DEFINING THE TARGET LANGUAGE IN LANGUAGE GENESIS 69

 languages. It must be mutually unintelligible without special exposure
 and acquisition, and it must be felt by its users to be a separate entity.
 It must be sufficiently homogeneous and stable to be described by a
 single grammar with variation rather than a combination of grammars.
 It must be sufficiently elaborated to be used in a wide range of
 communicative domains. As early as 1772, then, a portion of the
 community was bilingual in Palenquero and Spanish. This would have
 been at least five generations after the establishment of PSB.

 4. Discussion

 At the outset of this paper, I was hoping to answer several questions
 about Palenquero. Was there a target language for the Palenquero
 community? If so, what was it aiming to acquire and why? Is imperfect
 learning of some pre-existing language (i.e. Spanish, Portuguese-based
 pidgin, etc.) an adequate description for the formation of Palenquero?
 As Baker (1990) argued for in his analysis of Mauritian Creole, to claim
 that a Spanish or Portuguese-based pidgin was the TL of the
 Palenqueros suggests that there was a choice in the matter. In other
 words, the PSB community aimed to acquire Spanish instead of Kikongo.
 Furthermore, it suggests that the group strived to acquire native-like
 fluency in the language. In the following discussion I will address each
 of these suggestions in turn.
 Was there a choice in which the Palenqueros opted to acquire a pre-
existing language over another (i.e. Spanish, Portuguese, Portuguese-
based pidgin, etc.)? Although many of the cimarrones probably arrived
to the colony speaking a common language (mutually intelligible Bantu
languages), there must have been some degree of heterogeneity in PSB
(at least half were extra-Bantu speakers). Furthermore, some (if not the
majority) had some contact with a Portuguese-based pidgin4 and maybe
a Spanish-based pidgin. If the Palenqueros needed to communicate with
someone who did not share their ancestral language, Spanish would
have served as a logical lexical fountain given that all groups had at
least some degree of access to it. This clearly does not imply that Spanish
was a TL for the Palenqueros. It simply means that for communication,
there was clearly no other logical choice for lexical selection.


 SSlaves were often held captivity in Africa waiting for the proper season and
winds for the ships to sail to South America. During this time, it's possible that
many could have been exposed to pidgin Portuguese to a certain degree.