Variables in contact: nominal address terms in Palenquero and Palenquero Spanish

Abstract This study examines nominal address in Palenquero and Palenquero Spanish, two languages spoken in the historically Afro-Colombian creole community of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. Drawing on survey data from 62 bilingual speakers within a Variational Pragmatics framework, we model address-term choice with Bayesian multinomial mixed-effects regression, accounting for the multiple responses each speaker contributed. In both systems, address selection is conditioned chiefly by power and, secondarily, by social distance, while gender, age, and education play little systematic role. The two languages nonetheless encode these pressures differently: Palenquero keeps a broad, flexible repertoire in which kinship and solidarity forms remain available even in asymmetrical encounters, whereas Palenquero Spanish uses a narrower inventory more tightly aligned with hierarchy. We tentatively propose that Spanish functions here as a pragmatifier, shaping the salience of sociopragmatic variables without supplying the forms through which they are realized.