Despite their genetic relatedness, Romance languages and dialects exhibit considerable differences in their phonological systems. In rhythm typology, Spanish was long considered a textbook example of the so-called syllable-timing type, while the classifications for French and Portuguese were often disputed. Rhythmic differences were also found between the more accent-based European varieties of Portuguese and the more syllable-based Brazilian dialects. Our contribution first endeavors to carry out a phonological assessment of the degree of syllable prominence and accent prominence in European French, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as in varieties of Spanish and Portuguese spoken in the Americas. In a second step, we conduct a phonetic case study using comparable spoken language data of the varieties under investigation.

This chapter will explore, for the first time, the existence, development and characteristics of a Latin American corpus of contemporary Arthurian literature (nineteenth to twenty-first century), written both in Spanish and Portuguese. So far, the collection and study of texts from the Latin-speaking nations of North, Central and South America (Latin America) has remained unexplored. This chapter will show that this area has suffered from unjust neglect; there is, therefore, an urgency to fill this gap in Arthurian studies. Arthur, Merlin and Isolde are found in the tropical lands of Mexico or the great plains of central Brazil, and their stories were added to local motifs; they add new meanings for different communities of readers. Latin American children and younger readers were equally fond of Arthur – as much as young readers elsewhere.

The last inquisition tribunal established in the Spanish empire was founded in Cartagena de las Indias, in Colombia, in 1610. It appears that Spanish inquisitors in Cartagena prosecuted and executed far fewer people than their counterparts in Mexico City and Lima, though in contrast to those cities’ archives Cartagena’s records have been curtailed by adverse weather conditions, termites (comejénes), and the destruction of the city in 1697 by the French corsair, Baron of Pointis. As a result, few inquisition trials have survived in their entirety; we primarily know about Cartagena’s prosecutions through the case summaries that inquisitors periodically sent to the inquisition leadership in Madrid. This chapter presents an overview of the crimes, victims, and power dynamics that characterized Cartagena’s Inquisition. It highlights the ways in which the pageantry of public celebrations, the secrecy of the tribunal’s inner workings, and local and metropolitan politics affected rivalries and alliances in the region, and thereby influenced inquisitorial decisions.

Panama’s authorities identified and combatted unmarried cohabitation or "amancebamiento" as a threat to the social order. This chapter discusses marriage’s lack of popularity on the isthmus, due to non-Catholic cultural traditions as well as the convenience and potential advantages of “living in sin.” In particular, it notes a proliferation of young widows described as “single” but free from paternal and conjugal authority. Alongside legal and fiscal measures to promote marriage, cases for marital separation or annulment provide insights into gendered obligations associated with the sacrament. Such cases’ success at court depended upon family support and alleged compliance with gender obligations. Other women turned to magic to shape their marital, affective, and economic relations. Inquisitorial trails, recorded in the summaries sent from Lima or Cartagena to Madrid, detail the experiences of Afro-descendants whose amatory and divinatory techniques garnered them prominent clienteles or merged with indigenous traditions in nocturnal revelries. Finally, Portugal’s separation from the crown of Castile disrupted the slave trade more than Portuguese residents in Panama.

Bombay did not progress steadily from its uncertain beginning for it was beset by an uncompromising topography, a Portuguese landed class which refused to forfeit its valuable estates, hostile rival powers and a malarial climate which regularly took its toll on English lives. For decades, its very survival was in doubt. Even the governorship of Gerald Aungier, long celebrated for its achievements in setting Bombay on the path to modernization and legal and municipal reform, actually did little to guarantee its survival. Fortifications were neglected and the administration of justice was left in abeyance, particularly at the time of Keigwin’s rebellion of 1683 and the aftermath of the siege of 1689 which brought Bombay close to total collapse. But progress there was. Faltering it may have been but for the Company there was sufficient evidence to encourage a transition of power from Surat. And by the third decade of the eighteenth century, a Mayor’s Court was established as a decisive new phase in the administration of justice. By then, the Company could claim a certain sovereign authority over a defensible Bombay, essential conditions for the explosive growth of the eighteenth century.

