On the importance of legal history to Afro-Hispanic linguistics and creole studies

This paper claims that legal history has much to offer to the study of the Afro-European languages that developed in the Americas. In particular, it is suggested that a comparative analysis of colonial slave laws may help us better understand why certain colonies were more conducive to the formation/preservation of creole languages than others. This study builds on the recently-proposed Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (Sessarego, 2015, Sessarego, 2017) and, in so doing, it provides data that weaken the assumptions on which the Afrogenesis Hypothesis was based (McWhorter, 2000).