Afro-Bolivian Spanish and Helvécia Portuguese: semi-creole parallels

The study of isolated speech communities that have arisen and developed in the absence of contact with prestige norms is an important component of contemporary sociolinguistics. This is nowhere more certain than in the case of Afro-Iberian communities scattered across Latin America. Africans who learned Spanish and Portuguese in adolescence or adulthood (referred to unflatteringly as bozales) spoke learners’ varieties,, at times exhibiting areal characteristics of specific African language families, and in other cases replicating errors found among L2 speakers of Spanish and Portuguese worldwide (Lipski 2005a and references therein). The present study will focus on two isolated Afro-Iberian speech communities, both apparently formed in relative isolation from broader language contact situations. One community, now well known among creolists, is located in Brazil, and represents the final stages of the African slave trade and the formation of bozal speech communities in Americas: the early 19th century. The other community, whose linguistic features have only recently been described, is located in Bolivia, and in all probability descends from the first large contingents of African slaves taken to Spanish America, in the mid 16th century. A comparison of similarities and differences in the restructuring of the original input languages will potentially shed light on the true nature of early Afro-Iberian language contacts and on the incipient stages of creolization.