The aim of the paper is to discuss names and naming practices among Africans and their descendants in slave societies in the Americas and to present a brief overview of naming systems among these groups in colonial as well as modern Brazil. Data from previous research on names and naming practices in a number of slave societies in the Americas constitute the point of departure for discussing who named enslaved Africans and their sons and daughters, in order to provide an overview of the different types of names that have been registered for such groups, and to comment on how these names may have been chosen and used, as well as how they reflect power relations and express resistance. The paper shows that owners were not always the name-givers of slaves and that, although African names are rare in historical records, modern naming practices may still include components of African origins and evoke memories of collective experiences.

Resumen El presente artículo se centra en el uso variable de las construcciones adverbiales locativas del tipo (a)delante de mí – (a)delante mío en el español del Uruguay. Estudiamos los usos de tales variantes, destacando el proceso diacrónico de cambio lingüístico y los mecanismos subyacentes a este. A través del análisis cuantitativo de un conjunto de más de dos mil datos extraídos de cinco corpus comparables, describimos los contextos lingüísticos de empleo de estas construcciones entre 1900 y 2019. Comprobamos que la probabilidad de encontrar la variante posesiva aumenta con el tiempo y que esta forma innovadora se difunde particularmente junto a adverbios prefijados y con referentes de las 1a y 2a personas del singular (como en a-delante mío y a-trás tuyo). Al comparar estos resultados con los que se han obtenido anteriormente con datos de España, constatamos que el español uruguayo y el peninsular comparten una gramática probabilística de esta variación morfosintáctica, mostrando tendencias altamente similares con relación a los factores lingüísticos que condicionan el fenómeno estudiado (persona gramatical, número gramatical, tipo de locativo).

This article focuses on the analysis of a specific vocabulary, possibly the remains of a mining language spoken by descendants of Africans. It analyzes 149 lexical items that were registered in the 1920s in a rural region of Minas Gerais, near the city of Diamantina. Based on earlier historical and linguistic studies, as well as on dictionaries of relevant African languages, the lexical study aims to analyze 149 words and expressions in order to verify the etymologies, and determine whether they fit the demographic data available on the origins of the slave population in this area. The second aim is to analyze the distribution of the lexical items in different semantic domains and word classes and compare the observed tendencies, as well as other linguistic characteristics and social functions, with other mining languages and/or similar Afro-Brazilian and Afro-European varieties. The results indicate that Umbundu maintained a high status in the area, and that this variety was not limited to mining activities, but was probably used in everyday life as a secret code that was part of the strategies of resistance among slaves.

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