Developing self-awareness of a minority dialect/language John M ...

Developing self-awareness of a minority dialect/language
John M. Lipski
The Pennsylvania State University
Introduction
The main theme of this presentation, that speakers of traditionally marginalized minority
speech communities may be unaware of the true nature of their language, first struck me head-on
not in one of the remote redoubts of Latin America or Africa where my fieldwork has taken me,
but in a culturally advanced corner of the European Union: Spain. Since my interest in Ibero-
Romance goes beyond Spanish, I had studied Portuguese- and Galician-speaking communities,
had spent time among Catalan speakers, and had eventually managed to observe Asturian bable
spoken in its native habitat. One Ibero-Romance language still escaped me, namely Aragonese,
which figures prominently in treatises on Spanish dialectology and Romance philology, but
which according to much scholarship that came my way, was a rapidly receding language now
confined to rural areas of the Upper Pyrenees, in the province of Huesca. Having been invited to
lecture at the University of Zaragoza, I made contact with scholars of Aragonese, was taken to
Huesca, and finally met up with a number of elderly native speakers of Aragonese, some nearly
monolingual. My long-standing desire was quickly and amply satisfied, since these individuals
generously plied me with many hours of spontaneously spoken Aragonese, including several
regional variants. This speech was grammatically as far removed from canonical Spanish as
Catalan or Portuguese, in terms of verb conjugations, subject and object pronouns, prepositions,
word order, and core vocabulary. Like all Ibero-Romance languages spoken in Spain, Aragonese
can be understood by a speaker of Spanish (especially one trained in Romance philology) after a
little practice. After listening them speak to me at length in a quintessential Aragonese dialect

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(not the almost Catalan still spoken with considerable vitality in extreme eastern Aragon), I
asked them what they themselves had called their unique language when they were growing up.
I was astounded by their answer—delivered in Spanish—which was that this was simply hablar
mal `speaking poorly.’ In other words, these speakers had been led to believe—and some still
believed—that the Aragonese language was simply “bad Spanish.”
This response was a poignant reminder that linguists’ appreciation for and fascination
with minority languages and dialects are often not shared with members of the speech
communities in question. Not only are minority language s frequently disparaged with terms
such as jargon, patois, and misnomers suggestive of illegitimate parentage (to wit Tex-Mex,
pocho, Spanglish, franglais, Taglish, Quechuañol, joual), but in many instances their very
existence as languages is denied, in nomenclature as well as official practice. In Spain during the
long dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, all regional languages (Catalan, Asturian, even
Franco’s native Galician) were officially declared to be “dialects” of Castilian, i.e. Spanish.
Pushing this absurdity to its extreme, some adherents of the regime even insisted that Basque—a
non-Indo European language completely unintelligible to speakers of any Romance language—
fell into the same category. At the other end of the scale sentiments of mini- and maxi-
nationalism may provoke affirmations that regional or social dialects are in fact distinct
languages, claims that are difficult to refute empirically given the lack of clear algorithms for
establishing the distinction between dialects of a single language and separate sibling languages.
Thus some Andalusian activists in southern Spain claim el andaluz as a language, although
objectively it is identical to other regional dialects of Spanish except for some very predictable
pronunciation. In eastern Spain Valencians claim that their language—valenciano—is a
different language than Catalan and not simply a regional dialect of the latter; at least a few small

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grammatical differences can be adduced to bolster this claim, which appears to have
proportionally more emotional content than linguistic foundation. Closer to home, the debate
over Ebonics is far from over in the United States, given the enormous legal, educational, and
political stakes involved.
Even among scholars studying the language s in question there is often a lack of
agreement on the status of particular varieties as dialects or separate languages. Thus some
treatises on the languages of Spain (e.g. Entwistle 1936) treat Asturian and Aragonese as dialects
(presumably of Castilian), while Galician and Catalan, many of whose varieties overlap
significantly with Asturian and Aragonese, respectively, are considered separate languages.
Such classifications are frequently based on independent literary traditions, tied to national or
regional identities, as well as to the existence of similar varieties in neighboring countries where
they are unquestionably regarded as dialects: Portuguese in Portugal vs. Galician in Spain;
Provençal in France vs. Catalan in Spain. Such reasoning can produce total circularity, since
when written texts (usually poems or stories) are produced in minority varieties they are
inevitably consigned to the category of “folk ” literature, and face a struggle to be taken seriously.
When political events catapult ambivalently regarded regional languages/dialects into official
status, as occurred in Spain with the declaration of autonomous regions, the speech communities
are taken by surprise, and in the rush to create “serious” and “modern” discourse, are forced to
rely on neologisms as well as borrowings from the majority language, all of which contributes to
the notion of linguistic illegitimacy. I have heard a Spanish academic professional (raised in a
community where a rustic variety of Asturian was spoken) deliver lectures on microbiology in
“official” Asturian that is not native to any region or social class, while some Aragonese activists
have given pronouncements on education and economy, all in a neo-Aragonese koiné that no one

