Spanish in Contact with Haitian Creole

Abstract

In the Caribbean, varieties of Spanish, English, French, and Creole languages are spoken, resulting from contact between lexifier languages (Spanish, English, French, and Dutch) and substrate languages, brought to the Caribbean territories by slaves from the beginning of the 16 century. Some of these lexifier languages have been in contact with the Creole languages that are spoken in the region, such as the case with Spanish and Haitian Creole at the HaitianDominican border. This border divides Hispaniola into two countries, Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Two nations, two cultures, and two distinct languages co-exist there, both artificially separated by geographic and political divides. Dominican Spanish is part of the linguistic Hispanic Caribbean zone. It is a HispanicAfrocaribbean variety, characterized by phonetic innovation, a fixed subject-verb-object word order, redundant subject pronouns, the impersonal pronoun ello, explicit pronouns with inanimate referents, questions with no subject-verb inversion, infinitives with overt subjects, and double negation. In contrast, Haitian Creole is a Creole language that shares official status with French and is the native language of almost the entire Haitian population. It is considered a prototypical Creole (Bickerton 1984), with a lexifier basis in French and a strong African substrate of the Nigeria-Congo group, especially of the language family KWA (Gbe and Akan) and Bantu, formed among African adults between approximately 1680-1740 (Singler 1996). Contact between Dominican Spanish and Haitian Creole has barely been studied in Hispanic Linguistics (Ortiz Lopez, 2010). So, in this chapter I focus on this scenario from the perspective of contact linguistics and translinguistic influence. I perform a comparative analysis of some properties of the null subject parameter among bilingual Spanish-Haitian Creole speakers with the objective of providing responses to theoretical debates about contact linguistics, and in the case of this particular investigation, answers to questions such as the following: (1) Are there differences in the properties of subject pronoun expression between adult and child monolinguals (L1), adult and child simultaneous bilinguals (in Spanish and Creole) [2L1], and adult and child sequential bilinguals [L2]? (2) Does age influence the acquisition of this parameter in [2L1] and [L2]? (3) What effect do the parametric differences (pro-drop and non-pro-drop) between these languages in contact have during the acquisition of Spanish by adolescent and adult 2L1 and L2 speakers? (4) Do bilinguals ([2L1] and [L2]) acquire or not acquire the syntactic-pragmatic functions of subject pronouns in Spanish?