This chronicle is a journey in time and distance. The journey takes us to one of the most shameful episodes in the history of Spain, that of slavery. Although it may be complicated, let’s try to put ourselves in a situation: we are in a Latin American country during the colonial era, in the barracks of a mine or a sugar plantation, for example. Hundreds of people live there, crowded together. They are African slaves and need to learn the language of their masters. This is how it is born muzzle speecha kind of marginal, very rudimentary Spanish.
Let’s stop first at the word muzzle. This term referred, with contempt, to the black man born in Africa who had acquired almost nothing of European culture in the late 15th or early 16th centuries. By transferring the slave terminology to the Spanish American colonies, the word muzzle It also began to be used, more specifically, to name slaves born in Africa who spoke Spanish with difficulty.
Also known as half tonguespeech muzzle It was, in short, the reduced language of those who learn Spanish for the first time, under difficult conditions and without achieving complete mastery of grammar or pronunciation. “In the slave barracks, the African had practically no contact with the native speakers. Their contact was with foremen or foremen, who tended to be people of mixed race and not all of them were native, so this linguistic distance with Spanish was maintained,” he tells Archiletters John M. Lipski, American linguist and professor, specialist on the subject.
Some researchers maintain that Bozal speech could have been a stable language and, in some way, a precursor to today’s Caribbean Spanish. Germán de Granda, a deceased Spanish philologist, postulated that “it was not unthinkable that the speech that served as a vehicle of normal communication among the inhabitants of the barracks of slaves imported from Africa had survived, from generation to generation, through a process of uninterrupted continuity.” , renewed in each new case of incorporation of black muzzles.”
However, today this is not easy to prove. Lipski maintains that time – two generations (between 1820 and the abolition of slavery around 1880) – is not enough: “I do believe that it contributed several characteristics to speech. It is possible that Africans were not the origin of the change in consonants or their pronunciation, but they did contribute to it. My perspective is that the African gave a little push to other characteristics that already existed.”
Muzzle speech was quite widespread, especially on the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, places where new shipments of slaves continually arrived directly from Africa. Lipski adds Peru and the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo to the list and adds that “the interesting thing about these countries is that there were black writers who commented on and reproduced muzzle speech and did not do it in a parody way because they were of the same race. Instead, the texts of white writers imitated the language only to mock.”
Santeros in trance and songs
For Lipski, a very valuable testimony was that of the Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera. Born into a family of landowners, she listened to Africans as a child and, “as if she were a self-taught anthropologist, she collected abundant testimonies in several books based on conversations with black muzzles. I was lucky to meet her and, being already a 90-year-old woman, I could still reproduce her language quite authentically.”
Cuba also provides other clues to this ‘Africanized Spanish’ thanks to Santeria. Specifically, through the Afro-Cuban palo mayombe ritual language. Apparently, the santeros, when they are in a trance, say that they reproduce the speech of their ancestors, which is the muzzle.
Likewise, in Cuban music there are many songs from the first half of the 20th century that do have characteristics of that language. For example, the verb are: “I areus are”. Another way is elleinstead of he either she.
Muzzle on the Peninsula?
We are left with the doubt as to whether muzzle speech penetrated the Iberian Peninsula, and Professor Lipski’s explanation convinces us: “It is unlikely that it was present in Spain. There were no barracks, there were no farms. They worked more than anything in domestic service or as assistants to some craftsman.”
According to his research, it seems that the peninsular Spanish bozal was a transitory phenomenon that did not meet the sociodemographic conditions to become something more. In general, blacks born in Spain acquired Spanish from the regions where they lived, although some elements may have been maintained in the speech of the most marginalized blacks – for example, in the infamous black neighborhoods of Seville – or in the activities of the black brotherhoods.
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