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Liberian Interior Pidgin English
Merico or Americo-Liberian (or the informal colloquial name "American") is an English-based creole language spoken until recently in Liberia by Americo-Liberians, descendants of original settlers, freed slaves, and African Americans who emigrated from the United States between 1821 and the 1870s. It is distinguished from Liberian Kreyol and from Kru, and may be connected to Gullah and Jamaican Creole. The original settlers numbered 19,000 in 1860. By 1975 the language was partly decreolized, restricted to informal settings. Grammatical features Plurals are unmarked, as in "rock", "rocks", or marked with a suffix, as in "rocks". The verb expressing "to be" is , as in "she is small", but adjectives may be used without it, as in "he is big". Verbs are not inflected for past tense. Separate particles are used to indicate some verb tenses: * for negation ( "I didn't ask the child"), * or for continuing action ( "he is talking at great length", "she is crying"), * for f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Americo-Liberians
Americo-Liberian people (also known as Congo people or Congau people),Cooper, Helene, ''The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood'' (United States: Simon and Schuster, 2008), p. 6 are a Liberian ethnic group of African Americans, African American, Afro-Caribbean people, Afro-Caribbean, and Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone, liberated African origin. Americo-Liberians trace their ancestry to free-born and formerly Slavery in the United States, enslaved African Americans who emigrated in the 19th century to become the List of national founders, founders of the State (polity), state of Liberia. They identified themselves as Americo-Liberians.Liberia: History, Geography, Government, and Culture Infoplease.com Although the terms "Americo-Liberian" and "Congo" had distin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jamaican Creole
Jamaican Patois (; locally rendered Patwah and called Jamaican Creole by linguists) is an English-based creole language with influences from West African, Arawak, Spanish and other languages, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. Words or slang from Jamaican Patois can be heard in other Caribbean countries, the United Kingdom, New York City and Miami in the United States, and Toronto, Canada. The majority of non-English words in Patois derive from the West African Akan language.Cassidy, F. G. "Multiple etymologies in Jamaican Creole". ''Am Speech'', 1966, 41:211–215. It is spoken by the majority of Jamaicans as a native language. Patois developed in the 17th century when enslaved people from West and Central Africa were exposed to, learned, and nativized the vernacular and dialectal language spoken by the slaveholders and overseers: British English, Hiberno-English and Scots. Jamaican Creole exists in gradations between more conservative creole for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Americo-Liberian People
Americo-Liberian people (also known as Congo people or Congau people),Cooper, Helene, ''The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood'' (United States: Simon and Schuster, 2008), p. 6 are a Liberian ethnic group of African American, Afro-Caribbean, and liberated African origin. Americo-Liberians trace their ancestry to free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans who emigrated in the 19th century to become the founders of the state of Liberia. They identified themselves as Americo-Liberians.Liberia: History, Geography, Government, and Culture Infoplease.com Although the terms "Americo-Liberian" and "Congo" had distinct definitions in the nineteenth century, they are currently interchangeable and refer to an ethnic group composed of the descendants of the various ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Krio Language
The Sierra Leonean Creole or Krio is an English-based creole language that is the lingua franca and de facto national language spoken throughout the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Krio is spoken by 96 percent of the country's population, and it unites the different ethnic groups in the country, especially in their trade and social interaction with each other. Krio is the primary language of communication among Sierra Leoneans at home and abroad, and has also heavily influenced Sierra Leonean English. The language is native to the Sierra Leone Creole people, or Krios, a community of about 104,311 descendants of freed slaves from the West Indies, Canada, United States and the British Empire, and is spoken as a second language by millions of other Sierra Leoneans belonging to the country's indigenous tribes. English is Sierra Leone's official language, and Krio, despite its common use throughout the country, has no official status. Overview The Krio language is an offshoot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copula (linguistics)
In linguistics, a copula (; : copulas or copulae; abbreviated ) is a word or phrase that links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word ''is'' in the sentence "The sky is blue" or the phrase ''was not being'' in the sentence "It was not being cooperative." The word ''copula'' derives from the Latin noun for a "link" or "tie" that connects two different things. A copula is often a verb or a verb-like word, though this is not universally the case. A verb that is a copula is sometimes called a copulative or copular verb. In English primary education grammar courses, a copula is often called a linking verb. In other languages, copulas show more resemblances to pronouns, as in Classical Chinese and Guarani, or may take the form of suffixes attached to a noun, as in Korean, Beja, and Inuit languages. Most languages have one main copula (in English, the verb "to be"), although some (such as Spanish, Portuguese and Thai) have more than one, while ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry grammatical information (inflectional endings) or lexical information ( derivational/lexical suffixes)''.'' Inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. Derivational suffixes fall into two categories: class-changing derivation and class-maintaining derivation. Particularly in the study of Semitic languages, suffixes are called affirmatives, as they can alter the form of the words. In Indo-European studies, a distinction is made between suffixes and endings (see Proto-Indo-European root). A word-final segment that is somewhere between a free morpheme and a bound morpheme is known as a suffixoidKremer, Marion. 1997. ''Person reference and gender in translation: a contrastive investigation of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Decreolization
