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The Chota Valley: Afro-Hispanic Language in Highland Ecuador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

John M. Lipski
John M. Lipski*
Affiliation:
University of Houston
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The African influence on Latin American Spanish is undisputed, and yet the field of Afro-Hispanic linguistics is hampered by the lack of widespread Hispanic creole dialects, or even areas of widespread Afro-Hispanic language usage. A few tiny dialect pockets continue to exist, however, such as the palenquero dialect of Palenque de San Basilio in northern Colombia, and the special dialect of the negros congos of Panama's Caribbean coast; until the first decades of the twentieth century, a partially creolized Bozal Spanish (spoken by African slaves who had learned Spanish as a second language, and only imperfectly) was still to be found in Cuba as well as vestigially in Puerto Rico and perhaps the Dominican Republic. Given the geographical inaccessibility of many areas of Latin America containing large African populations, it is possible that additional traces of vestigial Afro-Hispanic language may still be found or may have recently disappeared.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , 1987 , pp. 155 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

This note is based on research carried out in Ecuador in 1984. Thanks are due to the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana in Quito, to Don Julio Estupiñán Tello, President of the Casa de la Cultura in Esmeraldas, to Licenciado Alfonso Cazar, Director of Student Affairs at the Universidad Nacional del Ecuador, and to Nelson “Clay” Bolaños, world champion boxer from the Chota Valley.

References

Notes

1. Derek Bickerton and Aquiles Escalante, “Palenquero: A Spanish-based Creole of Northern Colombia,” Lingua 24 (1970):254–67; Aquiles Escalante, “Notas sobre el Palenque de San Basilio, una comunidad negra en Colombia,” Divulgaciones Etnológicas 3, no. 5 (1954):207–359; José V. Ochoa Franco, Consideraciones generales sobre costumbres y lenguaje palenqueros (Cartagena: Dirección de Educación Pública de Bolívar, 1945); Germán de Granda, Estudios lingüísticos hispánicos, afrohispánicos y criollos (Madrid: Gredos, 1978), 441–66; Roberto Arrazola, Palenque, primer pueblo libre de América (Cartagena: Editorial Hernández, 1970); Nina Friedemann and Carlos Patiño Rosselli, Lengua y sociedad en el Palenque de San Basilio (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1983); and Nina Friedemann and Richard Cross, Ma Ngombe: guerreros y ganaderos en Palenque (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1979).

2. Luz Graciela Joly, “The Ritual Play of the Congos of North-Central Panama: Sociolinguistic Implications,” Sociolinguistic Working Paper no. 85 (Austin, Tex.: Southwest Educational Laboratory, 1981); John Lipski, “The Speech of the Negros Congos of Panama,” Hispanic Linguistics 2, no. 1 (1985):23–47; John Lipski, “El lenguaje de los negros congos de Panamá: ¿vestigios de un criollo afrohispánico?” Lexis, forthcoming; and John Lipski, “The Negros Congos of Panama: A Vestigial Afro-Hispanic Group,” journal of Black Studies 16 (1986):409–28.

3. Richard Otheguy, “The Spanish Caribbean: A Creole Perspective,” in New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English, edited by Charles James Bailey and Richard Shuy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1975), 323–39; Granda, Estudios lingüísticos, 311–34, 362–423, 481–91; Manuel Alvarez Nazario, El elemento afronegroide en el español de Puerto Rico (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1974); Humberto López Morales, Estudios sobre el español de Cuba (New York: Las Américas, 1971); Humberto López Morales, “Sobre la existencia y pervivencia del ‘criollo’ cubano,” Anuario de Letras 18 (1980):85–116; Humberto López Morales, “Estratificación sociolectal frente a diglosia en el Caribe hispánico,” Lingüística Española Actual 5 (1983):205–22; Concepción Teresa Alzola, “Habla popular cubana,” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares 23 (1965):358–69; Antonio Bachiller y Morales, “Desfiguración a que está expuesto el idioma castellano al contacto y mezcla de razas,” Revista de Cuba 14 (1883):97–104; Arturo Montori, Modificaciones populares del idioma castellano en Cuba (Havana: Imprenta de “Cuba Pedagógica,” 1916); John Lipski, “On the Construction ‘ta’ + infinitive in Caribbean Bozal Spanish,” Romance Philology, forthcoming. Papiamentu, spoken in the Netherlands Antilles, is a debatably Hispanic (although clearly Africanized) creole language in that the demonstrably Portuguese component predominates over the Spanish base. Compare John Birmingham, “The Papiamentu Language of Curaçao,” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia; Douglas Taylor, “Grammatical and Lexical Affinities of Creoles,” in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, edited by Dell Hymes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 293–96; and Granda, Estudios lingüísticos, 311–34, 424–40, 481–91.