We explore the necessarily comparative nature of CA’s methodology. We focus less on cross-linguistic comparisons, comparisons between talk-in-interaction in different settings, and comparisons between speakers from diverse speech communities. Instead, we consider the micro ways in which analysts work comparatively, ways that generally go unnoticed in accounts of CA’s methodology but which underpin our approach in data sessions, to building collections of phenomena, and even our research strategies when exploring certain linguistic or interactional forms. We demonstrate what can be learned from comparisons to be found in data, for example between the different responses by different participants to the same observation or question, or between different speakers’ versions of events, or from the different forms used by speakers when referring to the ‘same’ thing but in different action environments. We highlight the significance of speakers’ production of different versions of the ‘same’ something in their self-corrections. Finally, we illustrate the utility of a research strategy in which comparisons are made between speakers’ use of a certain reference form at one point in an interaction and the form they use at other points in the same interaction. In short, we explore the methodological significance of endogenous comparisons in data.

Chapter 2 tells the story of the conversion of the kings of Kongo. Nzinka a Nkuwu (King João) was baptised in 1491 but later apostatised and was succeeded by his son, King Afonso, who established an enduring Catholic dynasty in west central Africa. After acknowledging the significance of religious diplomacy, the chapter shows how the realm of immanent power was the most critical factor in the Kongo case. A close reading of the evidence indicates that the Portuguese or their ruler may have been considered to have a special association with the realm of the ancestors, while baptism was received as an initiation granting unusual powers, particularly in battle. This helps explain King João’s apostasy and is most apparent in the miraculous interpretation of the military victory that brought Afonso to the throne in 1506. However, it is also argued that conversion may have helped Afonso solidify his control of the religious field, as expressed in the iconoclastic sweeps that happened at several points in 1480–1530. The theme of cultural appeal is illustrated by a more general importation of the Portuguese culture by elites. Afonso is presented as a visionary with ambitions for societal recreation.

It has been widely recognized that how languages behave, particularly under conditions of contact with other languages, depends on their context. Using the Ethnolinguistic Vitality framework, this chapter describes the demographics, linguistic attitudes and institutional supports for heritage languages, defining the concepts and illustrating them with examples from Toronto, the context in which the HLVC project is conducted. Demographic information includes population sizes, language shift rates, and history of settlement in Toronto. Status information includes both reflections on the status of heritage languages, as a whole, in Canada and labels attributed to the specific varieties. The institutional support section reports on the number of language classes available for each language. The chapter also includes discussion of language policy, particularly for education, and the demographics of the university where the research is centered, enabling other researchers to best consider what aspects of the project might need adjusting for adaptation in other contexts.

This chapter draws cross-linguistic comparisons among the patterns reported in Chapter 5 for three linguistic variables that occur in at least three languages in the project: (VOT), (CASE), and (PRODROP). Conditioning factors, both linguistic and social, are discussed. Collapsing across rate and constraint hierarchy for each variable, we note any indication of change in either. Half the context we examine exhibit stability. Of the eight that indicate difference, half of these can be attributed to English (including both convergence and divergence). With few differences between homeland and heritage speakers to work with, we find few generalizations about what parts of the language, or which languages, change. We do see more change in one morphosyntactic variable, (CASE), than in the phonetic variable (VOT), but less in the other morphosyntactic variable (PRODROP).

Neither southern Africa’s archaeology nor its history or contemporary social and political structure can be understood without reference to its experience of colonialism and conquest or of the resistance to this. This chapter therefore looks at the archaeology of Portuguese exploration and subsequent settlement in Mozambique, as well as at the much more expansive colonisation of southern Africa set in motion by the establishment of a Dutch East India Company (VOC) base at Cape Town in 1652. It traces the spread of European settlement into the region’s interior, the emergence of new creolised populations on and beyond the frontiers of that settlement, the institutionalisation of the social, economic, and political structures that led to apartheid, and – crucially – the resistance of Indigenous societies to this. Chapter 13 also discusses the Mfecane and the emergence of the Zulu, Basotho, Ndebele, and Swazi states, among others, to emphasise their contemporaneity and potential connections with European settler expansion and to encourage comparative study of processes of state formation, migration, and population incorporation common to both.

