The Palenquero creole language (spoken together with Spanish in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia) exhibits a number of key grammatical features found in no variety of Spanish. Linguists who have studied Palenquero have noted the introduction of Spanish elements, ranging from conjugated verbs and preverbal clitics to more complex morphosyntactic constructions. The apparent mixing has variously been attributed to decreolization, language attrition, code-switching, interference from Spanish, performance errors, and the possibility that such configurations have been an integral part of Palenquero since its origins. Given the major morphosyntactic differences that separate Palenquero from Spanish it is a priori reasonable to assume that Palenqueros psycholinguistically partition Spanish and Palenquero, that they are able to identify given configurations as belonging to one language or the other, and that utterances containing both quintessentially Palenquero and uniquely Spanish structures will be acknowledged as mixed. The present study reports the preliminary results of experiments conducted in San Basilio de Palenque, using stimuli extracted from natural speech as well as synthesized samples, to probe bilingual speakers’ implicit partitioning of Spanish and Palenquero. The results demonstrate an asymmetry between perception and production: “grammars” and “languages” are not psycholinguistically coterminous for Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals. The analysis proposes that Spanish-like incursions are not all feasibly characterized as codeswitching, and do not meet the criteria for decreolization.
John M. Lipski (Mon,) studied this question.