ABSTRACT

The massive colonial and imperial intrusion in West Africa had far-reaching linguistic consequences. The people enslaved and transported to the Caribbean were thrust into a situation in which they could make little or no use of their native languages. This was frequently a programmatic point among the slavers, who deliberately and systematically put people with different linguistic backgrounds (West Africa is a very polyglot region) together, thus ensuring that the consequent lack of communication would be a major hindrance to any attempts at rebellion. This practice was continued on New World plantations as well. Since, however, communication was a necessity, both between the slavers and their victims and among the enslaved themselves, a make-shift type of language emerged in which both sides, slave and slaver, used the grammatical structures of their native languages. In addition, the slaves used vocabulary borrowed from the language of the slave masters, that is, English, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, or French. In this way reduced contact languages, pidgins and later creoles came into existence. These languages were also used for trading purposes in Africa, hence the term trade language. Today Pidgin English, a lingua franca which has been passed on over the generations, is still widely used as a market language in much of coastal West Africa (see 9.3 for explanation of the terms introduced).