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recognizes as their own langua ge. The creation of regional autonomies has even spurred
movements to upgrade to “language ” status archaic rustic varieties that had never been
considered anything more than regional dialects. In Murcia some intellectuals are promoting a
modernized variety of the traditional rural panocho dialect as authentic murciano o lengua
maere, together with an orthography based on popular speech that gives the visual impression of
a much greater distance from Castilian than might objectively be recognized. Similarly the
traditional castúo dialects of Extremadura, in reality part of the Leonese dialect cluster, are
making an intellectual comeback among activists in Cáceres, although probably not among rank
and file citizens of these regions.
In the extreme case, a “language” may achieve recognition through linguistic scholarship
alone, even when its own speakers do not acknowledge a sense of linguistic or ethnic
community. This is patently the case of “Rhaeto-Romance,” universally acknowledged among
Romance linguists as one of the Romance languages, at least since the pioneering scholarship of
Ascoli (1875). In reality this is a group of widely divergent dialects, spoken in several
discontiguous communities in Switzerland and northern Italy, and strongly influenced by
majority languages and regional dialects, including German, standard Italian, Florentine, and
northern Italian dialects. Switzerland has officially recognized Romansch (a related cluster of
dialects) as one of its official national languages and has created an official koiné. Activists in
the Dolomites (northern Italy) and in Friul have also worked toward the recognition of their
respective languages and the creation of official versions. However except for the scholarly
virtual speech community of linguists, speakers of the various Rhaeto-Romance dialects do not
find common cause. The Italian linguist Carlo Battisti (1931:164, apud Haiman and Benincà
1992:6) commented on “the supposed linguistic unity which corresponds neither to a

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consciousness of national unity, nor to a common written language, nor to any ethnic nor
historical unity.” And he was referring only to the Ladin dialect group, not to Swiss Romansch
or the Friulian dialects. This mismatch between linguists’ descriptions and prevailing beliefs in
the communities being studied suggests that linguists are sometimes guilty of violating the
“prime directive,” although it is difficult to imagine any harmful consequences to the speakers
involved.
Afro-Hispanic language in Latin America
This rather lengthy preamble documents the fact that activism and linguistic scholarship
can converge on minority language varieties, with potential consequences affecting the social
and economic possibilities of the speakers themselves. I will discuss the implications of the non-
recognition of minority dialects with respect to the largest non- indigenous minority group in
Latin America, people of African descent. The purpose is twofold: first, to demonstrate the
enormous gaps between linguistic reality and popular perception that can result from
marginalization and racism; and second, to suggest some ways in which linguistics can be
brought to bear on social issues involving ethnic minorities.
During the Atlantic slave trading period between 8 and 10 million sub-Saharan Africans
were taken to Spanish America, first to highland mining regions in Central Mexico and the
Andes, then to urban areas in the largest cities, and finally to the burgeoning sugar plantations of
19th century Cuba and the cotton plantations of coastal Peru. Although in most contemporary
Latin American countries the black populations have been substantially integrated into national
cultural and economic patterns, there continue to exist relatively isolated and culturally self-
aware Afro-Hispanic communities in several nations, i.e. regions or communities which are not
only characterized by phenotypically Afro-American residents, but whose inhabitants consider

