By John M. Lipski

The negros congos of Panama's Caribbean coast are a special cultural manifestation of Afro-Hispanic touch. in the course of Carnival season every year, this crew reenacts dramatic occasions which affected black slaves in colonial Panama, plays dances and pantomimes, and enforces a suite of formality legislation' and punishments'. A key element of congo video games is a distinct dialect, the hablar en congos, that's hired through a subset of the congos in each one payment. the current examine investigates the congo dialect from a linguistic standpoint alongside dimensions. the 1st comprises planned phonetic, syntactic, and semantic distortion as a part of the final spirit of of burlesque and mock that surrounds Panamanian Carnival. the second one is the retention of previous, partly creolized Afro-Hispanic language kinds that could nonetheless be extracted from modern congo speech. those Afro-Hispanic vestiges are of key value to monogenetic theories of Afro-Romance creolization as Panamanian congo speech offers examples of certain creolized Spanish.

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Extra info for The Speech of the Negros Congos in Panama

Sample text

In our corpus, use of subject pronouns is nearly categorical, while in the interviews con­ ducted in regional Spanish with the aim of establishing basic descriptive parameters, the frequency of usage of subject pronouns, while high, was not as nearly exceptionless as in congo speech. It is interesting to observe that in the present corpus, in those lin­ guistic interactions in which the investigator, a relative stranger in the midst of closely knit communities, was an active interlocutor, the pro­ nominal treatment extended to the investigator was variable in a fashion that may reflect sociolinguistic preoccupations among costeños.

On the other hand, Joly's (1981) data from the Costa Abajo show no evidence of such epenthetic consonants, which once more underscores the importance of the process of imitation of rec­ ognized congo masters, and the potential for propagation of originally sporadic and idiosyncratic variants used by a prestigious congo personage. 4 Formation of open syllables Joly (1981) notes that many of the phonetic processes common to congo dialect speech have the overall result of forming open syllables: CV-CV-CV.

The situations 32 THE SPEECH OF THE NEGROS CONGOS OF PANAMA which produce vestigial speakers vary widely, but include historical events which changed the dominant culture/language in a nation, such as occurred in Trinidad and in the Philippines, moves away from Spanishspeaking neighborhoods or communities, mixed-ethnic marriages where only one partner speaks Spanish, or conditions of social mobility or indi­ vidual choice which result in a decision not to employ Spanish among individuals capable of doing so, and to not teach the language to the children of such individuals.

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