Palenquero Spoken by residents of a town established by maroons who had escaped from Cartegena, Palenquero is seen as a form of cultural resistance. Palenquero is a Spanishbased Creole spoken in the Colombian town of Palenque de San Basilio, located in the province of Bolívar. The palenque was originally one of the many fortresses founded by maroons in the town throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. Since around the 16th century, sporadic armed conflicts appear to have occurred between maroons and Spaniards, but the community of San Basilio reached a truce with the colonial government in 1691 and has been free ever since. However, Palenque de San Basilio remained isolated from mainstream Colombian society until 1980, and for this reason its Creole language has been preserved. The Palenque language was discovered recently, after the first systematic description in the Bikerton and Escalante article in 1971. Since many maroons had not been in contact with people of European descent, the Palenqueros spoke Creole languages that include Spanish and Kikongo, a language spoken in central Africa. Palenquero does not have an official spelling system and, similar to other Creoles, almost always the nouns, adjectives, verbs and determiners do not change. In addition, the grammar gender does not exist and because of that, the adjectives descend from the Spanish masculine form. For instance: lengua africano = ‘African language’ Esta crema está sucia Ese nata é susio =‘This cream is dirty.’ Adicionalmente, la pluralidad en el sintagma nominal se expresa a través de la partícula ‘ma’ (posiblemente de origen bantú): un ría → un ma ría = ‘a day’ ‘some days’ By Sakina
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