4. Granda, Estudios lingüísticos; Alvarez Nazario, El elemento afronegroide; Marius Valkhoff, Studies in Portuguese and Creole (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1966); Douglas Taylor, Languages of the West Indies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Keith Whinnom, “Origins of European-based Creoles and Pidgins,” Orbis 14 (1965):510–27; Ian Hancock, “Malacca Creole Portuguese: Asian, African, or European?” Anthropological Linguistics 17 (1975):211–36; Germán de Granda, “La tipología ‘criolla’ de dos hablas del área lingüística hispánica,” Thesaurus 23 (1968):193–205; and Anthony Naro, “A Study on the Origins of Pidginization,” Language 54 (1978):314–47. By the fifteenth century, significant numbers of black slaves lived in Lisbon, and many were later transferred to southern Spain. The first examples of Africanized Spanish, which appeared in peninsular Spanish literary documents of the early sixteenth century, indicate a high degree of interference from pidgin Portuguese. See Ruth Pike, “Sevillian Society in the Sixteenth Century: Slaves and Freedmen,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47 (1967):344–59; Alfonso Franco Silva, Registro documental sobre la esclavitud sevillana (1453–1513) (Seville: Universidad de Sevilla, 1979); and A. C. de C. M. Sanders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For early examples of Africanized Spanish, compare Frida Weber de Kurlat, “Sobre el negro como tipo cómico en el teatro español del siglo XVI,” Romance Philology 17 (1962):380–91; Germán de Granda, “Posibles vías directas de introducción de africanismos en el ‘habla de negro’ literaria castellana,” Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 24 (1969):459–69; Granda, Estudios lingüísticos, 216–33; Edmund de Chasca, “The Phonology of the Speech of the Negroes in Early Spanish Drama,” Hispanic Review 14 (1946):322–39; Howard Jason, “The Language of the Negro in Early Spanish Drama,” College Language Association journal 10 (1967):330–40; Juan Castellano, “El negro esclavo en el entremés del Siglo de Oro,” Hispania 44 (1961):55–65; Paul Teyssier, La Langue de Gil Vicente (Paris: Klincksieck, 1959); John Lipski, “Black Spanish: The Last Frontier of Afro-America,” Crítica (San Diego) 1, no. 2 (1985):53–75; and John Lipski, “On the Reduction of /s/ in Bozal Spanish,” Neophilologus 70 (1986):208–16.

5. In addition to the sources cited in notes 3 and 4, a minimal bibliography would include: F. Adolfo Coelho, “Os Dialetos Românicos ou Neo-Latinos na Africa, Asia e América,” in Estudos Lingüísticos Crioulos, edited by Jorge Morais-Barbosa (Lisbon: Acadêmia Internacional de Cultura Portuguesa, 1963), 1–233; Jorge Morais-Barbosa, “Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and São Tomé and Principe: The Linguistic Situation,” in Miscelânea Luso-Africana, edited by Marius Valkhoff (Lisbon: Junto do Ultramar, 1975), 133–51; W. A. A. Wilson, The Crioulo of Guiné (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1962); Jan Voorhoeve, “Historical and Linguistic Evidence in Favour of the Relexification Theory,” Language in Society 2 (1973): 133–45; Germán de Granda, “A Socio-Historical Approach to the Problem of Portuguese Creole in West Africa,” Linguistics 173 (1976):11–22; William Megenney, “Traces of Portuguese in Three Caribbean Creoles: Evidence in Support of the Monogenetic Theory,” Hispanic Linguistics 1, no. 2 (1984):177–90; David Dalby, “Black through White: Patterns of Communication in Africa and the New World,” in Black-White Speech Relationships, edited by Walt Wolfram and Naomi Clark (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1971), 99–138; Mervyn Alleyne, Comparative Afro-American (Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1981); Kemlin Laurence, “Is Caribbean Spanish a Case of Decreolization?” Orbis 23 (1974):484–99; J. L. Dillard, Black English (New York: Random House, 1972); M. F. Goodman, A Comparative Study of Creole French (The Hague: Mouton, 1964); Alain Yacou, “A propos du parler bossal, langue créole de Cuba,” Espace Créole 2 (1977):73–92; Marius Valkhoff, New Light on Afrikaans and Malayo-Portuguese (Louvain: Editiones Peeters, 1972); Ian Hancock, “A Provisional Comparison of the English-based Atlantic Creoles,” African Language Review 8 (1969):7–72; John Baugh, “Bipidginization and African-Related Creole Development,” Southwest Journal of Linguistics 6 (1983):166–84; Douglas Taylor, “The Origin of West Indian Creole Languages: Evidence from Grammatical Categories,” American Anthropologist 65 (1963):800–814; and William Stewart, “Creole Language of the Caribbean,” in Study of the Role of Second Languages in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, edited by F. Rice (Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1962), 34–53. Derek Bickerton is the leading exponent of the strongest form of the language universais approach; see his Roots of Language (Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1981). A less extreme approach is taken by Paul Kay and Gillian Sankoff in “A Language-Universals Approach to Pidgins and Creoles,” in Pidgins and Creoles: Current Trends and Prospects, edited by David DeCamp and Ian Hancock (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1974), 61–72.

