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In referring to the Greater Antillean islands of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica, Bartolomé de Las Casas, primary sixteenth-century chronicler of the Indies,reiterates many times in his epochal Historia de las Indias (1875:I:326, among others) that “en todas estas islas hablaban una sola lengua”—“in all these islands they speak a single language.” This statement has, out of context, been taken literally to mean that only one language was spoken by all the inhabitants of the Greater Antilles. That assumption has been followed and the phrase uncritically quoted by almost every researcher of Antillean prehistory who has set pen to paper, generation after generation. The only two exceptions that come to mind are Douglas Taylor and Arnold High¤eld (High¤eld 1993, 1997), both of whom have been aware of the linguistic complexity of Greater Antillean speech. Las Casas and the other writers of the early 1500s clearly distinguished four aboriginal languages in the Greater Antilles, Taíno, Macorís, Ciguayo, and Guanahatabey, and for two of those—Taíno and Macorís—he noted a number of geographically distinct dialects. Such blind-faith acceptance of the una sola lengua dictum as the delimiter of Greater Antillean aboriginal languages is unquestionably due to the fact that the phrase has with almost no exception been quoted out of context, largely by researchers who have been working from poor English translations, who have not consulted the original Spanish texts, or—strangely very common among non-Hispanic Caribbean specialists until very recent years—who could not read Spanish. This has regrettably led to the perpetuation of a myth quite undeserving of being perpetuated, for when viewed in context in the originals the una sola lengua phrase has a meaning totally different than the literalism accorded it. The language in question is, of course, Classic Taíno, but the contexts more frequently than not add the qualifying phrase “porque cuasi [emphasis added] 2 The Languages of the Greater Antilles A Documentary View Fig. 2. Antillean Ethnic Units & Hispaniolan Kingdoms in 1492 toda es una lengua y manera de hablar”—“because it is almost [italics added] a single language and manner of speech”(e.g., Las Casas 1875:I:291), or the words universal or general are added—la lengua universal de toda la tierra (Las Casas 1875:V:486, for example); la lengua general desta isla (Las Casas 1875:V:256). What emerges from the writings of the times, in other words, is the unambiguous fact that the Taíno language, which had many monolingual speakers and was the numerically dominant language of the Greater Antilles, also served as the general language of interchange, even with speakers of other languages , serving much the same purpose and for essentially the same reasons as Norman French in post-1066 England. In addition to being the native language of many, it was, in short, a lingua franca. At the time of the Spanish Conquest the ¤ve geographical regions of Hispaniola—Caizcimú, Huhabo, Cayabo, Bainoa, and Guacayarima—were organized into approximately 45 chiefdoms, referred to by the Spanish as “provinces ” (Vega 1980). Five of these provinces, Maguá, Maguana, Higüey, Xaraguá, and Marién, had emerged as dominant. They had become the focal points for¤ve provincial confederations or kingdoms, ruled by the paramount chief of the central province, but with each of its other provincial rulers left with what seem to have been wide local autonomous powers (Vega 1980). These kingdoms , their primary provinces, and selected other provinces of importance to our discussion, are shown on the map in Figure 3. Puerto Rico, with 20 chiefdoms or provinces, had, for all practical purposes, been organized into a single confederated kingdom, Borinquen (bo-ri-kf) “The People’s Homeland.” Cuba, on the other hand, only recently colonized by the Classic Taíno, had no overall political structure above that of the individual settlements. The earlier Cuban natives, the Ciboney, Las Casas tells us, had no chiefdoms nor overriding political organization (Las Casas 1875:III:463 et passim). The inhabitants of each of the ¤ve Hispaniolan Taíno kingdoms of Maguá, Maguana, Higüey, Xaraguá, and Marién seem to have spoken slightly variant dialects of Classic Taíno, but the muy más prima prestige dialect of the Kingdom of Xaraguá, “The Lake Country,” in southwestern Hispaniola had assumed the role of second language with most of the population of the Greater Antilles (Las Casas 1875:V:486). It had, as pointed out...

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