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  • Calunga and the Legacy of an African Language in Brazil by Steven Byrd
  • Sandro Sessarego
Byrd, Steven. Calunga and the Legacy of an African Language in Brazil. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2012. 278 pp. Appendix. Notes. References. Index.

In this research monograph Steven Byrd provides a sociohistorical and a linguistic account of Calunga, an Afro-Brazilian contact language spoken in and around Patrocínio, Minas Gerais, by the descendants of slaves taken to that region during colonial time to work in mines and plantations.

The author collected the data by conducting sociolinguistic fieldwork in several Afro-Brazilian communities located near the Serra da Canastra, Triângulo Mineiro. Findings suggest that Calunga developed as an intragroup cryptolect, a language used among slaves as a secret solidarity means of communication. Byrd defines this variety as “a lexical phenomenon with some peculiar grammatical aspects” (6). In fact, Calunga grammar is for the most part the same as rural regional Brazilian Portuguese (Caipira Portuguese), while its lexicon is heavily influenced by African languages, especially Kimbundu, Umbundu, and Kikongo. This is a well-researched book that, in my view, represents a very welcomed contribution to the study of Afro-Lusophone contact linguistics in the Americas.

The study consists of six chapters and an appendix. The chapters are organized into two parts. Part one (chapters 1–3) provides an introduction as well as a historical and linguistic overview of the contact scenario that characterized the Portuguese colonial expansion and the colonization of Brazil. Part two (chapters 4–6) consists of a linguistic description of Calunga; it addresses the social, lexical and grammatical aspects of this language variety. The appendix is a collection of excerpts of transcribed recorded interviews in Calunga with their respective English translation.

The first chapter is an introduction to the book, which provides a general layout to the study and presents the main questions that the following chapters will try to answer: What is the history and historical context of Calunga? What is the linguistic context of Calunga? And what types of scholarly literature have been written on African languages spoken in Brazil and the African contribution to Brazilian Portuguese? What is the sociolinguistic profile of the Calunga speech community? What are the lexical and grammatical aspects of Calunga?

Chapter 1 also provides a description of several technical and foreign terms that are employed throughout the book. The purpose of such a terminological list is to provide the readers, who may not be completely familiar with the topic, with a brief glossary to better understand the content of the monograph.

Chapter 2 presents a historical overview of the Portuguese colonial enterprise, with particular attention devoted to the African and Brazilian campaigns and the subsequent implementation of the transatlantic slave trade between these two sides of the ocean. This chapter also addresses the living conditions of slaves in Brazil during the colonial phase, their acts of resistance and the creation of maroon communities (quilombos) up until the abolition of slavery, in May 1888.

Chapter 3 offers a linguistic overview of the Afro-Portuguese contact varieties that developed from the Portuguese colonization of Africa and Brazil. The [End Page E53] chapter describes a variety of contact languages and provides an overview of the main studies and hypotheses concerning the influence of African languages in Brazilian Portuguese. This chapter also summarizes the debate concerning the potential creolization, semi-creolization and decreolization of vernacular Brazilian Portuguese as well as the long-lasting debate concerning the origin of Afro-Hispanic contact varieties in Spanish America. In doing so, Byrd offers a list of common features that appear to be shared by several Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese contact dialects and that have been ascribed by some linguists to a potential pidgin/creole background: lack of gender and number agreement in the NP, bare nouns in subject position, lapses of subject-verb agreement, non-inverted questions, etc (but see: Sessarego, S. (2013). Chota Valley Spanish. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert). The author also provides the definition of terms such as “anti-creole” and “mixed language” linguistic varieties whose grammar and lexicon proceed from two different sources, and which may describe the Calunga case well.

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