Abstract
Abstract The present paper deals with 82 words of possible African origin registered in Uruguay by Ildefonso Pereda Valdés and Rolando Laguarda Trías between 1937 and 1965. Many of the lexical items were probably introduced by enslaved Africans brought to the region during the 18th and 19th centuries. Evidence shows that most of the words are apparently shared with varieties of Spanish outside the Rio de la Plata region, and most of them also appear in neighboring Argentina and Brazil. Furthermore, the African-derived lexicon is often used to denominate the ‘other’ with respect to people and social behaviors, and most of these loanwords are nouns with possible origins in Bantu languages spoken in West-Central Africa, which corresponds to the available demographic data.
Highlights
The present paper deals with 82 words of possible African origin that characterize the variety of Spanish used in Uruguay
In spite of the lack of sources regarding the speech of Africans and their descendants in Uruguay, we do refer to lexicographical works that enable us to get closer to our object of study
Pereda Valdés made a fundamental contribution to documentary and historical sources regarding Africans and their descendants in the Rio de la Plata region, and his vocabularies serve as the basis for the work of Rolando Laguarda Trías (1969) on what he calls afronegrismos (‘Afronegrisms’) in the same region
Summary
Two pioneering Uruguayan authors, Ildefonso Pereda Valdés (1937; 1965) and Rolando Laguarda Trías (1969), studied the lexical contribution of Africans and their descendants in the Spanish of the Rio de la Plata in the 20th century. In their publications, they compiled lists of supposed African-derived vocabulary in Uruguay that served as the point of departure for the volume edited by Álvarez López/Coll (2012). Pereda Valdés made a fundamental contribution to documentary and historical sources regarding Africans and their descendants in the Rio de la Plata region, and his vocabularies serve as the basis for the work of Rolando Laguarda Trías (1969) on what he calls afronegrismos (‘Afronegrisms’) in the same region. The authors may have found lexical items in the written sources from Argentina and Brazil that they cite and included them in their lists for reasons that we ignore
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