Expedition into the savannah and jungle to look for a lost language

(Spanish version, translated by Jonathan Mastai Husum, can be found here)

Our islands bear twisting names in fading tongues

Whose meanings now escaped our young

                  Basil Rodrigues, Spanish Arawak from Guyana, in his poem Santa Rosa

Around a year ago, I published this article on Lingoblog on whether linguists can prevent a war. I had written it after the Venezuelan supreme leader and his government had claimed two thirds of their neighboring country Guyana. The dictator’s parliament also supported the land claim, and now that area is listed as “contested” in several places. Sad, because the Spanish and the Venezuelans never really had shown any presence in that part of the world.

The land claim, and the threatening invasion by the much bigger country Venezuela, was motivated by two things. One is, that Venezuela, via its predecessor colonial power Spain, claimed to have possession rights of that region because of some 15^th century treaty in which Spain and Portugal divided the known world among themselves. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Even though the Spanish never settled there. Second, and more importantly, Guyana had found oil in the Essequibo region, and Venezuela wants to have that. In other words, greed is the main motivation. Venezuela has 28 million inhabitants (but 25 % has left the country recently) and Guyana less than a million.

In the earlier Lingoblog contribution, I mentioned that the region was actually colonized by the Dutch, particularly from the Zealand region in the southwest of the country. They traded there in the late 1500s, and settled around 1600. All historical evidence pointed to the absence of any colonial effort from the part of the Spanish, and a successful colonization by the Dutch. The Dutch used land for farming, employed local indigenous people (also enslaved ones) and enslaved Africans, and in other regions they established posts to trade with the indigenous populations. There is, however, no trace of the Spanish language in the toponymy of the region, there is no evidence of direct borrowings from Spanish into the local languages, and the earliest historical sources usually describe Spanish incursions beyond the Amacuro River as incursions into enemy territory, inhabited by indigenous populations and their allies, the Dutch. In areas where the Dutch had not settled as farmers, they had established posts along the rivers, with the purpose of controlling population movements, keeping track of enemy incursions and trading with the indigenous populations.

There was, however, one fascinating exception to the absence of Spanish. A settlement called Santa Rosa Mission, which has a Spanish name, and it was founded in 1840, in the Essequibo region. Already in 1764, the Dutch had a postholder there who spoke Spanish, but it is not clear where and why he had learned that language. There is no indication that he had learned indigenous languages. Other postholders, however, either used (their versions of) the indigenous languages when communicating with the locals in the late 1700s, or they used interpreters who spoke the indigenous languages. No mention of Spanish. Hmm, interpreters should always be bilingual. However, the sources do not say which languages those bilinguals used on the other side. Presumably Dutch, as is clear from later, post-1800, sources, and one or more indigenous languages. In that later period, they communicated in Creole Dutch with the indigenous populations.

 I studied historical sources of the region. In several historical sources, I encountered references to a fascinating group that settled in Santa Rosa.

They were known among others as the Spanish Arawaks. The Arawakans are an indigenous population, widespread in South America, all the way from the Caribbean islands to Bolivia, and from Ecuador in the east to the mouth of the Amazon in the west. Groups of speakers of Arawakan languages are present along all the countries along the Northern coast of Columbia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and Brazil. In The Guyanas, they call themselves Lokhono. Sources agree that these so-called Spanish Arawaks had fled, or were thrown out of, Venezuela, and in 1817 they were invited to settle along the Moruca River, deep into Guyana, where they would get spiritual guidance from a Catholic priest. Also today, they are thoroughly Catholic. Only seven procent of the population is Catholic. Around 54 % are Christians. Apparently, according to the sources at least, they were a mixed group, descendants of Catholic Spanish and indigenous Arawaks. This is how Schomburgk described them, when he visited the community in the 1840s:

The houses of the Indians and Spanish Creoles who live here, consist likewise of plastered walls and thatched roofs; they have generally only one room and the interior bespeaks poverty. The Indians are from the Pauula and Marianna nation, and though I believe that many were absent, I do not think there [SIC] number amounts to more than eighty. We were met on shore by some of the Spanish or rather Colombian Creoles, the offspring of an Indian mother and the descendants of the former Spaniards. They lost no time to inform us that they were Patriots [i.e. loyal to the British King] (…). They were well dressed in the attire of men of their class, but as something extraordinary though perhaps Spanish custom, their shirt sleeves were provided with ornamental trimming.

This was exciting information for me. I have been working on languages of mixed populations for a long time. In some cases, they appear to speak mixed languages: the Canadian Métis (mestizos) speak a mixture of French and Cree, called Michif, the South African Basters/Griekwas spoke a mixture of Khoenkhoen and Afrikaans, the Chindos in Indonesian speak a mixture of Chinese Malay and colloquial Ngoko Javanese, and there are more like these.

What if these Spanish Arawaks also spoke a mixed language? Then that new language would be most likely a combination of a Spanish vocabulary (of the fathers) and an Arawakan grammatical system of the mothers. In all cases of mixed languages that we know of, the language of the mothers provided the lexicon and the fathers the grammar: sound system, morphology, syntax from one language, the verbs and nouns from another.

Nothing like this was reported on the language in the sources that I had encountered. But that does not mean that there could not mean there was no such language. The mixed language of the Métis was first mentioned by outside observers a century after it had emerged, and Pieter Muysken found out first after three months of living with a Quechua family that the couple also spoke a mixture of Quechua and Spanish with one another. That is how he discovered the existence of the mixed language Media Lengua.

