Rap folklórico palenquero represents the voice of the people, says Andris Padilla Julio, leader of the Afro-Colombian hip-hop group Kombilesa Mi. The crew rapidly switches between Spanish and another language – but it is not English, the international language of hip-hop.

The other language is Palenquero, one of the two creole languages native to Colombia. There are 68 indigenous languages in the country, and many of them are under threat of going extinct from “pressure to assimilate” or Colombia’s long-running internal conflict with drug cartels and paramilitary forces.

Palenquero traces its linguistic roots to the Bantu language family native to sub-Saharan Africa, and includes influence from several romance languages as well. It is centuries old, and hip-hop might help it survive further into the 21st Century.

“At one point, Palenquero was considered poorly spoken Spanish, and because of that, people felt bad and decided not to speak it,” says Padilla Julio, who goes by the name Afro Netto. A grassroots revival in the latter half of the 20th Century sought to fight these negative stereotypes while at the same time re-establishing the language among the town’s roughly 3,500 inhabitants.