Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online

1. Introduction ⇫ ¶

The variety of Media Lengua (literally ‘half language’ or ‘halfway language’) described here is spoken natively by ca. two hundred people (men, women, children) near Salcedo, Central Ecuador. Other varieties have been discovered in Saraguro (Province of Loja), outside of Cañar, both in the southern part of the Ecuadorian highlands, and in Imbabura province in the north (Gómez Rendón 2008).

Linguistically speaking, Media Lengua is essentially Quechua with the vast majority of its stems replaced by Spanish forms. Ecuadorian Quechua is often called Quichua, but I will use the more general term Quechua here. Examples of Media Lengua utterances are given in (1) through (3), with the (b) examples giving the regional Quechua equivalent, and the (c) examples the regional Spanish equivalent.

(1) a.   unu  fabur-ta       pidi-nga-bu     bini-xu-ni             (Media Lengua)

one    favor-acc     ask-fn-ben     come-prog-1sg

‘I come to ask a favor.’

b.   shuk    fabur-da      maña-nga-bu    shamu-xu-ni  (Quechua)

one   favor-acc     ask-fn-ben     come-prog-1sg

c.    vengo  a          pedir       un       favor                        (Spanish)

It is clear that (1a) has resulted from putting the phonological shapes of the words in (1c) into the lexical entries in (1b). Thus shuk is replaced by unu, maña- by pidi- etc. Several things should be noted. First, we get an emphatic form of the indefinite article in Media Lengua, unu, rather than Spanish unemphatic un. Second, the Spanish irregular verb form vengo appears in a regularized stem form bini. Third, the Quechua rule voicing the accusative case marker -ta to -da after fabur has not applied in Media Lengua; Quechua dialectological evidence suggests that this is a recent rule. Fourth, what is peculiar about Media Lengua is not so much that it contains Spanish words (many dialects of Quechua do as well), but that virtually all Quechua roots, including all core vocabulary, have been replaced. Fifth, the Spanish forms have been adapted phonologically to Quechua; mid vowels have been replaced by high vowels. Quechua word order and morphology have been retained.

(2) a.   kuyi-buk   yirba    nuwabi-shka              (Media Lengua)

            cavia-ben  grass   there.is.not-mir         

‘There turns out to be no grass for the guinea pigs.’

b.   kuyi-buk      k'iwa         illa-shka             (Quechua)

            cavia-ben     grass                                        there.is.not-mir    

c.    no     hay   hierba    para    los    cuyes   (Spanish)

Note that the Quechua word kuyi ‘guinea pig’ appears in the local Spanish as well. The Media Lengua verb maintains the Quechua-specific “sudden discovery tense” (or mirative) marking -shka. The Quechua negative existential verb stem illa· has been relexified with a newly formed “frozen” stem nuwabi-, derived from Spanish no and haber ‘have’. The Spanish verb ‘have’ has an impersonal form hay which also has existential meaning.

(3) a.   yo-ga     awa-bi        kay-mu-ni             (Media Lengua)

1sg-top water-loc  fall-cis-1sg

‘I come after falling into the water.'

b.   ñuka-ga yaku-bi      urma-mu-ni          (Quechua)  

1sg-top   water-loc  fall-cis-1sg

c.    vengo  despues     de     caer     en        el  agua   (Spanish)     

Examples such as (3) show the extent to which Media Lengua utilizes the possibilities of Quechua verbal affixation. Cislocative -mu can be attached to non-movement verb stems indicating that the subject comes after some action. This possibility exists in both Media Lengua and Quechua.

      What examples (1) to (3) illustrate is that:

      (a) Media Lengua is essentially the product of replacing the phonological shapes of Quechua stems with Spanish forms, maintaining the rest of the Quechua structure;

      (b) the Spanish forms chosen have undergone regularization and adaptation to Quechua morphophonology;

      (c) Media Lengua is conservative in sometimes reflecting earlier stages in Quechua pronunciation;

      (d) it is not made up on the spot every time it is spoken;

      (e) the occurrence of Spanish strong alternants, frozen composites, etc. is an indication that we do not have a simple process of vocabulary replacement here;

      (f) the Quechua and Spanish that have contributed to Media Lengua have influenced each other in other ways as well.

2. Sociohistorical background ⇫ ¶

Media Lengua probably came into existence because acculturated Indians could not identify completely with either the traditional rural Quechua culture, or the urban Spanish culture. Thus, it was not communicative needs that led to it, but rather expressive needs. It appears that ethnic self-­identification is of crucial importance in determining the relation between Quechua, Media Lengua, and Spanish in the Ecuadorian Highlands. Media Lengua is not the product of an interlanguage arrested and fixed, resulting from an emergency contact situation; but rather it is a departure from Quechua through massive relexification, and not at all along the path of Quechua-Spanish interlanguage.