The seventeenth century shaped Dai Viet in major ways. Like their counterpart in Cochinchina, the Le-Trinh regime directly involved in the silk for sliver trade. Eight tons of silver flew into Tongking bringing the wealth of the nation to a new level. Commerce changed culture in many ways, from the introduction of Christianity to the emergence of Lieu Hanh, a new religious figure connected to women traders. It modernised Tongking’s firearms and financed the seven campaigns against Cochinchina. It stimulated the import of Chinese books and prints, which had become more accessible and affordable to the literati class. Add to this new wealth in circulation more broadly, a construction boom, and increased participation of women. Like the thirteenth century, the Red River delta saw another political integration, this time between the military group from Thanh Hoa and the literati from the Red River delta. It may not be a coincidence that both eras s saw the extensive and intensive maritime commerce both in the country and with overseas. The synergy brought in by the maritime wealth however created a more systematically Confucianist institution from the village up. The autonomous village now became the fixed image of Vietnam.

The quotative system is routinely adduced as the locus of rapid cross–linguistic change. Aside from the prodigious number of empirical studies investigating English quotatives, quantitatively driven demonstrations of change in the quotative system of other languages remain the exception to the rule. Observing that change in languages other than English has often been intuited from isolated or anecdotal examples, we inaugurated a large–scale study of quotative variation in European and Canadian varieties of French, supplemented by data from Brazilian Portuguese and Italian. Drawing on more than 5,500 tokens representing the targeted varieties, detailed quantitative investigation revealed that only in urban varieties of Quebec and Acadian French does the innovative être comme variant (cf. English be like) qualify as a mid–range – and locally conditioned – change in progress. In other varieties that we examined, including the French and Portuguese spoken in the global cities of Paris and São Paulo respectively, we find little compelling evidence of anything other than relatively incipient change in the quotative system. Taken together, our quantitative results are damaging to ubiquitous claims that simultaneous parallel developments are purportedly affecting the quotative system of numerous languages and point to the primordial importance of community–based speech data in ratifying linguistic change.

The evolution of the Romance languages from Latin was significantly shaped by the numerous language contact environments, which resulted from conquest, colonization, and trade. This chapter traces the development of the largest Romance languages throughout Europe, with emphasis on the known or postulated effects of language contact. The chapter continues with an account of the spread of Spanish, Portuguese, and French to the Americas, together with the ensuing contacts with indigenous languages and languages of voluntary and involuntary immigration and the formation of Afro-Romance creole languages.

The Sultanate was a global state that interacted with regimes in North, West and East Africa, Mediterranean Europe, Asia Minor, the Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia. Its ideology of diplomacy focused on maintenance of the balance of power extant during the formative stage of its founding: control over the Syrian Littoral and Red Sea nautical routes to South and East Asia. Senior officers appointed from Cairo ruled Syrian provincial capitals as viceroys, tying them directly to the imperial center. On the Red Sea coast of Arabia (Hijaz), the Hasanid Sharifs of Mecca exercised local political authority, but from Baybars’ reign were compelled to comply with the Sultanate’s commercial and fiduciary policies over the spice trade. Tensions in Southeastern Asia Minor heightened when objectives of territorial stasis advocated by the Mamluks clashed with aims of territorial conquest asserted by the Ottomans. Regional principalities pursued their own goals of autonomy with varying degrees of success. The international system of commerce, centered on Venetian and Mamluk exploitation of trade routes to Asia through the Red Sea, was decisively altered by the Portuguese entry to the Indian Ocean. When the Ottomans defeated the Cairo Sultanate, its centrality in the global environment was already diminished.