Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages
Vol. 30:2 (2015) ► pp.307–343

Traces of Portuguese in Afro-Yungueño Spanish?

| University of Zurich

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

Keywords: Afro-Yungueño Spanish, Afro-Bolivia, Yungas, Atlantic slave trade, Spanish Creoles, Afro-Hispanic varieties, Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese
Published online: 2 October 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.30.2.04per
References
Agar, Michael H
2008 The professional stranger. An informal introduction to ethnography, 2nd edn. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.Google Scholar
Alba, Orlando
2004 Cómo hablamos los dominicanos: un enfoque sociolingüístico. Santo Domingo: Grupo León Jimenes.Google Scholar
Alleyne, Mervyn C
2000 Opposite processes in “creolization”. In Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh & Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), 125–133.Google Scholar
Álvarez Nazario, Manuel
1991 Historia de la lengua española en Puerto Rico. SantoDomingo: Editora Corripio.Google Scholar
Angola Maconde, Juan
2000 Raíces de un pueblo. Cultura afroboliviana, 2nd edn. La Paz: Producciones CIMA.Google Scholar
Baxter, Alan
1997 Creole-like features in the verb system of an Afro-Brazilian variety of Portuguese. In Arthur K. Spears & Donald Winford (eds.), The structure and status of Pidgins and Creoles (Creole Language Library 19). 265–288. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1998 Morfosintaxe do Português vernáculo do Brasil. In Matthias Perl & Armin Schwegler (eds.), América negra: panorámica actual de los estudios lingüísticos sobre variedades hispanas, portuguesas y criollas, 97–134. Frankfurt: Vervuert.Google Scholar
Baxter, Alan & Dante Lucchesi
1999 El pasado criollo del dialect afro-brasileño de Helvecia. In Klaus Zimmermann (ed.), Lenguas criollas de base lexical española y portuguesa, 503–523. Madrid: Iberoamericana.Google Scholar
Bowser, Frederick P
1974 The African Slave in Colonial Peru. 1524–1650. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Bridikhina, Eugenia
1995 La mujer negra en Bolivia. La Paz: Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano.Google Scholar
Busdiecker, Sara
2006 We are Bolivians, too. The experience and meaning of blackness in Bolivia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Cariaga, Juan
2008 Mururata. La Paz: La Razón.Google Scholar
Carricaburo, Norma
1999 El voseo en la Literatura Argentina. Madrid: Arco Libros.Google Scholar
Chaves de Melo, Gladstone
1975 [1946] A língua do Brasil, 3rd edn. Rio de Janeiro: Getulio Vargas.Google Scholar
Clements, J. Clancy
2009 The linguistic legacy of Spanish and Portuguese. Colonial expansion and language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crespo, Alberto
1995 [1977] Esclavos negros en Bolivia, 2nd edn. La Paz: Librería Editorial Juventud.Google Scholar
Detges, Ulrich
2000 Two types of restructuring in French creoles: A cognitive approach to the genesis of tense markers. In Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh & Edgar W. Schneider,135–162.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R
1981 Linguistic variation in Brazilian Portuguese: Aspects of the phonology, syntax, and language history. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Haas, Mary R
1976 Anthropological linguistics: History. In Anthony F.C. Wallace, J. Lawrence Angel, Richard Fox, Sally McLendon, Rachel Sady, & Robert Sharer (eds.), Perspectives on anthropology 1976. Arlington: American Anthropological Association.Google Scholar
Hardman, Martha J
2001 Aymara. Munich: Licom.Google Scholar
Harrison, K. David
2007 When languages die. The extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Holm, John
1987 Creole influence on popular Brazilian Portuguese. In Glenn G. Gilbert (ed.), Pidgin and Creole languages. Essays in memory of John E. Reinecke, 406–429. Honolulu: University of Honolulu Press.Google Scholar
2004 Languages in contact. The partial restructuring of Vernaculars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hyman, Larry M. & Alessandro Duranti
1982 On the object relation in Bantu. Syntax and Semantics 151. 217–239.Google Scholar
Jacobs, Bart
2009 The Upper Guinea origins of Papiamentu. Diachronica 26(3). 319–379. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Reassessment of the Portuguese contribution to the Papiamentu lexicon. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. 28(1). 154–165. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1972 Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Leons, Barbara
1978 Race, ethnicity and political mobilization in the Andes. American Ethnologist 5(3). 484–494. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lopes, Norma da Silva & Alan N. Baxter
2011 A concordância verbal variável no português dos tongas. Papia 21(1). 39–50.Google Scholar
Lipski, John M
2005 A history of Afro-Hispanic language. Five centuries, five continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 Afro-Bolivian Spanish and Helvecia Portuguese: Semi-Creole parallels. Papia 161. 96–116.Google Scholar
2007 El Español de América, 5th edn. Madrid: Cátedra.Google Scholar
2008a Afro-Bolivian Spanish. Madrid: Iberoamericana. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008b Afro-Paraguayan Spanish: The negation of non-existence. The Journal of Pan African Studies 2(7). 1–37.Google Scholar
Lucchesi, Dante, Alan Baxter & Ilsa Ribeiro
(orgs.) 2009 O português afro-brasileiro. Salvador da Bahia: EDUFBA. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McWhorter, John H
