) … vece me doy una guelta a Oaxaca, pero nomá ocho día y pa’trá … puej yo soy campesinio. ‘Sometimes, I go to Oaxaca City for eight days and I go back because I am a peasant.’

This construction is commonplace in rural Spanish speech. It is not a surprise to find it in my Costeño sample given the socioeconomic background of the subjects.

5.2.7. Loss of copula Sporadic deletion of the copula has been considered a typical trait in Spanish derived creoles like Palenquero and Papiamentu (Megenney 1985; Granda 1988; Lipski 2005), bozal Spanish (Lipski 1994, 2005; Otheguy 2000), Afro-Hispanic varieties in Latin America (Grande 1977; Megenney 1982, 1999; Lipski 1986a, 1986c, 1994b; Schwegler 1991a), as well as in vestigial speech (Lipski 1994). In regard to this, Lipski stresses the following. Occasional elimination of the copula … often occurs in vestigial speech, and given that a large cross-section of West African languages employ ‘verbalized adjectives’

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instead of combination of verb + predicate adjective, loss of a copula might be an African areal characteristic rather than a post-creole carryover. In any case, the Afro-Hispanic examples are vanishingly rare (Lipski 1994: 114).

Interestingly, the Costeño data account for the following two isolated cases of the deletion of copula in (25). (25) Cases of loss of copula in Costeño a) La soja de plátano (son) pal tamal de tichinda. ‘The banana leaves are for the tichinda tamale.’ b) La jollita (son) a quince peso. ‘The little pots cost fifteen pesos.’

The examples in (25) are similar to those found in other isolated AfroHispanic varieties in Latin America where African presence was significant during the colonial period.

5.2.8. Conclusions Costeño’s morphological and syntactic characteristics offer an interesting picture, in some ways distinctive, and in some ways typical to other Spanish varieties worldwide, a fact that reaffirms its linguistic rhizomatic nature. At first glance, one of the most salient features in the Costeño Spanish is its linguistic isolation from the mainstream until the mid-1960s. This is mainly reflected in its morphological component through the use of archaic verbal, adjectival and adverbial forms, an abundance of analogical constructions, fluctuation in the pronominal patterns, and double plural endings, among other morphological issues that are common in vestigial Spanish, as well as rural and popular speech. Also, the persistence of a strong black African presence during the colonial period has inevitably left its trace, which is still perceived in the Costeño speech of the elders, and occasionally in those who live in the bajos de Collantes (small settlements along the Arena River). It is in the speech of these people that we find morphosyntactic fluctuations of the following type: unmarked infinitives, a lack of subject-verb and noun-adjective agreement, verbal paradigm modification, the omission of articles and prepositions and sporadic loss of copula, among others trends that have characterized Africanized Spanish. In fact, as previously stated, these morphosyntactic phenomena have also been considered as evidence that Afro-Hispanic language was once creolized (Granda 1994, 1977; Megenney 1999, 1985; Otheguy 2000; Lipski 2005; Díaz-Campos and Clements 2005). However, as was mentioned, this is more suggestive rather than conclusive.

