User:Hancocka/Slavery'sImpactonAfricanEnglish

Slavery's Impact on African English

Before slavery, America had no concept of “race” because different ethnicities had very limited interactions. As the European population in America grew, race became more important. Native American groups found strength in numbers as well did the African slaves who were brought to America, introducing the idea of race. Within different races were different cultures and different languages. The contact of different languages due to slavery brought changes to the African American English language. The history of the English language, conditions of slavery developing plantation pidgin and granting freedom to the slaves influenced how Africans spoke English. The way English was spoken would never be the same again.

English Roots

American English derived from European English and as colonization spread across America, the English language spread too. People from all over Europe, including the Irish, French, Scottish, Dutch, and German, brought their own languages and dialects which contributed to the melting pot that was the United States. Charleston, North Carolina and New Orleans, Louisiana are a few of the first settlements in the south. One trait that was brought from Europe to these settlements is dropping the –g in the endings of words like running, jumping, and playing which began in Europe as late as the nineteenth century (Brooks 4). The r-lessness found in the south also derived from European English. This type of r-less speech indicated wealth and plantation life (Finegan 9). People all across the south would drop their rs to sound wealthy. People in the south are very conservative; to this day the r-less and –g dropping accent is found throughout the southern United States.

Slavery

People from many different areas of the world were brought to America to work as slaves, brining a whole new language variety to add to America’s diverse language heritage. The majority of these people were from Africa, “Where they arrived speaking as many as forty to fifty different languages” (Nichols 54). Since the boundaries of the different countries in Africa have changed so much over the years, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where many of the slaves were from. Instead of using the names of countries, linguists use geographical regions to describe where they were from. According to Patricia Nichol’s studies, “A large portion of the vocabulary of blacks on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia...come from the Sierra Leone region” (Nichols 57). Slaves from many other regions such as the upper Guinea Coast and the Gold Coast were used throughout the south as well.

Slave traders were very strategic in how they bought their slaves. They bought people who could not speak the same language as the others to force them to learn English. A pidgin is, “a reduced language that results from extended contact between groups of people with no language in common” (Holm 5). Socially, the group with less power, in this case the slaves, are more likely to use the words and phrases from the new language. Since the slaves could not speak a common language, “…together they created and learned a common language that can still be heard in many homes, churches, and school yards of the lowcountry: Gullah” (Nichols 54). Speakers of Gullah and Kanaka, another language developed by the slaves, claim they are speaking English, but linguists have decided that these languages are not mutually intelligible with other English vernaculars (Filppula 280). Words like banjo and bogus are common remnants of that language.

Pidgins

Plantation life was very unique in the way pidgins developed. One way is that the workers came from many diverse groups that did not speak the same language. Another reason it was unique is that they were immigrants and were not around the language they spoke so they never could use it to communicate with others, forgetting it over time. A final reason is the social distances between laborers and their masters. There were limited interactions between the two so language contact was restricted. It would be impossible for American overseers to learn that many different languages so they resigned to use the language that these people would soon learn, English. The reason it generally stopped as a pidgin is that the contact between languages was so limited they could not completely learn the new language.

The main reason pidginization occurs is because the new language people are trying to learn is influenced by the old language. For example, in this case the target language is English. The immigrants coming from various countries already know a language and have an idea of what the grammatical structure of their language is. The immigrant does not learn the target language completely, only an imperfect version of it. This imperfect version of the language is less complex than either the target language or the language they already knew. The laborer learns that this pidginized language is the only way to communicate with others. Since nobody else speaks the same original language, each version of the plantation pidgin is different (Siegel 18). The original languages of these people were forgotten in the shadow of English. The Altered Model Theory states that the origin of these imperfect versions of the language is due to the speakers of the target language simplifying their language in order to communicate with those who do not speak it. The Imperfect Learning Theory says that, “the learners’ imperfect productions of the target language provide the basis for the pidgin language” (Siegel 19). Eventually, the pidgin language becomes closer to the target language and more synchronized with other speakers of the pidgin. Different pieces of the pidgin were more prevalent than others.