6. Carlisle González and Celso Benavides, “¿Existen rasgos criollos en el habla de Samaná?” in El español del Caribe, edited by Orlando Alba (Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1982), 107–32; Sylvia Moodie, “Morphophonemic Illformedness in an Obsolescent Dialect: A Case Study of Trinidad Spanish,” Orbis (forthcoming); Sylvia Moodie, “Basilectal Survivals in Post-Creole Caribbean Spanish,” manuscript; and John Lipski, “Creole Spanish and Vestigial Spanish: Evolutionary Parallels,” Linguistics 23 (1985):963–84.

7. Leslie Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and Rolando Mellafe, Negro Slavery in Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973).

8. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, “Sevilla frente a Madrid,” in Miscelánea homenaje a André Martinet, edited by Diego Catalán (La Laguna, Canary Islands: Universidad de La Laguna, 1963), 3:99–165; Manuel Alvar, “Las hablas meridionales de España y su interés para la lingüística comparada,” Revista de Filología Española 39 (1955):284–313; and Manuel Alvar, Teoría lingüística de las regiones (Barcelona: Planeta and Universidad Complutense, 1975).

9. Rout, African Experience in Spanish America, 211, 232.

10. For example, see Julio Estupiñán Tello, El negro en Esmeraldas (Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1967), 45–48; and Humberto Toscano Mateus, El español del Ecuador (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), 19–20. This theory is also repeated by Carlos Alberto Coba Andrade, Eiteratura popular afroecuatoriana (Otavalo, Ecuador: Instituto Otavaleño de Antropología, 1980), 19–49.

11. Leopoldo Benítez Vinuenza, Ecuador: drama y paradoja (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1950), 62.

12. Robert West, The Pacific Lowlands of Colombia: A Negroid Area of the American Tropics (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1957), 106; and Teodoro Wolf, Geografía y geología del Ecuador (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1892), 525.

13. Norman Whitten, Jr., Class, Kinship, and Power in an Ecuadorian Town: The Negroes of San Lorenzo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), 22–25; Piedad Peñaherrera de Costales and Alfredo Costales Samaniego, Coangue o historia cultural y social de los negros del Chota y Salinas (Quito: Llacta, 1959); and Albert Franklin, Ecuador: Portrait of a People (New York: Doubleday, 1943), 269.

14. Kathleen Klumpp, “Black Traders of North Highland Ecuador,” in Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Norman Whitten, Jr., and John Szwed (New York: Free Press, 1970), 245–62.

15. Edwin Ferndon, Jr., Studies in Ecuadorian Geography (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research, 1950), 7.

16. Whitten, Class, Kinship, and Power, 161–62; Federico González Suárez, Historia general de la República del Ecuador 8 (Guayaquil: Publicaciones Educativas “Ariel,” 1970), 160.

17. Estupiñán Tello, El negro en Esmeraldas, 49.

18. Norman Whitten, Jr., Black Frontiersmen: A South American Case (New York: John Wiley and Schenkman, 1974), 179; and Klumpp, “Black Traders.”

