9,840 Abibisika (Black Gold) Points

Rank: Unranked Newbie

“Acquisition of African languages in North America has both historical antecedents and contemporary manifestations. Works such as Lorenzo Dow Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect and Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive are landmark works that document the retention of lexical items and idiomatic expressions from African languages on a regional basis and on a more widespread basis. While acquisition of African languages may be thought of as a contemporary phenomenon of conscious intentionality, the syntactic structures, idiomatic expressions, and the corpus of vocabulary that make up the lexicon of Ebonics itself are a testament to an older, preexisting thrust to acquire and reacquire linguistic connections to Africa by the broader Black population. Certainly, all Africans who were enslaved and brought to North America were not brought at the same time. As successive waves arrived, they brought with them retained linguistic knowledge in areas including, but not limited to, syntax, morphology, semantics, phonology, phonetics, pragmatics, and an overarching worldview that encapsulated all the aforementioned. For a congealed phenomenon as recognizably distinct as Ebonics to exist, it seems, therefore, that those who were already in North America may have acquired linguistic knowledge from more recent arrivals and, conversely, that new arrivals may have been influenced by the linguistic retentions of those who were already in North America. Such retentions and acquisitions may have been peculiar to the ethnolinguistic origins of individuals or groups encountered. Further, we have yet to discover the linguistic influence that those Africans who, according to some scholars, traveled to the Americas in pre-Columbian times may have had on place names, vocabulary, and other structures that have been retained to this day.”

-Ọbádélé Kambon, on the retention and reacquisition of African languages in North America