# Languages  
The previous subsection explains that a specific African vocabulary, particularly terms related to religion, gastronomy, songs and greetings, survived. This subsection focuses on the presence of African languages and their transformations in different diaspora settings.  
Margarida Petter discusses the presence of African languages in the Americas as a whole and problematizes the fact that creole languages were not created in the majority of the countries in question. For Petter, this does not mean that African languages were not spoken in regions of the Americas or that they have completely disappeared. Much to the contrary, she points to the importance of the African lexical influence and grammatical interference found in Portuguese and Spanish in the Atlantic diaspora. Moreover, she highlights the survival of African languages in Afro-Brazilian cults (the languages have a liturgical function and their use is restricted to initiates and practitioners, in a context where language is understood as a symbolic vehicle of expression and not of 'linguistic competence') and in contemporary black rural communities.  
Alain Anselin addresses the invisibility that the authorities created with regard to the languages spoken by enslaved Africans in the Americas. Despite this invisibility, there were/are clear links to African heritage "inscribed" in the very materiality of crops', such as the names given to landscapes, tools and foods; this is also the case in the realm of intangible culture, which includes  
songs, prayers, dances and so on. Anselin argues that the 'invisible ties' that link the diaspora to Africa refer not only to vocabulary, which in itself reveals many keys to transculturation, but also to the negotiation of codes in the formation of new languages.