The Ecuadorian capital of Quito went through a phase of rapid expansion in the period between 1905 and 1925, after the railway linking it to the Pacific port of Guayaquil had been built. Many of the construction workers were recruited in the provinces south of the capital, where also the speakers of Media Lengua are to be found. The variety reported on here is spoken about two kilometres from a station on this railway. While now it has lost its importance, the influence of the railway station after the turn of the century and its pulling effect on the Indian labourers must have been tremendous, and there is a long history of cyclical migration to the capital. It is not at all unlikely that Media Lengua emerged as a result of the migration to the capital, among the young adult males who were suddenly much more affluent and independent than their peasant relatives, and suddenly confronted with a Hispanic urban society.

      Why then did Quechua speakers relexify their language and create Media Lengua? It may be useful here to compare Media Lengua with pidgins and creoles. Most theories of pidgin (and hence creole) genesis assume that pidgins emerged through the need for communication among people with different language backgrounds, processes of incomplete target-language learning due to quantitatively restricted second language input, and qualitative restrictions on the target-language input through the use of foreigner-talk registers by speakers of dominant groups. None of these processes contributed to the emergence of Media Lengua.

First, Media Lengua is an intragroup language, not known outside the communities where it is spoken. Because its structure is almost entirely Quechua and the vocabulary taken from Spanish has been both relexified and adapted to Quechua phonology, it is no more intelligible to Spanish speakers than Quechua is. In fact few, if any, Spanish speakers understand Media Lengua, while a substantial number of them have some knowledge of Quechua through contacts with Indians from different communities in the region. And when I played tapes of Media Lengua to Quechua speakers from nearby areas, they could recognize it as some sort of strange Quechua - ­presumably because of the suffixes - but could not understand it.

      Second, Media Lengua cannot be considered to be a case of learning Spanish as a second language, since many Media Lengua speakers speak fluent Spanish and Media Lengua is very different from Spanish interlanguage. If it were the product of an ongoing process of second language learning we would expect much more variation in the language.

      Finally, Media Lengua and Spanish foreigner talk have different features. Spanish foreigner talk is characterized by the use of diminutives, and a general reduction of Spanish functional categories. Only in the absence of articles do we find coincidental similarity with Media Lengua.

3. Sociolinguistic situation ⇫ ¶

The Media Lengua-speaking communities studied here are located on the fringe of a Quechua-speaking area, to which the community historically belonged. Due to its geographical situation and due to the necessity for and possibility of its inhabitants to make frequent trips to the capital to look for work, the community has come to be culturally differentiated from neighbouring areas to the extent that its people find it necessary to set themselves apart from the neighbours.

It is not used with outsiders, but neither is it a secret language. Rather it is an ordinary, day-to-day community-level form of communication.

      Media Lengua is either learned as a first language or, now that language shift towards Spanish is more advanced, as a second language, in any case before Quechua. Only the oldest generation may still have Quechua as its first language, but everyone has some knowledge of Media Lengua. Many people now in their early middle age are fluently trilingual in Quechua, Media Lengua, and Spanish. Some older people have less fluent Spanish, many younger people only rudimentary Quechua.

In the communities, Spanish is the language of contacts with the non-Indian world and that of the school, while Quechua is the language of tradition and of contacts with the Indian campesinos higher up the slopes, and Media Lengua is the language of daily life within the community.

4. Phonology ⇫ ¶

Media Lengua phonology resembles that of Quechua, so that Spanish words are often adapted. Since we are concerned with the fate of the Spanish words in Media Lengua, when incorporated into a predominantly Quechua phonology, the most important differences involve elements or combinations of elements present in Spanish but not in Quechua. The voiced stops [b], [d], and [g] occur in Quechua primarily in loans from Spanish and from unidentified Amerindian substrate languages. In addition, they can result from rules that voice initial consonants of affixes. We find that Spanish /e/ and /o/ are often, but not always, pronounced as [i] and [u], respectively (with some variation that also occurs in the Quechua pronunciation of Spanish loans). The Spanish vowels [e] and [o] are often retained in names and interjections. In stressed position [e] and [o] are more frequently retained than in unstressed position.

Tables 1 and 2 give the phoneme inventory of of Media Lengua. Unlike Peruvian and Bolivian Quechua, where [e] and [o] often occur as the result of the (sometimes lexicalized) lowering of /i/ and /u/ in the context of the postvelar stop /q/, Ecuadorian Quechua, lacking /q/, only has [i] and [u].

5. Noun phrase ⇫ ¶

There are no genders or noun classes in Quechua, and the category nominal includes pronouns, numerals, adjectives, and nouns. These can be distinguished semantically and through their distribution, but not morphologically. Derivational morphology on the noun is quite limited. The case suffixes of Media Lengua are listed in Table 3.

