A substantial majority of the Atlantic slave trade was directed to the Portuguese and Spanish colonial empires in the Americas.  Africans were a majority of the founding populations of Brazil and the Hispanic Caribbean, and their descendants still constitute a majority or substantial minority in these regions today.  What were the linguistic consequences of this forcible transfer of some six million people to what is now referred to as Latin America?  Their original languages, such as Kimbundu, Kikongo and Yoruba, were mostly suppressed and lost in the New World, as their speakers were forced to attempt to communicate in the language of their oppressors – Spanish or Portuguese.   But the consequences of this language contact and abrupt language shift were manifold, and the traces of this history are still evident in popular speech in Brazil and the Caribbean.  Several creole languages drawing on Spanish and Portuguese still exist (e.g. Palenquero in Colombia), and many more must have existed in maroon communities, palenques and quilombos.  But many features of the popular local varieties of both Spanish and Portuguese also reflect this history of language contact and shift.  Number marking in nouns and verbs is highly variable in the vernaculars of Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, etc.  Phonological reductions consistent with impositions from Niger-Congo languages are rampant, as are other morphosyntactic phenomena not originating in European Spanish or Portuguese.  The language of most people in these countries thus reflects the same kind of African-European syncretism found in their cultures, music and cuisines.