Afro-Bolivian Yungueño Spanish.

One of the least-known Afro-Hispanic speech communities is found in a few small villages in Bolivia. The region is the Yungas, tropical valleys surrounded by the Bolivian highlands to the northeast of La Paz.  Afro-Yungueño Spanish differs systematically and significantly from any other variety of Bolivian Spanish, and from any natively spoken Spanish dialect elsewhere in the world. Afro-Yungueño data provide a window into early colonial Afro-Hispanic speech, as well as offering a possible model for the retention of post-bozal linguistic traits in other geographically and socially isolated Afro-Hispanic communities.

Systematic grammatical differences between Afro-Bolivian Spanish and other Spanish varieties worldwide (including the local non-Afro Bolivian dialects):

• Suspension of grammatical gender in nouns and adjectives.  Only remnants of the Spanish masculine gender are used:  lu mujé `the women’; tudu lu gente `everyone’; lu taza di cajué `the cup of coffee’
• Invariant plurals; nouns do not take the normal Spanish plural form:  lu persona mayó `the older people’; lu mujé `the women’; lu patrón `the landowners’
• “Bare plurals,” marking plural /s/ (if at all) only on the first element of the noun phrase:  esoh fiesta `those parties’; algunoh cosa `some things’
• Elimination of definite articles in subject position (required in other Spanish dialects):  perro ta flojo [los perros están flojos] `dogs are worthless’; patrón huasquiaba mujé `the landowners beat the women’; nube ta bien rojo [las nubes están bien rojas] `the clouds are very red’
• Restructured subject pronoun system, including no formal-familiar 2<sup>nd</sup> person distinction and no masculine-feminine distinction in the 3<sup>rd</sup> person:  yo, oté, ele (masculine and feminine), nojotro, otene, eyuh (masculine and feminine)
• placement of object clitics between auxiliary verbs and infinitives:  yo va ti decí ``I’m going to tell you’; ¿por qué no viene mi mirá `why don’t you come see me?’; ¿quién va ti bañá? `who is going to bathe you?
• Non-inverted questions:  ¿cuánto hijo pue oté tiene?`How many children do you have?’;  ¿ande pue oté viví? `where do you live?’; ¿Andi pue oté ta trabajá? `where are you working?’
• Use of the Spanish 3^rd person singular as invariant verb form for all persons and numbers in each tense:  nojotro tiene[tenemos]  jrutita `we have fruit’; yo no conoció [conocí] hacienda `I never knew the haciendas’; yo miró[miré] jay `I saw it’
• Constructions based on invariant ta(ba) + infinitive instead of conjugated verbs:  ¿quién ta comprá? `who is buying [coca]?’; ¿andi pue tía ta i? `where are you going, ma’am?’; eje taba mirá `she was looking’; eje perro ta ladrá `that dog is barking’
• Elimination of the prepositions a and en:  yo nació [en] Mururata `I was born in Mururata; nojotro va [al] trabajo `we’re going to the work site’

These significant grammatical features, together with a radically altered phonetic/phonological system, demonstrate that traditional Afro-Bolivian speech is not really a “dialect” of Spanish but rather a restructured semi-creole language, as different from Spanish as, e.g. some Asturian and Aragonese dialects.

My research in Bolivia has been partially supported by grants from the Africana Research Center at Penn State and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Dialect sample

Representative publications:

 Book:

• Afro-Bolivian Spanish. Frankfurt and Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 2008.

Articles:

• El “nuevo” Palenquero y el español afroboliviano: ¿es reversible la descriollización? Selected proceedings of the 13th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, ed. Luis Ortiz-López. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 2011, pp. 1-16.
• Decreolization as emergent grammar(s): some Afro-Bolivian data. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26 (2011), 276-340.
• El habla tradicional afroyungueña. Las lenguas de Bolivia, ed. Pieter Muysken and Mily Crevels. Laz Paz: Plural Editores/ Koninkrijk der Nederlanden: MUSEF.
• Africanisms in Afro-Bolivian Spanish. Black through white: African words and calques which survived slavery in creoles and transplanted European languages, ed. Angela Bartens and Philip Baker (London: Battlebridge, 2012), pp. 73-80.
• Depleted plural marking in two Afro-Hispanic dialects: separating inheritance from innovation. Language Variation and Change 22 (2010), 1-44
• El habla afroboliviana en el contexto de la “reafricanización.” Tinkuy no. 9 (2008), 15-32.
• Afro-Bolivian Spanish: the survival of a true creole prototype. Synchronic and diachronic perspectives on contact languages, ed. Magnus Huber and Viveka Velupillai (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007, pp. 175-198 (Creole Language Library 32).
• La formación de la partícula ta en los criollos de base afroibérica: nuevas vías de evolución. La Romania en interacción: entre historia, contacto y política, ed. Laura Morgenthaler and Martina Schrader-Kniffki (Frankfurt: Vervuert/Iberoamericana, 2007), pp. 443-455.
• Afro-Yungueño speech: the long-lost “black Spanish.” Spanish in Context 4 (2007), 1-43.
• Afro-Bolivian Spanish and Helvécia Portuguese: semi-creole parallels. Papia no. 16 (2006), 96-116.
• El dialecto afroyungueño de Bolivia: en busca de las raíces el habla afrohispánica. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Hispanoamericana 3:2 (2006), 137-166.
• Afro-Bolivian language today: the oldest surviving Afro-Hispanic speech community. Afro-Hispanic Review v. 25, no. 1 (2006), 179-200.
• Nuevas fronteras de dialectología afrohispánica: los Yungas de Bolivia. Conferencias sobre la lengua y cultura del mundo de habla hispana. Kyoto: University of Foreign Studies, 2005, pp. 53-72.