Hispanic Linguistics

This paper provides a legal perspective on the “Spanish Creole debate”, the debate concerning the paucity of Spanish creoles in the Americas (Lipski 2005; McWhorter 2000). In so doing, it presents the Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (LHCG) (Sessarego 2015, 2017a) and tests it on Colombian Chocó, a remote region, far away from urban centers and legal courts, where law could hardly be enforced during the colonial period.