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Merico Language
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Americo-Liberians
Americo-Liberian people or Congo people or Congau people in Liberian English,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 descent. The sister ethnic group of Americo-Liberians are the Sierra Leone Creole people, who share similar ancestry and related culture.Liberia: History, Geography, Government, and Culture Infoplease.com Americo-Liberians trace their ancestry to free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans who emigrated in the 19th century to become the [...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 West African influences, spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora. A majority of the non-English words in Patois come from the West African Akan language. 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 forms of English spoken by the slaveholders: British English, Scots, and Hiberno-English. Jamaican Creole exhibits a gradation between more conservative creole forms that are not significantly mutually intelligible with English, and forms virtually identical to Standard English. Jamaicans refer to their language as ''Patois'', a term also used as a lower-case noun as a catch-all description of pidgins, creoles, dialects, and vernaculars worldwide. Creoles, including ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Americo-Liberian People
Americo-Liberian people or Congo people or Congau people in Liberian English,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 descent. The sister ethnic group of Americo-Liberians are the Sierra Leone Creole people, who share similar ancestry and related culture.Liberia: History, Geography, Government, and Culture Infoplease.com Americo-Liberians trace their ancestry to free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans who emigrated in the 19th century to become the |
Krio Language
Sierra Leonean Creole or Krio is an English-based creole language that is 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 of the lan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Copula (linguistics)
In linguistics, a copula (plural: 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 co-operative." 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, although some (like Spanish, Portuguese and Thai) have more than one, while others have none. In the case ... [...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, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry grammatical information ( inflectional suffixes) or lexical information ( derivational/lexical suffixes'').'' An inflectional suffix or a grammatical suffix. Such inflection changes the grammatical properties of a word within its syntactic category. For derivational suffixes, they can be divided 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). Suffixes can carry grammatical information or lexical information. A word-final segment that is somewhere between a free morpheme ... [...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 in that region, along with those from numerous Western a ... [...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 estimated globally speak some form of 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 ... [...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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liberian Kreyol Language
Liberian Kreyol is an Atlantic English-lexicon creole language spoken in Liberia.Liberian English Ethnologue Report by SIL Also known as Liberian kolokwa English, was spoken by 1,500,000 people as a second language (1984 census) which is about 70% of the population in that time. Today the knowledge of some form of English is even more widespread. It is historically and linguistically related to Merico, a creole spoken in Liberia, but is grammatically distinct from it. There are regional dialects such as the ''Kru kolokwa English'' used by the fishermen. Liberian Kreyol language developed from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
_Departure_of_colored_emigrants_for_Liberia_-_The_Illustrated_American%2C_March_21%2C_1896.jpg "Click for more on -> Americo-Liberian People")
