A New Perspective on Afro-Dominican Spanish: the Haitian Contribution

Abstract

The present study represents a first attempt at reassessing the status of Afro-Dominican language. It will be proposed that the presence of African bozales (slaves born in Africa and speaking Spanish as a weak second language) diminished earlier in Spanish Santo Domingo than in other Caribbean areas which form the centerpiece for Afro-Hispanic linguistic theories. The 19th century sugar plantation boom which resulted in massive importation of African slaves into Cuba and Brazil barely touched the Dominican Republic, thus precluding the formation of a new bozal Spanish, as happened in Cuba. By far the greatest extra-Hispanic linguistic influence in the Dominican Republic has been Haitian Creole, a presence which began almost as soon as the latter language came into existence, probably towards the end of the 17th century or the beginning of the 18th century.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.