2000 The missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the birth of plantation contact languages. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mendoza, José G
1991 El castellano hablado en La Paz. Sintaxis divergente. LPZ: Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación.Google Scholar
Megenney, William
1998 A relevância das línguas africanas no português do Brasil. In Matthias Perl & Armin Schwegler (eds.), 97–134.Google Scholar
Mello, Heliana Ribeiro de
1996 The genesis and development of Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese. New York: CUNY PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Mello e Souza, Marina de
2002 Reis negros no Brasil escravista. História da festa decoroação de rei congo. Belo Horiyonte: UFMG.Google Scholar
Michaelis, Susanne
2000 The fate of subject pronouns: Evidence from creole and non-creole languages. In Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh & Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), 163–184.Google Scholar
Montaño Aragón, Mario
1992 La familia negra en Bolivia. Chap. 37 of Guía etnográfica y lingüística de Bolivia. Tribus del altiplano y valles. Vol. 31. La Paz: Editorial Don Bosco.Google Scholar
Mufwene, Salikoko S
2000 Creolization is a social, not a structural, process. In Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh & Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), 65–84.Google Scholar
2001 The ecology of language evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 Language evolution. Contact, competition and change. Wiltshire: Cromwell.Google Scholar
Mühn, Juan
1946 La Argentina vista por viajeros del siglo XVIII. Buenos Aires: Huarpes.Google Scholar
Naro, Anthony Julius & Maria Marta Pereira Scherre
2007 Origens do português brasileiro. São Paulo: Parábola.Google Scholar
Neumann-Holzschuh, Ingrid & Edgar W. Schneider
(eds.) 2000 Degrees of Restructuring in Creole Languages (Creole Language Library 22). 65–84. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortiz Oderigo, Néstor
2007 Esquema de la música afroargentina. Editado por Norberto Pablo Cirio. Caseros: Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero.Google Scholar
2008 Diccionario de africanismos en el castellano del Río de la Plata. Caseros: Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero.Google Scholar
Perez, Danae M
2010a Las huellas lingüísticas de África en Bolivia: el habla afroyungueña. Zurich: University of Zurich MA thesis.Google Scholar
2010b Las estrategias reivindicativas de la comunidad afroboliviana. Bulletin Suisse des Américanistes 721. 49–58.Google Scholar
Perez, Danae & Lena Zipp
2015. Researching voice quality variation in spontaneous free speech data of Afro-Yungueño Spanish Romanistntag, Mannheim.
Pizarroso Cuenca, Arturo
1977 La cultura negra en Bolivia. La Paz: ISLA.Google Scholar
Portugal Ortiz, Max
1977 La escavitud negra en las épocas colonial y nacional de Bolivia. La Paz: Instituto Boliviano de Cultura.Google Scholar
Rey Gutiérrez, Mónica
1998 La Saya como medio de comunicación y expression cultural en la comunidad Afroboliviana. La Paz (Bolivia): Universidad Mayor de San Andrés BA thesis.Google Scholar
Schreier, Daniel
2009 Language in isolation, and its implications for variation and change. In Blackwell language and linguistics compass 3. Oxford: Blackwell Publisher. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schwegler, Armin
1999 Monogenesis revisited. The Spanish perspective. In Rickford, John & Suzanne Romaine (eds.), Creole genesis, discourse and attitudes: Studies celebrating Charlene Sato, 235–262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2000 The myth of decreolization: The anomalous case of Palenquero. In Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh & Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), 125–133.Google Scholar
2002 Creolistics in Latin America: Past, present, and future. In Gilbert Glenn (ed.), Pidgin and Creole linguistics in the twenty-first century, 121–171. New York: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
2014. Spanish/Portuguese interface within five unique circumstances. In Ana M. Carvalho & Patrícia Amaral (eds.) Portuguese/Spanish interfaces Amsterdam John Benjamins
Schwegler, Armin & Constanza Rojas-Primus
2010 La lengua ritual del Palo Monte (Cuba): estudio comparativo (Holguín/Cienfuegos). Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoramericana 15(1). 187–244.Google Scholar
Sessarego, Sandro
2011a On the status of Afro-Bolivian Spanish features: Decreolization or Vernacular Universals? In Jim Michnowicz & Robin Dodsworth (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Spanish Sociolingusitics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
2011b Introcucción al idioma afroboliviano. Una conversación con el awicho Manuel Barra. La Paz: Plural Editores.Google Scholar
Sessarego, Sandro & Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach
2011 Feature valuation, variation, and minimalism: Gender in Afro-Bolivian Spanish. Iberia 3(1). 65–80.Google Scholar
Spedding, Alison
1994 Wachu wachu. El cultivo de coca e identidad en los Yunkas de La Paz. La Paz: Hisbol.Google Scholar
Studer, Elena F.S. de
1958 La trata de negros en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII. Montevideo: Libros de Hispanoamérica.Google Scholar
Winford, Donald
2000 “Intermediate“ creoles and degrees of change in creole formation: The case of Bajan. In Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh & Edgar W. Schneider (eds.), 215–246.Google Scholar
Statistics 2001 Census: [URL]
Cited by

