# Grammatical interference  
The incorporation of a lexicon of African origin is perceived as a positive aspect of the contact between languages, since it enriches the linguistic repertoire of the transplanted European languages, characterizing them as varieties that can be distinguished from the original colonial languages. In contrast, the interference of African languages in the pronunciation of certain  
sounds, or the modification of grammatical structures, is regarded as harmful to the integrity of Portuguese or Spanish. Mastery of the colonizer's language was used to distinguish between two important categories of enslaved Africans, the Ladinos, who could already express themselves well in the languages of the colonizers, and the Boçais, who did not yet have a perfect command of their masters' languages and whose speech exhibited traces of their mother tongues.  
The term Bocal first appeared in the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century, with its earliest recorded use in Portugal. The first written records of the Spanish designation date back to the sixteenth century. Its use continued until the mideighteenth century, reaching its height during the Renaissance period, with plays and poems that mimicked the hesitant speech of Africans (Lipski, n.d., p. 9). In Latin America, reference was made to the Spanish word Bocal in poems and songs from the mid-seventeenth century, with similar linguistic characteristics to those identified in the Spanish texts. This word first appears in documentation from mining areas of Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia and Guatemala. There are few remaining documents to attest to Afro-Hispanic speech of the eighteenth century, and these are from Cuba and Mexico only. The geographical distribution of the existing texts reflects the profile of trafficking in Latin America. The nineteenth century texts come from three regions: Cuba (and Puerto Rico), the coast of Peru and the region of Buenos Aires/Montevideo (Lipski, n.d., p. 10).