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Furthermore, morphosyntactic simplifications of this kind have also been considered, as Lipski (2005) has accurately pointed out, to be traits of partial acquisition of Spanish as a second language. It is important to recall here that in Chapter 2, devoted to a discussion of some of the most representative theories on creole genesis, the Theory of Relexification (Lefebvre 1998) and the Approximation Model (Chaudenson 2001) associate, to some extent, the birth of creole languages with strategic cases of Second Language Acquisition used by the slaves to approximate their speech of a lexifier language, just like non-native speakers learn an L2/FL in non-institutional settings. Additionally, similar morphosyntactic fluctuations are common in non-healthy languages/dialects cross-linguistically (Dressler 1972; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Lipski 1990; Holloway 1997). In short, the different interpretations of not only the aforementioned morpho-syntactic reductions, but also of the phonological phenomena discussed in the preceding chapter reinforce, once again, the rhizomatic linguistic composition of this Costeño dialect manifested through its heterogeneity. Such a heterogenic profile sometimes creates ambiguity in determining the linguistic source of certain phenomena that occur in Costeño such as the cases of ‘atypical’ negation (i.e. reduplication of the negative no and the preverbal double negation of the type nadie no...), that, as we saw (Subsection 5.2.5 above), might be attributed either to any one of two linguistic sources, African or Mixtec, or maybe to both. I have also expressed a concern for the endangerment situation faced by the current Costeño speech of the elders due to the following external factors: socioeconomic absorption, linguistic forces of standardization, drug trafficking, emigration, and natural disasters. These four agents have had significant repercussions on the younger generation, people between 16 and 35 years-old, who, seeking better socioeconomic levels of life not available in their communities, leave their birth towns and sporadically return once or twice a year, or in the worse of the cases do not return, especially those who emigrate to the United States. As a result, the elder persons are practically the only residents who remain in those towns, maintaining their small family properties and being in charge of their grandsons and granddaughters. In present days, these children have a better chance of attending schools where speech is standardized. To conclude the present chapter, it is worth highlighting that the locus of a language/dialect is in the minds of the people who use it, and it can only exist if there is a community who speaks and transmits it. Thus, when languages/ dialects lose their speakers, they die. Unfortunately, the current elders’ Costeño speech is in severe endangerment of language death.

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C

6

Lexical Characteristics of Costeño Spanish

The present chapter focuses on the Costeño lexicon and is divided into three main sections. Section 6.1 is devoted to the rhizomatic nature of the Costeño lexicon, highlighting the lexical contributions of the different languages that have left their traces in this Afro-Hispanic variety. Section 6.2 addresses some preliminary remarks on the Costeño vocabulary that is presented in this chapter. Finally, Section 6.3 offers a small sample of the words that characterize the Costeño lexicon as is spoken currently in the target area.

6.1. The rhizomatic nature of the Costeño lexicon As any other American Spanish variety, Costeño is a product of various linguistic contacts that have taken place since the beginning of its formation in the colonial period. The different ethnic groups, both local and foreign, that have coexisted in the region at different times have shaped the lexicon of this Afro-Hispanic variety by giving it a singular and regional air that is not found in any other part of Mexico. At first glance, the Costeño lexicon exhibits items of autochthonous languages spoken since the ancient period of Mexico, especially coastal Mixtec, Nahuatl and, to a lesser extent, Chatino. Also, as any other Afro-Hispanic variety, Costeño presents some African lexical remnants, as well as Spanish archaisms which have survived since colonial times. Likewise, Philippine lexical

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contributions have left a footprint on Costeño Spanish through Tagalog words which are at times heard among community speakers. These Tagalogisms were probably introduced by Asiatic sailors and slaves who arrived in the area once Acapulco developed as a port (1573) and the first Spanish vessels from Manila, the so-called Naos de China, began to increase their maritime activity in the area (Seijas 2014; Fish 2011; Aguirre Beltrán 1989a). In this regard, Fish (2011) stresses: It is interesting to note that the galleons carried slaves. The slaves were brought to Manila aboard Portuguese and Asian vessels in order to sell them in the city. They had been captured in India, Malabar, Timor, Cochin-China, Africa (Guinea and Mozambique), as well as the Cape Verde Islands. The presence and sale of slaves in manila was a commonplace practice until 1608 when Phillip III, prohibited the continuation of slavery in the Philippines. Despite the king’s prohibition, the slave trade continued as it was difficult ending the practice, which was considered indispensable. The slaves who worked on the vessels performed the lowliest jobs on the ships as servants of the Spaniards or crew members. When the vessel arrived in Acapulco, they oftentimes managed to remain in Mexico or were sold by their owners. Their descendants can still be found in Mexico and particularly around the areas in and around Acapulco (Fish 2011: 295, my italics).

