|
A
dance troupe performed at an annual drum festival
in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. The villagers
speak what is thought to be the only Spanish-based
Creole language in Latin America. (Scott Dalton
for The New York Times) |
A
little-known language survives in Colombia
By
Simon Romero
Published: October 17, 2007
SAN BASILIO DE PALENQUE,
Colombia: The residents of this village,
founded almost three centuries ago by runaway slaves in
the jungle of northern Colombia, eke out their survival
from plots of manioc. Pigs wander through dirt roads.
The occasional soldier on patrol peaks into houses made
of straw, mud and cow dung.
On
the surface, it resembles any other impoverished Colombian
village. But when adults here speak with one another,
their language draws inspiration from as far away as the
Congo River Basin in Africa. This peculiar speech has
astonished linguists since they began studying it several
decades ago.
The
language is known up and down Colombia's Caribbean coast
as Palenquero and here simply as "lengua" -
tongue. Theories about its origins vary, but one thing
is certain: It survived for centuries in this small community,
which is now struggling to keep it from perishing.
Today,
fewer than half of the community's 3,000 residents actively
speak Palenquero, although many children and young adults
can understand it and pronounce some phrases.
"Palenge
a senda tielan ngombe ri nduse i betuaya," Sebastián
Salgado, 37, a teacher at the public school here, said
before a classroom of teenage students on a recent Tuesday
morning. (The sentence roughly translates into English
as, "Palenque is the land of cattle, sweets and basic
staples.")
Palenquero
is thought to be the only Spanish-based Creole language
in Latin America. But its grammar is so different that
Spanish speakers can understand almost nothing of it.
Its closest relative may be Papiamento, spoken on the
Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao,
which draws largely from Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch,
linguists say.
The survival of Palenquero points to the extraordinary
resilience of San Basilio de Palenque, part of whose very
name - Palenque - is the Spanish word for a fortified
village of runaway slaves. Different from dozens of other
palenques that were vanquished, this community has successfully
fended off threats to its existence to this day.
Colonial
references to its origins are scarce, but historians say
that San Basilio de Palenque was probably settled sometime
after revolts led by Benkos Biohó, a 17th-century
African resistance leader who organized guerrilla attacks
on the nearby port of Cartagena with fighters armed with
stolen blunderbusses.
And
while English-, French- and Dutch-based Creole languages
are found in the Caribbean, the survival of one in the
interior of Colombia has led some scholars to theorize
that Palenquero may be the last remnant of a Spanish-based
Creole once used widely by slaves throughout Latin America.
Palenquero
was strongly influenced by the Kikongo language of Congo
and Angola, and by Portuguese, the language of traders
who brought African slaves to Cartagena in the 17th century.
Kikongo-derived words like ngombe (cattle) and ngubá
(peanut) remain in use here today.
"There
is nothing else like this language in the Spanish-speaking
countries of the Americas," said Armin Schwegler,
a linguist at the University of California, Irvine, who
has researched Palenquero since the 1980s. "But it
is in danger of disappearing."
Advocates
for keeping Palenquero alive face an uphill struggle.
The isolation that once shielded the language from the
outside world has come to an end. Once three days by mule
to the coast, the route to Cartagena now takes two hours
by bus on a bumpy dirt road.
Electricity
arrived in the 1970s as a government gift in recognition
of Antonio Cervantes, better known as Kid Pambelé,
a Colombian world boxing titleholder who was born here.
With electricity came radio and television. The schoolhouse,
named in honor of Biohó, has an Internet connection
now.
But
Palenqueros, as the community's residents call themselves,
say the biggest threat to their language's survival comes
from direct contact with outsiders. Many here have had
to venture to nearby banana plantations or cities for
work, and then found themselves ostracized because of
the way they spoke.
"We
were subject to scorn because of our tongue," said
Concepción Hernández Navarro, 72, who survives
by farming yams, peanuts and corn.
Only
two of Hernández's eight children live here; five
are in Cartagena and one moved as far away as Caracas,
drawn by Venezuela's oil boom.
"We
have always been poor here," she said in an interview
in front of her modest house, "but our poverty has
grown worse."
If
there is one blessing to this impoverishment, it may be
that Colombia's long internal war has largely been fought
over spoils in other places, allowing teachers here to
toil uninterrupted at reviving Palenquero since classes
were introduced in the late 1980s.
Undaunted
by the prospect of Palenquero disappearing after centuries
of use, Rutsely Simarra Obeso, a linguist who was born
here and lives in Cartagena, is compiling a lexicon. Others
here are assembling a dictionary of Palenquero to be used
in the school.
Bernardino Pérez, 38, a teacher trying to revive
Palenquero, said these efforts were undertaken with little
government assistance.
"The
Spanish empire imposed its language on us, but we resisted,"
Pérez said. "We'll keep on resisting a while
longer."
The
fight to keep the language alive is taking place as other
parts of Colombia, which by some measures has the largest
black population in the Spanish-speaking world, finally
takes interest in the community as it emerges as a mecca
for anthropologists, historians, musicologists and linguists.
Ana
Mercedes Hoyos, one of Colombia's most prominent painters,
has made images of Palenque a central feature of her work.
Newspapers from Bogotá have begun sending sports
reporters here to inquire about a boxing renaissance in
the stifling-hot gym where children dream of following
in Kid Pambelé's footsteps.
The
defenders of Palenquero view their struggle as a continuation
of other battles.
"Our
ancestors survived capture in Africa, the passage by ship
to Cartagena and were strong enough to escape and live
on their own for centuries," said Salgado, the schoolteacher.
"We
are the strongest of the strongest," he continued.
"No matter what happens, our language will live on
within us."