19. For example, see Modesto Chávez Franco, Crónicas del Guayaquil antiguo (Guayaquil: Imprenta y Talleres Municipales, 1930), 524–29. He mentions the village of Palenque, in the province of Los Ríos to the northeast of Guayaquil, where a group of descendants of escaped slaves had settled and where a vestigially creolized Spanish may have existed in the nineteenth century. Chávez Franco cited examples from his childhood days but was unable to provide an exact translation for the highly deformed elements. Granda examines these materials and speculates on the possible survival of creolized Spanish in the Palenque area in Estudios lingüísticos, 321, 381–83. The village of Palenque still exists, but my research reveals that none of its residents speak in this fashion, nor did I find any collective memory of a creolized speech being used by past generations. My findings lead to the supposition that the examples recalled by Chávez Franco—if in fact they represent a creolized Spanish (and not, for example, an actual African song or a series of onomatopoeic forms)—were the last remnants of an earlier speech mode.

20. Estupiñán Tello speaks of the settlements in the interior of Esmeraldas that had virtually no contact with the outside world until the Ibarra-San Lorenzo railroad link was constructed a few decades ago: “los negros vivían semidesnudos y hablaban su propio dialecto … así los encontró el ferrocarril Ibarra-San Lorenzo cuando por primera vez atravesó estas comarcas” (El negro en Esmeraldas, 71). In interviews with workers who had participated in the construction of the railroad and had visited some of the interior villages for the first time, it became apparent that no creolized Spanish existed in this area. Fieldwork among residents of the interior settlements confirmed this assertion.

21. For example, Frederick Hassaurek traveled through Ecuador in 1861 and noted on witnessing a celebration among Choteños: “I was unable to make out any of the verses, but my companions told me the songs were composed by the Negroes themselves, and in their own dialect. Like the Negroes of the United States, the Negroes of Spanish America have a dialect and pronunciation of their own. The same guttural voices and almost unintelligible pronunciation, the same queer gesticulation and shaking of the body, the same shrewd simplicity and good humor ….” See Hassaurek, Four Years among Spanish-Americans (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1868), 194. It is evident that regardless of his qualifications as an explorer and anthropologist, Hassaurek was a questionable linguist who was strongly influenced by stereotypes and generalizations that were invalid for Hispanic American dialectology even in the nineteenth century. The fact that the Choteños' songs were incomprehensible to the visitor (who apparently was not entirely fluent in Spanish) says nothing essential about the local Spanish dialect but rather exemplifies a natural phenomenon, the phonetic deformation of sung language and the stylistic discrepancies between daily speech patterns and the lyrics of popular songs.

22. For previous sources, compare D. Lincoln Canfield, Spanish Pronunciation in the Americas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 48–51; Toscano Mateus, El español del Ecuador; and Peter Boyd-Bowman, “Sobre la pronunciación del español en el Ecuador,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 7 (1953):221–33. In general, the phonetic traits are as follows: syllable-final and word-final /s/ is retained except in (1); in (3) and (4) and sometimes in (2) and (5), word-final prevocalic /s/ (los amigos) is realized as [z]; the palatal lateral phoneme occurs in (2) and (5), is given a groove fricative pronunciation [z] in (3) and (4), and is pronounced as [y] in (1); the group /tr/ is pronounced roughly as [c] in (3) and (4), where /r/ is also given a groove fricative pronunciation, as is implosive and phrase-final /r/; and syllable-final /l/ and /r/ may be neutralized in (1), where word-final /r/, particularly in verbal infinitives, may disappear. To this list of dialectal characteristics may be added the uniformly velar pronunciation of word-final /n/ before vowels and in phrase-final position (muy bien, un amigo) in nearly all of Ecuador, although in the extreme northern province of Carchi, a certain alternation with alveolar [n] occurs. In the Amazon region, considerable idiolectal variation occurs due to the small number of native Spanish speakers, who come from various regions of the country.

23. Boyd-Bowman claims that the Chota dialect “pertenece lingüísticamente a la provincia negra de Esmeraldas” in “Pronunciación del español,” 233. This opinion is echoed by Thomas Weil in Area Handbook for Ecuador (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973), 83. This source declares that on the Ecuadoran coast, a “black” subdialect exists alongside other varieties. My research disproves these remarks and offers possible reasons for the mistaken impressions. In particular, black highland Spanish normally retains the phoneme /s/ in all positions, being essentially the only “black” Latin American Spanish dialect to do so, a fact of considerable importance for theories of Latin American dialectology. Black Choteños also produce the assibilated variant [ž] of /r/, frequently assibilate syllable-final /r/, maintain the phonological opposition between /l/ and /r/ in all positions, velarize word-final /n/, give an alveolar articulation to the group /tr/, and frequently elide unstressed vowels in contact with /s/.

