Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences - Institute of Asian and African Studies

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences | Department of Asian and African Studies | Regional Departments | African Studies | Events | Upcoming Events | 10.11. Colloquium on African linguistics: Mayombe Portuguese and Palenquero Creole (Gutiérrez Maté)

10.11. Colloquium on African linguistics: Mayombe Portuguese and Palenquero Creole (Gutiérrez Maté)

"The Kikongo matrix of the grammars of Mayombe-Portuguese and Palenquero Creole and its implications for a theory of ‘language restructuring’" - Talk by Miguel Gutiérrez Maté (Universität Augsburg) given within the digital colloquium on African linguistics and languages
  • When Nov 10, 2020 from 04:15 to 05:45
  • Where via Zoom
  • iCal

Both the postcolonial varieties of Portuguese spoken in the Mayombe region (Cabinda, Angola) and the Spanish-lexified Palenquero Creole (spoken in the village of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia) share the same ‘substrate’: the Bantu language cluster, especially the Kiyombe dialect. Thus, getting to know the structural similarities and differences between Palenquero and Mayombe-Portuguese turns out to be extraordinarily helpful for the study of creolization, since it enables us to set quantitative and/or qualitative limits between 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) and Cabinda (2019, 2020). In addition, for the case of Palenquero, the author also uses the interviews made by Armin Schwegler during his first stays in the village (1985-8), which reveal themselves as extraordinarily helpful for containing large language samples of so-called Traditional Palenquero.

References
Gutiérrez Maté, Miguel. 2020. De Palenque a Cabinda: un paso necesario para los estudios afroiberorrománicos y criollos. In Gabriele Knauer, Alexandra Ortiz Wallner & Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (eds.), Mundos caribeños – Caribbean Worlds – Mondes Caribéens. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 105-138.

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

 

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