The present work not only contributes to shedding light on the linguistic and socio-historical origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. In order to provide a more concrete answer to the questions raised by McWhorter’s book on The Missing Spanish Creoles, the current study has focused on an aspect of the European colonial enterprise in the Americas that has never been closely analyzed in relation to the evolution of Afro-European contact varieties, the legal regulations of black slavery. This book proposes the 'Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis', which ascribes a prime importance in the development of Afro-European languages in the Americas to the historical evolution of slavery, from the legal rules contained in the Roman Corpus Juris Civilis to the codes and regulations implemented in the different European colonies overseas. This research was carried out with the belief that creole studies will benefit greatly from a more interdisciplinary approach, capable of combining linguistic, socio-historical, legal, and anthropological insights. This study is meant to represent an eclectic step in such a direction.
As of February 2020, this e-book is Open Access CC BY-NC-ND, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
“This piece of work includes one of the few available studies of Afro-Peruvian Spanish varieties. Its distinguishing attribute is that it provides both qualitative and quantitative analyses of linguistic data, collected during fieldwork in the province of Chincha, as well as a thorough socio-historical study based on secondary historical sources. The detailed demographical and historical facts presented are used to challenge earlier assumptions about colonial coastal Peru as an ideal setting for the development of a creole language that would be the origin of Afro-Hispanic varieties. Instead of assuming that Afro-Peruvian Spanish has gone through a process of decreolization, the author argues that it is an “advanced conventionalized second language”. Moreover, the analysis provides relevant information to shed light on the debate about the scarcity of Spanish related creoles and on the genesis and evolution of Afro-Hispanic varieties in Latin America. The author claims that the socio-historical conditions in Spanish colonies diverged from other European powers since Spaniards did not trade enslaved Africans themselves and had a quite different set of legal regulations of slavery.”
Laura Alvarez, Stockholm University
“Sessarego’s work offers an important contribution to the documentation and description of the Afro-Hispanic varieties and can be recommended to students and expert scholars alike. It is especially strong in the inclusion of socio-historical information in the explanations of the formation and development of these varieties. The case of Afro-Peruvian Spanish also has a wider theoretical importance, as it demonstrates the value of an interdisciplinary approach to creole studies. Sessarego puts this into practice in his own work. The author also shows that a new socio-historical hypothesis or explanation does not necessarily have to exclude previous proposals, but can contribute to a common cause of trying to unravel the questions about the origins and development of creoles.”
Eeva Sippola, University of Bremen, in Journal of Language Contact 10: 383-389 (2017)
Cited by (38)
Cited by 38 other publications
Visconte, Piero
2024. El español de Loíza en el Debate de los Criollos del Español: Un análisis sociohistórico y lingüístico. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2024:286 ► pp. 113 ff.
Arias-Quintero, Irene, Rafael Jiménez-Baralt, Piero Visconte & Sandro Sessarego
2023. El español del Chocó: una lengua afro-hispánica en la frontera española. Forma y Función 36:1
Walkden, George, Gemma Hunter McCarley, Raquel Montero, Molly Rolf, Sarah Einhaus & Henri Kauhanen
2023. Sociolinguistic Typology Meets Historical Corpus Linguistics. Transactions of the Philological Society 121:3 ► pp. 546 ff.
Raynor, Eliot
2022. Sandro Sessarego: Language contact and the making of an Afro-Hispanic vernacular: Variation and change in the Colombian Chocó. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 8:1 ► pp. 179 ff.
Torres Sanchez, Nadiezdha
2022. La gestión de la concordancia de género gramatical en el español de bilingües purépecha y español. Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 11:1 ► pp. 51 ff.
Wendy Ayres-Bennett & John Bellamy
2021. The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization,
Díaz-Campos, Manuel, Juan M. Escalona Torres & Valentyna Filimonova
2020. Sociolinguistics of the Spanish-Speaking World. Annual Review of Linguistics 6:1 ► pp. 363 ff.
Fenton, Elyssa, Amy Bustin & Antje Muntendam
2020. The intonation of broad focus declaratives in Afro-Peruvian Spanish: Findings from two elicitation tasks. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 13:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Morales-Front, Alfonso, Michael J. Ferreira, Ronald P. Leow & Cristina Sanz
2019. The Cambridge Handbook of African Linguistics,
Rao, Rajiv & Sandro Sessarego
2018. The intonation of Chota Valley Spanish: Contact-induced phenomena at the discourse-phonology interface. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 11:1 ► pp. 163 ff.
2016. Publications Received. Language in Society 45:3 ► pp. 471 ff.
[no author supplied]
2022. A bifurcation threshold for contact-induced language change. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7:1
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