Decreolization is a postulated phenomenon whereby over time a creole language reconverges with the lexifier from which it originally derived. The notion has attracted criticism from linguists who argue there is little theoretical or empirical basis on which to postulate a process of language change which is particular to creole languages. Overview Decreolization is a process of language change a creole language may undergo when in contact with its lexifier. As languages remain in contact over time, they typically influence one another, especially if one holds higher linguistic prestige. In the context of creole languages, the lexifier tends to have higher prestige (though not always) and will exert a much greater influence on the creole, which has lower prestige. This leads to the reintroduction of linguistic material into the creole from the lexifier. Decreolization predicts that eventually the creole will resemble the lexifier to such a degree that it could then be called ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gullah Language
Gullah (also called Gullah-English, Sea Island Creole English, and Geechee) is a creole language spoken by the Gullah people (also called "Geechees" within the community), an African American population living in coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia (including urban Charleston and Savannah) as well as extreme northeastern Florida and the extreme southeast of North Carolina. Origins Gullah is based on different varieties of English and languages of Central Africa and West Africa. Scholars have proposed a number of theories about the origins of Gullah and its development: # Gullah developed independently on the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by enslaved Africans. They developed a language that combined grammatical, phonological, and lexical features of the nonstandard English varieties spoken by that region's white slaveholders and farmers, along with those from numerous Western and Central Af ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English-based Creole Languages
An English-based creole language (often shortened to English creole) is a creole language for which English was the '' lexifier'', meaning that at the time of its formation the vocabulary of English served as the basis for the majority of the creole's lexicon. Most English creoles were formed in British colonies, following the great expansion of British naval military power and trade in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The main categories of English-based creoles are Atlantic (the Americas and Africa) and Pacific (Asia and Oceania). Over 76.5 million people globally are estimated to speak an English-based creole. Sierra Leone, Malaysia, Nigeria, Ghana, Jamaica, and Singapore have the largest concentrations of creole speakers. Origin It is disputed to what extent the various English-based creoles of the world share a common origin. The '' monogenesis hypothesis'' posits that a single language, commonly called ''proto–Pidgin English'', spoken along the West African coast in th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kru Languages
The Kru languages are spoken by the Kru people from the southeast of Liberia to the west of Ivory Coast. Classification According to Güldemann (2018), Kru lacks sufficient lexical resemblances and noun class resemblances to conclude a relationship with Niger-Congo. Glottolog considers Kru an independent language family. Etymology The term "Kru" is of unknown origin. According to Westermann (1952) it was used by Europeans to denote a number of tribes speaking related dialects. Marchese (1989) notes the fact that many of these peoples were recruited as "crew" by European seafarers; "the homonymy with crew is obvious, and is at least one source of the confusion among Europeans that there was a Kru/crew tribe". History Andrew Dalby noted the historical importance of the Kru languages for their position at the crossroads of African-European interaction. He wrote that "Kru and associated languages were among the first to be encountered by European voyagers on what was then known a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liberian Kreyol Language
Liberian Kreyol (also known as Kolokwa or Liberian Kolokwa English) is an Atlantic English-based creole language spoken in Liberia. It was spoken by 1,500,000 people as a second language at the 1984 census, which accounted for about 70% of the population at the time. It is historically and linguistically related to Merico, a creole spoken in Liberia, but it is grammatically distinct from it. There are regional dialects such as the ''Kru and Kpelleh kolokwa English'' used by the Kru fishermen. Liberian Kolokwa Language developed from ''Liberian Interior Pidgin English'', the Liberian version of West African vernacular English, though it has been significantly influenced by Liberian Settler English, itself based on American English, particularly African-American Vernacular English and Southern American English. Its phonology owes much to the indigenous Languages of Liberia. It has been analyzed having a post-creole continuum. As such, rather than being a pidgin wholly distinc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
