Samaná English (SE and SAX) is a variety of the English language spoken by descendants of black immigrants from the United States who have lived in the Samaná Peninsula, now in the Dominican Republic. Members of the enclave are known as the

Samaná Americans The Samaná Americans ( es, Americanos de Samaná) are a minority cultural sub-group of African American descendants that inhabits the Samaná Province in the eastern region of Dominican Republic. History Most of the Samaná Americans are desce ...

. The language is a relative of

African Nova Scotian English African-American English (or AAE; also known as Black American English, or Black English in American linguistics) is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers t ...

and

African-American Vernacular English African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban ...

(AAVE), with variations unique to the enclave's history in the area. In the 1950 Dominican Republic census, 0.57% of the population (about 12,200 people) said that their

mother tongue A first language, native tongue, native language, mother tongue or L1 is the first language or dialect that a person has been exposed to from birth or within the critical period. In some countries, the term ''native language'' or ''mother tongu ...

was English.

Immigration

Most speakers trace their lineage to immigrants who arrived at the peninsula in 1824 and 1825. At the time all of

Hispaniola Hispaniola (, also ; es, La Española; Latin and french: Hispaniola; ht, Ispayola; tnq, Ayiti or Quisqueya) is an island in the Caribbean that is part of the Greater Antilles. Hispaniola is the most populous island in the West Indies, and th ...

was administered by

Haiti Haiti (; ht, Ayiti ; French: ), officially the Republic of Haiti (); ) and formerly known as Hayti, is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, east of Cuba and Jamaica, and ...

, and its president was Jean-Pierre Boyer. The immigrants responded to an invitation for settlement that Jonathas Granville had delivered in person to Philadelphia,

Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was d ...

, Boston, and New York City. Abolitionists like Richard Allen, Samuel Cornish, Benjamin Lundy, and

Loring D. Dewey Loring Daniel Dewey (1791–1867) was an early 19th-century Presbyterian minister, an agent of the American Colonization Society, an active supporter of colonization societies, a printer, and a reformer. Political work Dewey was a supporter o ...

joined the campaign, which was coined the Haitian emigration. The response was unprecedented, as thousands of

African Americans African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

boarded ships in eastern cities and migrated to Haiti. Most of the immigrants arrived during the fall of 1824 and the spring of 1825. More continued moving back and forth in later years but at a slower rate. Between 1859 and 1863, another immigration campaign brought new settlers to the island but at a fraction of the number in 1824 and 1825. Those who originally settled in Samaná were fewer than 600 but formed the only surviving immigration enclave.

Survival

While more than 6,000 immigrants came in 1824 and 1835, by the end of the 19th century, only a handful of enclaves on the island spoke any variety of the antebellum Black Vernacular. They were communities in Puerto Plata, Samaná and Santo Domingo. The largest was the one in Samaná that maintained church schools, where it was preserved. During the

Rafael Trujillo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina ( , ; 24 October 189130 May 1961), nicknamed ''El Jefe'' (, "The Chief" or "The Boss"), was a Dominican dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from February 1930 until his assassination in May 1961. He ser ...

dictatorship (1930–1961), however, the government began a systematic policy of Hispanizing the entire Dominican population. The church schools in which English was taught were eliminated, and the language was discouraged. Enclaves across the island soon lost an important element of their identity, which led to their disintegration. Samaná English withstood the assaults in part because the location of Samaná was favorable to a more independent cultural life. However, government policies have still influenced the language's gradual decline, and it may well now be an endangered language.

Nature

The language is a dialect of English. It has very few features characteristic of English-based creoles, and while it shares many non-standard features with

, these are generally no more prominent in Samaná English. Like modern AAVE, Samaná English permits zero copula, or the omission of the conjugated present-tense forms of the verb ''to be'' from sentences. Samaná English generally follows the same copula-deletion patterns as AAVE, with lower rates of deletion than some northern urban AAVE varieties. Like in AAVE, Samaná English can only drop the copula where contraction would also be permitted, and Samaná English generally does not follow creole-like patterns of copula dropping.

Ethnologue

The 15th edition (2005) of

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...

dropped it from its list of languages, but linguists still consider it a separate language variety.

References

External links