How ‘Portuguese’ are Palenquero and Chabacano really? Bart Jacobs and Mikael Parkvall Jagiellonian University | Stockholm University A long-lasting debate within creole studies concerns the scarcity of Spanish- based creoles and the theoretical implications this may have. However, there is no agreement as to how many genuinely Spanish-based creoles there are in the world, and identifying the size of that group can generate controversies. Papiamentu, for instance, is canonically classified as a Spanish-based creole, even though most scholars at present seem to agree its origins are Creole Portuguese. A Portuguese lineage has on various occasions and by various authors also been claimed for Chabacano (Philippine Creole Spanish) and Palenquero (spoken in Colombia). These creoles, too, were supposedly once Portuguese-based, only to subsequently be ‘relexified’ towards Spanish. This paper argues that there is little linguistic basis for that claim. Although both creoles do indeed seem to have received some Portuguese (Creole) input, we maintain that this input was limited and substratal in nature, and thus has no bearing on the classification (whether diachronic or synchronic) of the two creoles as truly Spanish-based. Keywords: Spanish creoles, Palenquero, Chabacano, Papiamentu, Portuguese, Spanish, relexification, lexifier, substrate 1. Introduction The alleged scarcity of Spanish-based creoles is at the source of a long-lasting debate within creole studies (e.g. McWhorter, 2000 and elsewhere; Lipski, 2005a and elsewhere). The debate is hampered, however, by the fact that there is no agreement on the number of genuinely Spanish-based creoles to begin with. The APiCs (Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Structures; Michaelis et al. 2013) is an online typological database with historical and linguistic data of most the world’s languages considered creoles, along with some other contact languages. It sub- https://doi.org/10.1075/rro.19001.jac | Published online: 27 March 2020 Revue Romane issn 0035-3906 | e‑issn 1600-0811 © John Benjamins Publishing Company