An overview of recent research on the sociolinguistic role of Luso-Africans, ladino Africans, and criollos of African descent in the early colonial Spanish Americas

Abstract

The Spanish Creoles Debate centers around the question of why - with the exception of Palenquero - one does not find “classical” creole languages in the Spanish Americas, whereas there are many throughout the Anglophone and Francophone Americas. Some approaches have argued that there was once a pan- American Spanish Creole that “decreolized”, but that through this process certain linguistic-structural reflexes diffused throughout the local speech-community grammar and remained as trace features in Caribbean Spanishes and Afro-Hispanic varieties. Others have countered that Afro-Hispanic varieties only underwent partial language-contact driven restructuring during the early colonial era commensurate with language-ecological conditions. Portuguese Creole languages feature prominently in many of these theories given the demographic and cultural prominence of Luso-Africans throughout the Spanish Americas in the early colonial period. In this chapter, I compile and review recent research in creolistics and history on the sociolinguistic role of Luso-Africans, ladino ‘latinized’ Africans, and criollos ‘creoles’ of African descent in the early colonial Spanish Americas. I affirm the view that the language-ecological conditions in the early colonial Spanish Americas differed substantially from those of the plantation societies of the later colonial era such that they were not conducive to largescale, system-wide language-contact driven linguistic restructuring. I argue that the prominence of Luso-African Portuguese Creole speakers was a preventative, rather than a catalyst to contact-driven restructuring, since Luso-Africans were already acculturated to Ibero-Atlantic lifeways, including linguistically, when they arrived, and they inhabited a wide range of social strata and occupations, indicating that they had ample access to local varieties of Spanish which they acquired with facility. Finally, I highlight urban Ribeira Grande de Santiago de Cabo Verde and São Tomé as important sociohistorical prototype language ecologies that exerted direct influence on the early colonial Spanish Americas and corresponded to light or partial language-contact driven restructuring: the entrepôt/ center of acculturation/port-complex-node model.