Samaná English

Samaná English (SE and SAX) is a variety of the English language spoken by descendants of black immigrants from the United States who have lived in the Samaná Peninsula, now in the Dominican Republic. Members of the enclave are known as the Samaná Americans.

The language is a relative of African Nova Scotian English and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), with variations unique to the enclave's history in the area. In the 1950 Dominican Republic census, 0.57% of the population (about 12,200 people) said that their mother tongue was English.

Immigration

Most speakers trace their lineage to immigrants who arrived at the peninsula in 1824 and 1825. At the time all of Hispaniola was administered by Haiti, and its president was Jean-Pierre Boyer. The immigrants responded to an invitation for settlement that Jonathas Granville had delivered in person to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New York City. Abolitionists like Richard Allen, Samuel Cornish, Benjamin Lundy, and Loring D. Dewey joined the campaign, which was coined the Haitian emigration.

The response was unprecedented, as thousands of African Americans boarded ships in eastern cities and migrated to Haiti. Most of the immigrants arrived during the fall of 1824 and the spring of 1825. More continued moving back and forth in later years but at a slower rate.

Between 1859 and 1863, another immigration campaign brought new settlers to the island but at a fraction of the number in 1824 and 1825. Those who originally settled in Samaná were fewer than 600 but formed the only surviving immigration enclave.

Survival

While more than 6,000 immigrants came in 1824 and 1835, by the end of the 19th century, only a handful of enclaves on the island spoke any variety of the antebellum Black Vernacular. They were communities in Puerto Plata, Samaná and Santo Domingo. The largest was the one in Samaná that maintained church schools, where it was preserved. During the Rafael Trujillo dictatorship (1930–1961), however, the government began a systematic policy of Hispanizing the entire Dominican population. The church schools in which English was taught were eliminated, and the language was discouraged.

Enclaves across the island soon lost an important element of their identity, which led to their disintegration. Samaná English withstood the assaults in part because the location of Samaná was favorable to a more independent cultural life. However, government policies have still influenced the language's gradual decline, and it may well now be an endangered language.

Nature

The language is a dialect of English. It has very few features characteristic of English-based creoles, and while it shares many non-standard features with African-American Vernacular English, these are generally no more prominent in Samaná English. Like modern AAVE, Samaná English permits zero copula, or the omission of the conjugated present-tense forms of the verb ''to be'' from sentences. Samaná English generally follows the same copula-deletion patterns as AAVE, with lower rates of deletion than some northern urban AAVE varieties. Like in AAVE, Samaná English can only drop the copula where contraction would also be permitted, and Samaná English generally does not follow creole-like patterns of copula dropping.

Ethnologue

The 15th edition (2005) of Ethnologue dropped it from its list of languages, but linguists still consider it a separate language variety.

See also

*1873 Dominican Republic Samaná Peninsula referendum

References

External links

Ethnologue report for English
Samaná English is described under the heading "Dominican Republic"

from Muturzikin.com
Caribbean English (British Library)Cross-Referencing West Indian Dictionary
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Samana English
Languages of the Dominican Republic
North American English
Samaná Province

Dialects of English
English
Languages of the African diaspora