Convened by the ΔiaLing and BantUGent research groups, Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (Augsburg University) will present a talk titled “Towards a better understanding of Creoles through their comparison with fossilized learner varieties. The case of Palenquero Creole and Cabindan Portuguese”. This event is part of an Erasmus+ exchange.
Both Palenquero –a Spanish-lexified Creole spoken in the small village of San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia)– and the ‘partially restructured’ varieties of Portuguese spoken in the province of Cabinda (Angola) share the same ‘substrate’: some western varieties belonging to the Kikongo Language Cluster: cp. Schryver/Grollemund/Branford/Bostoen 2015 and Bostoen/Schryver 2018).
Thus, getting to know the structural similarities and differences between Palenquero and Cabindan Portuguese turns out to be extraordinarily helpful for the study of creolization, since it enables us to set quantitative and/or qualitative limits between the process of creolization and the fossilization of interlanguages (Selinker 1972), especially as regards the role of the substrate in the two possible outcomes (cf. Winford 2008; see Gutiérrez Maté 2020 for the particular case of the two languages compared here).
The ultimate goal of this talk is determining the different historical, sociological and attitudinal processes (i.e. the different ecologies) that account for the birth of a Creole, in one case, and a non-Creole, in the other, out of a very similar combination of contributing languages (Kikongo substrate and Ibero-Romance superstrate).
The data have been collected by the author in situ as a result of his fieldwork in Palenque (2017, 2018) and Cabinda (2019, 2020). In addition, for the case of Palenquero, the author also uses the interviews made by A. Schwegler during his first stays in the village (1985-1988), which reveal themselves as extraordinarily helpful for containing large language samples of so-called Traditional Palenquero (see Lipski 2020 about bilingualism in the village and other non- -traditional varieties of Palenquero).
Bibliography
Bostoen, Koen / Gilles-Maurice de Schryver. 2018. Seventeenth-century Kikongo is not the ancestor of present-day Kikongo. In K. Bostoen & I. Brinkman (eds.), The Kongo kingdom: the origins, dynamics and cosmopolitan culture of an African polity (pp. 60–102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gutiérrez Maté, Miguel. 2020. De Palenque a Cabinda: un paso necesario para los estudios afroiberorrománicos y criollos. Gabriele Knauer, Alexandra Ortiz Wallner & Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (eds.), Mundos caribeños – Caribbean Worlds – Mondes Caribéens. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 105-138.
Lipski, John M. 2020. Palenquero and Spanish in Contact: Exploring the interface. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schryver, Gilles-Maurice / Grollemund, Rebecca /Branford, Simon /Bostoen, Koen. 2015. Introducing a state‑of‑the‑art phylogenetic classification of the Kikongo Language Cluster. Africana Linguistica 21: 87-162
Schwegler, Armin. 2016. Combining Population Genetics with Historical Linguistics: On the African Origins of the Latin America Black and Mulatto Populations. In: Sessarego, Sandro/Tejedo, Fernando (eds.): Spanish Language and Sociolinguistic Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Selinker, Larry. 1972. Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics 10(3). 209–241.
Winford, Donald. 2008. Processes of Creole formation and related contact-induced language change. Journal of Language Contact 2/1. 124-145