Searching for the sociolinguistic history of Afro-Panamanian Congo speech

Among the surviving Afro-Hispanic linguistic manifestations, one of the most difficult to trace historically is the speech of the Congos of Panama's Caribbean coast, who maintain a series of folkloric manifestations occurring during Carnival season that includes a special language. According to oral tradition, Congo speech was devised among captive and maroon Africans in colonial Panama as a means of hiding their speech from their colonial masters. Putting together the contemporary variation in Congo speech and what diachronic developments can be extrapolated, a complex picture emerges that cannot be easily resolved with the notion that this dialect developed exclusively as a cryptolect in contact with Spanish colonists. The present study offers a plausible scenario, based on synchronic variation and available historical documentation.