The origins and evolution of Caribbean Spanish are the subject of continuing scholarly debate, the most controversial aspect of which centers on the role of prior African and creole languages. This project investigates language use in the only community in which a Spanish Creole language (Palenquero) is known to have survived in the Americas: San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia). For this reason, San Basilio is key to the investigation of the role of Creole languages in the history of Caribbean Spanish. Since its founding in the late 1600's by cimarrones (Spanish "run away African slaves"), the community of San Basilio has been bilingual in both Palenquero and Kateyano ('Castillian'). Today, a rapidly diminishing number of inhabitants continue to speak Palenquero which is related to the Afro-Portuguese creole language attested to in the Spanish Caribbean as early as the XVI century. This investigation has two main foci. First, combining ethnographic and sociolinguistic techniques, it will construct a sociolinguistic profile of San Basilio documenting the current status of bilingualism and language usage (Who speaks what to whom and why?) to assess the role these social factors have in language maintenance/abandonment and change. Second, using quantitative sociolinguistic techniques, this dissertation will investigate three linguistic variables across the two languages: the alternation of expressed subject pronouns with zero-subjects; the variation between s, h, and 0 (e.g. tu tiene0/tieneh/tienes 'you have'); and the variable prenasalization of initial stops (e.g. do vs. ndo 'two'). This approach will be useful in: (a) revealing the synchronic and diachronic linguistic relationship between these two speech varieties; and (b) documenting speech of a representative cross section of residents of San Basilio. In order to ameliorate the effects of the observer's paradox, the sociolinguistic profile and the collection of the data will be accomplished primarily through participant-observation and the subsequent recording of speech at the principal sites of recurrent linguistic interaction. The project contributes to the literature by the combination of ethnographic and sociolinguistic techniques of observation and data collection and the modern sociolinguistic methodology of analysis of linguistic variables to the study of this unique albeit rapidly disappearing bilingual Afro- Hispanic community.
