Abstract
The Afro-descendents of Panama's Caribbean coast maintain the tradition of the Negros Congos, a series of folkloric manifestations occurring during Carnival season, and including a special cryptolect based loosely on Spanish. 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. Widely felt-both by Congo participants and by outside observers - to consist only of deliberate deformations of Spanish words and semantic inversions, Congo speech in reality also contains numerous elements traceable to Afro-Hispanic communities in other former Spanish-American colonies. Data drawn from twenty-four Congo communities demonstrate systematic regional variation - phonetic and lexical - that verifies the status of Congo speech as a cryptolect undergoing natural language evolution. These data also contribute to the search for the geographical locus of the original Congo dialect.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 380-407 |
Number of pages | 28 |
Journal | Diachronica |
Volume | 26 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2009 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Language and Linguistics
- Linguistics and Language