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themselves culturally and ethnically black. An exceptional case is Uruguay, which has a
substantial black population, but no longer has black neighborhoods or villages. The Central
American nations, with the exception of El Salvador, have black populations of West Indian
origin along the Caribbean coasts, but these groups are not properly considered Afro-Hispanic.
Blackness does not always correlate with Afro-diasporic awareness, since in the more
marginalized communities knowledge of an African past is all but nonexistent.
Among the various Afro-Hispanic communities, discernible Afro-Hispanic language
exists in only a few spots, most known as such only to linguists and anthropologists. This fact
runs contrary to popular notions, since depictions of “black” Spanish in popular culture and
literature (invariably spoken by native Spanish speakers of African descent) inaccurately suggest
objective linguistic differences between monolingual Spanish dialects and sociolects based on
race or ethnicity. The linguistic features thus ascribed to “black” Spanish are usually common to
all popular strata in the countries in question, especially among the socially most marginalized
sectors of society, in which individuals of African origin are overrepresented. In all instances,
the speech traits in question—nearly all phonetic in nature—are common in the vernacular
speech of the region, irrespective of race. Indeed, with few exceptions all of these traits are
common to vernacular Spanish worldwide, and represent linguistically universal patterns of
consonant and vowel reduction. Paradoxically, some distinguished Afro-Hispanic writers have
used the same mechanisms to create a virtual “black Spanish,” linking vernacular speech traits to
speakers of African origin, assigning only unmarked Spanish to their other personages (Lipski
1999). These authors include Nicolás Guillén of Cuba, Nicomedes Santa Cruz of Peru, Manuel
Zapata Olivella of Colombia, and Nelson Estupiñàn Bass and Adalberto Ortiz of Ecuador. This
counterpoint of racist stereotypes and the appropriation of these same stereotypes by Afro-

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Hispanic cultural activists has produced a environment of ambiguity from which unusual results
can emerge. For example the Colombian constitution guarantees land and monetary rights to the
nation’s linguistic minorities, all of indigenous (Amerindian) origin. Afro-Colombian groups
have claimed minority language status for “Afro-Colombian Spanish,” in the absence of any
empirical proof that such an ethnically distinct variety exists. A more frequent result is the
educational marginalization of black children in schools, under the preconceived assumption that
they suffer from linguistic (and therefore in the popular conception cognitive) deficits. The
problem is further exacerbated in nations which “officially” contain few or no citizens of African
descent, and in which black populations are small and isolated. The present remarks will
describe the relationships between language variation and ethnicity in four nations not normally
associated with Afro-Hispanic populations: Bolivia, Paraguay, Mexico, and Chile.
Among Afro-Hispanic communities where an objectively distinct ethnolinguistic features
exist, the most widely known is the town of Palenque de San Basilio, Colombia, to the south of
Cartagena, where a true creole language is spoken. This language, evidently formed in the 17th
century and with a heavy Portuguese component, is known as Palenquero to linguists and as
lengua by community members, and after centuries of discrimination is finally emerging as an
acknowledged language in educational and political domains. Despite the existence of accurate
transcriptions of Palenquero as early as Escalante (1954), the field workers of the linguistic atlas
of Colombia visited Palenque and found only regional varieties of popular Spanish (Montes
Giraldo 1962). This is apparently due to the fact that Palenqueros preferred to not reveal their
local language to outsiders, several of whom were experienced dialectologists and would have
immediately recognized a creole language if they had heard it. A few years later the creolist
Derek Bickerton got together with the anthropologist Escalante and the two published the first

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definite article acknowledging the existence of the Palenquero Creole (Bickerton and Escalante
1970). Thereafter numerous Colombian and foreign linguists visited Palenque de San Basilio,
which resulted in many monographs and articles. More importantly, it resulted in Palenqueros’
taking a fresh look at a traditional language that many younger residents felt was an
embarrassing throwback, and an endangered language shunned by many Palenqueros has been
revitalized and has now been adopted as a proud symbol of ethnicity.
From out of the shadows: Afro -Bolivian Spanish
The Palenquero case is an extreme example of a truly bilingual community, whose local
language was always recognized as such within the community, but either unknown or rejected
by outsiders. A more complex case, and one brimming with possibilities for linguistic
intervention, comes from the only other region of Spanish-speaking Latin America in which a
complete Afro-Hispanic language is known to exist: in Bolivia. Despite a scattering of anecdotal
commentaries heard in passing over the years, no one had studied Afro-Bolivian speech until I
began my own fieldwork some three years ago. I therefore have the dubious distinction of being
currently the only source of sociolinguistic data on this unique speech community. 1 This means
in effect that I can’t blame anyone else for any errors or misinterpretations.
Highland Bolivia, known in colonial times as Alto Perú, then the Audiencia de Charcas, was
the site of the earliest massive importation of African slaves in Spanish America. Slaves were
carried to the silver mines of Potosí, Bolivia, where most worked in the royal mint (Casa de la
Moneda) and as domestic servants. The African slave population in Bolivia was never large,
many mixed with indigenous or European residents, and the cultural, linguistic, and demographic
profile of Afro-Bolivians declined steadily from a high point in the early 17th century, when
Africans represented nearly 5% of the population (Crespo 1977:28). Despite the overwhelming

