Common Words of African Origin Used in Latin America

Abstract

EVER since the discipline of linguistics began to solidify itself around the end of the 18th century, scholars in this field have been interested in the phenomenon of language contact and have studied the complexities of linguistic borrowing. As we know, languages do not develop in isolation in any part of the world and Latin America is certainly no exception. Here we find a wide variety of words from many different American Indian languages that have filtered into the Spanish, Portuguese, French Creole, English, or Papiamento spoken in the geographical area of Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Most students of Spanish and Portuguese are aware of this indigenous substratum influence, especially as concerns the Aztecs in Mexico, the Mayans in Mexico and Central America, the Incas in Peru, and the Tupi-Guarani in Brazil. Most students, however, do not realize that the Atlantic slave trade was also instrumental in supplying a rich flow of vocabulary items to the superstrate languages throughout a relatively large portion of Latin America. This was especially true in the Caribbean area and in Brazil, since these places needed large numbers of blacks to provide the muscle necessary for the sugar and coffee industries, and, to a lesser extent, for the production of cocoa. That the languages and dialects spoken by the African slaves easily penetrated the superstrate languages may be seen by noting the large number of these black souls that were brought to Spanish and Portuguese America. Philip D. Curtin, in his The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, tells us that the estimated number of blacks imported to Spanish America during the entire period of the slave trade was approximately 1,552,000, and to Brazil, some 3,646,000.' Even though all these slaves spoke many different languages, it was only natural that some words from them would find their way into Spanish or Portuguese and become permanent fixtures there. No one has ever calculated the approximate number of languages and/or dialects which the slaves brought with them to the Americas, but based upon the areas of sub-Saharan Africa from which the Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, and Danes2 took slaves (parts of all the countries of western Africa, from Senegal in the north to the southern border of Angola, and from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia), it is probably safe to guess that at least about 500 to 700 languages-dialects were involved. Of these, of course, some had more speakers among the slave population than others, and some, such as Yoruba, remained alive and active because of a very strong religious fervor among the people who spoke them, in addition to the numerical preponderance of their speakers. Many of these languages faded out of existence in the Americas when their speakers died, but of those which remained, albeit if only in the form of a few borrowed words cemented into the superstrate language, we ight be safe in assuming a number of about 150-200. To be sure, there are many words of supposed sub-Saharan origin, such as burundanga 'a special drink prepared to bewitch someone,' or candonga 'earring,' the exact source languages of which have not yet been identified. This, of course, is also true for English; the origin of the word chimpanzee, for example, has bewildered scholars for years and to date no one has been able to pin down the language from which it came. Also the source language of the word banjo remains somewhat of a mystery, although there is a strong possibility that it comes from the KiMbundu word mbanza, which is a musical instrument similar to our banjo. In this article, I should like to supply a list of words which are generally well known and found with a relatively high frequency of usage throughout most of Spanish America or Brazil, as the case may be. They are words which, according to my own findings, may be categorized as stemming from a definite sub-Saharan language. As part of the information given under each entry, I will also provide

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