The
Congos
of Panama
Panama was the site of one of the most
prolonged Afro-Hispanic demographic contacts, since almost all enslaved Africans
destined for the Pacific coast of Spanish America passed through Panamanian
ports, particularly Portobelo. The Afro-descendents of Panama’s Caribbean
coast maintain the tradition of the Negros Congos, a series of folkloric
manifestations occurring during Carnival season, and including a special
cryptolect based loosely on Spanish. According to oral tradition, Congo
speech was devised among captive and maroon Africans in colonial Panama as a
means of hiding their speech from their colonial masters. Widely felt—both by
Congo participants and by outside observers—to consist only of deliberate
deformations of Spanish words and semantic inversions, Congo speech in
reality also contains numerous elements traceable to Afro-Hispanic communities
in other former Spanish American colonies.
Map of Congo communities studied
Congo dialect samples
and examples
Representative publications:
Books:
-
El habla
de los Congos de Panamá en el
contexto de la lingüística afrohispánica.
Panamá: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 2011.
-
The Speech of the
Negros Congos of Panama: a
Vestigial Afro-Hispanic Creole. Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 1989.
Articles:
-
Searching for the
sociolinguistic history of Afro-Panamian Congo speech. Whitney
Chappell & Bridget Drinka (eds.), Spanish socio-historical linguistics:
isolation and contact (141-162). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2021.
-
The Congo language of
Panama: born of resistance, surviving through activism. Afro-Hispanic
Review 36 (2017), 97-118.
-
Tracing the origins of
Panamanian Congo speech: the pathways of regional variation.
Diachronica 26
(2009).380-407
-
El cambio
/r/ > [d] en el habla afrohispánica: ¿un rasgo fonético “congo”? Boletín
de Lingüística vol. 19, no. 27, 94-114 (2007).
-
El lenguaje
de los negros congos de Panamá y el lumbalú palenquero:
función sociolingüística de criptolectos afrohispánicos. América Negra
14 (1997), 147-165.
-
El lenguaje
congo panameño: ¿vestigios de un criollo
afrohispánico? Actas del VII Congreso
de la Asociación de Filología y Lingüística de América Latina.
Santo Domingo: Universidad Nacional Pedro Henríquez
Ureña, l989, t. II, pp. 63‑80.
-
The negros congos of
Panama: Afro-Hispanic creole language and culture. Journal of Black
Studies 16 (1986), 409-28.
-
A blast from the past:
ritualized Afro-Hispanic linguistic memories (Panama and Cuba). Journal
of Caribbean Studies 21:3 (2007), 163-188.
-
When and how does bozal Spanish
survive? Spanish in contact: policy, social and linguistic inquiries,
ed. Kim Potowski and Richard Cameron. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 2007, pp. 359-375.
-
El lenguaje
de los negros congos de Panama. Lexis (Lima), 10 (1986),
53-76.
-
The speech of the negros
congos of Panama: creole Spanish vestiges? Hispanic Linguistics
2 (1985) 23-47.