The paper examines the issue of the emergence and composition of African languages and their decline in Uruguay. The presence of the African element in the Uruguayan demographic and cultural panorama has been recognized for a long time, but only in recent years has the attention of linguists really been drawn to the question of the African component in the linguistic history of Uruguay, as well as the problem of the African influence on the Uruguayan Spanish. This article contains a brief overview of the literature on the topic and known information about the existence of African languages on the territory of Uruguay in the 17th – early 20th centuries.