The emergence and evolution of tone systems in Afro-Iberian contact varieties

Abstract

<p>The prosodic systems that have emerged across the Afro-Atlantic (Africa and Caribbean Basin) from contact between African tone languages and European languages with stress are typologically remarkable. Prosodic contact has engendered tone-only, stress-only, and mixed systems combining tone with stress, irrespective of their classification as creoles or indigenized colonial varieties. Equatorial Guinean Spanish, for example, features a two-tone system, fixed word tone patterns, tonal minimal pairs, the arbitrary assignment of tone in function words, and tonal processes (Bordal Steien & Yakpo 2020). By contrast, the Upper Guinea Portuguese-lexifier creoles of Cape Verde (Swolkien, 2015), Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal (Biagui, 2012) have all been analyzed as languages with stress, not tone. Using primary and secondary data, I show that the prosodic systems of Afro-Iberian Creoles and indigenized Iberian colonial varieties form an areal continuum from Africa to the Americas, roughly corresponding to tone in the east and stress in the west. Transitional systems are found in the Caribbean, where tone and stress systems have converged in various ways (Yakpo 2021). Drawing on Equatoguinean Spanish and the Spanish-sourced lexicon of the English-lexifier Creole Pichi (Equatorial Guinea), I present a framework for Afro-Iberian contact prosodic systems characterized by tone. I identify three concrete mechanisms involved in the emergence of tone systems in Iberian Romance contact varieties: stress-to-tone mapping, paradigmatization, and idiosyncratization. This study contests that the idea that tone is eliminated during language contact and creolization, even when speakers of tone languages constitute majorities (e.g., Salmons, 1992; McWhorter, 1998; Trudgill, 2010). The trajectories of the Afro-Iberian contact languages instead suggest that creoles and indigenized colonial varieties have developed tone, stress or mixed systems in accordance with the linguistic factor of areal typology (dominance of tone vs. stress in the ecology), the cognitive factor of psycholinguistic dominance (recipient vs. source-language agentivity), and social factors in their specific linguistic ecologies (the demographic proportion and social stratification of speakers of tone and stress-only languages). I conclude that the emergence and evolution of the prosodic systems of the Afro-Iberian languages of the Afro-Atlantic provides further evidence that regular processes of language change involving genetic transmission, areal diffusion, and structural adaptation collude in shaping language contact and creolization.<br></p>