Volume 2016, Issue 239 - Special Issue: Exploring glottopolitical dynamics in Africa: the Spanish colonial past and beyond, Issue Editors: Susana Castillo-Rodríguez and Laura Morgenthaler García

The article aims at demonstrating that toponymy in colonial and postcolonial settings is a promising area for linguistically-informed research. On the basis of evidence drawn from erstwhile colonies of France (with a focus on Senegal) and Spain (with a focus on the Western Sahara) it is shown that, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, the processes of naming and renaming places are conditioned by an intricate network of mostly social forces. The interaction of these forces may yield different results so that colonial toponyms are not necessarily doomed to disappear from the maps when decolonization sets in. The authors argue strongly for paying more attention to colonial and postcolonial toponymy especially from a comparative perspective.

The introduction of European educational models before, during and after the colonization of the African continent has played a fundamental role in the expansion of colonial languages and, in many cases, the displacement of native ones. This article analyses the means by which France and Spain administered linguistic-educational policies in Morocco and Western Sahara. It also focuses on the disputes these countries engaged in to secure both official language and social domains of use for French and Spanish as prestige languages in contrast to Arabic. As an important and innovative contribution, the present article analyses the nature of the strategies adopted in Western Sahara in the attempt to spread the Spanish and French languages to a nomadic population par excellence that was completely unconcerned with school attendance. Finally, the current consequences of colonial decision-making on the field of linguistic policies will be analysed.

The French colonial presence in North Africa gave rise to a view that was founded on attributing certain – supposedly distinctive – qualities to the Kabyle people (Algeria) and the Berber people in general (Algeria and Morocco). This became known as “the Kabyle (or Berber) myth” and was propagated both by North African nationalists and by the academic world in order to validate their accusations against the colonial powers of practicing a “divide and conquer” policy. What’s more, from the outset, the French and Spanish colonial governments, by empowering Arabic as an imperial and dominant language to the detriment of the peripheral and low prestige Berber languages, greatly contributed to the widespread acceptance of a further myth, i. e., North Africa was “Arab and Muslim”. These myths then became a key argument used by the post-colonial governments to deny the distinctiveness of the Kabyle people, and Berbers in general, hence justifying rejecting their demands for linguistic and cultural recognition. In recent years, however, the Berber people have reacted to these myths; we have witnessed the birth of a resistance movement, the uprising in Algeria (Kabylie) and the development of cultural pride and identity. Surprisingly, these events have caused us to reflect anew on the Berber myths of the colonial period.

This contribution takes a diachronic look at the political, social, cultural and economic reasons behind the decline of Haketia, which has become one of the most symbolic icons in the collective memory of the Hispano-Moroccan Sephardic Jews in their new settlements. The article has three parts: it opens with a general section that introduces the concept of Sephardic Jew and sets out the linguistic varieties of this ethnic group; a second section contextualises the sociocultural and linguistic history of Sephardic Jews in Morocco after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula and up until 1860, the year of the Spanish military foray into North Morocco; and a third and central section examines the causes of the decline of Haketia and the current situation. The article concludes with glottopolitical reflections on the evolution of this idiom, the tension between a colonised and a colonising tongues, and the role of language in ethnic-cultural identity, all of which prove how linguistic homogeneity and linguistic difference can be considered the result of ideological expressions in the social and political processes of a given region.

When in 1861 nearly 200 emancipated black Cubans settled in the “Barrio Congo” of Fernando Po to work in public construction, a process of language contact initiated. Four years later, a few hundred political activists were deported from Cuba to Fernando Po because of their potential influence in the Cuban revolution. This historical episode might have triggered Cubans’ and Afro-Cubans’ lexical transfers to the Spanish spoken in Fernando Po as a result of the two-way connection of the transatlantic slave trade. Based on royal decrees, archival material and the memoirs of Cuban exiles (Balmaseda, Francisco Javier. [1869] 1874. Los confinados a Fernando Po e impresiones de un viage a Guinea . New York: Imprenta de la revolución; Bravo Sentíes, Miguel. 1869. Revolución cubana. Deportación a Fernando Po. Relación que hace uno de los deportados . New York: Halle y Breen. Collection Development Department, Widener Library, HCL. Harvard University (accessed on 18 March 2012).; Saluvet, Juan B. 1892. Los deportados a Fernando Póo en 1869: memoria escrita por Juan B. Saluvet . Matanzas: Imprenta Aurora del Yumuri.; Sifredo y Llopiz, Hipólito. 1893. Los mártires cubanos en 1869. La más exacta narración de las penalidades y los martirios de los 250 deportados políticos a Fernando Po. Primeras víctimas propiciatorias de la insurrección de Cuba en la Habana . Habana: imprenta La Prensa de Ricardo M. Dávila.; Valdés Ynfante, Emilio. 1898. Cubanos en Fernando Pó . Habana: Imprenta “El Fígaro”, 1898. Collection Development Department, Widener Library, HCL. Harvard University. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FHCL:641407 (accessed 11 July 2012).; Miranda, Manuel M. 1903. Memorias de un deportado . Habana: Imprenta la luz.), I reconstruct the historical context of that language contact and discuss the type of intercolonial borrowings that circulated on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century – a “linguistic boomerang” in Maniacky, Jacky. 2013. Africanisms in American English: Critical Notes on Sources and Methodology’. In: Robin Poynor Susan Cooksey & Hein Vanhee (eds.), Kongo across the Waters . Florida: University Press of Florida. words.

This article addresses the historical and sociolinguistic evolution of Fa d’Ambô, a Portuguese-related creole language spoken originally on the small island of Annobón in Equatorial Guinea. It will be shown that Fa d’Ambô and the three creole languages spoken on the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Santome, Angolar and Principense) descend from a single contact language that arose on the island of São Tomé and branched in the sixteenth century. After its permanent settlement in the second half of the sixteenth century, Annobón became strongly isolated until the twentieth century. Due to intense migration from Annobón to Equatorial Guinea’s multilingual capital Malabo over the last decades, Fa d’Ambô’s speech community has not only become divided but also more exposed to other languages, in particular to English-based creole Pichi, the capital’s lingua franca. Given the small size of the Fa d’Ambô speech community (approx. 5,000 speakers), it will be argued that these factors, in addition to the lack of government support for the country’s minority languages, pose an increasing threat to the survival of the language.

This article explores the nexus between language policies and language ideologies in Equatorial Guinea and West Africa. By analyzing spoken and written discourses in Spanish and Pichi, I identify a set of ideas and beliefs about Pichi and the semiotic processes by which they have emerged. The comparison of Pichi with Krio, Nigerian Pidgin, Cameroon Pidgin and Ghanaian Pidgin English shows that Pichi is the most disadvantaged of the West African English-lexicon creoles with respect to a number of sociolinguistic characteristics. I argue that linguistic ideologies about Pichi have contributed significantly to disregarding language policy options for elevating the status and extending the uses of Pichi in Equatorial Guinea. Pichi is nevertheless expected to expand its social functions by gradually conquering additional domains of use as has been the case with the other English creoles of West Africa.