practice of transporting cheap black labour from western Africa to the New World was begun by the Spaniards in the 16th Century, and it had been also used by the Portuguese, Dutch and French, but it was adopted in earnest by the British in the early 17th Century. The British had established numerous outposts in the Caribbean (dubbed the “West Indies” by Columbus out of the conviction that he had reached the spice islands of the Indies, or Asia, by a western route), and had developed a whole trading empire to take advantage of the tropical climate of the region. The labour-intensive work on tobacco, cocoa, cotton and particularly sugar plantations required large numbers of cheap workers, and the Atlantic slave trade triangle (Britain - West Africa - Americas) was developed to supply it, although soon a demand also grew for household servants.
The numbers of African slaves in the America alone grew from just twenty in 1619 to over 4 million at the time of the American abolition of slavery after the Civil War in 1865 (the British had abolished the slave trade earlier, in 1807). The slaves transported by the British to work in the plantations of the American south and the islands of the West Indies were mainly from a region of West Africa rich in hundreds of different languages, and most were superb natural linguists, often speaking anywhere between three and six African languages fluently. Due to the deliberate practice of shipping slaves of different language backgrounds together (in an attempt to avoid plots and rebellions), the captives developed their own English-based pidgin language, which they used to communicate with the largely English-speaking sailors and landowners, and also between themselves.
A pidgin is a reduced language that results from extended contact between people with no language in common. Verb forms in particular are simplified (e.g. “me go run school”, “him done go”, etc), but adjectives are also often used instead of adverbs, verbs instead of prepositions, pronouns are no inflected, etc. The resulting stripped-down language may be crude but it is usually serviceable and efficient.
SOUND CLIP
Gullah is a patois dating back to the days of slavery (17 sec)
(from The Story of English PBS series (Ep. 5))
Click here for transcript
Once established in the Americas, these pidgins developed into stable creoles, forms of simplified English combined with many words from a variety of African languages. Most of the African slaves made landfall at Sullivan Island, near Charleston, South Carolina, and even today Gullah can be heard in many of the Sea Islands off the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia. Gullah is an English-African patois (the name is possibly derived from the word Angola), thought to be remarkably unchanged from that spoken by African slaves two or three centuries ago. Gullah and similar “plantation creoles” provided the basis of much of modern Black American English, street slang and hip-hop, but interestingly it also significantly influenced the language and accent of the aristocratic white owners, and the modern English of the southern states.
The popular Uncle Remus stories of the late 19th Century (many of them based around the trickster character of Brer Rabbit and others like Brer Fox, Brer Wolf, etc) are probably based on this kind of creole, mixed with native Cherokee origins (although they were actually collections made by white Americans like Joel Chandler Harris). The following passage is from Charles Colcock Jones Jr.’s 1888 story “Brer Lion an Brer Goat”:
Many of the words may look strange at first, but the meanings become quite clear when spoken aloud, and the spellings give a good approximation of a black/Caribbean accent (e.g. notus for notice, bole for bold, ansur for answer, skade for scared, etc). Dis/dem/dey are used for this/them/they in order to avoid the difficult English “th” sound, and many other usages are familiar from modern Caribbean accents (e.g. mout for mouth, ting for thing, gwine for going, etc). For simplicity, adjectives often stand in for adverbs (e.g. coward man) and verbs may be simplified (e.g. Brer Lion bin a hunt) or left out completely (e.g. Brer Lion stonish). Double adjectives (e.g. big big) are often used as intensifiers, although not in this particular passage.
Jamaican creole (known locally as “Patwa”, for patois) was one of the deepest in the Caribbean, partly because of the sheer numbers transported there, and the accent there is still so thick as to be almost undecipherable. Variations of English creoles gradually mixed with other creole forms based on French, Spanish and Portuguese, leading to a diverse range of English varieties throughout the Caribbean islands, as well as adjacent areas of Central and South America. Familiar words like buddy for brother, palaver for trouble, and pikni for child, arose out of these creoles, and words like barbecue, savvy, nitty-gritty, hammock, hurricane, savannah, canoe, can