Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Series editor's foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and acronyms
- 1 Language contact, language learning, and language change
- 2 The general socio-historical context of Portuguese and Castilian
- 3 Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified creole languages
- 4 Bozal Spanish of Cuba
- 5 Chinese Coolie Spanish in nineteenth-century Cuba
- 6 Chinese Immigrant Spanish
- 7 Andean Spanish
- 8 Barranquenho
- 9 Contact, cognition, and speech community
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Bibliography
- Author index
- General index
4 - Bozal Spanish of Cuba
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Series editor's foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations and acronyms
- 1 Language contact, language learning, and language change
- 2 The general socio-historical context of Portuguese and Castilian
- 3 Portuguese- and Spanish-lexified creole languages
- 4 Bozal Spanish of Cuba
- 5 Chinese Coolie Spanish in nineteenth-century Cuba
- 6 Chinese Immigrant Spanish
- 7 Andean Spanish
- 8 Barranquenho
- 9 Contact, cognition, and speech community
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- Bibliography
- Author index
- General index
Summary
Introduction
The debate about whether there was ever a Spanish-lexified creole language spoken in Cuba or elsewhere in the Caribbean is complex and there are arguments for and against its putative existence. Given the overwhelming evidence in the Caribbean of creoles lexified by French, English, Portuguese, and Dutch, there is no a priori reason to exclude the possibility of a Spanishlexified creole having existed in the Spanish-speaking area of the Caribbean. Specifically in the case of Cuba, Otheguy (1973) argues that references regarding the presence of a black bozal Spanish in Cuba go back more than one hundred years, suggesting that there was once a Spanish creole spoken by the African (and African descendant) population in Cuba. Granda (1978) and Schwegler (1993, 1996a) maintain that a widespread Spanish-based creole was possibly spoken throughout the Spanish Caribbean and Latin America, but that it underwent significant de-creolization, such that today there are only vestiges of it found in the Spanish spoken in Cuba. Perl (1987) discusses texts found in Cabrera (1954) which contain re-structuring like that found in creoles, and more recently Ortiz López (1998) finds evidence of re-structuring reminiscent of creole structure in the speech of older Afro-Cubans currently living in more isolated regions of the island.
Not all scholars, however, share this view. McWhorter (2000), for instance, argues forcefully that no Spanish-based creole ever existed in Cuba or anywhere else in Latin America. He develops an Afro-genesis hypothesis for New World creoles in which he proposes that creole languages developed in West African trade settlements where many of the African slaves were sent before their coerced migration to the New World.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Linguistic Legacy of Spanish and PortugueseColonial Expansion and Language Change, pp. 68 - 101Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009