The word kom is one of the most productive and wide spread features of English pidgin. They can be both stative and non-stative verbs. For example, someone might say, “A kom deh respet dat won: I was respecting that one” or “Ma hosban kom sen mi di pepas: My husband sent me the papers” (McWhorter 358). It often occurs when with deh or it can be interpreted literally as come. Both children and adults use kom in the non-stative form more often than the stative form. It is also used sequentially more often than non-anterior and anterior and it is also more affirmative than negative (McWhorter 360). Kom is an important marker in English pidgin because it can be used so many ways. It is one of many words the Africans learned as they began communicating with the slave owners.

Pronouncing the, this, and that as de, dis, and dat is another linguistic trait that is still spoken in the south today, by not only the African community but by educated white people as well. According to Brooks, there is reason to believe that de, dis, and dat were being used in Sussex as early as the Tudor age (Brooks 10). As the languages of Europe changed, several did not obtain the th- sound that English has. Slaves could have gained this trait because of an inability to pronounce the th- sound as many other immigrants, from France or Germany for example, have trouble pronouncing it, leaving an accent on their version of the language.

Gullah is still spoken by communities of African Americans on the coast of South Carolina. The origins of this language begin with plantation pidgin. With most immigrant languages, the language becomes more similar to the target language with time. Younger generations of Africans should speak more like people native to English but since interactions were limited between the slaves and the plantation owners, the language never fully developed into English. Another influence to Gullah is from the Indians. Since the Indians were enslaved by the Europeans as well, the two worked side by side in the fields. They learned English as the Indians learned it, combining their native languages influences into the pidgin. The population of African Americans rose dramatically while the population of Native Americans fell and the influence the Native American language had decreased. The Africans learned English mostly through people who knew English as a second language and learned all the imperfections as well (Nichols 91). It was under these conditions that Gullah was formed.

Freedom of the African Americans

The late nineteenth century symbols African Americans’ fight for freedom with the passing of the Jim Crow laws. Differences in English varieties began to disinagrate as European influences blended together. With the African American’s freedom, the barricades that restricted their mastering the English language disappeared; they were exposed to the language full force and they were allowed to learn their target language. Salikoko S. Mufwene says that, “The ethnic dialectal distinctions that still survive in the United States today do not reflect different kinds of language restructuring processes; they reflect the varying impact of divergent social ecologies on the language evolution” (Fippula 288). Social class affects how the language is spoken by different groups of people, not the restructuring of the language. Even though it can be argued that Gullah stabilized by the end of the nineteenth century, white southern English reflects socioeconomic changes in the nineteenth century. The abolition of slavery and the plantation industry’s downfall ended the importation of African labor and there was an increase of European immigrants. This prevented any major language restructuring (Fippula 290). Influences from immigrants affected the southern language.

Conclusion

African American Southern English was greatly influenced by slavery. Slave owners separated people who spoke the same language in order to force them to learn English. The limited interactions they had with people who spoke English prohibited their learning of the language and left them speaking plantation pidgin. They learned most of their English from people who spoke it as a second language or from elders who have learned bits and pieces and all the imperfections that went with it. The south is a very conservative community, causing several phrases such as dat, de, and dis to remain in use throughout the centuries. Slavery as well as immigration changed the way English was spoken throughout the nation.

References

Brooks, Cleanth. The Language of the American South. Athens: University of Georgia Press: 1985.

Fippula, Markku. Juhani Klemola and Heli Paulasto. Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Finegan, Edward and John R. Rickford. Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Holm, John. An Introduction to Pidgins and Creoles. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

McWhorter, John. Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, c2000.

Nichols, Patricia Causey. Voices of Our Ancestors: Language Contact in Early South Carolina. Columbia, S.C. : University of South Carolina Press, c2009.

Siegel, Jeff. Language Contact in a Plantation Environment: A Sociolinguistic History of Fiji. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.