Why Am I Here?

At this point, if you’re still reading you might be wondering why I chose to ship off to Colombia, picked Cartagena to hang out in, and left during Penn State’s finals week, all seemingly at random. The truth is, this trip has been in the works since August when I first sat down in with Dr. John Lipski, a prominent professor in the Spanish, Italian and Portuguese Department in University Park. John, sometimes affectionately referred to as the Indiana Jones of Linguistics, has been traveling to remote locations, dealing in exotic languages, and narrowly avoiding ancient booby traps for the past few decades. In his lab, along with two other undergrads, Mindy and Mary Beth, and one grad student, Lauren, we explored the languages and culture of a small rural, town in coastal Colombia, San Basilio de Palenque. 

Palenqueros have a fascinating history, including the distinction of the being the longest standing pueblo in the New World originally established by escaped Spanish slaves. So, since the 1500s, Palenque has juggled its cultural heritage alongside linguistic pressures. What has resulted is a bilingual town speaking an easily recognizable brand of Spanish common to Coastal Colombia and a creole tongue called Lengua Palenquera (or simply, Lengua) which mixes elements of Spanish with characteristics from the Bantu family of African languages. However, a stigma developed around Lengua, discouraging Palenqueros from using it outside of the town and drove it close to extinction. And yet, in the past half-century, with an influx of interest from outside scholars and researchers, many Palenqueros have redoubled their efforts at preserving and proliferating their language. A Lengua Palenquera renaissance. 

So, why am I here? The more I learned about Palenque, the more I wanted to know. I developed my own research questions, as did Mary Beth, Mindy, and Lauren. The three undergrads turned that question into an application for the PIRE grant, which will allow us to continue our investigations through June and July at Radboud University in the Netherlands (but that is a story for another day). Meanwhile, our lab group of five planned a two-week trip for early May so we could truly get our hands dirty, doing linguistics field-research in literal fields. For the week prior to our work in Palenque, Mary Beth, Mindy and I took the opportunity to get a taste for Colombian culture and language at spent it in Cartagena. 

If you’re still interested, here is a poster that outlines what sort of language-y goodness I’ll be getting into for the next 12 days: