Indigenous Influence in Puerto Rican Spanish

Manuel Alvarez Nazario's El influjo indígena en el español de Puerto Rico is an important study and constant entry in the bibliographies of studies on the Taino legacy in the Caribbean. A short study using the existing corpus of known Taino lexicon and expressions in Puerto Rico and the Hispanic Caribbean, Alvarez Nazario extrapolates from the Island Carib and Garifuna language to glimpse at the deeper structure and evolution of the Taino tongue. Since the Island Carib and Garifuna language is, drawing on Taylor's research, an Arawakan language that survived through the Igneri women subjugated by Caribs, Alvarez Nazario believes it may be a reliable indicator on some of the features of the Taino language. Indeed, by drawing on data from linguistic studies of Garifuna, Igneri, Lokono and other Arawakan languages of South America, one can deduce some of the vocabulary and grammatical features of the Taino tongue. Unfortunately, however, the author seems to think the Taino language spread through a late migration into the Greater Antilles that supplanted or possibly conquered the earlier Igneri. Thus, like the later Carib conquerors, the Taino become an invasive force who may have defeated the Igneri and possibly even imposed naboria status on them. Needless to say, the evidence for this is lacking. It nonetheless reflects earlier scholarship in which linguistic and ceramic changes necessarily implied migration rather than local evolution or adaptation.

Despite the issue with the assumptions of migration and a possible "conquest" of the Igneri by the Taino, using the scholarship on Island Carib languages available since the 17th century enriches our understanding of the Taino language. These sources buttress Alvarez Nazario's identification of indigenismos in Puerto Rican Spanish with likely or possible explanations for changed in pronunciation as the words entered the Spanish vernacular. Indigenismos in the case of Puerto Rico, like the Dominican Republic and Cuba, tend to be most obvious with place names, references to everyday life, flora, fauna, and domestic architecture or instruments (yuca, casabe, cayos, canoa, batey, enagua, maraca, bohio, and conuco, for instance). Unsurprisingly, the material culture of the indigenous people survived long after the dissolution of the Taino sociopolitical order. Words reflecting this culture, which was adopted by the Spanish, Africans, and mixed-race progeny of all three groups left a permanent imprint in Puerto Rican Spanish. In the countryside especially, this legacy of the Taino language and culture is quite strong. Indeed, indigenismos from the Taino language even referring to forms of dress, weapons like the macana, and even eyes (macos in Puerto Rican Spanish) suggest indigenous vocabulary was possibly pervasive in other aspects of criollo life. Unfortunately, no surviving voabularios of the Taino language survive from the 1500s, although Fray Domingo de Vico was said to have composed one in the 1540s based on the language spoken in Hispaniola. 

The remainder of Alvarez Nazario's study gives multiple examples of how indigenismos were incorporated into the Spanish language. Additional suffixes and adaptations turned or adapted many local terms into verbs or new meanings in colonial and modern Puerto Rican Spanish. Indigenismos from other languages of the Americas also left an imprint, including Nahuatl, Carib, and South American Guajiro (ture, for stool, is supposedly derived from Guajiro). Overall, the indigenous influence profoundly shaped Puerto Rican Spanish as it provided the lexicon for the local features of land, flora, fauna, agriculture, peasant homesteads, and perhaps even the term jibaro. Even if the Taino really was no longer spoken by the end of the 16th century, survivors and their children laid the foundation for the Creole culture of our rural majority. Indeed, the linguistic evidence provides further support for the proponents of of Taino survival as some of the vocabulary, expressions, and toponyms were likely retained by those descending from the indigenous population.