23 Language
Creating an African-American Culture—Language, Religion, and Music
Language
For the first generations of Africans enslaved in the colonies, language accommodation and acculturation were a necessity for their survival in the Western world. Depending upon when and where they came from in Africa, in addition to their own languages, different African people had varying degrees of language competence in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. As a result of trade with the Portuguese in the middle fifteenth century, bilingualism arose among West Africans along the coast. In succeeding centuries, as West Africans traded with the Dutch, French and English, some Africans continued to at least understand, and many to speak, some form of one or more European languages. Even though they spoke many different African languages, many Africans who had participated in long distance trading on the African continent spoke a “lingua franca” or trade language that allowed them to communicate among themselves (Abrahams 1983:26). African sailors on European vessels may have also spoken a “maritime jargon” (Berlin 1998; Birmingham 1981; McWhorter 1997, 2000a). The first generations of Africans and Europeans who came into contact with one another, like all people of different language groups, spoke their own language and developed apidgin , language. Pidgins included words and meaning from both languages that allowed them to communicate.
Over time, both Africans and Europeans communicated in some form of creole . People of Angola and West Central Africa developed Angolar Creole Portuguese , a language still spoken by descendants of maroon slaves who escaped from Portuguese plantations on São Tomé beginning in the middle sixteenth century. People who were enslaved by the Spanish developed Spanish-based creoles, called Papiamentu Creole Spanish .Palenquero is another Spanish creole developed by Africans in maroon settlements of what is now Colombia, South America. Enslaved Africans in New Netherlands, later New York, developed a Dutch-based creole, Negerhollands Creole Dutch , in Haiti and later in Louisiana people spoke a French-based creole, today called Haitian Creole French . In the English colonies Africans spoke an English-based Atlantic Creole , generally called plantation creole. Lowcountry Africans spoke an English-based creole that came to be called Gullah . Gullah is a language closely related to Krio a creole spoken in Sierra Leone. (3)
Enslaved African American Language
Gullah and other creoles emerged because enslaved Africans greatly outnumbered whites on colonial plantations as occurred in the Lowcountry, especially on the sea islands where Gullah developed. John McWhorter, a linguist, advances an “ Afrogenesis Theory ” of creole origins, stressing the importation of most plantation creoles from West African trade settlements. There creole languages originated in interactions between white traders and slaves, some of whom were eventually transpo