Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This monograph investigates language change and language evolution that occurs during periods of contact between speakers of Spanish or Portuguese as a second language and speakers of other languages in Latin America and in Europe. Changes to syntactic, lexical, and phonetic features of both languages are discussed. The book provides an overview of issues involved in language contact and change, looking primarily at naturalized language learning of colonized peoples and immigrants, while also providing an introduction into Spanish and Portuguese migration history. Ch. 1 positions this study within the framework of the author’s understanding of the processes involved in language acquisition, language borrowing, and language shift through language contact. In Ch. 2, Joseph Clancy Clements provides an overview of the historical emergence of Spanish and Portuguese on the Iberian Peninsula since the Roman times and surveys the linguistic shifts made in the Celtic substrate languages due to interaction with Latin in the centuries leading up to the Moorish invasion in 711.

In Ch. 3, C describes the fascinating and perhaps under-appreciated case of the incorporation of African slaves into both rural and urban Portugal in the fifteenth century. He discusses elements of African-Portuguese as portrayed in the literature of the period and finds similarities in this variety with other learner or restructured varieties that are acquired naturalistically (discussed later in this book). C goes on to discuss Portuguese-based creoles spoken in Africa and Asia, paying particular attention to the influence of the substrate on the development of certain markers. Ch. 4 is dedicated to a discussion of whether a stable pidgin or a creole existed in Cuba in the nineteenth century, based primarily on information gained from the correspondence of two contemporary scholars.

Ch. 5 considers the language spoken by Chinese indentured laborers, or coolies, to Cuba in the nineteenth century. Although the short thirty-year period of shipping laborers was insufficient to foster the development of a pidgin, this language variety displayed the common features of a basic variety of naturalistically learned Spanish. Chinese immigrant Spanish in the twentieth century, discussed in the following chapter on the basis of limited data provided by two informants, indicates that the acquisition processes in the formation of a pidgin is not wholly unlike those displayed by untutored second language learners.

Ch. 7 considers the situation of language contact between Spanish and Andean languages, in particular Quechua, from the conquistador and early colonization period. Despite the strong presence of Quechua linguistic features in Andean Spanish, C suggests that, due to the negative evaluation of these nonstandard features, they do not contribute towards group identity. This contrasts with the findings from the final chapter in the volume on Barranquenho, the dialect spoken in the Spanish-Portuguese border area of Barancos. C discusses issues of language prestige in the area, noting again the importance of sociopolitical factors in determining the higher prestige of Castilian Spanish over both Portuguese and Barranqueño but also commenting that linguistic identity has contributed to Barranqueño’s maintenance.

C makes ample use of examples from the languages under analysis, which appear with an English translation. This is not only a fascinating reader but is also an unusual compilation of studies, which enables a look at aspects of Spanish and Portuguese colonial expansion from a linguistic perspective. For students of Spanish and Portuguese linguistics, this work will provide a refreshing and unusual overview of the socio-political background of varieties of learner Spanish through history.