The typical order of elements in the noun phrase is head final:

(4)    adjective-noun     (preferred)

         kura       bindizia-xu-n        mushug/nwibu  iskwila-da   

         priest     bless-prog-3        new                    school-acc

         ‘The priest blesses the new school.’

(5)    noun-adjective

         papa    frita-da-mi/fri-shka-da-mi           kiri-ni

         potato fried-acc-aff / fry-nmlz-acc-aff   want-1sg

         ‘I want fried potatoes.’

(6)    possessor-possessed

         isi-guna    mio               muxer-pu        hermana-guna    

         that-pl      1sg.poss      woman-gen    sister-pl

         ‘Those are my wife’s sisters.’

(7)    postpositions/case suffixes  

         morocho-da-ga  inki-bi       sika-chi-shun   

         corn-acc-top    what-loc  dry-caus-fut.1pl

         ‘In what shall we dry the corn?’

The personal pronoun system of Media Lengua includes the elements shown in Table 4.

6. Verb phrase ⇫ ¶

The Media Lengua verb receives regular suffixes, as in Quechua. These fall into several categories. In Table 5 the person marking suffixes are listed:

Notice that all the verbs in Table 5 have a Spanish base (with the exception of ga- ‘be’, cf. Muysken 2010), but are all regularized. Person marking is derived from Quechua. The -naku- reciprocal marker is used here to mark verbal plural in the third person.

      The majority of the derivational suffixes found in Quechua occur in my Media Lengua data as well (cf. 8).

(8)    bi-chi-        see-caus-             ‘show’

         bi-ri-          see-refl-             ‘see oneself’

         bi-naku-    see-recp-             ‘see each other’

         bi-naya-    see-desid-            ‘like to see’

Consider now the tense / mood / aspect marking suffixes of Quechua, presented in Table 6.

Obviously, elements from these different categories of suffixes can be combined freely, as in:

(9)    ki-da             azi-ndo   chaiku-mu-rka-ngi?

         what-acc     do-subord                        tire-cis-pst-2sg

         ‘How did you tire yourself out?’       

7. Simple sentences ⇫ ¶

In simple sentences the subject is often not explicitly present, and XV order is dominant though not obligatory. Arguments are typically marked with case, but this can be absent in the accusative. Some typical examples are:

(10)  yo-ga               fiti-wa-lla-di-mi                    kiri-ni

         1sg.pro-top   little-dim-delim-emph-aff want-1sg

         ‘I only want a very little bit!’

(11)  inki      kuchillu-n-di        korta-ka-ngi   pan-da

         what   knife-ins-emph     cut-pst-2sg    bread-acc

         ‘With what knife did you cut the bread?’

Negation is marked with a pre-constituent negator no and a post-constituent (often post-verbal) negator -chu. The latter is not always present. 

(12)  llubi-kpi       mañana       no        i-sha-chu     

         rain-subord.ds  tomorrow          neg    go-fut.1sg-neg

         ‘If it rains, I won’t go tomorrow.’

(13)  boskuna-ga    no        xwirti      toma-shka-ngichi

         2pl.pro-top   neg      strong    drink-mir-2pl

         ‘You (pl) did not drink a whole lot!’

8. Complex sentences ⇫ ¶

Media Lengua complex sentences are formed in various ways. The principal way, as in Quechua, is through verbal suffixes. These can be nominalizations:

(14)  -y         ‘infinitive’

         -shka   ‘definite’  

         -na      ‘indefinite’,     ‘infinitive’

         -k         ‘agentive’

Alternatively, they mark adverbial subordination:

(15)  -sh(p)a  ‘same subject’

   -kpi      ‘different subject’

   -ndu    ‘no differentiation for subject’

The elements marked in bold in the fragment below illustrate these suffixes.

On the whole, subordinate clauses precede the head (in the case of relatives), the main verb (complements), and the main clause (adverbials), but there are exceptions in this respect.

In addition, a number of Spanish coordinating conjunctions have been introduced into Media Lengua. Most productive are i ‘and’ and pero ‘but’, but o ‘or’ and sino ke ‘but rather’ occur as well. There are also a few cases of subordinating ki ‘that’, porque ‘because’ and aunke ‘although’.

9. Other features ⇫ ¶

The most important other feature of Media Lengua (and Quechua) to be mentioned is the presence of a number of class-free suffixes or enclitic markers. Examples are:

(17)  chango-bi-ga       warangitu       sinta-xu-n-chari

         Chango-loc-top cactus.beer     exis-prog-3-dub

         ‘There may be cactus beer at Chango’s.’

(18)  todabia   llubi-xu-n-lla-mi

         still         rain-prog-3-delim-aff

         ‘It looks like it is still raining a bit.’

Thus we find a topic marker -ga, and uncertain knowledge marker -chari, a delimitative marker -lla and an affirmative marker -mi.