Merico or Americo-Liberian (or the informal colloquial name "American") is an

English-based creole language 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 cr ...

spoken until recently in

Liberia Liberia, officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to Guinea–Liberia border, its north, Ivory Coast to Ivory Coast–Lib ...

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 Am ...

, descendants of original settlers, freed slaves, and

African Americans African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa ...

who emigrated from the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

between 1821 and the 1870s. It is distinguished from

Liberian Kreyol 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 ...

and from Kru, and may be connected to

Gullah The Gullah () are a subgroup of the African Americans, African American ethnic group, who predominantly live in the South Carolina Lowcountry, Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida within ...

and

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 ...

. 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 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 ca ...

, 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 future ( "we will come"), * or for completed action ( "they have gone that way", "not a little piece was left") The pronouns include: * Subject: /, //, /, , , / * Object: , , /, , /, ' * Possessive: /, /, /, /, ,

References

Americo-Liberian people English-based pidgins and creoles of Africa Languages of Liberia Languages attested from the 19th century {{pidgincreole-lang-stub

Grammatical features

See also

References