Colombian Creole: Not Dead Yet

On the surface, it resembles any other impoverished Colombian village. But when adults here speak with one another, their language draws inspiration from as far away as the Congo River Basin in Africa. This peculiar speech has astonished linguists since they began studying it several decades ago.

The language is known up and down Colombia's Caribbean coast as Palenquero and here simply as "lengua" - tongue. Theories about its origins vary, but one thing is certain: It survived for centuries in this small community, which is now struggling to keep it from perishing.

Today, fewer than half of the community's 3,000 residents actively speak Palenquero, although many children and young adults can understand it and pronounce some phrases.

"Palenge a senda tielan ngombe ri nduse i betuaya," Sebastián Salgado, 37, a teacher at the public school here, said before a classroom of teenage students on a recent Tuesday morning. (The sentence roughly translates into English as, "Palenque is the land of cattle, sweets and basic staples.")

Palenquero is thought to be the only Spanish-based Creole language in Latin America. But its grammar is so different that Spanish speakers can understand almost nothing of it. Its closest relative may be Papiamento, spoken on the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, which draws largely from Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, linguists say.