So I decided to go there. I was in the capital of Guyana for a Conference about the languages of the Caribbean, and I had met people from most of the nine indigenous language groups. The Lokhonos (as the Arawaks from the Guyanas call themselves), however, spoke only English. British missionaries told the indigenous populations that God wanted them to see the light, and the language of light was the language of the Bible, and that is English. If the native Guyanans would abandon their own language and replaced it with English, then God would be happy. As a consequence, the state of the indigenous languages in Guyana is now pretty bad in most communities. Most indigenous people in the country speak only English and Creole English, sometimes only English.

The chances that the mixed language of the Spanish Arawaks was still spoken in the community, some two centuries about the forced move from Spanish-speaking territory, was minimal. Maybe it never existed. But perhaps they still spoke a special form of the Spanish language, and that could also be interesting news for Romance linguistics. Only one way to find out: get there.

People originating from, or familiar with, the community around Moruca/Santa Rosa Mission, told me how to get there: take a taxi to the big market in Georgetown, find a car that takes you to Parica, from there you take a boat to cross the Essequibo River (1,5 hours) to Supenaam, there you must find a car that takes you to Charity (one hour) on the Pomeroon River, there you catch a speedboat that takes you to the Atlantic Ocean and from there upriver on the Moruca River.

This boat, however, only sails once a day, at around 11, I found out. The boats had left, they told me, when I arrived there around noon. I had to wait until the next day in order to continue the trip. There was someone who offered to take me alone in his boat, but he was six times as expensive than the accommodation I found in Charity. And Charity appeared to be an interesting town with competent boatbuilders and incompetent hairdressers (you may have noticed my hair after I came back).

Next day, I arrived in the town, and I started to talk to the locals. Almost all identified as Arawaks. They felt threatened by the Venezuelans, they found that they were not well treated by the authorities and by the big companies that extracted their resources from the land. Nobody spoke a mixture of Spanish and Arawak, and nobody spoke Spanish, it appeared, except some children who learn Spanish in school. From there, it is around 100 kilometres to the border with Venezuela. Guyana has almost the same surface as Great Britain, and Venezuela is twice as big as Sweden.

Finding a mixed language would have been sensational, as there are only around 25 in the world that fit my purist definition of a mixed language. If there still would be speakers of Spanish (or maybe a Spanish Creole?) of the 1817 immigrants, that would not be spectacular, but it would still be linguistically interesting, and potentially sensational, if it deviates from Venezuelan Spanish, and has an Arawak substrate. Non-linguistic signals pointed to a hybrid culture, not only in the older sources, also in more recent sources, where they made music with a very Latin American sound, rather than the South Asian or Guyana popular music one hears elsewhere in the country. Can we know what their Spanish was like?

By chance, when visiting the Walter Roth Museum for Anthropology in Georgetown, Guyana, I had found an autobiography of Basil (English first name) Rodrigues (Spanish family name), who was from the community. He was born in 1932, and his autobiography appeared in 1998, edited by Justin Greene-Roesel. There were several references to Spanish in the book. Let us list the relevant remarks in quotes:

My father was more educated than mommy. He had good English and a good fist; she had less education. Even though my father spoke Spanish, such as when he spoke with his father, he only spoke English to us. That was the language in school. My mother also spoke Spanish, but she knew a bit of Arawak too, because like dad, her background was Arawak. (p. 12)

Whenever there was a spree, a celebration, a dance, [my father] would be invited with his violin to play music for the people to dance, so he was quite well-reputed. In those days the emphasis was on the Spanish kind of music they called the hurropo. It was the kind of music they played in Venezuela and he knew quite a number of those. (p. 8)

There was this great lady named Grandma Rosa who knew a prayer called oración (p. 13; it refers to a supernatural activity rather than a Catholic activity)

The oración is a Spanish prayer. Some of the older people would know these prayers. Especially for helping someone who was sick.

We also had a lot of religious rules. We had to say the rosary a lot. A nice, good rule was that mommy always spoke of respect to the elderly. Anytime we met an older person on the road, we had to stop and cross our arms and beg a blessing. To the other person, we’d say, “I ask your blessing,” and the old person would say, “I give you my blessing.” But all this was done in Spanish, so we’d say “Bendición,” and they would reply “Diós te bendígo.” That was one of the rules.

In addition, he uses some Spanish kinship terms like papita and Mamita for his parents. Unfortunately, there is not enough information about the kind of Spanish, and the possible mixture. One of the people I met, mentioned that his grandparents would mix Arawak and Spanish, but it cannot be established whether this was spontaneous codemixing, or a stable mixed language.

Their traditional culture (clothing, music, food) seems to mix Spanish and indigenous traditions.

Strikingly, nobody that I talked to, spontaneously mentioned their Spanish heritage. They all identified as Arawaks. But most don’t speak the Arawak language either. Only one elderly lady with a really neat lawn around her house, claimed to get by in the Arawak language.

Well, this story can only end in an anticlimax. No special version of Spanish found, no mixed language either. The expedition failed, but I spent a couple of nice days (except when it was storming and raining) in the community. For the language, I came two generations too late.

Coverphoto: colourbox.dk.

Peter Bakker is a linguist specialized in language contact and contact languages. He has a special interest in new languages such as creoles and mixed languages, some of which are spoken by new ethnic groups. The many dozen creoles spoken in the Circum-Caribbean area have his special attention. He is employed at Aarhus University, where he is working on a textbook on creole languages and where he coordinates a project on the history of Karriols, the former creole of the Danish West Indies.

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