Cited by 18 other publications

Korfhagen, David, Rajiv Rao & Sandro Sessarego
2021. Chapter 7. Declarative intonation in four Afro-Hispanic varieties. In Aspects of Latin American Spanish Dialectology [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 32], ► pp. 155 ff. DOI logo
Lipski, John M.
2022. The Emergence andEvolution of Romance Languages in Europe and the Americas. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 427 ff. DOI logo
McWhorter, John H.
2018. Why neither demographics nor feature pools can explain the missing Spanish plantation creoles. Lingua 202 ► pp. 4 ff. DOI logo
Danae Perez, Marianne Hundt, Johannes Kabatek & Daniel Schreier
2021. English and Spanish, DOI logo
Perez, Danae, Sandro Sessarego & Eeva M. Sippola
2017. Chapter 12. Afro-Hispanic varieties in comparison. In Creole Studies – Phylogenetic Approaches, ► pp. 269 ff. DOI logo
Perez, Danae & Lena Zipp
2019. On the relevance of voice quality in contact varieties. Language Ecology 3:1 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Perez, Danae M.
2017. Sessarego, 2014. The Afro-Bolivian determiner phrase. A microparametric approach. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 32:2 ► pp. 449 ff. DOI logo
Perez, Danae M.
2021. Contact Scenarios and Varieties of Spanish beyond Europe. In English and Spanish, ► pp. 115 ff. DOI logo
Rao, Rajiv & Sandro Sessarego
2016. On the intonation of Afro-Bolivian Spanish declaratives: Implications for a theory of Afro-Hispanic creole genesis. Lingua 174 ► pp. 45 ff. DOI logo
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. DOI logo
Röthlisberger, Melanie & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2019. Dialect Typology: Recent Advances. In Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Röthlisberger, Melanie & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2020. Dialect Typology: Recent Advances. In Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, ► pp. 131 ff. DOI logo
Sessarego, Sandro
2016. A response to Perez. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 31:1 ► pp. 200 ff. DOI logo
Sessarego, Sandro
2019. Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular, DOI logo
Sessarego, Sandro
2021. A socio-historical perspective on the origin and evolution of two Afro-Andean vernaculars. In Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 12], ► pp. 164 ff. DOI logo
Sessarego, Sandro & Rajiv Rao
2016. On the simplification of a prosodic inventory. In Inquiries in Hispanic Linguistics [Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 12], ► pp. 171 ff. DOI logo
Sessarego, Sandro & Adrián Rodríguez-Riccelli
2018. Formal issues in Afro-Hispanic morphosyntax: The Afro-Bolivian Spanish case. Lingua 202 ► pp. 58 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2022. Emergence and Spread of Some European Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact, ► pp. 425 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.