![]() Subsequent generations of enslaved Africans in the Americas creolized the West African Pidgin English that the previous generations spoke. On the plantations in which they were forced to work, they were supervised by indentured white men whose dialects of the English language they incorporated into their West African Pidgin English. In the Americas, enslaved Africans spoke West African Pidgin English. Nonetheless, because slave raiders did not, as a deliberate policy, allow Africans who spoke the same native language to be together for fear of mutinies, they communicated with each other in the West African Pidgin that they’d learned during their one-year imprisonment on the coast before their forced trans-Atlantic transportation. ![]() They were a core group whose services were indispensable to the slave trade.Įnslaved Africans who arrived in the Americas from the 1600s to the 1860s were at least bilingual in their native languages and West African Pidgin English. This is why I think the Lancados from Britain weren’t just random fun-seeking Britons, political dissidents running away from political persecution, or outlaws evading the consequences of their crime at home. In other words, West-African-Pidgin-English-speaking coastal areas served as the venue for a linguistic initiation ritual for enslaved Africans before their eventual expatriation to the Americas. Whenever Africans were enslaved from the coast or the hinterland, they were first imprisoned for at least a year “in the coastal barracoons and factories before transportation” to America and the Caribbean islands. The ensuant language, over time, which came to be known as West African Pidgin English, became mostly structurally African and mostly lexically English. The emergent language also began to mimic the structure of the languages of its non-native West African speakers. Words from Mandinka, Igbo, Serer, Wolof, Temne, Susu, and soon began to creep into the language. With more Africans speaking the emergent language, it evolved fundamentally. In time, other Africans came to live and socialize with the mix-raced communities that had formed in the coasts, and learned to speak WACE. The resultant language was called West African Coast English (WACE). ![]() Linguists call this process “levelling,” that is, uniformizing linguistic codes to aid unimpeded communication.Īfter the Lancados from Britain arrived in coastal West Africa, they married African women and gave birth to biracial children who spoke a fusion of the languages of their mothers and their fathers. My own suspicion is that the lancados were sent to West Africa by slave merchants preparatory to the mass enslavement of Africans, as I will show later.Īt the time of their emigration, Standard English hadn’t been birthed, and they spoke different dialects of the English language.īecause they spoke different dialects of English, which were sometimes mutually unintelligible, they devised a means of communication by identifying what was common to them and abandoning dialectal shibboleths that were unique to them. The lancados from Britain, Hancock pointed out, were a mix of fun-seeking adventurers, criminals escaping justice from their homeland, and political refugees running away from persecution. ![]() The Portuguese called them-and other Europeans who came to Africa-lancados, which denoted people who “threw themselves” from ships into distant, unknown lands. Nonetheless, although it formed in coastal West Africa, as it with most pidgins, Guinea Coast Creole English emerged from Europe and merged with African languages, creating a situation where most of the vocabulary of the new language is European while its structure is mostly African.Īccording to Hancock, Guinea Coast Creole English was born when, in 1553, British sailors made the decision to migrate to West Africa permanently. Guinea Coast Creole English formed along the coasts of what is now Equatorial Guinea, Western Cameroon, southern Nigeria, southern Benin Republic, Togo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, the Gambia, and Senegal. Hancock calls the ancestor language that connects large swaths of Black people in Anglophone Africa and the Americas “Guinea Coast Creole English.” (“Guinea” is the historic term used to refer to Black people, which traces lexical provenance to Portuguese Guiné by way of the North African Berber Ghinawen, which means “the burnt people,” apparently in reference to our dark skin.) ![]()
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