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rfmcdonaldI was interested by an article I found recently in The New York Times, "A Language, Not Quite Spanish, With African Echoes", about an unusual Spanish creole spoken in a village in Columbia.
The village of Palenquero was settled by Maroons, freed slaves, who seem to have gone on to create a refuge akin to the quilombos of Brazil, there creating a Spanish creole (Palenquero) that drew heavily upon the Kikongo language of the lower Congo basin and the Portuguese spoken by slavers. There aren't many surviving Spanish Spanish-based creole languages, perhaps because as Manuel Díaz-Campos and J. Clancy Clements have argued in their paper "Mainland Spanish Colonies and Creole Genesis: The Afro-Venezuelan Area Revisited" (PDF format)--the volume of African slave migration to Spanish America generally was never large enough to create a critical mass of non-Hispanophones that could support a stable creole language.
The residents of [Palenquero], founded centuries ago by runaway slaves in the jungle of northern Colombia, eke out their survival from plots of manioc. Pigs wander through dirt roads. The occasional soldier on patrol peeks into houses made of straw, mud and cow dung.
On the surface it resembles any other impoverished Colombian village. But when adults here speak with one another, their language draws inspiration from as far away as the Congo River Basin in Africa. This peculiar speech has astonished linguists since they began studying it several decades ago.
The language is known up and down Colombia’s Caribbean coast as Palenquero and here simply as “lengua” — tongue. Theories about its origins vary, but one thing is certain: it survived for centuries in this small community, which is now struggling to keep it from perishing.
Today, fewer than half of the community’s 3,000 residents actively speak Palenquero, though many children and young adults can understand it and pronounce some phrases.
“Palenge a senda tielan ngombe ri nduse i betuaya,” Sebastián Salgado, 37, a teacher at the public school here, said before a classroom of teenage students on a recent Tuesday morning. (The sentence roughly translates as, “Palenque is the land of cattle, sweets and basic staples.”)
Palenquero is thought to be the only Spanish-based Creole language in Latin America. But its grammar is so different that Spanish speakers can understand almost nothing of it. Its closest relative may be Papiamento, spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, which draws largely from Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, linguists say. It is spoken only in this village and a handful of neighborhoods in cities where workers have migrated.
The survival of Palenquero points to the extraordinary resilience of San Basilio de Palenque, part of whose very name — Palenque — is the Spanish word for a fortified village of runaway slaves. Different from dozens of other palenques that were vanquished, this community has successfully fended off threats to its existence to this day.
The village of Palenquero was settled by Maroons, freed slaves, who seem to have gone on to create a refuge akin to the quilombos of Brazil, there creating a Spanish creole (Palenquero) that drew heavily upon the Kikongo language of the lower Congo basin and the Portuguese spoken by slavers. There aren't many surviving Spanish Spanish-based creole languages, perhaps because as Manuel Díaz-Campos and J. Clancy Clements have argued in their paper "Mainland Spanish Colonies and Creole Genesis: The Afro-Venezuelan Area Revisited" (PDF format)--the volume of African slave migration to Spanish America generally was never large enough to create a critical mass of non-Hispanophones that could support a stable creole language.