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adversities and the time span of more than four centuries, in this primarily indigenous and
mestizo nation, a tiny but vibrant Afro-Bolivian community has survived to the present day,
including many Afro-Hispanic cultural and linguistic retentions. In the area of language, the
speech of some of the oldest and most isolated Afro-Bolivians offers the biggest surprise of all:
a fully intact restructured Afro-Hispanic language (spoken alongside highland Bolivian Spanish)
that represents the only known survival of what was once the language of some nine million
bozales (African-born second language speakers of Spanish).
Most contemporary Afro-Bolivians live in scattered communities in the provinces of Nor
Yungas and Sud Yungas, in the department of La Paz. Bolivia is divided into departamentos
`departments,’ and each department is divided into provincias `provinces.’ The Yungas de la
Paz are located in the department of La Paz, to the northeast of the capital city. The Yungas are
tropical valleys no more than a few thousand feet above sea level, surrounded by some of the
most forbidding mountain terrain in all of South America, with peaks reaching more than 15,000
feet. The torturous terrain, nearly vertical geography, lack of adequate roads and other
infrastructure, and frequent mud and rock slides, has effectively cut off the Yungas communities
from much of Bolivian society. Most communities are less than 100 miles from La Paz, but to
reach even the closest settlements one must travel upwards of four hours in crowded and decrepit
vehicles along a one- lane muddy mountain road with steep dropoffs and no guard rails
(considered to be the world’s most dangerous “highway” by travel agents and known as la
carretera de la muerte `death road’ by Bolivians). The region is principally inhabited by an
Aymara-speaking indigenous population together with a considerable mestizo component; black
Yungueños live both in villages with Aymara majorities and in comunidades (an officially
recognized term in Bolivia)—scattered mountainside houses on lands once belonging to

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haciendas. The small towns have electricity and rudimentary telephone service, as well as some
running water. In the comunidades electricity has arrived only recently and many houses still
have no electric service or use but a single light bulb. Running water and indoor plumbing are
all but nonexistent in the smaller comunidades. . Most residents do not travel to La Paz or other
highland areas, due to the bad road, the discomfort caused by the high altitude and cold
temperatures of the altiplano, and the lack of funds to pay even the very modest cost of
transportation. Although the region produces excellent coffee, oranges, and other tropical
products, the prohibitive cost of bringing these products to urban markets precludes the
development of significant cash-crop agriculture. Most residents have devoted all arable land to
growing coca, the principal product of the old haciendas but now representing a virtual
monopoly in the Yungas. The cocales are made by cutting terraces into the steep slopes; a less
labor- intensive but short- lived technique is the zanjío, consisting of furrows cut into the
mountainside. The coca is purchased at low prices by brokers, ostensibly for the legal Bolivian
tradition of chewing coca leaves and brewing mate de coca herb tea, and for use in the many
“cola” drinks produced around the world. Local production exceeds the needs of these markets,
and an undetermined amount of the coca finds its way to the clandestine cocaine laboratories of
eastern Bolivia.
The most important Nor Yungas black communities are Tocaña, Mururata, Chijchipa,
and Dorado Chico, together with some smaller settlements such as Khala Khala and Coscoma.
In Sud Yungas the principal black community is Chicaloma (now less than 50% black but once
the principal Afro-Bolivian community in the region), with black Bolivians scattered in many
neighboring settlements. The geographical extension of the traditional Afro-Yungueño dialect in
its most basilectal form has yet to be determined exactly, given the existence of widely scattered

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