Aspectos del lenguaje afronegroide en Venezuela (review)

This book will be of interest not only to scholars in Spanish linguistics but to creolists and to students of African-American Vernacular English in the United States. Megenney analyzes Venezuelan Spanish as spoken in 57 taped interviews from areas with a significant population of African ancestry.

The book consists of four chapters preceded by an introduction. In the introduction, M reviews the total body of scholarship on Africans in Venezuela, including both linguistic and nonlinguistic (history and folklore) perspectives. Ch. 1 examines the history of slavery in both Venezuela and the Caribbean. Ch. 2 examines the interview communities, with separate treatments of settlement history, phonology, morphosyntax, and lexico-semantics. Ch. 3, a separate treatment of Spanish in eastern Venezuela, provides a contrast with the areas examined (eastern Venezuela’s population is for the most part not of African ancestry, but its Spanish differs from Venezuelan national standard). Ch. 4 examines the Venezuelan vocabulary—this time for the whole country—of supposed subsaharan origin.

Ch. 1 is especially concerned with the sources of slaves who came to the Caribbean and to Venezuela in particular and with the African language families that are most likely to be represented. The majority of slaves came to these areas from west Africa, with a significant representation from central Africa as well. However, the settlement of slaves in Venezuela is more complicated than simple numbers would suggest. Many Africans did not come directly to Venezuela but were sold from other islands in the Caribbean. Moreover, the social conditions of settlement in Venezuela are a matter of debate. Some historians claim that slave owners in Venezuela were more humane than elsewhere in the western hemisphere, which may have led to a greater degree of assimilation and desafricanización. On the other hand, folklorists have pointed out that slaves, freed slaves, and/or fugitives used a certain degree of autonomy to organize for the specific purpose of preserving traits of African culture.

Ch. 2, the heart of the book, treats a number of Spanish variants found on the shore of Lake Maracaibo and Barlovento, the two areas with large populations of African descendants. Each feature, whether phonological, morphosyntactic, or lexico-semantic, is presented with a detailed description which includes structure and possible sources. The results do not indicate a single source. Many features are Spanish archaisms attested in European dialects (especially Anadalusia, the Canary Islands, and Extremadura); others are found throughout Latin America. Some are features structurally similar to those in many attested creoles while only a few can be traced to Africa with any certainty.

Ch. 3 examines dialect features from eastern Venezuela, where African settlement was not significant. While not present in Barlovento or Lake Maracaibo, a number of phonological features presented here suggest a hypothetical African substratum which could have appeared in many varieties of Spanish throughout the colonial period. However, M does not feel enough evidence exists to point to definite conclusions.

Ch. 4 reviews both M’s and other scholarship to compose a list of all words of possible subsharan origin in Venezuelan Spanish. M feels that it is only at the lexical level that any features of Venezuelan Spanish can confidently be traced to African sources. Of these 135 items, the most frequent linguistic source seems to be Kimbundu followed, in order of frequency, by Kikongo, Kikongo/Kituba, Mende, Yoruba, Tshiluba, Kiluba, Duala, and Zulu. I was surprised to see both Swahili and Kikuyu mentioned as occasional sources.

The difficulty in constructing creole histories with African components is evident both in this book and in the Black English debate in the United States. As is apparent in the history of English creoles, oftentimes regional dialects and archaic forms from the dominant language can be as big a contributor as the African sources.