24. In the Chota Valley, ten black informants were used (seven men and three women) from the villages of El Chota, Carpuela, Salinas, and Juncal. Their ages ranged from twenty-seven to seventy-eight, and all were engaged in subsistence-level farming and rudimentary artesanal trades. Each informant provided approximately thirty minutes of taped material consisting of unstructured interviews in which a maximally informal style was sought. Data from the remaining dialect areas were also collected in situ, using a sample of five informants from each dialect region. Informants included men and women from twenty-eight to sixty-five years of age whose socioeconomic status was lower to lower-middle class in order to effect an adequate sociolinguistic comparison with the black Choteños.

25. Whitten, Class, Kinship, and Power, 22–25; Estupiñán Tello, El negro en Esmeraldas, 49.

26. For example, in the Spanish of Equatorial Guinea (the only Spanish-speaking area of black Africa), /s/ is normally retained in all positions, but word-final lexical /s/ falls with relative ease. Compare John Lipski, “The Spanish of Malabo, Equatorial Guinea,” Hispanic Linguistics 1 (1984):69–96; John Lipski, The Spanish of Equatorial Guinea (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1985); and Germán de Granda, “Fenómenos de interferencia fonética de fang sobre el español de Guinea Ecuatorial,” Anuario de Lingüística Hispánica (Valladolid) 1 (1985):95–114. Speakers in the Colombian Chocó region exhibit a similar behavior, with nonmorphological /s/ being lost more often than in other circumstances. Compare José Joaquín Montes Giraldo, “El habla del Chocó: notas breves,” Thesaurus 29 (1974):409–28; and Germán de Granda, Estudios sobre un área dialectal de población negra: las tierras bajas occidentales de Colombia (Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1977).

27. Amadeu Amaral, O Dialeto Caipira (São Paulo: Editora Anhembi, 1955), 53; Ana Natal Rodrigues, O Dialeto Caipira na Região de Piracicaba (São Paulo: Arica, 1974); Milton Azevedo, “Loss of Agreement in Caipira Portuguese,” Hispania 67 (1984):403–8; and William Megenney, A Bahian Heritage: An Ethnolinguistic Study of African Influence on Brazilian Portuguese (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). Compare also Lipski, “The Reduction of /s/ in Bozal Spanish”; Weber de Kurlat, “El negro como tipo cómico”; and Chasca, “Phonology of the Speech of Negroes.” Because virtually none of the African languages known to have been current among black slave populations in Latin America used word-final consonantal endings, it is not surprising that even in regions where word-final consonants are normally retained in Spanish, a subtle African substratum influence might weaken certain consonants under conditions of grammatical redundancy.

28. For example, although few Choteños are fluent in Quechua, most utilize syntactic patterns based on the gerund and the verb estar that result from Quechua influence. An example is dame comprando unas espermitas, “buy me some candles.” Chota Valley Spanish also makes use of the intensive verb ser, also found in other Latin American Spanish dialects, to a greater extent than is found elsewhere in Ecuador: Para el ojeado, se nota es cuando le sale así granos, “You notice when the person with evil eye gets a rash.” Compare Charles Kany, American Spanish Syntax, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 256.

29. Laura Hidalgo Alzamora, Décimas esmeraldeñas (Quito: Banco Central del Ecuador, 1982), 159–60. In the Chota Valley and in some more marginal dialects of Esmeraldas, the second person singular is formed with vos plus verbs with stressed final syllable (for example, vos hablás, “you speak,” as opposed to tú hablas, él habla, or other possible forms), a pattern that precludes explicitly stating the subject pronoun.

30. Ibid., 165.

31. González and Benavides, “¿Existen rasgos criollos?”

32. Lipski, The Spanish of Equatorial Guinea, chap. 3.

33. Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1979), 137; Lydia Cabrera, El monte (Miami: Ediciones C. R., 1971); Granda, Estudios lingüísticos, 481–91; López Morales, Estudios sobre el español de Cuba, 62–71; Lipski, “The Construction ‘ta’ + infinitive”; and Otheguy, “The Spanish Caribbean.”

34. Lipski, “Creole Spanish and Vestigial Spanish”; and Sylvia Moodie, “Basilectal Survivals” and “Morphophonemic Illformedness.”

35. J. Alden Mason and Aurelio Espinosa, “Porto-Rican Folklore: Folktales,” Journal of American Folklore 40 (1927):313–414, 410; and Alvarez Nazario, El elemento afronegroide, 386.

36. Enrique López Albújar, Matalaché, 3d. ed. (Lima: Editorial Juan Mejía Baca, 1966), 38.