Likewise, there is an almost imperceptible Chilean Spanish lexical contribution to its Costeño sibling through Chilean immigrants who spent time on the coast near Pinotepa Nacional on their route to the Sacramento Valley during the epoch of the California Gold Rush (mid-19th century). According to the oral narrative of one of my subjects (M13), the ship on which these Chilean immigrants traveled had to make a forced stop in Puerto Minizo because the ship was damaged and they remained in the area for approximately six months. During this sojourn, the Chilean immigrants entered into contact with the inhabitants of Collantes and Pinotepa Nacional, and their presence influenced some aspects of the local culture, among them the lexicon. In addition, like all Spanish dialects, especially those of the Americas, Costeño also presents in its lexical base items from Arawacan-Taino origin probably spread by the first Spanish colonizers who had spent a certain period of time in the Caribbean zone (The Dominican Republic, Cuba and Puerto Rico) (Arango 1995). Costeño also exhibits borrowings from Arabic, Basque and Galician, including others of unknown origin. In this regard, Alonso (1953: 53) has accurately pointed out, “la conquista y la colonización de América se hizo con

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los pueblos de todas las regiones españolas”1. Hence, it is no surprise to find lexicon from different regions of the Iberian Peninsula in Costeño, along with other terms of unknown origin.

6.2. Preliminary remarks to the Costeño lexicon The Costeño glossary presented in this chapter is mostly the result of my own data gathered in situ. In addition, I also took advantage of two written sources (Baños Delgado 2001: 81-88; Coronado 2004: 17). My corpus of the Costeño lexicon contains a total of 214 words for which I tried to maintain the most representative lexical interpretations. I intentionally leave aside terms that are common in other parts of Mexico, or even Spanish cross-dialectally. As already mentioned in Chapter 4 (Section 4.2), 35.98% out of the total of the Costeño words contain the grapheme ch realized as a voiceless alveo-palatal affricate (i.e. /č/). I tried to include, as much as possible, the etymology of all words; however, for many of the terms this task was not possible. Only 47% of my Costeño lexical sample includes an etymology and sometimes with little detail. The rest of the words (53%) lack any etymological representation, and this matter still deserves further investigation. In reality, this is the first attempt to offer an etymological description of the Costeño lexicon. The work of Díaz Pérez (1993), that analyzes the afro-mestizo lexicon of the state of Guerrero, along with the previously mentioned works of Baños Delgado (2001) and Coronado (2004), only offer the local Standard Spanish version of Costeño terms. The present Costeño glossary is organized in alphabetical order starting with the Costeño term, followed by its phonetic representation as realized by Costeño speakers. The word category is given in an abbreviated form accompanying the English translation. The etymology is preceded by the symbol < and followed by the name of the language and lexical source with its respective English translation. Also included is a brief comment of the use of word in the target area when appropriate, and finally the equivalent of the word in local standard Spanish is listed. To provide an idea about the Costeño lexicon composition, Figure 6.1 offers a rough estimate of the languages that have contributed to build the current Costeño lexicon.

1

‘The conquest and colonization of the Americas were accomplished with people of different regions of the Iberian Peninsula’.

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Figure 6.1. Costeño lexicon composition

These figures are based on my Costeño lexicon sample. The Amerindian lexicon comprises terms from coastal Mixtec, Chatino, Nahuatl, and Arawakan-Taino. The African & Philippine lexicon includes aside from Tagalogisms, words from Moroccan Arabic, as well as other African languages like Kimbundu, Yoruba and Kikongo. Under the category of other languages, I group terms from Basque, Galician, Spanish varieties like Chilean, Andalusian and so on. Table 6.1 details these categories.

Amerindian

African & Philippine Other languages Unknown origin

Languages Nahuatl Coastal Mixtec Arawakan-Taino Chatino African Tagalog

Items 23 7 4 3 13 7

Percentage 11 % 3% 2% 1% 6% 3%

Basque, Galician, Spanish varieties, and so on.

45

21 %

112

53 %

Table 6.1. Proportional contributions to Costeño Spanish from other lexicons

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These lexical contributions to Costeño Spanish strengthen its rhizomatic linguistic nature discussed throughout this study; whereas some of the words still preserve their original form, others have undergone phonological and semantic change and even recreation by speakers. The following list of words is a small sample of the Costeño vocabulary as it is currently used in the speech of the Afro-Mexicans of the Costa Chica and heard in their oral tradition as well as in the lyrics of some local songs.

6.3. Costeño vocabulary A acotejado [ko.t̪ e.há.o], adj. ‘helpful’.