In the most comprehensive volume to date, John Lipski, one of the top scholars on Afro-Hispanic language varieties, traces the history of African–Iberian linguistic contact from its origins with the importation of black African slaves to Portugal and Spain to the present-day situation of these varieties. The book can be divided into two parts: chapters 1–5 contain the introduction and a detailed review of the data, while chapters 6–9 examine how the data bear on the likelihood of the independent formation of a Spanish-based creole in the Caribbean. In chapter 1 Lipski details the first significant African–Iberian contacts, with sections on the different phases of colonization and slavery, tracing the Portuguese expansion in Africa and Asia, the role of the Spanish, the ascent of Dutch and English in the colonization scene, and the slave trade. He focuses on African slavery in South America, noting that there were fewer blacks than whites until the 19th century, when the big plantations came into their own. At this time, we find a disproportionate number of blacks to whites in some areas of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Chapters 2 and 3 contain commentary on the earliest Afro-Portuguese and Afro-Spanish texts. For Portuguese, the main authors who portrayed African speech are Henrique da Mota (15th century) and Gil Vicente (16th century), and such portrayals appeared in plays and later in popular literature. In this later material, Lipski notes a uniformity that he sees as reflecting a move toward stabilization in the “black Portuguese” in the Portugal of that period (p. 61). This is a distinct possibility, especially since we know that by the end of the 15th century a Portuguese pidgin had formed as a consequence of the African–Portuguese contact throughout that century. (Another, but probably less likely possibility is that authors of that period had routinized their portrayals of black Portuguese speech.) The portrayals of Afro-Spanish are found in works of Rodrigo de Reinosa and Sánchez de Badajoz, among others, and of the great literary masters Lope de Rueda, Góngora, and Lope de Vega. The texts referred to by Lipski are not included in the volume, but they are downloadable from the publisher's website in a 305-page appendix.
In chapter 4, Lipski presents historical data on the most significant African populations in Latin America during colonial times – that is, on those communities for which the greatest amount of written description is available. In chapter 5, he provides for each of these communities written documentation of their respective varieties, the most extensively documented being Cuban and Puerto Rican Spanish.
In the second half of the book, Lipski gives some background on the African languages that the Afro-Spanish speakers must have spoken, the phonetic and grammatical features of Afro-Spanish, and how these traits bear on the debate about whether there ever existed a Spanish-based creole independent of pidgin or creole Portuguese. After briefly introducing the relevant African languages and language families in chapter 6, Lipski takes a comparative look (chapter 7) at the phonetic/phonological features that make up Afro-Iberian, considering to what extent they are attributable to African language influence. After a detailed examination of the Afro-Spanish features in question in three different phases of colonization (i.e. occlusive pronunciation of /b, d, g/, weakening of syllable-final consonants, realization of 1pl -mos as [mo], variable presence of paragogic vowels, interchange of /l/ and /r/, loss of /r/-/rr/ distinction, tone replacing stress accent, onset cluster reduction [e.g. negro > nego ‘black’], and the prenasalization of voiced obstruents [e.g. pampagaya < Spanish papagayo ‘parrot’]), Lipski concludes that the majority of features used by African bozales are generic to second-language learners of Spanish from a variety of backgrounds. Moreover, both the influence of the relevant regional Spanish varieties and the African languages involved (most of which permitted only CV-type syllables) conspired to simplify the syllable structure of bozal Spanish. In this context, mention of the influence of regional Portuguese varieties and African languages on the development of Brazilian Portuguese would have been welcome.
In chapter 8, the focus is on grammatical features of the Afro-Iberian languages. Here Lipski examines, in African languages as well as Afro-Iberian languages, a wide variety of morphosyntactic phenomena, including general word order, use of subject and object pronouns, verbal agreement, negation, question words and question formation, pluralization, definite articles, copulative verbs, genitive constructions, verb systems, and adpositions. His conclusions address two varieties of Afro-Hispanic: pre-19th century and 19th-century speech. The general characterization of the first variety is its high morphosyntactic variability and lack of systematicity. In the 19th-century variety, however, Lipski finds more consistency, including frequent use of 3sg present-tense verb forms, lack of noun-adjective agreement, disjunctives pronouns instead of object clitics, and use of (n)elle as the 3sg/pl pronoun. In addition to these frequently found Afro-Caribbean traits, others found in Cuba, such as the verb construction ta + infinitive, point to the possibility that a minority of Afro-Cubans spoke a creole.
The existence of a creole in the Spanish Caribbean has been a hotly contested point among creolists for many years and is addressed in the last chapter of the book. Here Lipski brings all the documentation reviewed to bear on the question of whether there ever was a Spanish-based creole in the Caribbean that formed independently of Portuguese. After reviewing the various arguments for and against the possibility, considering demographics, the differential nature of slavery in Spanish colonies, the birthplace of such a creole (Africa vs. New World), the role of bozal-Spanish in the Spanish colonies in general and in Cuba and Puerto Rico in particular, and the possible influence of other pidgins/creoles in West Africa and the Caribbean, Lipski cautiously concludes that the debate is far from over, and that the data surveyed cannot invalidate either position. At times this caution leads to apparent contradictions. For example, on p. 282 Lipski cites McWhorter 2000, who considers Palenquero and Papiamentu to be originally Portuguese-based creoles. Lipski notes that “scholars are almost evenly divided as to the Spanish vs. Portuguese origins of Papiamentu, while the obvious affinities between Palenquero and the Portuguese creoles of the Gulf of Guinea are matched by the equally strong affinities with Spanish, which even according to the Portuguese-origin hypothesis … are not due to subsequent decreolization or relexification.” However, later on he states, “With the exception of Palenquero and, arguably, Papiamentu, no Spanish-based creole exists in Latin America today; even the aforementioned creoles may owe more of their origins to Portuguese than to Spanish” (286). Here it is difficult to tease apart what scholars think from what Lipski believes on the topic. Some passages are ambiguous. In one (285–86), Lipski evaluates McWhorter's (2000:203–4) argument that black identity may have been a factor in some African speakers' purposefully choosing certain Spanish speech traits, remarking on the one hand “There is no acceptable evidence that ‘black’ Spanish is or ever has been characterized by deliberately adopted phonetic traits,” and on the other, “At the same time, there are hints that in Cuba, and probably elsewhere, blacks deliberately adopted marked registers in order to distinguish themselves from their non-black counterparts.” If we take “marked registers” as also referring to phonetic traits, then there may well be a case in which blacks deliberately chose such traits. In any case, Lipski's caution is prudent, I believe, because the historical and linguistic issues are exceedingly complex.
In this volume Lipski has amassed an impressive amount of data from a near-exhaustive bibliography; he has catalogued the data, reviewed the relevant historical background, pointed out tendencies apparent in the data, and discussed in detail the various interpretations of the data, often commenting on discrepancies between interpretation, data, and historical facts. The available data tell two different stories about Afro-Iberian language. The phonological data (243–44) suggest that most features in question are generic to second-language learners of Spanish, while morphosyntactic data go beyond second-language learner features (e.g. ta + inf). This apparent discrepancy may simply be a function of the difference in data, but it should have been addressed.
New sources of Afro-Hispanic speech have only now been discovered that may help to complete the picture of language change and language formation in colonial Latin America (cf. Clements & Davis 2005). A resolution to the debate may be found in correspondence between scholars of the colonial period or in the discovery of new evidence from existing or extinct Afro-Spanish communities. Until then, the present volume will serve as the state of the art about Afro-Hispanic language.
