Language and the African Diaspora in Latin America

How has the Atlantic slave trade influenced the languages currently spoken in the Americas? This is one of the main questions that has been pursued in the field of Creole studies in the past decades (Holm 1988). However, the African contribution to the formation of the Spanish and Portuguese spoken in Latin America is still a largely ignored topic in the field of Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics (Guy 2005; Schwegler 2010). This talk addresses how, as a field, we can solve this disregard of the African element in the study of the varieties of Portuguese and Spanish, more specifically the Afro-varieties spoken in Brazil and Bolivia. My hypothesis is that the concept of false racial democracy present in both nations and racial bias (Charity Hudley et al. 2020) derived from centuries of colonization are the main motivations for this lack of interest of the African contribution. My proposal is that when talking about the origins and development of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in Latin American, we should use nuanced theoretical approaches, combining sociohistorical, linguistic, and ethnographic researches, to fully understand the sociohistorical and linguistic development of these varieties and also use anti-racist theorical frameworks (Alim 2016) to expand our understanding of these languages and the ideologies that are carried out in our own work in the field of linguistics.

 

Luana Lamberti is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics. Her research interests are in the fields of Creoles, sociolinguistics, language contact, pragmatics, and morphology. She has experience researching and teaching Spanish and Portuguese language and linguistics. Her interest in the field of linguistics dates back to when she started her bachelor’s degree in Brazil, where she became a junior researcher in linguistics. Moved by this early desire to research and teach linguistics, Luana devoted herself to become an academic and has since gained experience in a wide range of subfields of linguistics. She has also developed considerable pedagogical skills by teaching and studying three different languages (English, Portuguese, and Spanish) in three different countries (Brazil, Portugal, and the United States). Luana has published on topics related to double negation, imperatives, objects in Brazilian Portuguese, and most recently on the variation of the future forms in Spanish. Her dissertation project is related to Afro-Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Bahia and Afro-Bolivian Spanish.